Dear Diary,
It is the 9th of June and I am writing to you to today in fear that I will go insane. I have seen things, smelt things, and many of my comrades have died, and yet, despite all this, the thing I fear the most are the trenches. The hygiene of this place I have forced to call home is absolutely horrid. The horrific stench nauseates me. The murky waters disgust me. I have seen many people succumb to the terrifying disease known as ‘trench foot’. We haven’t changed our shoes and socks for days; we were soaked through and through. My subordinates have told me that the first indication of trench foot is numbness, and then, after a while, their feet became red and toes start falling off.
Another thing I fear is lice, every time I woke up, I would find red marks on my body, a sign that pointed at lice infestation. My clothes were contaminated and on some days, we had to hot iron some of our clothes to get rid of some of the disgusting parasites, and on even rarer days, we washed out clothes in chlorine.
Rats also dominate the trenches, there were two types, black and brown, the black rats were the diseased rats and the brown rats would eat the corpses. They were big, bigger than usual, I have seen many rats the size of fully grown cats.
Every day I find myself treading on those who have been brutally murdered, taken by the enemy or disease. Their faces are still contorted in pain and their arms move limply as I step heavily onto them. I wince every time I do this- how can I survive a war when I cannot bear the sight of a corpse?
Well, I have very little time left to finish this off and I don’t know when I can write in here again.
But, I will fight for the good of the nation.
Farewell.
Yours sincerely, Harrison.
A gripping post with some disturbing descriptions of life in the trenches. The image is particularly difficult to look at. Did people ever die of trench foot? Was it the constant wetness of the feet that caused trench foot? Was there any way to stap it once the infection had started?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the compliment sir, and to answer your questions, yes, people did die from contracting trench foot, and yes, it was because of the constant wetness of their feet, socks and shoes that caused trench foot, however, they found a way to stop the disease much later, they realised that changing their socks several times a day, drying them, and soaking their feet in whale oil eventually made the disease go away. During the war, they avoided trench foot by constantly changing shoes and socks, hope that helped.
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