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 III How The Men Are Trained Although, in time of war, the soldier of the R. A. M. C. is not really a soldier, since he is not nominally liable to attack by either side, yet he has to be trained in every way—with the exception of the use of arms—as a soldier. For the essence and object of discipline is to inculcate in a man the habit of quick and intelligent obedience to orders, and this is required of the medical orderly to as great an extent as in the case of the infantryman with his rifle, or the artilleryman with his gun. Consequently, on enlistment, the recruit to the ranks of the R. A. M. C. is drafted to one of the depot companies at Aldershot. Here he finds that his work consists first of all, not in learning how to tend patients in bed, but in learning to march andexecute military formations, in the care of clothing and personal equipment, and in the performance of duties which seem to the man being taught to have no relation to his real work. As a matter of fact, though, these seemingly irrelevant items of training have a very real relation to the work of the Medical Corps, for men must be taught to walk before they can be expected to run, and inculcation of the first principles of discipline is all-important in the making of a first-class medical orderly. Under charge of a drill sergeant, the men are instructed in stretcher drill, which to the uninitiate looks like a lot of purposeless running about, but is designed with a view to teaching men how to perform their work in the field, and how to act in all cases of emergency, without getting in each other's way. A stretcher case, such as men are constantly being called on to deal with on active service, must be treated according to the peculiar needs of the case, and a wounded or in any way disabled man m...