Every medical officer has many such incidents after a few months of service. They often add a bit of humor to a dull business. Rather strangely, the parades are always larger out of the lines than in them, for the vast majority of the men hold it as a point of honor to stick it out, no matter how rough it may be, while in the line. But as soon as the battalion gets out of the line and hard training, route marches, equipment cleaning and inspection begin, the parades increase in size. Often the men hope that they will be given excuse duty, which means that they have nothing to do for that day. Or, should the parade be held at a late hour, some few of them prefer to stand about the M.O.'s tent awaiting their turn, to doing some drill or route march. The sick parade is held daily at a fixed hour, and as a rule the earlier the parade the smaller the number who come. If it is held before all other parades, only the really ill come, for the others would but add to their daily number of parades if they came pretending to be ill. A medical friend of mine had an interesting way of keeping down the numbers at his parade. He was a young man with a ministerial air, wore eyeglasses, and was apparently very serious, though underneath the outer covering was a rich vein of humor. When his numbers grew too large to suit him, in other words when fifty to one hundred came, to practically all he gave an ounce of castor oil, to be taken in his presence. One day the colonel came to him and said that he had had some complaints from the men that the only thing they got from the M.O. for all complaints was castor oil. The medical officer's face remained long and serious, and looking at the colonel over his spectacles, he said: "Well, do you know, my dear colonel, that castor oil is a wonderful remedy, marvelous, almost miraculous. Can you believe it on my sick parade a week ago today there were seventy-five sick who came. I have given them nothing but castor oil, and so many are cured that today only seventeen came to see me. It's really an astonishing remedy. Wouldn't you like to take an ounce of it, sir?" "No, damn you, I wouldn't," roared the colonel, as he made his exit. I was sitting in his tent one day when a lieutenant came in to see him, saying that ten years before he had broken his clavicle--"collar bone,"--and that over the old fracture he was having so much pain at times that he feared he would have to get a month off. "Ah, yes, my dear Mr. Blank. Would you kindly divest yourself of your clothes till I examine the shoulder?" and the half of his face on my side screwed itself up into an exaggerated wink, which meant to me that he considered that this officer was trying to "put one over." He probably knew him!