From ‘Compulsory Inoculation’, The Spectator, 13 February 1915:
IT is a little difficult to keep one’s patience with the Government’s attitude towards compulsory inoculation. It is a capital example of “Letting ‘I dare not’ wait up ‘I would,’ like the poor cat i’ the adage.” “The cat would eat fish, and would not wet her feet.”
The Government would like to knock enteric out altogether from the list of serious Army diseases. They know that they can do so and ought to do so, but they have not done so as yet because they do not want to wet their feet politically—i.e., antagonize the faddists of their party. In reality the Government have hardly anything to be afraid of—something even leas than the pin-prick of the inoculation needle, which, for some inscrutable reason, is so much dreaded by a large portion of the male population of these islands. The faddists are not in the ascendant during the war. While the Opposition are very properly determined to support the Government in this matter, any threat to turn the Government out because they have not toed the anti-inoculation line is perfectly ridiculous. We do not suppose that on a resolution censuring the Government for making enteric inoculation compulsory in the Army the faddists could put together a dozen votes.
The dread that there would be ill-feeling amongst the soldiers already with the colours, or that there would be any serious interference with recruiting, is equally fallacious. The moment the ordinary soldier knew that inoculation against enteric was compulsory he would not dream of resisting it or resenting it, any more than be would dream of resisting or resenting an order to occupy a particular trench. The men who refuse to be inoculated refuse, not from any serious disbelief in the advantages of inoculation or dread of its consequences, but out of what we may term a mixture of shyness, ignorance, and childish terror. Strange as it sounds, it is undoubtedly true that lads who are perfectly willing to take knowingly all the risks of bullet and shrapnel, and will, if necessary, go to their graves like beds, are frightened, just as a blood horse is frightened at a scrap of paper in the road, by the thought of the terrible doctor approaching their bare backs or arms with that awful little needle which is to be shoved into the living flesh, &c., &c., &c.! The real impediment in the ranks to inoculation is this dread of the needle and nothing else.
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