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.")