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.
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