Without presuming to compare either the importance or the onerousness of
the hospital orderly's work with that of the soldier capable of going to
the front to fight, I would here add that the critic who watches the
stretcher-carrying and thinks it a pity that able-bodied males should be
wasted on it, is doing the system (not to mention the men themselves) an
injustice. For the men whom he sees are not, as a matter of fact,
able-bodied, even though muscular enough to stand this short physical
effort. Excitable old gentlemen who believe that they can decide at a
glance whether a man is medically fit, and write to the Press about the
"shirkers" they think they have detected, were of the opinion, long
since, that the R.A.M.C. should be combed out. Certain journals made a
great feature of this proposal. Whatever may be the case elsewhere, I
can only say that as far as our unit was concerned it had already,
months before the newspaper agitation, been combed out five times; and
this in spite of the fact that, at the period when I enlisted, our
Colonel declined to look at any recruit who was not either over age or
had been rejected for active service.
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