The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told
about lice and rats and mine-shafts there. Another misery came to
torture soldiers in the line, and it was called “trench-foot.” Many men
standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all
sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet,
began to swell, and then to go “dead,” and then suddenly to burn as
though touched by red-hot pokers. When the “reliefs” went up scores
of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be
carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing stations.
So I saw hundreds of them, and, as the winter dragged on, thousands. The
medical officers cut off their boots and their puttees, and the socks
that had become part of their skins, exposing blackened and rotting
feet. They put oil on them, and wrapped them round with cotton-wool,
and tied labels to their tunics with the name of that new
disease--“trench-foot.” Those medical officers looked serious as the
number of cases increased.
“This is getting beyond a joke,” they said. “It is pulling down the
battalion strength worse than wounds.”
Brigadiers and divisional generals were gloomy, and cursed the new
affliction of their men. Some of them said it was due to damned
carelessness, others were inclined to think it due to deliberate
malingering at a time when there were many cases of self-inflicted
wounds by men who shot their fingers away, or their toes, to get out of
the trenches.
There was no look of malingering on the faces of those boys who were
being carried pick-a-back to the ambulance-trains at Remy siding,
near Poperinghe, with both feet crippled and tied up in bundles of
cotton-wool. The pain was martyrizing, like that of men tied to burning
fagots for conscience' sake. In one battalion of the 49th (West Riding)
Division there were over four hundred cases in that winter of '15. Other
battalions in the Ypres salient suffered as much.
It was not until the end of the winter, when oil was taken up to the
trenches and rubbing drill was ordered, two or three times a day, that
the malady of trench-foot was reduced, and at last almost eliminated.
The spirit of the men fought against all that misery, resisted it, and
would not be beaten by it.
A sergeant of the West Riding Division was badly wounded as he stood
thigh-high in water. A bomb or a trench-mortar smashed one of his legs
into a pulp of bloody flesh and splintered bone. Word was passed down to
the field ambulance, and a surgeon came up, splashed to the neck in mud,
with his instruments held high. The operation was done in the water,
red with the blood of the wounded man, who was then brought down, less
a leg, to the field hospital. He was put on one side as a man about to
die... But that evening he chattered cheerfully, joked with the priest
who came to anoint him, and wrote a letter to his wife.
“I hope this will find you in the pink, as it leaves me,” he began. He
mentioned that he had had an “accident” which had taken one of his legs
away. “But the youngsters will like to play with my wooden peg,” he
wrote, and discussed the joke of it. The people round his bed marveled
at him, though day after day they saw great courage; such courage as
that of another man who was brought in mortally wounded and lay next to
a comrade on the operating table.
“Stick it, lad!” he said, “stick it!” and turned his head a little to
look at his friend.
Many of our camps were hardly better than the trenches. Only by
duck-boards could one walk about the morass in which huts were built and
tents were pitched. In the wagon lines gunners tried in vain to groom
their horses, and floundered about in their gum boots, cursing the mud
which clogged bits and chains and bridles, and could find no comfort
anywhere between Dickebusch and Locre.