retcher must be quickly but gently removed from the
ambulance and carried into the receiving hall.

Four orderlies haul the stretcher from its shelf in the ambulance; two
orderlies then take its handles and carry it indoors. At the entrance to
the receiving hall they halt. The Medical Officer bends over the
patient, glances at the label which is attached to him, and assigns him
to a ward. (Certain types of cases go to certain groups of wards.) The
attendant sergeant promptly picks a metal ticket from a rack and lays
it on the stretcher. The ticket has, punched on it, the number of the
patient's ward and the number of the patient's bed in that ward. This
ceremony completed, the orderlies proceed, with their burden, up the
aisle between the beds in the receiving hall.

Arrived at the bed, they lower their stretcher until it is at such a
level that the patient, if he is active enough, can move off it on to
the bed; if he is too weak to help himself he is lifted on to the bed by
orderlies under the direction of the receiving-hall Sister. The
stretcher is promptly removed and restored to its ambulance. If the
patient is in an exceptionally suffering condition he is not placed on
the receiving-hall bed; instead--the Medical Officer having given his
permission--his stretcher is put on a wheeled trolley and he is taken
straight away to his ward, so that he will only undergo one shift of
position between the ambulance and his destination. The majority of
stretcher-cases, however, reach us in a by no means desperate state,
for, as I say, they seldom come to England without having been treated
previously at a base abroad (except during the periods of heavy
fighting). And it is remarkable how often the patient refuses help in
getting off the stretcher on to the bed. He may be a cocoon of bandages,
but he will courageously heave himself overboard, from stretcher to bed,
with a gay _wallop_ which would be deemed rash even in a person in
perfect health. Our receiving hall, at a big intake of wounded, when
every bed bears its poor victim of the war, presents a spectacle which
might give the philosopher food for thought; but I suspect that, if he
regarded its actualities rather than his own preconceptions, what would
impress him more than the sadness would be on the one hand the
kindliness, brisk but not officious, of the staff, and on the other the
spontaneous geniality of the battered occupants of the beds. The
orderlies can spare li