According to regulations, you
were not allowed to wear ward-shoes except within the confines of the
ward. No doubt it was expected that every time you were sent on an
errand outside the ward you would solemnly take off your ward-shoes and
put on your marching-boots--then, on the return, take off your
marching-boots and put on your ward-shoes--but life as a nursing orderly
is too short for such elaborations of etiquette. It was nothing unusual,
when one was working in a ward which lay at a distance of quarter of a
mile from the hospital's main building, to be sent to the said main
building a dozen times in a single morning. This incessant
message-bearing had to be done, if not at the double, at any rate at
nothing slower than five miles per hour in the morning (the busy time);
in the afternoon a speed of four miles per hour might sometimes be
permissible. At all events, running-shoes, as I told the shopman, would
not have been inappropriate during certain periods of crisis.
From time to time our tasks were interrupted by the notes of a bugle--or
the shrilling of the Sergeant-Major's whistle--demanding our presence
for an intake of new patients.
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