which must be instituted when the business of eating is concluded in
order that the business of eating may recommence.

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)