It was a large base hospital in a large and dirty town. South Country men grew frank with disgust when they saw the pall of fog that hung for a fortnight outside the windows, yet things were little better when the fog cleared and the great buildings stood stark in their black ugliness.
Yet the night nurses would linger at the corridor windows on their way down to the dining-room. There was the glamour of night on the big city, mighty buildings silhouetted against a sky of dark luminous blue, towers that divided the stars, and far below in the street the ruby and topaz lights of the road-menders, with the glowing brazier of the night-watchman. And then dawn came with its chilling wind and its grey cheerless light that discovered, without love or pity, the sordid things of town—the dirty canal, the barges, the heaps of timber, the ugly money-making warehouses and factories. All this we saw—a world pallid and cold, with none of the genial glow of noontide.
The hospital never failed to charm me at night. Its interior aspect had a beauty of dim wards and red subdued lights over the ‘dug-outs,’ where a sister or nurse sat in charge. The long rows of white beds disappeared into the darkness, and the men in them had that pathos—unreal in some cases—of the sleeping and the helpless. At night they were all children—children who talked pitifully in their sleep of Germans and trenches and ghastly things beyond our ken. They called sometimes a woman’s name and professed next morning a guileless ignorance of her existence.
It was a hushed and mysterious world, where one whispered and walked stealthily, and yet where much was told and where life seemed simpler and more genuine than by day when the little tin gods were all awake. At that time I saw most of the mental ward, the most pathetic place in any hospital. Sleep was an unwilling visitor there, except to the orderlies, who, in the intervals of card-playing and button-cleaning, relapsed into the attitudes of the seven sleepers.
Night after night old Dad Hobson would stay awake till two or three o’clock, without complaint or murmur. Any man a little past his prime was called ‘dad’ or described as ‘old’ in this land of youth. And in sober fact Dad Hobson had seven children. He had been a miner before he made the great sacrifice that had left him maimed and insane. He was always courteous, always considerate. Even on those days when he refused to eat it was with a polite ‘I’m sorry not to oblige you, nurse.’ He believed himself guilty of some crime—he had murdered Sir Ian Hamilton—and in trivial ways too he held himself responsible for any disturbance in that much-disturbed ward. At times he was so much better that we hoped he was regaining his wits, but always there would come a relapse and his face would be downcast, and ‘I’m puzzled someway, something’s wrong. I can’t get things clear in my mind,’ would be the explanation. He had odd delusions too, for a doctor clad in a dressing-gown provoked his question to an orderly, ‘Is that Lord Nelson?’
It was a strange little party altogether in that ward. Hobson would lie there by the hour, dimly annoyed by Jimmy in the bed opposite. Jimmy had nearly died of wounds and later of pneumonia, but he had rallied, only to reach a state of discomfort and nervous temper that was liable to fiendish explosions. For the most part he was a lovable boy, with a curious charm of his own. Sleepless, like Hobson, till the small hours, he played cards with the orderlies. When things pleased him Jimmy was an angel, but at other times he was a fiend. A certain soldier, a clarionet player once in the Queen’s Hall orchestra, came to the ward. He was suffering from insomnia and melancholia. Jimmy’s drawling voice and his card-playing and, perhaps, his popularity annoyed the clarionet player, and they quarrelled. Jimmy merely remarked:
‘I’ll do for him—see if I don’t.’
The clarionet player was removed to the next ward, separated from the other only by a glass and wood partition.
‘He shan’t sleep to-night if I don’t,’ said Jimmy, and he took careful aim at the glass partition with his tin mug. He hit the woodwork and missed his enemy’s head in the next ward, so he fell into heavy-browed sulking, with the threat ‘I’ll do for myself.’ This is often a mere threat, but he did make an endeavour by biting up a blue-lead pencil—a tedious and uncertain form of suicide. The pencil was taken away and, blue-lipped and weary, like a naughty child he fell asleep. Poor Jimmy! He went to a Scottish asylum where many of our patients were sent for further treatment. I heard lately that he was really better and likely to be discharged.
One of the beds was occupied by Andy—Andy of the picturesque speech and uncertain behaviour. He came in raging under the effects of alcoholic poisoning. Such cases always spent a night or so in the X-ray room with a special orderly. I saw him that night, a flushed unhappy-looking boy, who was sane enough to speak politely and to say ‘Nurrse,’ with the delightful roll that our Jocks put into it. Later Andy came down to the ward, and was duly established in a corner bed. Here we got to know him for the loquacious rattle-pate he was. By day he was sane enough, but at night he was subject to awful dreams and fits of horror, which caused him to roll out of bed with an alarming bump. One night he thought the German prisoners were coming to murder him—two inoffensive boys with very little strength between them; another time I found him a hump at the foot of his bed.
‘Come out, Andy,’ I said.
‘I’ll kill you if I do, Nurrse; I’ve killed all my chums.’
But he crawled out flushed and weary. His face was coarsened and weakened by too much drinking, but it was a pleasant boyish face. He had, too, that quick imagination which gives vivid charm even to stories which tax belief. Andy told us wonderful stories of his doings at Loos and elsewhere. He had been a bomb-thrower, one of three survivors from a party of one hundred and sixty. The story was declared to be untrue by someone who knew him, but Andy could spin a yarn to keep Sister B., the orderlies, and myself in amazement round his bed. His own history, too, was a chequered, strange record. He had run away from home at ten years old and had joined a circus. He had been with Barnum, Wombwell, ‘Lord’ George Sanger, and travelled the kingdom from town to town. At fifteen he had enlisted in the Cameron Highlanders, deserted after a time, changed his name and joined the Gordons. He had been a champion boxer for—I forget the place. He had been everywhere and done most things, and was—poor Andy!—a nervous, dyspeptic wreck at twenty-four. Yet he had ‘a way with him’—a way that made us fond and disapproving at the same time.
The night before I started for a holiday, the Sister in charge had given orders that Andy was to wear pyjamas. He preferred a night-shirt. The point made a dispute. To humour him I said:
‘Andy, you’ll spoil my holiday if you don’t put on those trousers. I couldn’t be happy if I thought you hadn’t got them on.’
Andy was on the far side of a screen. There was silence, then a rustling, then Andy’s voice: ‘Nurrse ... I’ve got on they trrousers. I wouldn’t spoil your holiday, you ken.’
The next morning I saw the last of him. He was asleep. I put my hand on his head and said ‘Tell him I left him my blessing.’ It was carelessly said; I thought I should find him when I came back, but I have never seen him since.
They sent an armed escort from Aberdeen to bring Andy to a court-martial. Rumour went round the hospital that he had deserted in France, and would be sent back to France to be shot. How often in his sleep Andy had muttered ‘I won’t go back; I won’t.... I won’t.... I’ll do for myself first. They shan’t court-martial me ... they shan’t.’ Now it was explained.
When Andy heard that the escort had come for him he was quiet enough. He promised to pack his kit-bag and go quietly. However, he went off to the bathroom and was found trying to hang himself. They brought him back to the ward. He snatched a razor from his locker and tried to cut his throat. I don’t think he tried very hard—Andy was more dramatic than thorough. The escort went back to Aberdeen, for Andy was now in one of his raving, struggling attacks, and obviously unfit for the journey. When he was better he was handcuffed, his hands behind him, and so left for more hours than one likes to think of. I heard the story when I came back, and there was a chorus of pity on his behalf.
‘I could have cried when I saw him handcuffed, marching down the corridor,’ said a nurse. And the orderlies, even one whom he had kicked in the stomach, were pitiful for him—orderlies are a compassionate race.
The escort returned and Andy, strapped to a stretcher, was taken away to Aberdeen. We discussed his fate for many days, always with the decision ‘They couldn’t shoot him.’ Then rumour said he would get five years in a military prison, but meanwhile Andy sent us letters, written in lurid-looking red ink. He wrote from a Scottish hospital, and wrote gaily, jauntily, with no mention of prisons, desertion, or court-martial. His pride must have suffered horribly, for he had made of himself so gallant a figure, poor boastful Andy. He loved to write in the dialect that he talked, though he could, if he chose, send a fine English letter. Speaking of his very delicate digestion he says ‘I had a wee bit jelly for dinner; it slipped itself doon and just slipped back again. It doesna matter, what they gie me, it comes back. I try hard to keep it, but I canna.’ A few letters came from the large Scottish asylum where many of our mental cases were sent. They were always written in red ink, and concluded with a liberal supply of kisses (a matter of politeness this with many soldiers). Then the letters stopped, and none of us has heard anything more of poor Andy. He belonged, I fear, to the flotsam of life, and the waves washed him here and there.
A sad case was poor old Snakes. He was called Snakes because when he recovered enough to speak, he told us that he had swallowed a lot of snakes—no wonder that he never smiled. One morning I put the conventional question, ‘Are you better to-day?’ and received the sad answer, ‘How can I be better, I’m full of buttons.’ Another time he was full of watches that ticked in his ears, and again he had swallowed a tramcar—poor, melancholy old Snakes!
But the dearest of all our sad little family was certainly Alfred; Alfred Morgan of a Welsh regiment, never mind which. He was brought in from a military prison—sentenced for desertion, a case for a certain paper that champions the injured Tommy. Poor Alfred, with his wits all gone to pieces, his head and limbs shaking, his face working, seemed to us a living protest against any judgment but a doctor’s. I could hardly bear to see him, so hopelessly insane did he look. Death would have been far better than this doddering idiocy. The other men, sanest of the sane compared with him, tried to pet him and to coax answers out of him, but his mind, as Sister B. remarked, was a jig-saw puzzle gone to pieces. The pieces seemed to have no cohesion. He talked ramblingly of Bob his horse, of a dog, a canal, some medals, a picture, of Ada and the pigeons. He fancied the floor was the canal, and fished there with groping hands. Sometimes a word or a place-name would seem to rouse him, and he’d tell us the names of streets or of people: at other times he would shake his head and gaze vacantly round him, or look with that worried, bewildered look that made one’s heart ache.
It was Sister B. who did the most to fit the puzzle together. Every night she would sit by his bed and question him, bringing him back to the point time after time. We were filling in more of the puzzle every night. Alfred had lived in Birmingham, had been on a canal barge, had taken coal to some place; he had won medals, had a mother, and there was a picture that he remembered. Policemen excited him to frenzy, and when he saw one of the Force he would fling apples or slippers, or any handy missile, through the window. He could play cards too. There was a gradual mental development—the most fascinating thing one can watch. But it was slow, and Alfred seemed like a rudderless boat at sea till he met Jock.
Jock is a story all to himself. Suffice it to say of him that his vocation was to be a guardian angel. Every Scottish soldier is Jock in hospital, and perhaps other hospitals have found Jocks like ours—always unselfish, cheery, uncomplaining, infinitely pitiful to every trouble but their own; still I believe our Jock would outshine theirs.
Sister B. decided to bring Alfred on a visit to Jock’s ward. I must say that the experiment was painful. A surgical ward is a very cheerful place, and poor Alfred, shaky, bewildered, pitiful, was a figure to darken the sun at that time. But Sister B. was a nurse of brave experiments. She dared and succeeded; she was resourceful and passionately interested in her patients. So she brought Alfred to this sane and happy ward, and sat him down by Jock’s bed. Jock had been wounded at Loos in September, 1915, and had remained in bed for eight months with the occasional variation of an operation and brief respites when he was up and in a wheeled chair.
Among many pathetic things I had seen, none seemed to me more pathetic than the sight of those two war-shattered boys together. Alfred, nearly speechless, his poor wits all astray, tried to make himself lucid, while Jock, with infinite pity on his face, tried to understand and to help. The one looked like an angel of mercy, the other like some poor soul in search of peace. I don’t know how they talked, but somehow they made friends. Alfred was utterly unwilling to go back to his own ward, though he returned laden with cigarettes and apples. From that day the friendship grew. Every day Alfred visited Jock, and Jock, when he could get into a chair, returned the call. Somehow they talked. Jock has infinite patience and tact; he has graduated in the college of suffering and has learnt the whole art of compassion. He found out that Alfred knew most things knowable about football, that he was, in fact, a ‘real little sport.’
The ward adopted Alfred as a sort of mascot; he might do and have what he liked. He was just an unhappy child, humoured at all points.
Then arrived someone who solved the riddle of the medals and the picture of which Alfred talked so much. This man had seen a picture of Alfred boxing another celebrated pugilist. Alfred was a well-known character in the Ring—he had won his nine medals in various contests. To name a boxer was to set Alfred blazing with excitement and fearful efforts to stammer out some story of an encounter in which he had taken part.
We learnt more of Ada at last. Ada was ‘his girl,’ and he had left the pigeons in her keeping.
‘Poor Ada,’ I said one day to Jock, ‘what would she say if she saw Alfred?’
‘Alfred writes to her,’ Jock replied solemnly. ‘At least I write for him.’
‘But,’ I objected, ‘Ada may fall in love with your letters—it’s not fair to her.’
‘Oh! I put “Jock helped to write this” at the top,’ he explained earnestly.
What Ada thought of these dual letters I cannot say. I suppose she minds Alfred’s pigeons and hopes on. As for Alfred, I think his real love was for Jock. When he was restive and talked of going away we could soothe him by saying that he surely would not leave Jock alone. Everything he had he brought to his idol to share it with him. He made himself bath-chairman, and the two would go off to the one window that commanded an amusing street view. Together they hung out in perfect amity and understood each other in silence, for Alfred could barely get the words for even a short sentence. Alfred was the sheep-dog, Jock the shepherd.
It was understood that if one was asked to tea anywhere the other must go too. With Jock Alfred was known to be ‘all right.’ So things went happily until the inevitable parting. Jock was sent to a Red Cross hospital almost at a moment’s notice. Alfred was inconsolable; he wandered, red-eyed, forlorn, piteously incoherent, from ward to ward, searching vaguely and vainly for his chum. He shed bitter childlike tears, while Jock, for his part, suffered for Alfred’s trouble and his own. Such is the pathos of hospital. Later, Alfred was sent to the Scottish hospital of which mention has been made. He and Jock write to each other—perhaps some day they will meet.
As for Jock, I think a star laughed when he was born—though he can suffer to the full capacity of a Celtic nature. Good angels have him in their keeping and save him—only Heaven knows how—from being spoilt.
I was present when the sergeant of the guard met Jock being wheeled down the corridor. He interrupted the triumphal progress with six foot of stalwart manhood.
‘That,’ said he, ‘is by his looks the happiest boy in this hospital. I’ve never seen him sad, I’ve never heard him grumble. He’s the boy for my money—he’s a good boy, a great boy! We need more like him, we do!’
This was embarrassing, but Jock took it quietly and politely. More touching was the devotion of the corporal of the guard. ‘I had a son just like him, killed at Suvla Bay,’ he explained.
But Jock was of those who have fairy godmothers. If you imagine Bonnie Prince Charlie before his heroism was tarnished, you have Jock; or if you imagine Malcolm, Marquis of Lossie, in a lighter vein, you have him; and if you picture young Lochinvar, or Jock of Hazeldean, or some other hero of Scottish ballad, you see our Jock.
When first we saw him—it was an October day soon after the battle of Loos—he looked haggard, unshaven, and quite unlike the boy of a later date. He had a shockingly wounded knee, and was running a temperature. His dressing was a daily torture. We knew it was agony, because he whistled and sang the whole time and talked the most fascinating nonsense in beautiful Doric—only he gripped the head rail of his bed with an iron ‘grup,’ as he would have called it, and looked within measurable distance of fainting.
Movement was dreadful to him, but he had journeys to the X-ray room and to the operating theatre. Even in semi-consciousness he was true to himself—true to the self which was always pushed out of sight. I remember his sitting up just after an operation, and casting a distracted look round the ward.
‘Are the troops safe and in their places?’ he asked wildly. Reassured, he asked again ‘Is Paddy all right?’ Paddy was our orderly and a devoted friend of Jock’s. Then with a sigh of relief he lay down.
The following day he had an extension put on the injured leg. If you can imagine what it is to have a terribly injured knee, then to have it cut about, and finally to have it held up for half an hour or more while the extension is put on, you have just a faint idea what Jock suffered in grim silence. He was in the torture chamber but he never winced—only the youth went out of his face and a sort of grey old age seemed to come upon him.
I said to him later: ‘You’ve had an awful time of it to-day, Jock.’
He was still faint with pain, but he murmured: ‘No so bad. Oh! it was no so bad at all, Nurse.’
To these bad times belonged his polite requests, ‘Will you pull my leg a wee?’ and ‘Will you sort my leg?’—a phrase which always delighted me; but, as a Scottish captain asked seriously when I had quoted this latter request, ‘What else could he have said?’
Often in those bad winter days when Jock’s temperature rose with such alarming bounds, I used to wonder if he would ever see Scotland again. There was the dreadful bugbear septicæmia, and there was always the likelihood that he would have to lose his leg. But he had a good angel in Sister B. No one could ‘sort his leg’ as she could, no one could hurt him so little or so quickly as she, and no one could put in what he called ‘they tubes’ as she could—those deadly tubes that seemed to go by winding alleys and narrow desperate ways under his patella and right through the back of his knee. I think she staked her soul (and no one gave more life and soul to her patients than she did) that Jock should keep his leg. She was the first who dared to get him into a wheel chair; she taught him to walk again; she comforted him and helped him to face the long months, for even Jock had his dark days—more of them than he let us know. He used at these times to read Burns with devotion, and he told me that ‘Desolation’ and ‘Man is made to Mourn’ were his favourite poems, and exactly expressive of his feelings.
‘One gets a wee bit fed up at times,’ he confessed, ‘thinking one’ll never play football again.’
Football had been his joy, and somehow I think he went out to the war as to football on a larger scale. Quite casually he described the Highlanders’ charge at Loos. He was out of it very soon himself, but even at that moment his thoughts had all been outside himself.
‘I prayed then as I never prayed before,’ he remarked.
‘For the stretcher-bearers to come to you,’ suggested a listener.
‘No, of course not’—this with surprise—‘I prayed for the boys. Man! it was grand to see the kilts go by.’
Casually he told of his effort to save one of his officers who was severely wounded. But both of them were unable to move and they lay on the field for twenty-four hours.
Patrick MacGill in his terrible description of Loos tells how the Jocks were scattered, dead and wounded, on the battlefield, their bare knees gleaming in the pale morning light. But for many there was no return.
However, this is a happy story. I firmly believe that Jock is the true fairy-tale hero who marries the princess and lives happily ever afterwards, even as he deserves. But he will always suffer for the suffering of others. He confided to me with shame that certain books brought him inexplicable sensations rather like wanting to cry. ‘It’s a sort of soft spot in my wooden heart,’ he explained. All alone in the ward he would solace himself by singing Burns’s songs—with tears in his eyes. He accounted for them by saying the light had dazzled him.
To the sorrows of the ward he gave all his heart. One of the ineffaceable memories of hospital is the morning when Patterson died. Patterson, a man of very different temperament, had loved Jock too and had, during his long-drawn weeks of dying, found comfort, I believe, in the atmosphere of cheeriness that emanated from Jock’s bed, when he could not move. They were two of the worst cases, and they could only exchange greetings by shouting across the ward.
On this morning there was a terrible silence. No one had the heart for song or gramophone. Patterson’s pain was too apparent; the coming end of it held the men in a hushed suspense. Then suddenly Patterson made an effort and called to Jock, ‘How are you, Jock?’ And Jock, white with sympathy, called back, ‘Champion! What way are you, Patterson?’ The pity of it....
But Jock’s story is only a quarter written. Its chapters have been fine reading for those who have had the luck to read them so far, but I believe there will be finer chapters yet.
Often I said to myself in fear for him, ‘Whom the orderlies love die young’—for the orderlies adored Jock, but the adapted proverb did not come true, for he is walking about now and ‘enjoying life fine to make up for all the months in bed—not that I suffered so much at all, Nurse.’
This is a happy story, but we saw sad ones.
Death is just an incident in hospital life. Alas! one sometimes forgets that it is all-important to the dying. A household seems to hold its breath when somebody dies; a ward continues its automatic routine. There is pity—much of it—but it is a common-sense pity, that accepts death as just an inevitable happening to be finished and then forgotten.
I remember so well the night when old Sergeant Meadows died. He had only been in the ward for three days, so that his personality had had no chance to impress us. All the men settled down to sleep except Harman, who had suddenly gone mad. He shrieked if anyone went near him, tried to push us away, then to blow us away. A hypodermic of morphia seemed to produce little effect on him except that he was a shade quieter; he did not sleep but remained sitting up in bed, watchful and terribly alert.
Meanwhile the poor old sergeant was dying. Nothing could be done for him. Morton, the orderly, always pitiful, came and looked at him.
‘Well,’ he said philosophically, ‘this is a queer night we’re having. A man in the other ward tells me ’e’s been seein’ rabbits. It’s too much! I just says “This must stop. There’s too many seein’ rabbits to-night.” I knew a man what saw red, white, and blue rats—had ’em proper, ’e did.’
Morton sighed. He was a gentle soul, capable of infinite tenderness and patience, as many orderlies are. They are, one sometimes thinks, gentler than women, less conventional, and stereotyped in their kindness.
‘Poor man!’ Morton murmured. ‘A good old soul. It’s queer how little one thinks of it. When the young ones die it comes worse on one.’
A few minutes afterwards the sergeant was dead. Unused to death, I hardly realised it. At once preparations were made for his laying-out and subsequent removal. There is a routine about death as about birth. The immensity of the spiritual change is obscured by the methodical functions of material life. Yet death is the supreme adventure.
It seemed sad for the old man to have met this great adventure among strangers, to go forth silently, without tears or prayers or love from us who watched. Yet I think this quiet, unemotional passing is dignified. Very soon afterwards the orderlies came with a stretcher and the Union Jack for pall, and so the old man left us. His body went to the mortuary, and his soul—surely, ‘his soul goes marching on.’ And all the time the other men slept like weary children. Only Harman sat up, still awake and watchful in his terrible nervous tension.
Hospital is a world to itself, and those outside know little of it; so one often thought, when visitors expressed surprise that we all seemed cheerful. Of course we were not all cheerful or always cheerful. The cheerfulness of the Tommy is a composite thing. In part it is due to his youth and his character, and is in that sense natural; but it is in part his religion—in some cases his only real religion. To be cheerful is ‘to play the game’—that wonderful, indefinite, sacred ‘Game’ of the English, which demands the utmost of body and soul. Just sometimes a man who had become one’s friend would admit the bitterness of his heart, would say that he was ‘fed-up,’ only to laugh it off and ask the eternal riddle, ‘Where’s the good of grumbling?’ So we were really cheerful at most times, but I always thought the most cheerful time the hours between five o’clock and eight in the morning.
In a surgical ward dressings are begun between four and five o’clock, but the general stir is not till five. It was customary in many wards for Sisters and nurses to provide an early cup of tea for the patients, and the Jocks and a few others had porridge. This was the time of sing-songs. Torrey-Alexander hymns were sandwiched between such cheerful ditties as ‘What’s the Matter with Father?’ and ‘Hulloa! hulloa! Who’s your Lady Friend?’ Then of course we had the inevitable ‘Little Grey Home,’ and as surely ‘Michigan’ and ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling.’ Meantime the bed patients were washing and beds were being made. The men who could get up were the last to move. If the delay became insupportable, their more active companions would tip them on to the floor—I have seen the whole bedstead turned upside down. The men themselves were great bed-makers, and one could nearly always find someone to give a hand in quite professional style.
Yes, things were cheerful in the mornings, and informal too. If work was done early the Sisters and nurses had time for a private and hasty cup of coffee in one of the dug-outs, and there was time, too, for talk with the men, and always we had a cheery visit from the ‘night super,’ Sister L. As for the war—the very reason of our present estate—it was the subject least discussed. Sometimes one almost forgot that there was a war. Every private house worries and thinks more of war than any hospital ward does—or it seems so. There might be dark thoughts under all the trivial discussions, the little jokes, the conventional badinage that we carried on, but they did not appear.
At eight o’clock the day staff arrived and our night was over—always, I was a little sorry. There is a vague but eternal feud between ‘the day people and the night people.’ The night staff is ‘the cat’ for the day staff. Whatever is missing—spoons, mugs, dressings, instruments—the solution of the mystery is clear—‘it’s those night people.’ The day orderlies lay on the souls of the night nurses dozens of spoons, forks, and knives. The day Sister thinks the night Sister either too easy or too harsh with her patients. It is just one of the inevitables of life.
I shall think often now of those whose watch is by night—not with any pity, for it is a strange, quiet life, but a happy one. I only knew it in a rather dead season, not in the busy time when trains were coming in and patients arriving nightly. There the night staff has small time for reflection. The hours pass in a whirl of bed-baths, dressings, and settlement. But it was not my good fortune to know such nights.
‘Hallow-E’en.’