There were days when the ward-kitchen was to me a battlefield and I seemed to be fighting on the losing side.  This was when our scrub-lady was ill or had “got the sack” and it fell to me, the orderly, to do the washing-up single-handed.  Those patients who were well enough to be on their feet were supposed to help. (I speak of a men’s ward, of course, not an officers’.) They did help, and that right willingly.  Sometimes I was blessed by the presence of a patient with a passion for cleaning things.  When there were no dishes to clean he would clean taps.  When the taps shone like gold he would clean the hooks on the dresser.  When all our kitchen gear was clean he would invade, with a kind of fury, the sink-room and clean the apparatus there.  When this was done he would clean the ward’s windows and door handles.  Between-times he would clean his boots and shave patients in bed.  The new army is thickly sown with men like that.  They are the salt of the earth.  I would place them at the summit of the commonwealth’s salary list, the bank clerk second, and the business man, the artist and the politician at the bottom.  At all events these were my sentiments when a patient of this type, convalescing, began to be able to help me with my kitchen chores.  But it occasionally chanced that every single patient in the ward was confined to bed.  It was then that I made my most intimate acquaintance with the catalogue of horrors I have cited.

You behold me, with my shirt-sleeves rolled up, faced by a heap of twenty plates, twenty forks, twenty knives and twenty spoons, all urgently requiring washing.  Were these my whole task I should not shrink.  They would be nicely polished-off long ere one-fifteen arrived—­the time when I should (but probably shall not be able to) leave for my own meal in the orderlies’ mess.  But there are two far more serious opponents waiting to be subdued—­the dinner-tin and the pudding-basin.  This pair are hateful beyond words.  Their memory will for ever haunt me, a spectral disillusionment to spoil the relish of every repast I may consume in the years that are ahead.

The dinner-tin was a rectangular box some three feet long, twenty inches wide and six inches deep.  It was made of solid metal, was fitted with a false bottom to contain hot water, and was divided internally into three compartments to hold meat, vegetables and duff.  These viands were loaded into the tin at the hospital’s central kitchen.  I had naught to do with the cookery—­which I may mention always seemed to me to be excellent.  My sole concern was with the helping-out of the food to the patients and the restoration of the dinner-tin to its shelf in the central kitchen.  For unless I restored that tin in a faultless state of cleanliness, the sergeant in charge of the central kitchen would require my blood.  The tin’s number would betray me.  The sergeant needed not to know my name:  all he had to do, on discovering the questionable tin, was to glance at its number and then send for the orderly of the ward with a corresponding number.