“ACRABAH.”
“A LIGHT HORSE TYPE”
By W. O. David Barker
Concerning Medical Blokes
The Army Medical Corps is a chain of many links. Let the lay mind which has condensed its conception of the Corps’ duties into “picking up the wounded,” reflect upon an interwoven organization of Base Hospitals, Convalescent Homes and Rest Camps; Auxiliary Hospitals, Isolation Hospitals and Dermatological Hospitals; Stationary Hospitals (which are liable to move about) and Casualty Clearing Hospitals—we are working up the chain from the back to the front—Motor Ambulance Units and Hospital Trains and Hospital Ships; Divisional Receiving Stations, Field Dental Units, Field Operating Units and Field Laboratories (these all hear the firing of the guns); Field Ambulances (which comprise within themselves Field Hospitals), Dressing Stations and Advanced Dressing Stations (these get bullets through their tents and shells in their bivvies); and, end of the chain, the Medical Blokes with the Regiments. They are the last link; they are the tip of the longest tentacle of the Medical octopus. Truly, modesty forbids me from adding that they are the sweetest violet in the bunch.
The Medical Blokes are detailed from the Ambulance at the rate of an N.C.O. and one man to each Regiment. Thereafter they become part and parcel of that Regiment; live with it, move with it, minister to it; share its trials, troubles, tribulations, triumphs and rum issues. Nevertheless, in cold, official fact, they still belong to the Ambulance, being upon its supernumerary strength—“attached for duty and discipline to the Xth Regiment.” This little complication has its unsuspected advantages, for it sometimes breeds in the mind of an R.S.M. a shade of doubt as to exactly how far the Medical Blokes come within his jurisdiction, and he is constrained to permit them a certain independence of existence and exemption from routine. They obey “Reveille;” they approximate their appearance on the horse-lines, to groom, feed and water, as nearly to the Regimental schedule as the exigencies of the medical service permit; they generally manage to scratch an instant to be present at the cook-house at meal times; at the Quartermaster’s bivvy when he is doling out rations, and at the Orderly Room on pay-day. Their liabilities discharged, they are left free to order their time as they please. They are usually to be found lurking in the medical tent, though they sometimes go to earth in a bivvy pitched somewhere in its vicinity.
In addition to the two above-mentioned stalwarts, the Regimental medical establishment carries a Medical Officer and an offsider, a trooper of the Regiment, detailed for the job, who, in course of time, is likely to become so imbued with the spirit of his surroundings that he is not to be distinguished from genuine Medical Blokes themselves. Nominally he is intended for water duties; to carry out daily at the area drinking-water supply the mysterious rite (known to the uninitiated as “chlorinating” and to the rank and file as “poisoning”) by which the further existence of cholera and other germs in the water is discouraged. He is the man responsible for making the water taste as if there were a very dead camel lying a hundred yards further up the stream whence it was drawn; while tea made with it always seems to have been cut with an oniony knife. Yet he deserves a certain amount of pity. If he over-chlorinates, the whole Brigade will blaspheme him and his activities; if he under-chlorinates, Medical Officers accuse him of encouraging epidemic; and the happy medium of chlorination is so deucedly elusive that he never strikes it!