A Surgeon in Arms

by R. J. Manion

"Well, Jones, and what is it this time?" asks the M. O. in tones so cold that the poor victim can almost taste Pill No. 9, or Castor Oil as he listens. If he is not ill, but is simply sick and tired of the mud, dirt, rats, lice, discipline, and discomfort—as we all get at times—he will have to tax his ingenuity and his acting ability to convince the doctor that his pains in his legs and back are real, not imaginary; or that his right knee is swollen, when the practised eye of the physician says it is not. If he is an old soldier and knows the game well, he may get away with it, sometimes with the tacit consent of a sympathetic medical officer.

Tommy is not the only one who endeavors at times to get out of the lines with imaginary ills. His officers, and some medical officers for the matter of that, occasionally set him the example. It is very human on occasions to long for comfort instead of discomfort; cleanliness in place of dirt; a decent, white-sheeted bed in exchange for a hard, uncomfortable, and possibly vermin-infested bunk; and to wish to indulge in peace, quietness, rest, safety, and civilization after the noise, fatigue, dangers, and barbarism that give truth to the saying that war is hell. But the officer gets the same treatment as does his men. On one occasion I saw a colonel removed from an ambulance to make room for a badly wounded Tommy.

And it may safely be said that if the ordinary soldier hates the sick parade, his abhorrence of it is mild in comparison to that felt for it by the battalion representative of the Army Medical Corps. It is a thorn in his side that makes itself felt daily. And the reason is that he is between three fires,—the Assistant Director of Medical Services who expects a low sick rate in the different units; the battalion and company commanders who expect the men on parade, which means fit and on duty, while at the same time insisting, quite rightly, that the men get every attention at the hands of the medical department; and a certain small percentage of the men for whom the novelty and glamour of the war has worn off and who have become tired of the food, and find the work arduous and monotonous. It is this small percentage of the men—not large in numbers, but present in most units—who make the work difficult, for they begin to wonder how they can escape the working parties or the dangers and hardships of the trenches, and if by any chance they have varicose veins, flat feet, rheumatism, short sight, or any of the thousand and one ills that man is heir to, they immediately begin "swinging the lead," as the boys call malingering. In the Royal Army Medical Corps they call it "scrimshanking."

The M.O. is not popular with leadswingers or scrimshankers. A witty Tommy once said that all you can get from an officer of the medical department is a pill number nine—made up mostly of calomel—"an' if 'e hain't got a pill nine 'e'll give ye a four an' a five."

No doubt the man who "swings the lead" is to be sympathized with at times. Often he is given work to do almost beyond human endurance, his dugout may be a mudhole, his clothes soaking from a downpour of rain, his rations short, and, finally, perhaps the rum ration, the one cheery thing on a dark day, is missing. He has done his bit anyway—or thinks he has—and his only possible relief is to say that he is too ill to go on the next day. Occasionally, he has an attack of what a sharp little French Canadian sergeant called frigidity of the feet, and he dreads his next tour in the front line. At any rate, for one cause or another, he decides to go before the M.O. And many funny stories are told of the attempts made by men to get a few days' "excuse duty," which means a few days with nothing to do. Two men are overheard at the following conversation:

"Say, Bill, what are you goin' to tell the croaker?"—a common name for a stern M.O.

"Oh, I've got bad rheumatic pains in my back."

"The devil you have; that's what I had. Well, I'll go strong on diarrhea."

Each tells his story. It depends on how sick they appear or how often they have been before his medical majesty in the past as to the result. The latter at least may work a day off, at the expense of a nauseating dose of castor oil, taken at once, and some lead and opium pills, consigned to the gutter as soon as the sick man is out of sight. The former probably gets M.&D., that is medicine and duty, which translated means, carry on, with perhaps a good rubbing of his back with a strong liniment.

My corporal told me a story of two men who opened a can of bully beef and for four days left it standing on the parapet during hot weather. Then they ate it with the hope of getting ptomaine poisoning.