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Updated: May 4, 2025
Fumigator-Wallah is not the least busy of the more retiring members of a war-hospital staff. He is not in the limelight; but you might come to be very sad and sorry if he took it into his head to neglect his unapplauded part off-stage. The walking-cases are still splashing and dressing in the bathroom when the ambulances with the cot-cases begin to appear. Now is the orderlies' busy time.
It throbbed, for the most part, in darkness; but, here and there, caught in the half-light from lamps among tiered piles of boxes, he had odd glimpses of the splendid fellows as they went about their work; and he was thrilled by the grandeur and manhood of it all. Hours passed. Then a musical call through a megaphone, "Walking-cases this way," woke them to attention.
As soon as the list of the Medical Officer on the train had been checked with that of the Medical Officer on the platform, the evacuation began. Walking-cases were sent off first generally a tatterdemalion crew, hobbling and shuffling along the platform, and, at one stage of the war, with trench mud still clinging to their clothes. The walking patients, in fact, were a mere episode.
The walking-cases are the first to arrive men who are either not ill enough, or not badly enough wounded, to need to be put on stretchers in ambulances. They come from the station in motor-cars supplied by that indefatigable body, the London Ambulance Column. The walking-case alights from his car, is conducted into the receiving hall, and ten minutes later is in the bathroom.
"Not much room in the eye-wound wards," he ponders; or, "A lot of empties in the medicals." And then ... the tinkle of the telephone.... "Another convoy expected at 6.15? Twenty walking-cases and seventeen cots. Right you are!"
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