ttle time for talk, but the few chats which they
are able to have with patients whom they are helping to change their
clothes, or to whom they are proffering the inevitable cocoa (which is
a cocktail, as it were, prior to the meal which will be served in the
men's own ward), are punctuated by jokes and laughter rather than the
long-visaged "sympathy" which the outsider might--quite wrongly!--have
pictured as appropriate to such an assemblage.

The stretcher-case, before he is taken to his ward, must also "give his
particulars," must also be interviewed by the Pack Store officials, and
must also have assigned to him his blue uniform (wherewith are a shirt,
a cravat, slippers and socks) in anticipation of the time when he shall
be able to use his feet again and promenade our corridors and grounds.
He receives the customary packet of cigarettes (probably the second, for
he often gets one at the railway station too), and then, on another
stretcher, mounted on a trolley, is wheeled off to his ward. Here,
bestowed in bed at last, we leave him to his blanket-bath, his meal, his
temperature-taking and chart filling-in by the Sister, his visit from
the doctor, and all the rest of it. For the moment we see no more of
him; we must race back to the receiving hall, and, if there are no more
patients to take away, return the trolley to its proper nook, put
straight the blankets and pillows on the beds, sweep the floor, and tidy
up generally, in readiness for the next convoy's advent.

Presently the huge room, beneath its dim arched ceiling, is silent and
empty once more. The four ranks of beds, without a crease on their brown
blankets, are bare of occupants. The Sister and her probationers have
vanished. The Pack Store orderlies have carried off their loot of dirty
khaki tunics and trousers for the fumigator. The clerical V.A.D.'s have
gone to enter "particulars" in ledgers and card-indices. The cookhouse
people have removed their cocoa urn. The sergeant is inspecting the
metal ward-tickets left in his rack. A glance at them tells him how many
beds, and which beds, are free in the hospital; for the tickets have no
duplicates; any given ticket can only reappear in the rack when the bed
which it connotes is out of use and awaiting a newcomer; the ticket
hangs from a nail in the wall beside the patient's bed just so long as
that bed is tenanted. So the rack of metal tickets might almost take the
place of that important document, of whic