Medical Annex 44-C

#On the Medical Entry

Medical Annex 44-C survives in the Codex the way a splinter survives in a thumb: by its effects. The annex itself has not reached my desk. What has reached it is the correction it caused. That correction is entered beneath the Stuttgart plate and repeated in the A.S. 201 survey of Colonel-Catechist Othmar Vey, whose file borrows the same erratum without adding a word of medicine to it. Two citations, one source. Records would call this corroboration. I call it an echo with a good filing number.

The citation names three findings at the Stuttgart baptismal trench: trench rash, fungal bloom, and seventeen cases of devotional fever. That is the whole clinical inheritance. The number belongs to the fever and to nothing else. Nobody has told me how many boys had the rash, how many grew the bloom, whether one recruit carried all three, or what devotional fever means once a physician is obliged to define it. The annex's date is unrecorded, and so are its office, its examiner and its signatory. The designation 44-C is a shelfmark and not a year, whatever the more excitable clerks of the Ledger suppose.

What the annex did accomplish is plain enough. A medical entry describes bodies. A broadsheet makes promises about them. When the first contradicts the second, one of them must be revised, and the Church has never yet revised a body.

#On the Three-Day Crust

The rite must be understood before its casualties. Every great catechism-barracks performs the Litany of First Earth. Stuttgart performs it in a trench lined with river clay carted in under seal. I have reported elsewhere that the clay is mixed with ash from rejected petition bundles, and the public manuals deny it. I record both positions with equal solemnity and believe the one that smells of ink.

The recruit enters chest-deep. A Tribune-Chaplain reads the Litany above him. He emerges a soldier of the Faith, which is how the Bureau of War names the moment. The Bureau of Conscription enters the same moment as the completion of his transfer into martial custody. One office sees a sacrament and the other sees a receipt. Both are correct, and the boy is wet either way.

Stuttgart chaplains count while they read. They count the time in the trench and the shivering that interrupts the responses. They note which hand grips the board, and whether the eyes go west before emergence. The Baptism of Mud in its general form invites observation. At Stuttgart, observation has been domesticated into marks.

Then the mud stays. For three days the clay dries on skin and wool, tightens at every joint, and cracks wherever a body insists on bending. It is inspected at dawn, at noon and at curfew. Cracks at the elbows indict the kit carriage. Flaking at the knees indicts unregulated kneeling. Clean hands indict everyone.

None of this is medicine. It is assessment, conducted on a surface that also happens to be a boy's skin. Whatever the annex proposed about cause has not survived in its citation, and I will not supply a cause on its behalf. The observed practice is enough to go on: wet clay, sealed carts, cold air, three days, three inspections, and a clerk keeping his papers dry at a careful distance.

#On the Recorded Cases

Trench rash requires no theology. Every infantryman on the Sagittal Line meets it eventually, and most will prefer it to the other things on offer there. Fungal bloom is a gardener's phrase forced into a medical column. It tells us that something grew, and that someone saw it growing and wrote it down. I honour that someone. The Ledger rarely honours whoever writes down the inconvenient thing, so I will do it here, once and anonymously, which is the form of honour least likely to get the writer transferred.

Devotional fever is the difficult entry. No document that has reached me defines the phrase. It may be a physician's sneer. It may be a chaplain's euphemism. It may be what a Stuttgart clerk writes when a recruit burns hot in the barracks and nobody wishes to be the man who blames the sacrament. I record the term exactly as cited and decline to diagnose it, because the Codex has enough fevers of its own invention.

Seventeen. The number has no denominator. It is attached to no intake, season, rate, death or outcome. It stands alone in the citation, like a boy who stepped forward when the sergeant asked for volunteers and found that the line behind him had stepped back.

This is the institutional problem, and it is why a modest annex left its mark on a broadsheet. War had told recruits and their parishes that the trench joined them to the earth and the Faith in one body. By official reasoning, a body joined to the Faith does not develop a rash under its sacrament. When it does, someone must either explain the rash or adjust what the sacrament claims. Explaining the rash would require a physician. Adjusting the claims requires only a pen.

#On the Corrected Broadsheet

The old War training broadsheets carried a sentence of real ambition. The new ones carry a sentence of real caution. The difference between the two is the annex's entire legacy, and it fits in one erratum.

Read the two sentences side by side, as an examiner reads two ordinands for the same pulpit.

The first sentence describes a union. Recruit, earth and Faith become one sacramental body, the sort of claim a man might hope to hear repeated at a graveside. It promises something done to the whole person, and it makes the earth a partner in grace. A partner can be blamed. If a partner grows fungus on a boy's shins, it presumably meant something by it.

The second sentence describes a procedure. "Confers" keeps a scrap of sacramental grammar, as a bishop keeps his ring on in the bath. "Field-compatible humility" shrinks the gift to a single trait and measures it against the conditions of service instead of against the Creator. "Approved contact" is the masterstroke. Contact is a surface event, and it joins nobody to anything. Approval places the whole affair inside a permission, so that whatever happens on the skin happens within regulation and therefore within no one's sacramental responsibility. The earth has been demoted from co-celebrant to issued material.

I do not know who drafted the replacement. Authorized interpretation and the wording of such claims belong to the Bureau of Doctrine. The older and newer broadsheets would have passed into the keeping of the Bureau of Records. Neither fact puts a name to the pen. No meeting is recorded, and no correspondence survives in what I have been shown. I have read enough corrections to recognize a committee voice. This one has the committee's chief virtue: no physician could ever quote it back at anyone.

#On Continuing Use

The A.S. 201 survey shows the rite unchanged in every particular the annex could have touched. Recruits still enter chest-deep. The chaplain still reads and counts. The clay still arrives under seal. The crust still stays three days and still endures its three inspections. The Vey file puts it in four words I would happily have stolen: the mud is unchanged.

Nothing in the record mentions a shorter retention, a washing allowance, a treatment order, an inspection of the clay carts, or a single coin paid to anyone. I searched for these with the diligence of a man who expected to find nothing and wished to say so with authority. I say so.

The garrison's modern function was fixed in A.S. 112, after the First Continental Levy of A.S. 110. Its trench has since received every Swabian son the Levy tables could reach. Colonel-Catechist Vey has petitioned for a second trench. War endorsed it. Doctrine approved the instinct and delayed the appropriation six months. As of the survey, no second trench has been dug. If one is dug, it will doubtless be lined with the same sealed clay, read over with the same Litany, and advertised in the same approved language. That language has the singular merit of needing no revision for a second trench, or for a twentieth.

The separately titled Stuttgart mud-trench assessment annex of A.S. 185 concerns westward glances and desertion, and it gives no date for 44-C. Clerks who confuse the two are reminded that sharing a trench does not mean sharing a folio.