Lovely word ‘scrimshank’, describing either something being a mess, at sixes and sevens, or referring to work-shirking, particularly in the armed forces. The latter meaning is clearly intended here.
‘… those half-shaven scrimshankers I see lounging around Headquarters.’
Source: Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968 (1945)), p. 325
