d to grease their feet and legs. Unluckily,
only fortunately situated men could be so supplied, and the suffering
was terrible. Surgeons who have observed many cases of both frost and
water bite say that, curiously enough, the left foot is more
frequently and seriously affected than the right. The reason given is
that right-handed men automatically use the right foot more than the
left, make more movements with it. The order to remove boots twice a
day, for a few moments while in the trenches, had a beneficial effect
among certain battalions.

The British soldier who wraps tightly a khaki puttee round his leg and
thus hampers circulation has been a particular sufferer from frostbite
in spite of the precaution he takes to grease his feet and legs before
going into the trenches.

The presence of septic conditions has been appalling.

This is a dirty war. Men are taken back to the hospitals in incredible
states of filth. Their stiffened clothing must frequently be cut off
to reveal, beneath, vermin-covered bodies. When the problem of
transportation is a serious one, as after a great battle, men must lie
in sheds or railway stations, waiting their turn. Wounds turn green
and hideous. Their first-aid dressing, originally surgically clean,
becomes infected. Lucky the man who has had a small vial of iodine to
pour over the gaping surface of his wound. For the time, at least, he
is well off.

The very soil of Flanders seems polluted. British surgeons are sighing
for the clean dust of the Boer war of South Africa, although they
cursed it at the time. That it is not the army occupation which is
causing the grave infections of Flanders and France is shown by the
fact that the trouble dates from the beginning of the war. It is not
that living in a trench undermines the vitality of the men and lays
them open to infection. On the contrary, with the exception of frost
bite, there is a curious absence of such troubles as would ordinarily
result from exposure, cold and constant wetting.

The open-air life has apparently built up the men. Again and again the
extraordinary power of resistance shown has astonished the surgeons.
It is as if, in forcing men to face overwhelming hardships, a watchful
Providence had granted them overwhelming vitality.

Perhaps the infection of the soil, the typhoid-carrying waters that
seep through and into the trenches, the tetanus and gangrene that may
infect the simplest wounds, are due to the long i