The Mess listened to this plaintive recital in unsympathetic silence.  Perhaps they reflected that as the Camp Commandant is one of those to whom much, in the way of perquisites of office, is given, from him much may legitimately be expected.  “Well, you may think yourself lucky you haven’t my job,” said the Deputy-Assistant-Adjutant-General at length.  “I’m getting rather fed up with casualty lists and strength returns.  I’m like the man who boasted that his chief literary recreation was reading Bradshaw, except that I don’t boast of it and it isn’t a recreation—­it’s damned hard work.  I have to read the Army List for about ten hours every day, for if I get an officer’s initials wrong there’s the devil to pay.  And I spent half an hour between the telephone and the Army List to-day trying to find out who ‘Teddy’ was.  The 102nd Welsh sent him in with their returns of officers’ casualties as having died of heart failure on the 22nd inst.”

“Well, but who is ‘Teddy,’ anyhow?” asked the Camp Commandant.

“He is the regimental goat,” replied the D.A.A.G.  “I suppose they thought it amusing.  When I tumbled to it I told their Brigade Headquarters on the telephone that I quite understood their making him a member of their mess, as they belonged to the same species.”

“Wait until you’ve had to track down a case of typhoid in billets,” said the R.A.M.C. man who looks after infectious diseases.  “I’ve been on the trail of a typhoid epidemic at La Croix Farm, where a company of the Downshires are billeted, and it made me sad.  They had their filters with them and they swore they hadn’t touched a drop of impure water, and that they treasured our regulations like the book of Leviticus.  And yet the trail of that typhoid was all over my spot chart, and the thing was spreading like one of the seven plagues of Egypt.  At last I tracked it down to an Army cook; the rotter had had typhoid about five years ago and simply poisoned everything he touched.  He was what we call a carrier.”

“What did you do with him?” said the A.D.M.S.

“He won’t do any more cooking; I’ve sent him home.  The fellow’s a perfect leper, and ought to be interned like an alien enemy.”

“Well, I’d rather have your job than mine even if prevention is more honourable than cure,” said he whom we know as “Smells,” and who has a nose like a fox-terrier’s.  “I am the avant-garde of the Staff, and you fellows can thank me that you are so merry and bright.  If I didn’t make my sanitary reconnaissances with my chloride of lime and fatigue parties, where would you all be?”

“We should all be home on sick-leave and very pleased to get it,” said the A.P.M. ungratefully.

“The maire thinks I’m mad, of course,” continued ‘Smells,’ “and I can’t make him understand that cesspools and open sewers in the street are not conducive to health.”