Were People in the Great War As Enlightened As Modern Folk
[An officer, in a clean, well-tailored uniform, saunters into a filthy trench, somewhere near Passchendaele, in 1917, shortly before a scheduled attack.]
Sergeant: Officer present! Attention! Sah!
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: At ease, men; standing to attention is bad for the back. Ah, good, those ladders seem well placed and properly supported. Now are your weapons nice and safe? Ammunition safely put away?
Sergeant: Sah, yes, sah!
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: You, Private—
Sergeant: Hatkins, sah!
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: Ah, Atkins, is your bayonet clean? We don’t want an enemy to catch a nasty infection.
Pvt. Hatkins: Clean, sir, and sharp, sir!
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: Sharp? Sharp!
Sergeant: Well-honed, sah, razor-edged, ὀξύς, acutus—
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: Yes, yes, I know. Are any other bayonets similarly sharpened, Sergeant?
Sergeant: Why, all of them are, of course, sah. We must all be keen, and I always keep a sharp look-out, sah!
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: But we can’t have that—someone may get hurt! Dull these bayonets immediately!
[After a few seconds of stunned immobility, a few of the soldiers begin to strike their bayonets against rocks.]
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: Hey, what are you doing? Stop! That’s dangerous! Someone could put out an eye!
Pvt. Hatkins: We have no proper tools with us here, sir.
Occupational Health & Safety Officer: Sergeant, I leave it to you to ensure that these men dull their bayonets, and safely; but I don’t want to hear that you’ve been shouting at them. It could harm their hearing, and it lowers their self-esteem. I, meanwhile, have an appointment to meet Field-Marshall Haig; I must talk to him about this foolhardy practice of firing artillery shells. Farewell, men.
[The officer departs. The men murmur and mutter.]
Sergeant: All right, shaarp, you lot; you heard the officer, we need to devise a tool to blunt the bayonets.
Pvt. Hatkins: How, Sarge?
Sergeant: Men, form a file.
1 comment:
Health and safety is not a laughing matter in the British Army. A cousin in the tank regiment took a pocket geiger counter with him to the Iraq war. Not to be safe from Saddam's mythical WMD, mind you, just to avoid too much irradiation from the depleted uranium munitions stocked in his tank. They don't make soldiers like they used to.
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