IN THE ORDERLIES' HESS.
• A NY complaints ? " Regularly at dinner time the Orderly
_Pk Officer materializes for a fraction of a second in the men's mess, and having uttered this challenge, vanishes, wafted on his way by the unvarying " No, Sir ! " of the senior oorporaL The question and its answer are an Army ritual. They stand for jealously guarded rights : the right of the common soldier to gain a hearing with his superiors, and the right of his superiors to make sure that the common soldier is being treated as those superiors would wish him to be treated. The formula, though observed in the orderlies' mess of the hospital where I work, is devoid of the signifi- cance which it may possess elsewhere. For all that, I should be sorry to see it lapse. It is part of a procedure whose soundness is beyond dispute. But, whatever may be the case in other quarters, the " No, Sir ! " is, with us, sincere. And if you peeped into our messroom but at mealtime you would perceive the reason. No one, not an incurable sybarite, could find aught here to complain of.
When I reflect that we are on Army rations, and that in some camps the troops on those rations not only suffer from bad cooking but actually allege that they have tob little to eat, I despair of mas- culine honesty and intelligence. It seems incredible that anywhere the regimen can be so ill-managed, or the soldier so flagrantly robbed, that the bill-of-fare settled by the authorities should be made to appear insufficient or be inedible. Our messing arrangements -happen to be in particularly careful hands. I should be ungrateful if I did not acknowledge that, like the rest of the population of the great -war hospital, the orderlies ere " looked after " with punctilious consideration : but this—though praiseworthy—is only proper ; and when all is said and done, there is nothing to prevent the com- missariat from being as well and wisely conducted in every unit everywhere. Yet men who come to us from other centres one and all declare, when they have banqueted at our board, that they never met anything like it---the goodness of the "grub " and the seemliness with which it is served.
Before I enlisted I had heard such harrowing stories about the roughness of life in khaki that the victualling was from the first a pleasant surprise ; it would never have occurred to me to uplift my voice in " any complaints." There was always enough to eat. Beyond this point there seemed to be nothing more to be said. That we should have to scramble for our meat, potatoes, and duff, and discuss the same off tin plates, was rather amusing than otherwise. True, one's appetite for an evening off, and French kickshaws at a restaurant with white napery and a glass of wine, was sharpened by the contrast ; but that was in a manner something to be thankful for : these mild adventures added a spice to the novelty of one's existence. Nevertheless, looking back, I am conscious that our mess is better than it was in the spring of 1915 when I joined. The improvement is so marked that, were we suddenly switched back to the conditions then prevailing, the Orderly Officer, when he entered on his rounds, might hear a peevish " Yes, Sir " detaining him in reply to his usual query. For now we have been taught how good Army fare can be. In those days we did not know.
• Thereby bangs a tale. It is the tale of a woman who poked her nose in where she was not wanted—and on whose head a hundred and fifty men should shower blessings for her inquisitiveness.
It must be understood that the orderlies' mess is separate from the rest of the hospital It has no connexion with the kitchens in which the patients' food is prepared, nor with the messes of the female staff. It has its own supplies, its own cooks, its own Mess Committee. At the time of which I write, the cookhouse staff in our mess were men—chosen on an ancient principle. That principle, which has obtained immemorially in institutions where the masculine intellect rules—in the Army, on board ship, in mining communities, exploring expeditions, and the like—is that the Wight who is a failure at all other jobs may as well be put to the one on which the entire health and happiness of the company depend : namely, the cooking. The principle has its disadvantages, as I had already observed long before the war. I have voyaged on cargo steamers, and known, when I encountered the most slovenly and least intelligent vagabond in the crew, that I was safe to assume him to be the culinary artist from the galley. In the orderlies' mess the organization was never, of course, so inept. The various cooks who rather rapidly succeeded each other (the cause of the changes in the succession was compre- hended by the Sergeant-Major alone ; but I think he had very good reasons, if not for making the appointments, at any rate for can- celling them) were all straightforward enough, if not as creatively Inspired as one could wish. Stew was their standard achievement, and—given the ingredients—he must be a bungler indeed who could fail with stew. The only objection to stew is that it is apt to cease to be an engaging idea when it recurs seven times a week : a dis- covery which millions of good Europeans have made as one result of
-the Great War. The alternative to stew—and in the minds of the cooks :aforesaid there is only one alternative—is roast. Roast beef ; roast mutton ; stew, of either or both : these are the three possibili- ties, the sole possibilities. And these our cooks socomplished, in their fashion : not very well, but not very i1L As I have said, I never saw anything to cavil at, in regard to our food.
In the way it was "put en " there was perhaps an opening for the animadversions of the hypercritical. The mess corporal, who at that era was chosen on grounds not emir/liar to those which governed the choice of the cook, dumped upon his counter at the end of the messroom the large tin receptacle—resembling a baby's bath—which contained the stew (or the dishes bearing the roasts, as the case may be), and left it to the hungry rabble to help themselves as best they could. This you may be sure they did,. and our spirit of fairness was such that I am certain no one was deprived of his share by another's selfishness. Still—it was a tussle. The stew was mobbed by persons armed with spoons and enamelled coup-plates : the skirmish to dip into the appetizing mess was so confusing that you sometimes hardly knew what lucky morsel you had scooped until you had elbowed forth and could examine at leisure your plate's contents. The attack upon a joint was even more -vigorous. The joint could not be said to be carved ; it was rent asunder by several individuals' knives and forks hacking into it simultaneously with awkward effects in the matter of juices.
All this was not only indecorous but wasteful. Even when a, mess corporal who in civilian life had enjoyed some success as a bruiser, and whose battered countenance had a truculent cast not in the least in keeping with his true character, caused us to line up in a queue for our rations, the wastefulness was but slightly mitigated. Dinner was still a scrimmage. The tables were overcrowded. Their wooden tops were none too clean. The knives, forks, and spoons, which we culled out of an old egg-box, sometimes bore relics of previous meals. The same might be said of the chipped enamel plates. But these matters were beneath the notice of our corporal. He kept order in the mess. He produced the food from the back- ground of the kitchen at the hours appointed. Having done so, he beamed at us, from behind his counter, with the complacency of one who would be pained to learn that, as far as his messroom was con- cerned, all was not for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
I -liked Corporal Morgan, especially when, pipe in mouth, he relaxed into tales of a gory and sportive past. The sole weapon which he now wielded was a vocabulary. And that weapon failed him—for it could not be used in the presence of a lady—on the occasion when he was put to the test and his supremacy attacked.
The scene I remember wall. We orderlies were seated at our tables, munching hard, when I noticed that the usual babel of talk had died down. Looking up, I saw, behind Corporal Morgan's counter, three figures : those of the corporal himself, the Quarter-
master, and—astonishing vision N—, the Assistant- Matron. It was the first time that any one present had ever seen a woman in our mess hut. The sight struck us dumb. We gaped. Miss N—, with two spots of pink in her cheeks, and a determined expression, was interrogating Corporal Morgan : we saw her sniffing the stew, peering with a frown into the egg-box, and gingerly lifting out specimens of its contents, the knives and forks and spoons. It was not difficult to guess that she was dissatisfied with her scrutiny. Corporal Morgan, his scarred countenance suffused with blushes, was improvising what answers he could to her catechism. The Quartermaster looked on, with a grim smile.- detachment, as of one who shrugs his shoulders at a feminine foible.
Presently Miss N— withdrew, through the kitchen, the Quarter- master in her wake. The babel broke forth afresh, but with increased loudness and fury. I regret to say that the assemblage with almost complete unanimity expressed its vehement disapproval of the sacredness of the men's mess being invaded by a woman. Our cor- poral, haranguing us in language which reached an unusual floridity-, demanded to know whether we were, or were not, a girls' school, and whether the Matron, the Assistant-Matron, or any other member of the female staff, had a right to come and lord it over us. The outrage of a woman interfering in our affairs was represented to us as amendurable. She wants things altered, does she ? She'd like to boss us, would she ? We'll see about that. The corporal amused us that he knew his duty. It was not for him, as a soldier, to take orders from any woman, but only from his superior officers. No woman held any status in our unit. And so on : a rhetorical effort with which, sad to relate, the meeting wholly concurred—so blind are men to their own advantages. What exactly happened thereafter, behind the scenes, I do not know ; nor do I know what influence had caused Miss N— to .t examine into the men's mess—a course of action which, whether I had official sanction or not, must have required some courage on the part of a naturally shrinking character. I make no doubt that she
overcame opposition far more serious than that represented by the dour visage of Corporal Morgan. Suffice it to say that, mysteriously, phenomena began to supervene. Corporal Morgan found himself transferred to another post. Women cooks appeared in the kitchen, and a woman washer-up in the scullery. Stranger still, we suddenly beheld our bare wooden tables covered with American cloth ; a new outfit of flawless enamel plates, in two sizes, one for meat and one for pudding, on the counter ; likewise a complete new set of cutlery. The anti-social method of the skirmish, and even that of the queue, was superseded by a system whereby each table was allotted to a given number of men, and a plate of food, exactly calculated for that number, and ready carved, was placed thereon only when the table was filled. Each man helped himself, from the plate, to as much as he wanted ; unused food was saved ; any man who had taken food and then not eaten it was liable to be punished : the new rules against waste were rigid but just. And the " grub " itself— ! It was the same as before, yet how different ! Steak pudding . . . shepherd's- pie . . . " greens " . . . fried onions . . . stewed fruit . . . blancmange . . . salad . . . jam tart . . . roly-poly . . . why were these things, all quite unpretentious, never once seen as addenda to the stew, roast, and duff of our men cooks, yet introduced as a matter of course into our menu as soon as women reigned in the kitchen ?
In something, less than a week after Miss N— had aroused such perturbation in the bosoms of Corporal Morgan and his flock our mesa was almost unrecognizably improved. The corporal sulked ; he never, till he left us for work elsewhere, would admit that any reform had been necessary. But those who, at first, had agreed in his denunciation of all interference with menfolk's affairs on the part of women, basely deserted him. The proof of the pudding (and of the other delectable viands) was in the eating. We had not known, too, how uncivilized we were becoming, in our table manners, until the spotless American cloth, the bright utensils, the nicely kept cruets, and the equable service came as a refreshing inducement to a return to polite behaviour. Englishmen as a whole have very good table manners—incomparably better than those of most other Western nations. They are not greedy, nor are they gourmets. Plain food satisfies them. And they like their table appointments to be " nice." When Miss N— was shocked at the state of affairs in our mess she was shocked at what ought to have shocked us also. Having—against our will—enlightened us as to our own feelings in the matter, she left us to come to what conclusions we chose. Later she quitted the hospital for service abroad. Before going, she came once more into our mess. Again there were two pink spots in her cheeks. But this time there was no frown upon her brow. For she was there to receive a presentation—a gift subscribed to by every man in the mess, in token of their esteem and their gratitude ; and, when she nervously made her little speech of thanks, the but rang with the cheers of those into whose life she had, uninvited, poked her nose, to their huge benefit. The war had taken this kindly woman from our ken, but the neatness, cleanness, and appetizing food of a certain mesaroom but are a memorial to her common-sense and her resolution. When the Orderly Officer calls out " Any complaints Y " it is the far-off Miss N— whom he has to thank for the genuineness of the " No, Sir ! " which lets him go straightway on
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