V
The men who could not shirk the choice of Hercules, for other people, were the doctors. The stay of every N.C.O. or man at a base depot was on probation. Each had to go before a Medical Board soon after he came. It adjudged him either T.B. (Temporary Base) or P.B. (Permanent Base). If marked T.B. he went before the Board again once a week, and each time he might be marked T.B. again, or, if his disablement was thought graver or more likely to last, P.B.; or he might be marked A. (Active Service), and then he would join the next draft from home going up to his own battalion or another battalion of his regiment. When once a man was marked P.B. he only went before the Board once a month, and each time he, too, might be marked either P.B., T.B., or A.
Chance relegated me once for some weeks to a base and gave me the job of marching parties of crocks, total and partial, real, half-real, and sham, across the sand dunes to the place where the faculty did its endeavour to sort them. A picture remains of a hut with a long table in it: two middle-aged army doctors sitting beyond it, like dons at a Viva, and each of my party in turn taking his stand at attention, my side of the table, facing the Board, like so many Oliver Twists. The presiding officer takes a manifest pride in knowing all the guile and subtlety of soldier-men. No taking him in—that is proclaimed in every look and tone. He has had several other parties before him today, and the lamp of his faith, never dazzling while these rites are on, has burnt low.
“Well, my man—cold feet, I suppose?” he begins, to the first of my lamentable party. As some practitioners are said to begin all treatments with a prefatory purge, so would this psychologist start with a good full dose of insult and watch the patient’s reaction under the stimulus.
“No, sir, me ’eart’s thrutched up,” says the examinee. Then, while the Board perforates him from head to foot for some seconds with a basilisk stare of unbelief, he dribbles out at intervals, in a voice that bespeaks falling hope, such ineffective addenda as “Can’t get me sleep” and “Not a smile in me.”
“Very picturesque, indeed,” says the senior expert in doubting. “We’ll see to that ‘thrutched’ heart of yours. Cardiograph case. Next man.”
The suspect, duly spat upon, slinks out. The next man takes his place at the table. The president gives him the Dogberry eye that means: “Masters, it is proved already that you are little better than false knaves; and it will go near to be thought so shortly.” What he says is: “Another old hospital bird? Eh? Now, hadn’t you better get back to work before you’re in trouble?”
The target of this consputation is almost convinced by its force that he must be guilty of something, if only he knew what it was. Still, he repeats authority’s last diagnosis as well as he can: “Mine’s Arthuritic rheumatism, sir. An’ piles.”
“Fall out and strip. Next man.” While the next is taking his stand the presiding M.O. has been making a note, and does not look up before saying “Well, what’s the matter with you—besides rheumatism?”
“No rheumatism, sir. And nothing else.” The voice is as stiff as it dares.
The presiding M.O. seems taken aback. Why, here is a fellow not playing up to him! Making a nasty break in the long line of cases that fed his darling cynicism so well! Flat burglary as ever was committed. The second member of the Board comes to life and begins in a tone that savours of dissatisfaction: “Well, you’re the first man—”
“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.