Now it can be Told by Philip Gibbs — Read

The men remained in the trenches, and suffered horribly. I have told about lice and rats and mineshafts there. Another misery came to torture soldiers in the line, and it was called "trench-foot. " Many men standing in slime for days and nights in field boots or puttees lost all sense of feeling in their feet. These feet of theirs, so cold and wet, began to swell, and then to go "dead," and then suddenly to burn as though touched by red-hot pokers. When the "reliefs" went up scores of men could not walk back from the trenches, but had to crawl, or be carried pick-a-back by their comrades, to the field dressing stations. 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."