"
Poor soul!--he is weary of giving his "particulars." He has had to give
them half-a-dozen times at least, perhaps more, since he left the front.
At the field dressing-station they wanted his particulars, at the
clearing-station, on the train, at the base hospital, on another train,
on the steamer, on the next train, and now in this English hospital. As
he sits and comforts himself with cocoa, a "V.A.D." hovers at his
elbow, intent on a printed sheet, the details of which she is rapidly
filling-in with a pencil. For this is a card-index war, a colossal
business of files and classifications and ledgers and statistics and
registrations, an undertaking on a scale beside which Harrod's and
Whiteley's and Selfridge's and Wanamaker's and the Magazin du Louvre,
all rolled into one, would be a fleabite of simplicity. Ere the morrow
shall have dawned, our patient's military biography will be recounted,
by various clerks, in I don't know how many different entries. If you
are curious, refer to one of our volumes of the _Admission and Discharge
Book: Field Service Army Book 27a_. Open it at any of its
closely-written pages and see the host of ruled columns which the
orderly in charge of it must inscroll with reference to each of the many
thousands of patients who pass through our hospital per annum.
Pages:
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