THE SICK PARADE
The handling of the sick is not so easy a
matter as the caring for the wounded in
the lines, for the reason that it is not what
disease the man has that the medical officer must
decide as much as whether he has any disease,
or has simply joined the Independent Workers
of the World. In other words, is he really
ill, or is he just suffering from ennui, has he
at last become so "fed up" with it all that he
has decided to go sick, running the gauntlet of
an irate M.O. with the hope of receiving a few
hours or days of rest at the transport or in the
hospital? It may be a lucky father who knows
his own son, but it is a fortunate medical
officer who knows his own battalion. If he does
it is fortunate for the M.O., for it makes his
toils lighter. But it may not be so fortunate
for the poor devil who has just decided that
once again he will endeavor to "put it over"
the doctor. For the latter gets to know the
regular parader, and meets him with a
suspicious look of recognition.
"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.
Another chap is said to have feigned insanity
by giving all his attention to snatching up
every bit of paper he could find in the trenches
or out of them, and studiously endeavoring to
make the bits of paper into some important
document. He carried out this apparently
foolish search so long that at last he was
pronounced insane and given his discharge from
the forces. On receiving his discharge papers
he studied them carefully as he walked away.
Another soldier heard him murmur:
"Why, that's the paper I have been searching
for all the time."
Deafness is one of the commonest complaints
of a soldier who is scrimshanking. The soldier
tells the M.O. that for some months past his
hearing has been lessening and that at last he
is so deaf that he cannot carry on. He claims
that while on sentry duty or "standing to" in
the front line he has already nearly shot one
officer and three different men because he
could not hear them giving him the password.
The M.O. in a loud voice questions him as to
his name, place of birth, age, and so on, and
so on, keeping his face straight and his lips
hidden, to avoid allowing the soldier, if really
deaf, to read his lips. Gradually the voice of
the officer is lowered, and the man who at first
had difficulty hearing his loud tones,
unconsciously, if faking, answers the lowered voice
till he is answering to a voice that is almost a
whisper.
Then comes suddenly a change in the manner
of the "croaker." He becomes stern and
rebukes the man, ordering him forth to do his
duty like the other men of his battalion, and
not ever again to dare to come on parade with
a plea of deafness, under a threat of marking
him plain "DUTY," which means criming and
a likelihood of twenty-eight days first field
punishment.
Looking backward one can think of many
amusing incidents in which some chap tried to
get out of the lines, and perhaps succeeded in
so doing, by an imaginary ill. A soldier named
Jones who had not been long in the lines
became a regular caller upon me. As usual at
first every consideration was shown to him,
but as his face appeared and reappeared
almost daily, and as the said face was suffused
with the glow of health, his form of the
robust type, and his complaints always
functional--that is, consisting of symptoms only,
with no _signs_ of a real disease to cause them--I
began to feel certain that he was a
"lead-swinger." On his first call or two he had been
"excused duty," but as my suspicions grew
firmer that he was simply shifting his work
onto the shoulders of some other poor Tommy,
my manner toward him grew rather reserved,
and finally antagonistic.
About this time he came to see me at one of
my daily morning sick parades. He tried to
look as ill and dejected as his very healthy
appearance would permit.
"Well, Jones, what is the trouble this time?"
I asked harshly when his turn came.
"I can't swallow, sir. I can't get any food
down my throat. I don't know what's the
matter, sir, but I had this happen to me ten
years ago, and I nearly died. I was in the
hospital for three months."
"How long since you have swallowed any
food, Jones?"
"Well, I managed to get down a little, night
before last, but not a bite since then, not a bite.
And I'm feeling awful weak. I don't think I
could carry on long like this. But of course
I'll do my best, sir."
"Yes, I suppose so, Jones," I answered,
feeling certain that he was lying. "Of course
a few days without food really does most of
us good. A friend of mine regularly goes a
week on nothing but water whenever he feels
a bit 'livery,' as the English say. And then
you remember there was a man once who went
forty days fasting. He became quite famous.
So another day or two won't hurt you, Jones.
However, if it went too long it might become
serious. So I want you to report back here
tomorrow morning, sure, if you have not
succeeded in swallowing by that time. I have in
my panier a stomach tube, and we'll pass it
down through your esophagus and open it
up. It's a very tender passage," I continued
without smiling, "and you must expect severe
pain from the passing of the tube; unfortunately
we have nothing to deaden the pain, but
you can stand it if you make up your mind to
do so. Now you do your best to swallow like
a good fellow, and I think you will succeed,
but be sure to come back tomorrow if you
don't. That'll do, Jones. Next."
As a matter of fact I had no stomach or
esophageal tube, but I was just trying out a
little Christian Science treatment, for, as
Dooley says, if the Christian Scientists had a little
more science and the medical men a little more
Christianity it would not matter much which
you called in, so long as you had a good nurse.
And the moral treatment proved effective in
this case, for Jones did not come back next
day; nor did we see him again till nearly a
week had passed when he came in on parade
again.
"What's doing this time, Jones? Can't
swallow again?"
"Oh, no, sir. I got my swallowing back all
right." I could hardly resist the temptation
to smile. "But since then I vomit all my food.
Haven't kept a thing on my stomach since I
saw you, sir. I saw your man, Kelly, the other
day, and he was so unkind as to tell me that I
had better take something with claws in it. He
seemed to think I was swinging the lead, and
I'm a sick man, sir," with an injured air which,
however, did not take any of the healthy red
from his cheek. I stepped outside and asked
the corporal in charge of the sick from his
company what diet Jones was able to eat.
"Diet! He don't eat no diet, sir. He eats
every darn thing in sight and looks for more,"
was the sneering reply.
"I thought so. Now, Jones," I said sternly,
"if you come on sick parade again, when you
are not sick I'm going to put in a crime charge
against you for malingering. Now, get out."
And he got out, and that was the last time
I saw him on sick parade.
The chaps who fake are nearly always new
arrivals in the line. One such came hopping
into my dugout in the middle of the night,
with his boot, sock, and puttee, off one foot
which he carefully kept off the ground. He
said he had been blown up by a shell and
buried, severely injuring the foot he had bared.
I examined the foot tenderly and found a
swelling half the size of an egg just over the
inner side of the ankle. He howled with pain
when I touched it, so my examination was
rather cursory--that is hurried. Without
diagnosing the condition, I swabbed it with
iodine, merely to do something, and applied a
dressing, telling my assistant to make out a
hospital entry card for him. After leaving him
to go back to my bunk, for I was tired, I
happened to glance around and saw a broad grin
on his face. Stepping back I took off the
dressing, and carefully examined the swelling
notwithstanding his protest that it was very
painful. I found then that it was simply a
fatty tumor--an excess, but harmless, growth
of fat in a localized area--which had probably
been there for years. He then admitted the
fact that the swelling had been there for years,
but of course still claimed that he had hurt his
ankle a few minutes before. As it showed no
sign of it, he went back to duty!
Every medical officer has many such incidents
after a few months of service. They often
add a bit of humor to a dull business.
Rather strangely, the parades are always
larger out of the lines than in them, for the
vast majority of the men hold it as a point of
honor to stick it out, no matter how rough it
may be, while in the line. But as soon as the
battalion gets out of the line and hard training,
route marches, equipment cleaning and inspection
begin, the parades increase in size. Often
the men hope that they will be given excuse
duty, which means that they have nothing to
do for that day. Or, should the parade be held
at a late hour, some few of them prefer to
stand about the M.O.'s tent awaiting their
turn, to doing some drill or route march. The
sick parade is held daily at a fixed hour, and
as a rule the earlier the parade the smaller the
number who come. If it is held before all
other parades, only the really ill come, for the
others would but add to their daily number of
parades if they came pretending to be ill.
A medical friend of mine had an interesting
way of keeping down the numbers at his
parade. He was a young man with a ministerial
air, wore eyeglasses, and was apparently very
serious, though underneath the outer covering
was a rich vein of humor. When his numbers
grew too large to suit him, in other words
when fifty to one hundred came, to practically
all he gave an ounce of castor oil, to be taken in
his presence. One day the colonel came to him
and said that he had had some complaints from
the men that the only thing they got from the
M.O. for all complaints was castor oil. The
medical officer's face remained long and
serious, and looking at the colonel over his
spectacles, he said:
"Well, do you know, my dear colonel, that
castor oil is a wonderful remedy, marvelous,
almost miraculous. Can you believe it on my
sick parade a week ago today there were
seventy-five sick who came. I have given them
nothing but castor oil, and so many are cured
that today only seventeen came to see me. It's
really an astonishing remedy. Wouldn't you
like to take an ounce of it, sir?"
"No, damn you, I wouldn't," roared the
colonel, as he made his exit.
I was sitting in his tent one day when a
lieutenant came in to see him, saying that ten
years before he had broken his clavicle--"collar
bone,"--and that over the old fracture he
was having so much pain at times that he
feared he would have to get a month off.
"Ah, yes, my dear Mr. Blank. Would you
kindly divest yourself of your clothes till I
examine the shoulder?" and the half of his
face on my side screwed itself up into an
exaggerated wink, which meant to me that he
considered that this officer was trying to "put
one over." He probably knew him!
When the officer had stripped, Capt. Smith
asked him to show the exact spot of tenderness,
and the lieutenant put his finger with
exactitude on a certain point. Captain Smith
touched the spot with his fingers, the officer
exclaiming, "Oh, that hurts, doc," and
drawing back in pain.
"Ah, yes, I'm sorry, but I'll be careful,
Mr. Blank," and he examined gently the shoulder,
arm and chest, but always finished the
examination by pushing in fairly hard with his
finger and saying, "Now that's where it hurts,
Mr. Blank?" And Mr. Blank would each
time cringe with the pain of the touch. He
repeated this again and again, but I noticed
that each time he came back to the tender spot
he chose a point an inch or so from that which
he had chosen the last time. Finally he had
poor Blank saying, "Yes, that's the spot,"
when the spot touched was nearly six inches
from the original sensitive point. At last the
doctor said, very seriously:
"Yes, yes, Mr. Blank, that painful condition
must be attended to. It is a strange
condition, don't you know, for as I go on examining
it, the tenderness shifts about a great deal,
and I feel sure that with a little rubbing it
may be driven out altogether. Now this liniment
is the very thing, the very thing. Yes,
yes, twice daily, night and morning. Good
afternoon, my dear Blank. Don't fail to come
back if it troubles you any more;" and Blank
went out looking a bit sheepish, while the
doctor turned to me again with his face wearing
that exaggerated wink. Then he continued,
as if he were just carrying on an interrupted
conversation, "You know, Manion, some of
these officers are exceedingly troublesome,
exceedingly so, when they happen to swing the
lead, for one must appear to have the greatest
consideration for them. Now I have one
extremely interesting case of laryngitis in one
of the officers. It goes every now and then to
the extent of complete loss of voice. Troublesome
condition, for he cannot give his orders
to his men, and to hurry him back into
condition I have sent him twice to the hospital.
Now, though this officer's courage is absolutely
unquestioned, I find myself at times wondering
if it may not be just that general fed-up
feeling that we all get rather than laryngitis
that affects him. Captain Thompson is a great
friend of mine which makes it all the more
difficult, but you know, my dear chap, really it's
so easy to quit speaking aloud, and just whisper
instead. I wonder does he talk in his
sleep? By Jove, that would be interesting. I
must make inquiries.
"But," he continued, "I told him off a bit
a couple of nights ago. One of our companies
was putting on a raid at daybreak, and the
officer in charge of the raid is not overburdened
with nerve. One-half hour before the raid he
started to groan, when we were all in
headquarters dugout together, and said he had a
very severe pain in his stomach or bowels.
Though I doubted the pain, I examined him
carefully, and finding no real cause for it I
allowed him to carry on, and, to do him justice,
he went over the top like a man and did his bit
in the raid as well as anyone could have done.
"But just after I had examined him Thompson
stepped up familiarly to me and said: 'Do
you really think, Smith, that So-and-so did
have a pain?' 'Damn you, Thompson,' I
replied, 'what right have you to ask me such a
question?' 'Oh, come now, Smith, really, do
you think he _did_ have a pain?' 'Well, frankly,
Thompson,' I answered, in a low, confidential
tone, 'I am losing so much of my faith in
humanity, don't you know, that I find myself
doubting if you have any laryngitis when you
lose your voice!' And with a good-natured
burst of laughter he left me. But I somehow
feel that he won't have laryngitis again for
some time!
"But honestly, Manion, my great surprise
always has been, and still is, not that so many
try to get out of the line, but that in spite of
the dangers and hardships 95 per cent. of
officers and men do their hard, dangerous,
trying jobs with a smile and without complaint.
How very little cowardice there is in the
world!"
And anyone who has served out there must
agree with that opinion, particularly when he
remembers the great numbers who have
remained at home, facing no guns, braving no
dangers, enduring no hardships. The above
stories are told to illustrate the humorous side
of the life; for all praise and gratitude is due
to the men who have served out there in the
noble cause of the allies. If at times some
officer or man gets tired of the mud, rain, lice,
shells, dirt, and dangers that he is daily
encountering, and tries to get a few days in
civilized surroundings, he is but showing a very
human side to his nature.
[Illustration: Diagram Showing Route of Wounded
from Firing Line to Base Hospitals.]