Surgeon at Arms

directly into the patient’s lungs while leaving his face and mouth as a sterile unoccupied battlefield for the plastic surgeon.
    ‘That looked prety easy, I must say,’ observed the nurse, who like all nurses had long ago ceased to be impressed by her medical overlords. But her remark pleased John. The trick was rather like playing darts in the dark, not easy at all. Only the experience of twenty years made it seem so.
    As Bluey himself knew, the operations was to be a simple affair. Graham cut a thin graft of skin from Bluey’s thigh with a Thiersch knife like an oversized razor, then stitched it along his chin where a former one had failed to take. Bluey was back in bed within the half hour, struggling to consciousness through dreams about flying, which were always unpleasant but soon forgotten. He woke up deciding he didn’t feel as bad as usual. The Gasman’s injection was a winner. The next night he’d be fit enough to finish the bottle of rum in his locker, then slip out with half a dozen others to The Oak.
    Knowing the habits of his patients, Graham made a point on Saturday nights of taking a bus to the pictures in Maiden Cross. That Saturday he queued to see an American film about the war, in which all the Germans conversed in villainous guttural undertones, all the British officers had Oxford accents, and all their men talked like Sam Weller. The star was Stella Garrod, the woman Graham had made a fool of himself with before the war. He wondered wryly if she ever bothered to think of him. In fact, she spoke fondly and often of her affair with the little London surgeon, immorality with Englishmen having, after Dunkirk, considerable kudos in Hollywood.
    When Graham reached home on the last bus the pub was already closed, but Bluey and his companions had been disinclined to finish the evening. They had staggered down the Smithers Botham drive singing Cats on the Rooftops, and the night being moonlit someone noticed a collection of builders’ materials stacked outside Captain Pile’s office under the gleaming portico. Bluey gave a whoop as he found a tin of paint and a brush. A porter appeared through the complicated blackout screening the front door to investigate, but identifying denizens of the annex retreated instantly. Bluey painted across the portico a single word in large letters, one on each of the four columns. Then they went singing and laughing back to the annex and bed. The night nurses were used to it.
    Early the next morning Mrs Sedgewick-Smith came down the hospital drive, hurrying to a long-standing appointment with the elderly padre. Mrs Sedgewick-Smith was the wife of a stockbroker who commanded the local Home Guard, and before the war had filled the vacuum of her life by fussing over the mental patients at Smithers Botham, or as many of them as remained socially presentable. She had organised whist drives, jumble sales, demure dances, and extremely amateur theatricals, invited the inmates for tea or for outings in her Rolls, all of which she bracketed as ‘giving the poor things a nice little break’. The war presented even more poor things as targets for her deadly solicitude. She had installed herself as unofficial welfare officer at Smithers Botham, and was beginning to hope the war would go on long enough for somebody to give her a medal for it.
    She saw the word.
    She was horribly shocked. It was not a word which could possibly appear in print, but she had of course overheard it, from workmen, soldiers, lunatics, and the like. She had always imagined it spelt with a ‘ph’, like ‘phutt’. To see it splashed in black paint across the portico was absolutely outrageous. And on a Sunday morning, too. She would have to find Captain Pile.
    Captain Pile occupied a comfortable villa in the grounds, where he managed to live in unmilitary domesticity with his wife and two children. He was in his braces, enjoying his breakfast. He put on his tunic and inspected the word officially. Though he used it frequently himself, he had to affect an air of disgust as pained as his informant’s. Mrs Sedgewick-Smith must be humoured at all costs. She was a powerful lady at Smithers Botham, the dispenser of valuable grace and favours, mostly unobtainable off the ration.
    When Graham arrived at the annex at nine for an informal Sunday ward-round with his new sister, his spirits fell as he noticed Miss Mills in close conversation at the ward door with Captain Pile. He caught sight of
    Mrs