It is not only in matters of dress and equipment that we have learnt consideration for our troops on foreign service. The splendid organisation of the Royal Army Medical Corps has been severely tested in coping with the requirements of such a force as it was never contemplated Great Britain would or could put in the field; but the test has been nobly met; the latest discoveries in science have been employed to avert disease and mortality from wounds, thereby saving soldiers and their families and friends from an incalculable amount of misery. The Transport Service has not only met the extraordinary demand upon its resources in the conveyance of necessary supplies—food, munitions, &c.—but has proved equal to the punctual deliverance of the vast stores of comforts and even luxuries consigned from voluntary sources at home.
Among the said luxuries is one whereon the Iron Duke would have turned no favouring eye. The tobacco which has been supplied to our troops at the front—aye, and in hospital at home—must amount to a prodigious figure. When the Duke was Commander-in-Chief in 1845 he issued the following counterblast:
‘G.O. No. 577.—The Commander-in-Chief has been informed that the practice of smoking, by the use of pipes, cigars and cheroots, has become prevalent among the Officers of the Army, which is not only in itself a species of intoxication occasioned by the fumes of tobacco, but, undoubtedly, occasions drinking and tippling by those who acquire the habit; and he intreats the Officers commanding Regiments to prevent smoking in the Mess Rooms of their several Regiments, and in the adjoining apartments, and to discourage the practice among the Officers of Junior Rank in their Regiments.’
There was no Press Censor in those days, and Punch, which was then a vigorous stripling in its fourth year, was allowed to make merry over this fulmination, declaring that officers of the Army were greatly perturbed, ‘dreading the possibility of being thrown upon their conversational resources, which must have a most dreary effect.’ Tobacconists drove a brisk trade in pipe-stoppers carved in the likeness of the Duke’s head. These might now be a fitting object of pursuit on the part of collectors.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] The piece continued to be given in the provinces, where the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship does not take effect.
[4] A History of the Dress of the British Soldier, by Lieut.-Col. John Luard, 1852, p. 99.
[5] Of course because the French were the enemy in that campaign.
[6] Kincaid’s Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, 2nd edition, 1838, p. 222.
[7] See report of meeting of the Lowland Scots Society, held in Edinburgh on November 25, 1915.