ply
alcohol or indigestible refreshments to the most delicate war-hospital
inmates. Even with ordinary patients the orderly's afternoon excursion
is sometimes not unfraught with anxiety. But blind patients, as Corporal
Smith said, are the deuce.

Out of his party, four were totally blind, two could recognise dimly
the difference between light and darkness, and one had a single good
eye.

Queen's Hall was reached, by bus, without mishap. After the performance
there was tea at an A.B.C. shop. Here Jock, one of the totally blind
men, a Scotchman--all Scots are "Jocks" in the army--distinguished
himself by facetiae (audible throughout the whole shop) on the English
pronunciation of the word 'scone,' and intimated his desire to treat the
company to a ballad. This project was suppressed, but "a silly fool in a
top hat threatened to report me for having given my men drink," said
Corporal Smith. "Jock gave _him_ the bird, not 'arf. But I thought it
about time to be going home."

So the party prepared to go home.

The bus was voted dull. Somebody suggested the tube. Corporal Smith
consented.

He had forgotten that at Oxford Circus station the lifts have been
abolished in favour of sliding staircases. Confronted by the escalator,
Corporal Smith halted his party and informed them that they must walk
down by the ordinary stair. The escalator was not safe for blind men.
Unfortunately, Jock had sniffed a lark; the one-eyed man backed him up;
the party--elated perhaps by their tea--would not hear of anything so
humdrum as a descent by the ordinary stair. They were going on the
sliding stair. They insisted. Corporal Smith argued in vain. In vain he
exerted his (purely nominal) authority. His charges mocked him. The
one-eyed man leading, with Jock in his wake, they launched themselves at
the sliding stair. In sheer desperation Corporal Smith brought up the
rear, supporting two of the more timid venturers as best he might. None
of the group except Corporal Smith himself, as it turned out, had ever
travelled on an escalator before. But they had heard a comic song about
a sliding stair, and they wished--Jock especially--to sample this
metropolitan invention.

By dodging forward to place each blind man's hand upon the banister,
Corporal Smith managed to send off his patients without a stumble. But
as the stair inexorably lowered them into the bowels of the earth he
realised, only too vividly, what might happen at the foot of the
de