: H. C. McNeile, Sapper
: Sergeant Michael Cassidy, The Lieutenant& Other War Stories (67 Short Stories in One Volume)
: e-artnow
: 9788026849377
: 1
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: Spannung
: English
: 562
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This carefully crafted ebook: 'Sergeant Michael Cassidy, The Lieutenant& Other War Stories (67 Short Stories in One Volume)' is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Herman Cyril McNeile (1888-1937) commonly known as H. C. McNeile or Sapper, was a British soldier and author. Drawing on his experiences in the trenches during the First World War, he started writing short stories and getting them published in the Daily Mail. McNeile's stories are either directly about the war, or contain people whose lives have been shaped by it. His war stories were considered by contemporary audiences as anti-sentimental, realistic depictions of the trenches, and as a 'celebration of the qualities of the Old Contemptibles'. McNeile's view, as expressed through his writing, was that war was a purposeful activity for the nation and for individuals, even if that purpose was later wasted: a 'valuable chance at national renewal that had been squandered'. The positive effects of war on the individual were outlined by McNeile, in The Lieutenant and Others and Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E, in which he wrote about 'the qualities of leadership and selflessness essential to 'inspire' subalterns'. His war stories include descriptions of fights between individuals that carry a sporting motif: in Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E., he writes, 'To bag a man with a gun is one thing; there is sport-there is an element of one against one, like when the quality goes big game shooting. But to bag twenty men by a mine has not the same feeling at all, even if they are Germans' Content: Sergeant Michael Cassidy, R.E. The Lieutenant and Others John Walters Jim Brent The Man in Ratcatcher Men, Women and Guns Mufti No Man's Land Word of Honour

III. — MEDICAL INSPECTION


Cleanliness is Next to...


The other morning was not one of my best. Somehow in the days of peace I had always laboured under the delusion that, if ever we did go to war, we should at any rate enter simultaneously into an era when the ordnance cease from troubling and the doctors are at rest. So having found how great the delusion really was, my heart yearned for Sergeant Cassidy. His views on life in general, especially with regard to those branches of the Service whose mission in life is the annoyance of everyone else, would, I thought, be as balm to my anguished soul.

I found him in bed. His foot had relapsed.

"Cassidy," I said, as I handed him my cigarette case,"I am in trouble. A doctor has just inspected us, and was very put out to find the ration meat for the men floating in the soak-pit of a neighbouring ablution bench. It was not put there by my instructions, as I told him, but he was unappeasable. Again, a Board Inventory, the property of the Army Service Corps, has been defaced, in that false figures have been added by some person or persons unknown. Personally I suspect the solicitor, who is at present doing cook-mate, of having feloniously inserted the figures 94 opposite the item 'Shovels, coal, ordinary. Mark 6A.' We have not, as you know, got 94 shovels, coal, ordinary, Mark 6A. We haven't got one. It has been lost, and personally I again suspect the solicitor: but the stout gentleman who was making his weekly or yearly inspection has already reported it to the Army Council. He gave me to understand that if we do lose the war, it will probably be owing to that Inventory Board." I sighed deeply and relapsed into silence.

"'Tis always the same, sir," he answered kindly: I needed sympathy."'Tis always the same. The great thing is to discover their little weaknesses before they come round to see one. Of course the circumstances you mention are peculiar. I doubt me that, even had you discovered their peculiarities, so to speak, you would have escaped entirely — for as you say, sir, the soak-pit is no place for the meat to rest in at all. Still, 'tis a most important thing, and should be looked into on all occasions of that nature.

"I mind me now of a thing which took place some fortnight before I got the little souvenir in my foot. We were in billets; 'twas the billet of which I have already spoken, where the barn was burnt down. One day the doctor comes to me and says, 'Cassidy,' he says, 'it's inspected we'll be.'

"''Tis not the first time that same thing has happened,' says I, 'and we will survive. Do not be uneasy, sir. 'Twill be all right.'

"I should tell you that our doctor was not a soldier at all: one of those civilians, he was, who came in at the beginning. His principal duty when we was resting in billets was the obtaining of food and drink for the officers, at which same game, so I heard, he was hard to beat. One of them gentlemen who has a way with him: he would coax a bottle of the stuff out of a lime-kiln, and most of them cafés were worse than that after the boys had been there for a bit. A cheery gentleman he was, who always got mistakes in his returns. You mind them returns, sir — in triplicate they are generally, and he could not abide them same. Oh! there was a terrible box-up when he made a mistake on one occasion, and mixed up the number of orderlies that he had with the number of men that had been inoculated for the enteric. For he had but two orderlies, and one hundred and sixty of the boys had the inoculation taken.

"Of course he was not used to inspections, but I told him 'twould be all right. 'Twas the chief of all the doctors was coming, he said, and as he always got his returns wrong, he was anxious that all should be well. So we went round together, and he poked his nose into all the places where the men slept, and the cook-houses, and the like. I turned them on to the cleani