Some have been working in wards, some have been pushing trollies in the corridors, some have been shovelling coke, some have been toiling in the cookhouse or stores, some have been shifting loads of bedding to the fumigator, some have been on “sanitary fatigue,” some have been cleaning windows or whitewashing walls, some have been writing or typing documents, some have been spending their rest-hour in slumber or over a game of billiards.  Whatever they were doing, they must stop doing it at the word of command.

If the convoy be a large one, its advent may even mean, for the orderlies, the dread announcement, “All passes stopped.”  The luckless wight whose one afternoon-off in the week this happens to be, and who has probably arranged to tryst with a lady friend, finds, at the gate, that he is turned back by the sentry.  In vain he displays his pass, properly signed, stamped and dated:  the telephone has warned the sentry (or “R.M.P.”—­Regimental Military Policeman) that the passes have been countermanded.  Until the convoy has been dealt with, the pass is so much waste paper, and the unfortunate orderly’s inamorata will look for him and behold him not.  How many painful misunderstandings this “All passes stopped” law has given rise to, one shudders to guess.

But indeed no war-hospital orderly ever arranges any appointment without the proviso that he is liable to break it.  The folk who imagine that the hospital orderly enjoys a “cushy job” (to use the appropriate vernacular) seldom make sufficient allowance for this painful aspect of it.  The ordinary soldier in training in an English camp has his evenings free, and certain other free times, which are nearly as sure as the sun’s rising.  The hospital orderly is never—­in theory at any rate—­off duty.  His free moments are regarded not as a right but as a favour:  no freedom, at any time, can be guaranteed.  He is liable to be called on in the middle of the night, or at the instant when he is going off duty, or when at a meal, or when resting, or when on the point of walking out in pursuance of the gentle art of courtship.  And he must respond, instanter, or he will find that he has earned the C.B.—­which in this instance means not Companion of the Bath, but Confined to Barracks, a punishment as hard to bear as the cruel “keeping in” of our school-days.

Without presuming to compare either the importance or the onerousness of the hospital orderly’s work with that of the soldier capable of going to the front to fight, I would here add that the critic who watches the stretcher-carrying and thinks it a pity that able-bodied males should be wasted on it, is doing the system (not to mention the men themselves) an injustice.  For the men whom he sees are not, as a matter of fact, able-bodied, even though muscular enough to stand this short physical effort.  Excitable old gentlemen who believe that they can decide at a glance whether a man is medically fit, and write to