h a freshly-compiled edition is
typed every morning, the Empty Bed List; and the sergeant is meditative
as he sorts into the rack the tickets which have newly been sent in from
the Sisters of wards where there have been departures. "Not much room in
the eye-wound wards," he ponders; or, "A lot of empties in the
medicals." And then ... the tinkle of the telephone....

"Another convoy expected at 6.15? Twenty walking-cases and seventeen
cots. Right you are!"

And at 6.15 the party of orderlies will be back again at the front door,
again the motor-cars will stream up the drive, again the ambulances will
come with their stretchers, and again the receiving hall will awaken
from its interlude of silence to echo with the activities incidental to
a clearing house of those damaged human bundles which are the _raison
d'etre_ of our great war-hospital.

VII

"T.... A...."

War-hospital patients are of many sorts. It is a common mistake of the
arm-chair newspaper devourer to lump all soldiers together as quaint,
bibulous, aitch-dropping innocents, lamblike and gauche in
drawing-rooms, fierce and picturesque on the field, who (to judge by
their published photographs) are continually on the grin and continually
shaking hands either with each other or with equally grinsome French
peasant women at cottage doors or with the local mayor who congratulates
them on the glorious V.C.'s which, of course, they are continually
winning. In a war hospital that harbours many thousands of patients per
annum, we should know, in the long run, something about the
characteristics of Tommy Atkins; and it is with resentment that I hear
him thus classified as a mere type. He is not a type. Discipline and
training have given him some veneer of generalised similarities. Beneath
these, Tommy Atkins is simply the man in the street--any man in any
street; and if you look out of your window in the city and see a throng
of pedestrians upon the pavement you might just as well say that because
they are all civilians they are all alike as that, because all soldiers
wear khaki, they are all alike.

I have a quarrel with the Press on the score of its persistent fostering
of this notion that "our gallant lads" (as the sentimental scribe calls
them) are a pack of children about whose exploits an unfailing stream of
semi-pathetic, semi-humorous anecdotes must be put forth. Even the old
professional army exhibited no dead level either of blackguards on the