eme and, of course, considerably before the introduction of
Universal Service.) Perhaps it is allowable to point the moral against
the "shirker"-discovering armchair patriots aforesaid: that no small
proportion of our unit was composed of over-age recruits who, instead
of informing the world at large that they wished they were younger,
"And, by Gad, I envy the lads their chance to do _anything_ in the
country's cause," did not rest until they had found an opening. In my
own hut there were two recruits over sixty years of age. Elsewhere in
the unit there were several over fifty. Our mess-room at meal times was,
and still is, dotted with grey-haired heads, not of retired army men
rejoined, but of men who, previous to the war, had lived comfortable
civilian lives. At a later date, when the few fit men that our
combings-out revealed had gone elsewhere, the unit was kept up to
strength by the drafting-in either of C3 recruits or of soldiers who,
having been at the front and been wounded, or invalided back, were
marked for home duty only. So much for the "slackers in khaki" which one
extra emphatic writer (himself not in khaki, although younger than
several of the orderlies here) professed to discover in the R.A.M.C.
Those "slackers" may be having an easier time of it than the heroes of
France, Gallipoli, Salonika, Egypt and Mesopotamia. But they are not
having so easy a time as some of their detractors.

The hospital orderly is not (I think I may assert on his behalf) puffed
up with foolish illusions as to his place in the scheme of things. It is
a humble place, and he knows it. His work is almost comically
unromantic, painfully unpicturesque. Moreover--let us be frank--much of
it is uninteresting, after the first novelty has worn off. Work in the
wards has its compensations: here there is the human element. But only a
portion of a unit such as ours can be detailed for ward work: the rest
are either hewers of wood and drawers of water or else have their noses
to a grindstone of clerical monotonousness beside which the
ledger-keeping of a bank employee is a heaven of blissful excitements.
You will find few hospital orderlies who are not "fed up"; you will find
none who do not long for the war's end. And I fancy you will find very,
very few who would not go on active service if they could. On the
occasions when we have had calls for overseas volunteers, the response
has always exceeded the demand. The people who, looking at a p