Trench foot

“ It was found that a warm layer of air between the foot and the outer covering was absolutely necessary if trench feet were to be avoided. An oiled silk stocking has been recommended to be placed next to the skin and looser boots and loosened puttees are considered necessary when in the trenches. At present we have long rubber boots that the boys wear when they occupy the trenches. ”

“ The front part of the trench is then called the parapet and the rear part the parados. Both must be made strong, [71] the parapet for reasons already given, and the parados in order to protect the men from the force of shells that fall just behind the trenches. About a foot from the ground there is placed a board that is called the "firing step," on which the men stand when they are about to fire. I have said that there is seldom any roof over the trenches. It is difficult to cover in the trenches because of the limited supply of materials. ”

“ Artillery and the automatic gun are the determining factors in trench warfare to-day. The effect of artillery fire must be limited in its area as far as possible, and trenches are, therefore, cut by traverses, which are square blocks of earth not less than nine feet square, left every 27 feet along the trench. They should overlap the width of the trench by at least one yard, thereby limiting the effect of shell burst to a single bay, the 27-foot length of firing trench between two traverses. ”

“ Now, one often enters a trench in the dark. Certain short boards have been displaced by the outgoing unit. An incautious foot, with, say, fifteen stone avoirdupois behind it, is set on one end, and the perpendicular ambition of the trench-board manifests itself in a jarring wallop of the other end on one’s tin hat. The slat decidedly strikes you.
It is unpleasant to walk on, as anybody who has ever laboriously evaded coal-cellar gratings will realise. It exists in numbers that have never been counted. ”

“ We are in constant communication with the observing posts that cover our front, and our observing posts covering the other platoons are in constant communication with them.
[Pg 157]
6. We know the firing position assigned to us and are familiar with the use to be made of the accessories furnished us. We can fire over the parapet at the foot of our wire entanglements to repel night attack.
7. We will at all times be careful about needlessly exposing ourselves. We appreciate the fact that it is absolutely stupid to get killed or wounded in the trench through negligence. ”

“ As the trench (having vertical sides) is dug, the usual sheeting, rangers, and bracing are put in and the bracing is kept well keyed-up, so as to exert an active pressure on the earth. To illustrate the theory, in Fig. 25, let represent the vertical side of the trench, the earth extending only to the right of . Then from points such as , draw horizontal lines to the intersection with the corresponding s; the longest of these lines, to the scale of force, will represent the total force that must be exerted by all the braces, per foot of length of trench, to prevent any motion of the mass. ”

“ The face feels it the most, however. The cheeks become cold as ice. Far below, the snakelike windings of trenches—-trenches of friend and foe—-can be followed from high altitudes. Some parts of the line seem mile-deep systems of trenches, section on section, transverse here, approach line there, support line behind, ever joining one with another in wondrous fashion. Shell-torn areas between the trench lines, the yellow earth showing its wounds plainly from well above, caught the eyes of the fliers. ”

“ Now and again the heavy top-boots are useless protection against wet, the water rises over the tops of the boots and runs down the legs of the men. The boots stick in the mud, and often the men have to climb out of them; clamber from cells into a quagmire. In the days following the first trench winter when the earth got dry soldiers who had died in their top-boots were dug from the floors of the trenches. ”

“ The trenches themselves are no garden city, like those at Armentières. They were sited and dug in the dark, not many weeks ago, to secure two hundred yards of French territory recovered from the Bosche by bomb and bayonet. (The captured trench lies behind us now, and serves as our second line.) They are muddy—you come to water at three feet—and at one end, owing to their concave formation, are open to enfilade. The parapet in many places is too low. If you make it higher with sandbags you offer the enemy a comfortable target: if you deepen the trench you turn it into a running stream. ”

“ Beyond the parapet is broken ground, utterly uninteresting, utterly prosaic, for all that it is the realm of death. Immediately in front of the trench is barbed wire, new and taut and cleanly grey, fastened in a perplexing criss-cross work to lines of stout wooden posts driven deep in the ground; beyond that a stretch of flat field, of corn or grass or stubble, with a ditch here and a tree there, and maybe a pile of blackened bricks that once was a farm. ”

“ At the sign of an attack, darkness is lighted by star shells. It is then necessary for the patrol to get back to the wire-cut lane, or tunneled hole under the wires where they went out, their only refuge and chance for safety.
Back of the first line trench is the second, back of that a third. In some places, there are a dozen lines of trenches, different distances apart, varying with local conditions. From the rear, at right angles, interweaving like meshes of a net, are the communication and auxiliary branches through which men bring up supplies, provisions and ammunition. ”

“ The front line trench is nothing but a series of traverses, thus to avoid the enfilade effect of shell and machine-gun fire. A straight trench is a death-trap. But to carry hundreds of pole-slung cylinders, already weighing as lead, round traverses on a dark night, is a feat requiring superhuman endurance. ”

“ But, despite all the descriptions, the public still fails to visualize a trench. You do not see a trench with your eyes so much as with your mind and imagination. That long line where all the powers of destruction within man's command are in deadlock has become a symbol for something which cannot be expressed by words. No one has yet really described a shell-burst, or a flash of lightning, or Niagara Falls; and no one will ever describe a trench. He cannot put anyone else there. He can only be there himself.
The first time that I looked over a British parapet was in the edge of a wood. ”

“ These trenches, you know, are much deeper than one's height; you don't see anything. It's like walking along a mud-walled passage. You just trudge along them in single file. Every now and then some one stumbles into a soakaway for rainwater or swears at a soft place, or somebody blunders into the man in front of him. This seems to go on for hours and hours. It certainly went on for an hour; so I suppose we did two or three miles of it. At one place we crossed a dip in the ground and a ditch, and the trench was built up with sandbags up to the ditch and there was a plank. ”

“ It was not, strictly speaking, a line of trenches at all. As usual, each man had dug a hole by himself, and each man was his own architect. Very few holes had been connected by a rough sort of trench at the back. The Captain had described the topography of the situation very exactly. The holes were dug on the borders of the forest, but were concealed from enemy artillery observation by the trees. The field of fire was absolutely open. It stretched to the top of the hill, which formed their horizon, a distance of rather less than two hundred yards. ”

“ Whatever country the rivers pass they remain water, bordered by shore. So our front-line trenches, wherever they lie, are only gashes in the earth, fenced by wire, beside a greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell-holes, which is fenced with thicker, blacker, but more tumbled wire on the other side. Behind this further wire is the parapet of the enemy front-line trench, which swerves to take in a hillock or to flank a dip, or to crown a slope, but remains roughly parallel with ours, from seventy to five hundred yards from it, for miles and miles, up hill and down dale. ”

“ But you can see, my boy, when you've got rifle fire, machine-gun fire and shrapnel all looking for a different place to put a hole through you, a trench is the loveliest thing in the world, no matter if it's wet and slimy, full of smells and black with dried blood. The worst pool of filth would be a haven of refuge if only you could drop your body in it a few inches below the zone of certain death. If one gets caught once in the open, one never grumbles again about the labor of digging a trench. ”

“ These are cheerless pitfalls on a dark night, in which it is easy to sink one leg in mud or water over the knee. In places a duck-walk has canted over by losing its bearings on the trestle at one corner, giving the whole a treacherous list to one side or the other, simple enough to negotiate by day, but unpleasant for anyone hurrying along at night. Still, the trench is 'ducked' and, so far, luxurious, and a vast improvement on the sort of trench (common over the way among the Boches, I believe) in which men lose their boots, and have to be dug out themselves. ”

“ The trench from previous occupation is well known to the enemy, and as the pioneers shovel out the mud and the dirt to the left and right a new illumination is provided by the sudden glare and suffocating fumes of the heavies bursting right or left or in the trench itself. But night at least gives the appearance, if not the reality, of safety. As the infantry go forward the work must often be done in the broad daylight, the trench driven through to the new line, or a new resistance built to face the counter-attack. ”

“ Here the trench divided. There was no sign of a footprint either way. Shells of various sizes were sprinkling the landscape impartially—about ten or fifteen in the minute; none very close—a black burst on the brown hill—two white shrapnel puffs five hundred yards on one side—a huge brick-red cloud over the skyline—an angry little high-explosive whizzbang a quarter of a mile down the hill behind. It is so that it goes on all day long in the area where our troops are. ”

“ You must have boots that are right, otherwise you will soon be lamed and thus be out of action. And every man out of action "counts two on a division." We found it advisable in France to get boots that were large enough to accommodate the feet and two pairs of socks—one thin and one thick pair. Into the boots we poured a small quantity of oil, or between the socks we put small pieces of soap to keep the feet in good condition. You will find that the feet must be oiled if they are to stand the work of a campaign.
FIGURE 5:
Showing method of cutting trench; parapet and parados; drainage. ”

“ Number One Platoon gets to work on this. To Number Two is assigned a more subtle task—namely, the construction of a dummy trench a comfortable distance ahead, dug out to the depth of a few inches, to delude inquisitive aeroplanes, and rendered easily visible to the enemy's observing stations by a parapet of newly-turned earth. Numbers Three and Four concentrate their energies upon the supporting trench and its approaches.
The firing-trench is our place of business—our office in the city, so to speak. ”

“ One creeps and crawls at dusk along paths which months of experience has told the soldiers are the best means of approach; and one eventually scrambles into a communication trench which, in a number of zig-zags, leads you to the firing trench, where the men are waiting, rifle in hand, in case of attack, or now and again taking a snap-shot through a loophole in the trench parapet. ”

“ For reasons foreshadowed last month, we find that we are committed to an indefinite period of trench life, like every one else.
Certainly we are starting at the bottom of the ladder. These trenches are badly sited, badly constructed, difficult of access from the rear, and swarming with large, fat, unpleasant flies, of the bluebottle variety. They go to sleep, chiefly upon the ceiling of one's dug-out, during the short hours of darkness, but for twenty hours out of twenty-four they are very busy indeed. ”

“ In that country it is often difficult, with the best will in the world, to tell a trench when you come to it. One of the problems of the modern battle is that, when men are given a trench to take, it is sometimes impossible to recognise that trench when they arrive at it. The stretch in front of the lines is a sea of red earth, in which you may notice, here or there, the protruding timber of some old German gun position with its wickerwork shell-covers around [Pg 142] it—the whole looking like a broken fish basket awash in a muddy estuary. ”

“ When the ground falls away very rapidly to the rear it may be stepped under the traverses to prevent their sliding, and the rear of the gun emplacement may be raised when necessary to give the platform the proper slope. The central trench is cut deep enough to give 5 feet of cover over the splinter-proofs. ”

“ Behind a small hill within the German fortifications a group of officers stood in the moonlight, examining what looked superficially like the hangar of a small dirigible. Nestling behind the hill it cast a black rectangular shadow upon the trampled sand of the redoubt. A score of artisans were busy filling a deep trench through which a huge pipe led off somewhere—a sort of deadly plumbing, for the house sheltered a monster cannon reënforced by jackets of lead and steel, the whole encased in a cooling apparatus of intricate manufacture. ”