“That was unkind of you, Major,” I said insincerely.

“Not so, my son.  You see, I knew he’d been worrying old Simpson, and he wasn’t fit to undo the latchet of Simpson’s shoes.  Why! have you never heard the story of Simpson and the giddy goat?”

“The goat?” said the sub.

“Yes, the goat.  Useful animal the goat, if a trifle capricious.  It was like this.  Old Simpson, who’s got a head on his shoulders big enough to do all the thinking for the Royal College of Physicians, and ditto of Surgeons, with a good few ideas left over for the R.A.M.C., determined to get to the bottom of Mediterranean Fever—­a nasty complaint, which had worried the Malta garrison considerably.  Now the first thing to do when you are on the track of a fever is, as they say in the children’s picture-books, ‘Puzzle:  Find the Microbe.’  It occurred to Simpson to suspect the goat.  Why?  Well, because he’d noticed that goat’s milk was drunk in Malta and Egypt.  So he began to study the geographical distribution of the goat with the zeal of an anthropologist localising dolicocephalic and brachycephalic races.  He found eventually that wherever you could ‘place’ a goat you would find the fever.  Wherefore he took some goat’s milk and cultivated it assiduously in an alluring medium of Glucose-nutrose-peptone-litmus.”

“Dot and carry one.  Please repeat,” I interjected.

“Glucose-nutrose-peptone-litmus,” repeated the Major.

“Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar-man, thief,” soliloquised the subaltern, who was brightening up.

“Quite so,” said the Major with a benignant glance.  “Well, he then got a culture.”

“A what?”

“Culture.  Poisonous growth; hence German ‘Kultur,’” said the Major etymologically.  “To proceed.  He then inoculated some guinea-pigs.  No!  I don’t mean directors in the City, though he might have done worse.  And lo! and behold! he found the fever.  You know the four canons of the bacteriologist?  One, ‘get’; two, ‘cultivate’; three, ‘inoculate’; four, ‘recover.’”

“Well done, Simpson,” I said.

“You may say that, my friend.  And now there’s old Simpson down at the Base in charge of No. 12 General saving lives by hundreds and thousands.  You know while the bullet slew its thousands, septicaemia has slain its tens of thousands.  How did he stop it?  Why, by doing the obvious, which, you may have observed, no one ever does till a wise man comes along.  He got wounds to heal themselves.  He promoted a lymphatic flow from the rest of the body by putting suppositories of chloride of sodium inside drainage-tubes in the wound.  The heat of the body melts them, you see.  There are three great medical heroes of this war—­Almroth Wright, Martin-Leake, and Simpson.”

I could have named a fourth, but I held my tongue.

“Time to get on our hind legs,” the Major now said monitorily.  “Julie, l’addition s’il vous plait.”