Surgeon at Arms Read Online Free

walk in the blackout with white shirt-tails exposed behind, lighting cigarettes in the street after dark attracted abuse and sometimes prosecution, and for protection against motorists with two dim half-moons for headlights, the ponies of the New Forest were striped with white paint like zebras. The weather was more irksome than the war, the countryside for most of the winter being covered thickly with snow, a fact unmentionable in the papers lest it reach the attention of the enemy.
    At Smithers Botham there was a wonderful house-party atmosphere, with snowballing, skating on the pond, and amateur theatricals, like Dingley Dell. The fighting in Finland stimulated the students to inaugurate a sauna bath, rushing naked from their steaming washhouse to roll with wild shouts in the snow in full view of any female who might be passing in the blackout (an extraordinary number always were). The vast wards stayed half-empty, most civilians on the Blackfriars waiting-list being required to hold on a little longer to their hernias and varicosities in contribution to the war-effort. Space must be kept for the half-million casualties, enjoying a stay of execution. Trained hands remained idle. The nurses occupied themselves making and remaking beds, and the housemen occupied themselves making and remaking the nurses.
    Five miles away, in the Kentish market town of Maiden Cross, the local hospital was overwhelmed with cases of meningitis, of which there was an epidemic that winter, with a befitting outbreak of German measles. On Christmas Eve an old man was hit by a lorry in Smithers Botham village, and rushed by ambulance to the splendid portico. Captain Pile hastily redirected it to Maiden Cross, admission of such cases to Smithers Botham being against the regulations. The ambulance driver protested, but set off along twisting and slippery roads, and if the old man died on the way the coroner pronounced afterwards he would most likely have done so anyway.
    Something more horrifying happened on Boxing Day. A lady visiting her sister hospitalized with a goitre was caught short by her pregnancy, and enthusiastically delivered by an orthopaedic surgeon occupying the operating theatre at the time. But Smithers Botham was not classified by the Ministry for midwifery. No one had the slightest right to be born there. Captain Pile confessed himself greatly distressed by the irregularity. The versatile orthopaedic surgeon apologized, but found himself caught in a baffled correspondence with Whitehall, which continued on and off for the duration of the war.
    New Year’s Eve fell on a Sunday, and Graham had spent the day as usual at Smithers Botham. There was so much to do. He was astounded how the squad of builders were performing a workmanlike miracle in the annex. Huts were thrown up in the neglected garden, pipes and wires sprouted everywhere, they were even starting to apply the duck-egg blue, and if this turned out nearer royal purple the place was at least beginning to take something of its shape in his mind. He began to gather staff. Tudor Beverley, a young plastic surgeon from Canada whom Graham had met on a lecture-tour, unexpectedly appeared on the Smithers Botham portico and was promptly press-ganged as his first assistant. He even had a few patients, whom he was obliged to operate upon in the main theatres. His first case was the removal of a soldier’s tattoo, a splendid emblazonment on his arm dedicated to Florence, who had apparently become unworthy of the honour. Graham pickled it in a jar of spirit, and kept it on the desk of his hut office until the end of the war. He treated a sailor with a jaw fractured while fighting, regrettably not the enemy but another sailor in a pub off Piccadilly. There were a number of smashed-up dispatch riders, the motor-bike at the time striking Graham as the most dangerous weapon in the British Army.
    Feeling he should prepare himself as well as the annex, Graham read as many textbooks and papers