Surgeon at Arms Read Free

He would have to call the bloody man ‘sir’! A grisly thought.
    ‘Totally out of the question,’ Graham repeated. ‘I was a civilian in the last war and I’d best stay a civilian in this one. I’m not the military type.’
    Haileybury sipped his sherry with a pained look.
    ‘Neither are most young men in the country, but they are finding themselves obliged to be.’
    ‘I hope you’re not suggesting I lack a sense of duty?’
    ‘I am suggesting nothing of the kind,’ said Haileybury patiently. ‘If anything, I am suggesting you lack a sense of perspective. I made my offer because I thought, firstly, it was in the best interests of the Army, and secondly, it was in the best interests of yourself. You turned it down with hardly a second thought.’
    Graham sat looking surly. Haileybury saw the delicately built-up reconciliation was about to come down with a crash.
    ‘Perhaps I am pressing you too severely,’ he retreated. ‘I cannot expect you to decide on such a far-reaching matter in a couple of minutes. Please excuse my unreasonableness,’ he apologized with unexpected good grace. ‘Perhaps you will accept it as evidence of my enthusiasm for your services? Telephone me in a day or two, when you’ve mulled it over. Here is the number of my extension.’
    Haileybury spent the rest of the meeting talking about the disastrous effect of the war on county cricket, a topic Graham found painfully boring.
     

CHAPTER THREE
     
    ‘TREVOSE?’ asked Captain Cuthbert Pile of the Royal Army Medical Corps, sitting in his office at Smithers Botham. ‘Trevose? Never heard of him. What’s he want, Corporal?’
    ‘He’s from Blackfriars, sir,’ said Corporal Honeyman. Captain Pile groaned. ‘Not another? He doesn’t need accommodation, I hope? I’m doing miracles as it is.
    The Ministry can’t expect me to squeeze anyone else into the place. What’s his line?’
    ‘He seems to be a plastic surgeon, sir.’
    Captain Pile looked horrified. The war had forced acquaintance with fellow-doctors in many outlandish specialities, but the company of professional face-lifters he felt outside the line of duty. I don’t want to see him.’
    ‘You made an appointment, sir. For two this afternoon.’
    ‘Oh? Did I?’
    ‘You’ll remember the Ministry telephoned, sir. The gentleman has just joined the Emergency Medical Service.’
    Captain Pile rummaged busily through the papers covering his broad desk, which commanded a fine view of the sweeping front drive. There was a fire flickering in the oversized marble grate and an overall glow of mahogany-and-leather Victorian comfort. It had been the office of the Smithers Botham medical superintendent, then a consultant psychiatrist in the Army, where he was, in time, to have greater influence and invoke more widespread exasperation than a good many generals.
    ‘Where is this Trevose? In the hall?’
    ‘Yes, sir. He would have come to see Annex D, sir.’
    ‘Annex D,’ observed Captain Pile somberly. ‘Very well, Corporal, I’d better have a word with him. You go back to your work.’
    Corporal Honeyman withdrew to a small adjacent office to continue reading Lilliput, which he kept in a desk drawer with his bars of chocolate. He was a willowy young man with thinning, dandruff-laden hair, glasses in circular steel frames, and a battledress which chafed his long neck. He was a sight which depressed Captain Pile deeply. Corporal Honeyman had been a clerk in an estate agent’s before joining the Army through love of his country and dislike of living with his mother. The Army found he could use a typewriter, and sent him to Smithers Botham. He felt he would have been tolerably happy there, had it not been for Captain Pile, whom he was coming to care for even less than his mother.
    Captain Pile sat reading through some documents, feeling a little wait would put his visitor in his place. His own civilian career had been sadly frustrating. An intolerance of sick humans had led him