Wonderingly, the six hundred officers and men formed on the parade ground, many still in hospital whites. They were young M.D. first lieutenants grinding out their drafted service wearily. They were male R.N.'s with their big perennial bitch that they were lucky to get a rocker while a woman of equal training automatically got a gold bar. They were corporals who knew one end of a hypodermic needle from another, pharmacists who ached to inventory their own stock of trusses, penicillin, candy bars, yo-yo's and bulk vanilla ice cream in their own corner stores again, privates and recruits who could swing a sledge or mop a corridor. They were a handful of majors and lieutenant colonels who were honest-to-God career military surgeons passionately interested in the problems and possibilities of their work. On the parade ground the division surgeon reminded them of something. It was that they were trained to move into a given bare field and turn it, in two hours, into a functioning, five-hundred-bed hospital. They dispersed to almost-forgotten warehouses where they broke out field medical chests of instruments and medicine. They found again the long coiled snakes of green treated canvas, tons of it, the 500 litters, and the thousand tent pegs, big and small, and the jointed tent poles and the miles of rope, each piece in its place, and the sledges to drive the pegs, and the Coleman lanterns to hang on the poles. The trucks of the quartermaster battalion backed up and the tiny handful of field-grade officers buzzed everywhere, yelling and cajoling and consulting loading lists, and trucks were unloaded and reloaded a dozen times in some cases to get the right load in its right place in the line of convoy. The engineers had finished an overlay strip map of the route by then, and mimeographs began to spin out copies for the quartermaster drivers. An MP platoon moved out in a truck and one man was dropped at each tricky intersection to wave the convoy through. Each MP had a couple of K-rations with him, because he'd be busy long into the night; as the convoy went past the rearmost men they'd be picked up in the truck and leap-frogged ahead of the foremost men to the next tricky intersections. The water trucks went as a matter of course, but it took a flash of genius for somebody to realize that the area would be short of gas, and this got the infantry into it. A puzzled rifle company found itself yanked off the firing range and assigned to the mysterious chore of filling five-gallon jerry cans with gas from the pumps of the division motor pool and stacking them solid in three six-by-sixes.