Observations of an Orderly | Page 4

"A leg of chicken and some rice pudden. Only wasted if you
don't 'ave it."
"But is it allowed--?" I was, in truth, not only tired but ravenous.
Sister, entering upon this conspiratorial dialogue, unhesitatingly gave
her approval.
Cold rice pudding and a left-over leg of chicken, eaten standing, at a
shelf in a larder, can taste very good indeed, even to the wearer of a
spick-and-span grey lounge suit. I shall know in future what it means
when my restaurant waiter emerges from behind the screened
service-door furtively wiping his mouth. I sympathise. I too have
wolfed the choice morsels from the banquet of my betters.

II
LIFE IN THE ORDERLIES' HUTS
In May, 1915, when I enlisted, the weather was beautiful. Consequently
the row of tin huts, to which I was introduced as my future address "for
the duration," wore an attractive appearance. The sun shone upon their
metallic sides and roofs. The shimmering foliage of tall trees, and a fine
field of grass, which made a background to the huts, were fresh and
green and restful to the eye. Even the foreground of hard-trodden

earth--the barrack square--was dry and clean, betraying no hint of its
quagmire propensities under rain. Later on, when winter came, the
cluster of huts could look dismal, especially before dawn on a wet
morning, when the bugle sounding parade had dragged us from warm
beds; or in an afternoon thaw after snow, when the corrugated eaves
wept torrents in the twilight, and one's feet (despite the excellence of
army boots) were chilled by their wadings through slush. Meanwhile,
however, the new recruit had nothing to complain of in the aspect of
the housing accommodation which was offered him. Merely for
amusement's sake he had often "roughed it" in quarters far less
comfortable than these bare but well-built huts--which even proved, on
investigation, to contain beds: an unexpected luxury.
"I'll put you in Hut 6," said the Sergeant-Major. "There's one empty bed.
It's the hut at the end of the line."
Thereafter Hut 6 was my home--and I hope I may never have a less
pleasant one or less good company for room-mates. In these latter I was
perhaps peculiarly fortunate. But that is by the way. It suffices that
twenty men, not one of whom I had ever seen before, welcomed a total
stranger, and both at that moment and in the long months which were to
elapse before various rearrangements began to scatter us, proved the
warmest of friends.
Twenty-one of us shared our downsittings and our uprisings in Hut 6.
There might have been an even number, twenty-two, but one bed's
place was monopolised by a stove (which in winter consumed coke,
and in summer was the repository of old newspapers and orange-peel).
The hut, accordingly, presented a vista of twenty-one beds, eleven
along one wall and ten along the other, the stove and its pipe being the
sole interruption of the symmetrical perspective. Above the beds ran a
continuous shelf, bearing the hut-inhabitants' equipment, or at least that
portion of it--great-coat, water-bottle, mess-tin, etc.--not continually in
use. Below each bed its owner's box and his boots were disposed with
rigid precision at an exact distance from the box and boots beneath the
adjacent bed. In the ceiling hung two electric lights. These, with the
stove, beds, shelves, boxes and boots, constituted the entire furniture of

the hut--unless you count an alarm-clock, bought by public subscription,
and notable for a trick of tinkling faintly, as though wanting to strike
but failing, in the watches of the night, hours before its appointed
minute had arrived. The hut contained no other furniture whatever, and
in those days did not seem to us to require any. In the autumn, when the
daylight shortened and we could no longer hold our parliaments on a
bench outside, a couple of deck-chairs were mysteriously imported; and,
as the authorities remained unshocked, a small table also appeared and
was squeezed into a gap beside the stove. Some sybarite even goaded
us into getting up a fund for a strip of linoleum to be laid in the aisle
between the beds. This was done--I do not know why, for personally I
have no objection to bare boards. I suppose linoleum is easier to keep
clean than wood; and that aisle, tramped on incessantly by hobnail
boots which in damp weather were, as to their soles and heels, mere
bulbous trophies of the alluvial deposits of the neighbourhood, was
sometimes far from speckless. But to me the strip of linoleum made our
hut look remotely like a real room in a real house: it was a touch of the
conventional which I never cared for, and I only subscribed to it when I
had voted against it and been overborne. An