Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER X CAMP SANITATION AND CONSERVANCY—DISINFECTION AND DESTRUCTION OF INSECT PESTS Though in theory the work of the Army Medical Service falls naturally into certain clearly separated divisions and subdivisions, in the hard, practical, hand-to-mouth life of active service these demarcations tend to disappear. There are times when we must all be ready for a long day's stretcher-work on a shell-swept field, or a night of dressing and bandaging, or a spell of water-duty, or even—as befell the writer more than once—a turn with spade and pickaxe when it became necessary to throw up cover for a dressing station or bearer post too exposed to the enemy's fire. But there is one duty uniformly present to the R.A.M.C. man, officer and "O.R." alike, no matter wherein his speciality lies. We are all—or all ought to be—trained sanitarians, from the Surgeon-General in his watch-tower on the Medical Mountain-top down to the humblest G.D.O. scrubbing lockers in a hospital backyard. It has been said, rather uneuphemistically, that an army marches on its belly : it would be much truer, in modern warfare at least, to say that an army's pace and progress are those of its fit, healthy men; and on the number of these depends the military effectiveness of its advance, indeed whether it ever "gets there" at all. Man, and particularly the fighting man, cannot live by bread alone; and without any desire to minimise the importance of a good commissariat service—the Egyptian branch of which, at the time of writing, is sending daily many hundreds of tons of foodstuffs right across Sinai Peninsula—the Medical Service may truthfully claim to have done almost as much for the British soldier with its liquor cresolis, its T.A.B., and all the rest of its preventive paraphernalia against disease and u...