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Observations of an Orderly

<h2>XIV</h2> <h2>SLANG IN A WAR HOSPITAL</h2> Every ward in the hospital has a bathroom attached to it, but in addition to these there are two large bathrooms, each containing a number of baths, which are used by walking patients and also by the orderlies. The more recently built of these bathrooms is divided into private cubicles. In the older one the baths are on a more sociable plan, with no partition walls sundering them. The spectacle, in the "old" bathroom, when a convoy of walking cases has arrived, is one which should appeal to a painter. Clouds of steam fill the air, and through the fog you perceive a fine mêlée of figures, some half dressed, some statuesquely nude, towelling themselves or preparing to wash, or shaving at bits of mirror propped on the window-sills. Pink bodies wallow voluptuously in the deep porcelain-ware tubs, which are of the shape and superb dimensions of Egyptian sarcophagi. Sometimes a patient with a wounded arm, unable to help himself, is being soaped and sponged by an orderly; or you may see a cheerful soul, with an injured foot, balanced on the rim of the bath and giving himself all the ablutions which are practicable without the disturbance of bandages. No one who has frequented our bathrooms would ever doubt that the British Army loves cleanliness and hot water. Of cold water I cannot speak with the same enthusiasm. A newly-arrived convoy of course monopolises the bathroom; but throughout the whole day, at almost any hour, you will find a patient or two here; for by the rule of the hospital it is allowable for any patient—once he has been given permission to take an unsupervised bath at all—to take a bath whenever he likes. Consequently it happens often that half a dozen orderlies may be bathing at the same time as half a dozen patients—and it need not be added that the occasion is one for pleasant chats and the barter of anecdotes. For this reason, if for no other, I always elected to use the "old" bathroom: the "new" one, with its closed cubicles, was less fruitful in conversations. The "old" bathroom was the exchange (and perhaps the starting-point) of many of our hospital rumours. I imagine that every war hospital is a hotbed of rumours. Ours certainly was, and is. Amongst the orderlies there are incessant rumours about promotions, about the chances of the unit being sent abroad, about surprise inspections, about the imminent arrival of impossibly large convoys, about news—received privately by the Colonel over the telephone—of defeats or victories. Nine times out of ten the rumour turns out to be groundless. But this does not cause the output of rumours to diminish. Apparently the army is a prolific soil for rumours, inasmuch as they have a special name: a rumour is called a buzz. "Only a buzz" ("it's only a rumour") is an expression often heard on the lips of soldiers. In India it is sometimes "a bazaar buzz" (a rumour circulating in the bazaars); here it is, naturally, a bathroom buzz. Many were the choice examples of slang and of colloquialisms which I culled in the bathroom, sitting comfortably in my bath and communing with my neighbour in the next bath. I remember one morning making the acquaintance of an Australian who had recently recovered from a bad attack of trench feet. Four of the toes of one foot were missing, and the fifth looked far from sound. My friend was examining this lonely toe with a critical gaze, and I sympathised with him over its condition. "Ah!" he said, "that toe is a king to what it was." He went on to tell me (what I could well believe) that to get your "plates of meat" frostbitten wasn't such a "cushy wound" as it was cracked up to be by those who had never experienced its sufferings. "When I went sick the doctor thought he'd rumbled me swinging the lead. But as soon as he spotted them there toes of mine—the ones that's gone—I could see he knew I'd clicked a packet, square dinkum, this trip." ("Square dinkum" or "dinkum" is an Antipodean verbal flourish, which broadly approximates to the American "Sure enough" or the English "Not 'arf.") Certain of these neologisms are common enough in civilian life—have been imported into the army since 1914—but others (and the more interesting ones, as I hold) were, until the war, limited to the barrack-room. British regiments which had been abroad used an argot of considerable antiquity, some of it of Oriental origin (e.g. "blighty," meaning "home": hence "a blighty wound," or simply "a blighty," an injury sufficiently serious to cause the victim to be invalided to England). Whether the derivations of army slang have been investigated I do not know. It appears to me to be a subject worth examination. I am not myself a philologist, but in the bathrooms and elsewhere in the hospital I have heard and noted a small collection of slang phrases and idioms, and these may be worth recording. Such expressions as "swinging the lead" (malingering or deceiving or acting in a hypocritical manner or getting the better of anyone) have lost their novelty. So has "rumbled," which means to be discovered or detected or found out. These words have now spread far beyond the confines of the army. And indeed the rapidity with which all slang and all catch-phrases can be disseminated offers a rather alarming prospect. For whereas, before the war, slang at its silliest was often quite local, nowadays its restriction within given localities has in the nature of things become impossible. A war hospital such as ours contains inmates from every county in Britain, as well as from every colony. The same intermingling occurs on an infinitely greater scale in training-camps and at the various fronts. All these centres are hotbeds of slang: the men go home from them, carrying to their native places slang which would never, in ordinary times, have penetrated there. In the army you will hear a Scotchman doing what he never did before—dropping his aitches. He has caught it from his English comrades. You will hear him say "Not 'arf"—an inane tag which, despite its popularity in London, failed to find any foothold north of the Tweed before the war. "Not 'arf" was mouthed by Sassenach comedians on the music-hall stages of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and was grinned at for what it was worth: the streets did not adopt it. Now the streets will hear it and will use it: it is one of Jock's souvenirs from his campaign. I am afraid that another triviality which has hitherto been to the taste only of the south of England is fated to "catch on," by means of the same missionaries, from Land's End to John o' Groat's, and even in the colonies. Rhyming slang is extraordinarily common in the army, so common that it is used with complete unconsciousness as being correct conversational English. My friend of the king-like toe spoke of his feet as "plates of meat"—and this though he was an Australian, not a cockney. If he had had occasion to allude to his leg he would probably have called it "Scotch peg." A man's arm is his "false alarm"; his nose, "I suppose"; his eye, "mince pie"; his hand, "German band"; his boot, "daisy root"; his face "chevvy chase"; and so forth—an interminable list. What exactly was the raison d'être of this pseudo-poetic mania I do not know, but I suspect that it originated, in the distant past, with the poverty of rhyme-invention on the part of the writers of the cruder kind of pantomime songs—"round the houses," for example, being both a rhyme to and a synonym for "trousies" (garments beloved of those bards!)—and thus the vogue developed. This is only a theory. The one thing certain is that a clumsy form of slang, devoid of the humour and compactness which justify slang—and which were on the whole once characteristic of metropolitan slang—has tickled the ear of some millions of men who, but for the war, would never have fallen under its temptation. The only thing to hope for is that it will run its course and perish—like "What ho, she bumps!" and "Now we shan't be long!"—without leaving any visible and permanent trace upon the language. "Clicked," another word used by my trench-feet associate, resembles much modern slang in the breadth and elasticity of its application. To click can be either advantageous or baneful, according to the circumstances. A soldier asks a superior for a favour, and it is granted. That soldier has clicked. Or if he finds a nice girl to walk out with, he has clicked. Or if he is given a coveted post, he has clicked. But he has also clicked if he is suddenly seized on to do some menial duty. He has clicked if he is discovered in a misdeed. And he has clicked a packet if he gets into trouble generally. On such an occasion, it may be added, the N.C.O. or officer who administers a reproof ("ticks him off"), and does so in angry terms, "goes in off the deep end." Not all army slang is lacking, indeed, in a facetious irony. Miserable conditions in the desert or in the trenches, bad accommodation, doubtful food—anything which cannot arouse the faintest enthusiasm of any sort—these, in the lingo of our now much-travelled and stoical troops, are "nothing to write home about." Surely there is an admirable spirit in this sarcasm. It crops up again in the hospital metaphor "going to the pictures." That is Tommy's way of announcing that he is to go under the surgeon's knife, on a visit to the operating theatre. Again, there is a sardonic tang in the army's condemnation of one who has been telling a far-fetched story: he has been "chancing his arm" (or "mit"). Similarly one detects an oblique and wry fun in the professional army man's use of the word "sieda" to mean "socks." (The new army more feebly dubs them "almond rocks.") "Sieda" has been brought by the Anzacs from Cairo, and with them it means "Good morning!"—a mere friendly hail, now used with great frequency. But the veterans of older expeditions in Egypt and in India, when they had been on the march, took their socks from their perspiring feet and lay down to sleep; and in the morning—well, their socks said "Sieda!" to them when they awoke, and were christened accordingly.... Or again, the socks (or other property) might have vanished in the night—in which case there had been "hooks about" (pilferers about). If one of those "hooks" were caught, he would be first "rammed in the mush" (put in the guardroom), and then, if his guilt were established, he would be observed "going over the wall" or "going to stir" (going to the detention prison). A few other slang words which I have come across in the hospital, and which seem to me to bear the mark of the old army as distinct from the new, are: "bondook," a rifle; "sound scoff" (to the bugler, to sound Rations); "scran," victuals, rations; "weighing out," paying out; "chucking a dummy," being absent; "get the wind up," be afraid (and "put the wind up," make afraid); "the home farm," the married quarters; "chips," the pioneer sergeant (carpenter); "tank," wet canteen; "tank-wallah," a drinker; "tanked," drunk; "A.T.A. wallah," a teetotaller (from the Army Temperance Association); "on the cot" or "on the tack," being teetotal; "jammy," lucky (and "jam," any sort of good fortune); "win," to steal; "burgoo," porridge; "eye-wash," making things outwardly presentable; "gone west," died (also applied to things broken, e.g. a broken pipe has "gone west"); "oojah," anything (similar to thingummy or what-d'ye-call-it); "push," "pusher," or "square push," a girl (hence "square-push tunic," the "swagger" tunic for walking-out occasions). The words for drunkenness are innumerable—"jingled," "oiled," "tanked to the wide," "well sprung," "up the pole," "blotto," etc.; but I smell the modern in some of these; their flavour is of London taverns rather than of the dusty barrack squares of India, Egypt, Malta, and Gibraltar. But who can delve to the ultimate springs of slang? A verb which I never met before I enlisted was "to spruce." This is almost, if not quite, a blend of "swinging the lead" and "doing a mike." To spruce is to dodge duty or to deceive. A man who contrived to slip out of the ranks of a squad when they were performing some distasteful task would be said to "spruce off." Or he would be denounced as a "sprucer" if he managed to arrive late for his meal and yet, by a trick, to secure a front place in the waiting queue at the canteen. A word in constant employment, "spruce"! It was new to me when I became an orderly, and for a long time I thought that it was peculiar to our unit, in the same manner that the jargon of certain boys is peculiar to certain schools. But I concluded later that it might have a remote and roundabout origin in the old army slang, "a spruce hand" at "brag"—the latter being a variant of the game of poker, and a spruce hand, apparently, one which, held by a bluffer, contained cards of no real value. Some day these etymological mysteries must be probed. Perhaps the German professors, after the war, can usefully wreak themselves on this complex and obscure research. Meanwhile the above notes are offered not as a serious contribution to a subject so immense, but rather as a warning. The infectiousness of slang is incredible; and this gigantic inter-association of classes and clans has brought about a hitherto unheard-of levelling-down of the common speech. Accent may or may not be influenced: the vocabulary undoubtedly is. Nearly every home in the land is soon going to be invaded by many forms of army slang: the process in fact has already begun. If we were a sprightlier nation the effect might not be all to the bad. But most of our slang-mongers are not wits. "He was balmy a treat," I heard a soldier say of another soldier who had shammed insane. That is what we are coming to: it is the tongue we shall use and likewise (I fear) the condition in which some of us will find ourselves as a result. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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