“I’m an N.C.O., sir.” The young lance-sergeant’s voice is again about as stiff as is safe. Quite safe, though, this time. For the presiding M.O. is a Regular. Verbal points of military correctitude are the law and the prophets to him. He cannot be wholly sorry when junior colleagues, temporary commissioners, slip up on even the least of these shreds of orange-peel. Like Susan Nipper, he knows his place—“me being a permanency”—and thinks that “temporaries” ought to know theirs. So he amends the outsider’s false start to: “You’re the first N.C.O. or man who has come before us this morning and not said he had rheumatism.”
The sergeant, whom I have known for some days as a choleric body, holds his tongue, having special reasons just now not to risk a court-martial. “Well,” the president snaps as if in resentment of this self-control, “what is the matter with you?”
“Fit as can be, sir.”
“What are you doing down here, then, away from your unit?”
“Obeying orders of Medical Board, sir. No. 8 General Hospital, December 8.”
“Not sorry, either, I daresay,” the president mutters, wobbling back towards his first line of approach to the business. “Not very keen to go back up the line, sergeant, eh?”
“It’s all I want, sir, thank you.” The sergeant puts powerful brakes on his tongue and says only that. But he has sadly disconcerted the faculty. A major with twenty years’ service has cast himself for the fine sombre part of recording angel to note all the cowardice and mendacity that he can. And here is a minor actor forgetting his part and putting everything out. From where I am keeping a wooden face near the door I see opposition arising in the heart of the outraged psychologist beyond the table.
A sound professional instinct reinforces the personal one. Whenever a soldier goes before a Medical Board it is soon clear that he wants to be thought either less fit than he is or more fit. The doctor’s first impulse, as soon as he sees which way the man’s wishes tend, is to lean towards the other. And this, in due measure, is just. We all understate or overstate symptoms to our own family doctors according to what we fear or desire. The doctor rightly tries to detect the disturbing force in the patient’s mind, and to discount for it duly—just like “laying-off” for a side-wind in shooting. So now the president sees light again. The Board is now out to find the lance-sergeant a crock. “Hold out your wrist,” says the senior member. The pulse is jealously felt.
“Rotten!” the senior member says to the junior. Then, penetratingly, to the sergeant: “What’s that cicatrix you’ve got on the back of your hand? Both hands! Show me here.”
Two spongy, purplish-red pads of new flesh are inspected. “Burns, scarcely healed!” says the president wrathfully. “Skin just the strength of wet tissue-paper! Man alive, you’ve a bracelet of ulcers all round your wrists. Never wash, eh?” When liquid fire flayed a man’s hands to the sleeve, but not further, the skin was apt to break out, as he recovered, in small, deep boils about the frontier of the new skin and the old. The sergeant does not answer. He wants no capital punishment under the Army act.
“Man’s an absolute wreck,” says the major. “Debility, wounds imperfectly healed, blood-poisoning likely. Not fit for the line for two months to come. P.B.—eh?” he turns to his junior.
“That’s what I should say, sir,” the junior concurs, in a tone of desperate independence.
“Next man,” says the major. Before the lance-sergeant has quite stalked to the door the major calls after him “Sergeant!”
“Sir?” says the sergeant, furious and red but contained.
“You’re a damned good man, but it won’t do,” says the major. “Good luck to you!” Great are the forces of decent human relentment after a hearty let-out with the temper.
The inquisition proceeds, still on that Baconian principle of finding out which is a man’s special bent and then bending the twig pretty hard in the other direction; still, too, with the dry light of reason a little suffused, as Bacon would say, with the humours of the affections, of vanity, ill-temper and impatience. Nearly everybody is morally weary. Most of the men inspected have outlived the first profuse impulse to court more of bodily risk than authority expressly orders. Most of the doctors, living here in the distant rear of the war, have outlived their first generous belief in an almost universally high morale among the men. In the training-camps in 1914 the safe working presumption about any unknown man was that he only wanted to get at the enemy as soon as he could. Now the working presumption, the starting hypothesis, is that a man wants to stay in, out of the rain, as long as you let him. Faith has fallen lame; generosity flags; there has entered into the soul as well as the body the malady known to athletes as staleness.
VI
The war had more obvious disagreeables, too; you have heard all about them: the quelling coldness of frosty nights spent in soaked clothes—for no blankets were brought up to the trenches; the ubiquitous dust and stench of corpses and buzzing of millions of corpse-fed flies on summer battlefields; and so on, and so on—no need to go over the list. But these annoyances seemed to me to do less in the way of moulding the men’s cast of mind than that general, chronic weariness, different from all the common fatigues of peace, inasmuch as each instalment of this course of exhaustion was not sandwiched in between heavenly contrasts of utter rest before and after—divine sleeps in a
