Читать книгу The Times Great War Letters: Correspondence during the First World War - James Owen - Страница 32

FROSTBITE IN THE TRENCHES

25 January 1915

SIR,—REFERRING TO A letter headed “Frostbite” in your issue of yesterday, it may interest your correspondent to know that we were served out with grease before going up to the trenches on Christmas Eve. I rubbed my legs and feet thoroughly with this and was careful to leave my boots and puttees loose—but I arrived home on January 1 with frostbite in both feet, and am still laid up.

As to comparing us with men who explore the Poles, I do not know much about Polar expeditions, but I imagine that the men contrive to keep their legs and feet fairly dry, and have plenty of opportunities of taking exercise and keeping the circulation going. Whereas, in my particular case, I was for 36 hours in a trench which was so badly knocked about and fallen in, and had such an ineffective parapet, that it was simply “asking for trouble” to stand in anything like an upright position. The main trench was over knee deep in liquid mud (frozen over on Christmas morning), and the consistency of the ground in my particular traverse was such that if I kept my feet in the same place for a few minutes on end it was quite an effort to pull them out. You will readily see, then, that stamping or “marking time” was quite impossible, and we were reduced to knocking our feet together or hammering them with an entrenching-tool handle. I spent most of Christmas Eve and the following morning in such cheerful pastimes, but by lunch-time my feet and ankles were quite numbed. Our cubby-hole, by the way, had fallen in, and we had no hot shower-baths, stoves, drawing-room carpets, or other luxuries which abound in these Aladdin’s-Cave-cum-Ritz-Hotel trenches I have read about in the papers.

If your correspondent will excuse me saying so—when speaking, as he does in the last sentence of his letter, about “proper precautions” and so on, he does not realize the difficulties with which the authorities have to contend, especially when the trenches are only some 80 yards away from the Germans, as ours were. And I can assure him that when I left any amount of things were being done to improve the condition, and make things more comfortable for the men. But mud and frost are difficult things to deal with at any time, and how much more so when one or two crack shots are waiting to put a bullet through the first head or arm that appears.

Yours truly,

ONE WHO’S TRIED IT