Leaves from a Field Note-Book | Page 9

A.S.C. court of inquiry has as impassioned a preference for written
over oral evidence as the old Court of Chancery. So that if your
way-bill testifies:
Truck No. Contents 19414 Jam 36 x 50

and from the thirty-six cases of fifty pots one pot of jam is missing on
arrival at rail-head, then, though truck 19414 arrived sealed and your
labels undefaced, it will go hard with you as Train Officer unless you
can produce that pot.
For the feeding of the Army is a delicate business and complicated. It is
not enough to secure that there be sufficient "caloric units" in the men's
rations; there are questions of taste. The Brahmin will not touch beef;
the Mahomedan turns up his nose at pork; the Jain is a vegetarian; the
Ghurkha loves the flesh of the goat. And every Indian must have his
ginger, garlic, red chilli, and turmeric, and his chupattis of unleavened
bread. One such warehouse we entered and beheld with stupefaction
mountainous boxes of ghee and hogsheads of goor, rice, dried apricots,
date-palms, and sultanas. Storekeepers in turbans stood round us, who,
being asked whether it was well with the Indian and his food, answered
us with a great shout, like the Ephesians, "Yea, the exalted Government
hath done great things and praised be its name." To which we replied
"Victory to the Holy Ganges water." Their lustrous eyes beamed at the
salutation.
Great, indeed, is the Q.M.G. He supplies manna in the wilderness, and
like the manna of the Israelites it has never been known to fail. It is of
him that the soldier in the trenches says, in the words of the prophet,
"He hath filled my belly with his delicates." And his caravans cover the
face of the earth. You meet them everywhere, each Supply Column a
self-contained unit like a fleet. It has its O.C., its cooks, its seventy-two
motor lorries, with three men to each, and its "mobiles" or travelling
workshops with dynamo, lathe, drilling machine, and a crew of skilled
artificers, ready to tackle any motor-lorry that is put out of action. I take
off my hat to those handy-men; many times have they helped me out of
a tight place and performed delicate operations on the internal organs of
my military car in the inhospitable night. It is a brave sight and
fortifying to see a Supply Column winding in and out between the
poplars on the perilously arched pavé of the long sinuous roads, each
wagon keeping its distance, like battleships in line, and every one of
them boasting a good Christian name chalked up on the tail-board. For
what his horses are to a driver and his eighteen-pounder to a gunner,

such is his wagon to the A.S.C. man who is detailed to it. It is his
caravan. Many a time, on long and lonely journeys from the Base to the
Front, have I been cheered to find a Supply Column drawn up on the
roadside in a wooded valley, on a bare undulating down, or in a chalk
quarry, while the men were making tea over a blue wood fire. If you
love a gipsy life join the A.S.C.
Within this one-mile radius of the A.S.C. headquarters at the Base are
some twenty military hospitals improvised out of hotels,
gaming-houses, and railway waiting-rooms. For the Base is the great
Clearing House for the sick and wounded, and its register of patients is
a kind of barometer of the state of affairs at the Front. When that
register sinks very low, it means that the atmospheric conditions at the
Front are getting stormy, and that an order has come down to evacuate
and prepare four thousand beds. Then you watch the newspapers, for
you know something is going to happen up there. And in those same
hospitals men are working night and day; the bacteriologists studying
"smears" under microscopes, while the surgeons are classifying,
operating, "dressing," marking temperature-charts, and annotating
case-sheets. And in every hospital there is a faint mysterious incense,
compounded not disagreeably of chloride of sodium and iodised catgut,
which intensifies the dim religious atmosphere of the shaded wards. If
G.H.Q. is the greatest of military academies, the Base hospitals are
indubitably the wisest of medical schools. Never have the sciences of
bacteriology and surgery been studied with such devotion as under
these urgent clinical impulses. Here are men of European reputation
who have left their laboratories and consulting-rooms at home to wage
a never-ending scientific contest with death and corruption. They have
slain "frostbite" with lanoline, turpentine, and a change of socks; they
have fought septic wounds with chloride of sodium and the ministries
of unlimited oxygen; they have defied "shock" after amputation by
"blocking" the nerves of the limb by spinal injection, as a signalman
blocks