Another abysmal experience for the Soldiers was a condition named “Trench foot”, where after days spent constantly standing in knee-deep, dirty water the feet started to “swell up to two or three times their size”. After weeks of agony, many who suffered from this would have to have their legs or feet amputated.
Other conditions or illnesses included “shell shock”, a terrible one in which the patient suffered from varied symptoms, including “unrelenting anxiety, hysterical ticks, nightmares, shaking or gazing with a vacant expression”. These victims were often treated harshly and told to get “back on the line”.
There wasn’t just illness and death due to the war, but there were also trench rats. They were attracted due to the dead bodies all around and constant “scraps that littered the trenches”. They swarmed dead bodies, took food from pockets of sleeping men and even “eat a wounded man if he couldn’t defend himself”. These rats lived with the soldiers and helped add to the ongoing struggle they had to live in these dreadful surroundings.
Soldiers had to wear their uniform all the time, for eating, sleeping and of course fighting. This was made harder because of the annoying body lice which attached and were extremely difficult to remove. These lice didn’t just live in the soldiers clothes, but they brought on other indications, like “smell, disease, scratching, shooting pains and fevers”. A soldier quoted that as soon as he tried to sleep “…the vermin would get busy…in the most inaccessible spot.” This would have annoyed and distressed many soldiers and made it hard for them to live normally.
When the battalions formed in 1914 and 15, many joined the war along with their friends and many signed up to their platoons together. However, it will have been devastating to them when many of their friends were cut down next to them by enemy fire in what could be literally a matter of seconds. They had to live around the corpses of their friends, rotting away into the soil and had to eat and sleep while in the back of their minds was these images of their life-long, dearest friends being shot dead next to them.
