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.
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