ism than is involved
in walking less than a hundred yards to the ground and there standing
stock-still at attention.

I do not say that hospital orderlies never go for a march: only that
marching bulks relatively so small in our programme that any special
equipment for the purpose sounds a little ironical. The issue of
ward-shoes, now, was a real boon. Not that all the pairs with which our
unit was suddenly flooded by the authorities proved as silent as they
were intended to be. Some of them squeaked; and the peregrinations of
the orderly thus afflicted were perhaps more vexatious to the ear of a
nervous patient at night than even the clatter of honest hobnails. And
the soles were thin. A pair of ward-shoes lasted me on the average one
month. If only worn within the ward they might have lasted
longer--though not so very much longer. According to regulations, you
were not allowed to wear ward-shoes except within the confines of the
ward. No doubt it was expected that every time you were sent on an
errand outside the ward you would solemnly take off your ward-shoes and
put on your marching-boots--then, on the return, take off your
marching-boots and put on your ward-shoes--but life as a nursing orderly
is too short for such elaborations of etiquette. It was nothing unusual,
when one was working in a ward which lay at a distance of quarter of a
mile from the hospital's main building, to be sent to the said main
building a dozen times in a single morning. This incessant
message-bearing had to be done, if not at the double, at any rate at
nothing slower than five miles per hour in the morning (the busy time);
in the afternoon a speed of four miles per hour might sometimes be
permissible. At all events, running-shoes, as I told the shopman, would
not have been inappropriate during certain periods of crisis.

From time to time our tasks were interrupted by the notes of a bugle--or
the shrilling of the Sergeant-Major's whistle--demanding our presence
for an intake of new patients. A party of orderlies was wanted to go to
the railway-station to help to remove stretcher-cases from the ambulance
train. The station lies at a distance of a mile from the hospital, and
this small pilgrimage, achieved a few score times, is practically all I
know of the veritable employment of marching-boots.

I regretted when a change of plans diverted the ambulance trains to the
central termini for evacuation. The interlude of a station-party trip