ital every morning between 10 a.m. and 11
a.m. Private Binny can speak to him then.'

"'But by that time,' said the V. A.D. girl, 'the man will be buried.'

"'I can't help that,' said the matron.' The discipline of the hospital
must be maintained. It would be perfectly impossible to run a place like
this if every man was allowed to make complaints at all hours of the day
and to all sorts of people.'

"That V.A.D. was a plucky girl, and persistent--they sent her home
afterwards in disgrace--and she talked on until the matron agreed to
take a look at Binny. I think she was staggered when she saw him sitting
up in bed and heard him cursing the orderlies, who had come back by
that time. But she couldn't do anything. She wasn't really a bad sort
of woman, and I don't suggest for a moment that she wanted to have Binny
buried alive. But she had no authority. She could not alter an order.
And there the thing was in black and white. However, she persuaded the
orderlies to wait another half-hour. She went off and found one of the
surgeons. He was a decent sort of fellow, but young, and he didn't see
his way to interfering. There had been several mistakes made in that
hospital, and the C.O. had been rather heavily strafed, which meant
of course that everyone under him was strafed worse, on the good old
principle of passing it on. That surgeon's idea was to avoid trouble,
if possible. Somebody, he said, had made a mistake, but it was too late,
then, to set things right, and the best thing to do was to say nothing
about it. He was sorry for Binny, but he couldn't do anything.

"When the V.A.D. girl heard that, she lost her temper. She said she'd
write home and tell her father about it, and that her father was a
Member of Parliament and would raise hell about it She didn't, of
course, say hell!"

"She couldn't do that," said Mackintosh. "The censor wouldn't pass a
letter with a story like that in it."

"Quite right," said the padre, "and it wouldn't have been any good if
her father had got the letter. He couldn't have done anything. If he'd
asked a question in Parliament he'd simply have been told a lie of some
kind. It was a silly sort of threat to make. The V.A.D. saw that herself
and began to cry.

"That upset the surgeon so much that he went round and took a look at
Binny. The man was pale by that time and in the deuce of a funk. But he
wasn't in the least dead. The surgeon felt that it was a hard case, and
said he'd take