th healthy and vigorous men, and once they had
got over the shock of injury they had wonderful powers of recovery.
We very soon found that we were dealing with cases to which the
ordinary rules of surgery did not apply. The fundamental principles of
the art must always be the same, but here the conditions of their
application were essentially different from those of civil practice. Two
of these conditions were of general interest: the great destruction of
the tissues in most wounds, and the infection of the wounds, which
was almost universal.

Where a wound has been produced by a large fragment of shell, one
expects to see considerable damage; in fact, a whole limb may be
torn off, or death may be instant from some terrible injury to the body.
But where the object of the enemy is the injury of individuals, and not
the destruction of buildings, they often use shrapnel, and the resulting
wounds resemble those from the old smooth-bore guns of our
ancestors. Shrapnel consists of a large number of bullets about half
an inch in diameter packed together in a case, which carries also a
charge of explosive timed to burst at the moment when it reaches its
object. The balls are small and round, and if they go straight through
soft tissues they do not do much damage. If, however, they strike a
bone, they are so soft that their shape becomes irregular, and the
injury they can produce in their further course is almost without limit.
On the whole, they do not as a rule produce great damage, for in
many cases they are nearly spent when they reach their mark. Pieces
of the case will, of course, have much the same effect as an ordinary
shell.

The effects of rifle-fire, particularly at short ranges, have led to a
great deal of discussion, and each side has accused the other of
using dum-dum bullets. The ordinary bullet consists of a lead core
with a casing of nickel, since the soft lead would soon choke rifling.
Such a bullet under ordinary circumstances makes a clean
perforation, piercing the soft tissues, and sometimes the bones, with
very little damage. In a dum-dum bullet the casing at the tip is cut or
removed, with the result that, on striking, the casing spreads out and
forms a rough, irregular missile, which does terrific damage. Such
bullets were forbidden by the Geneva Convention. But the German
bullet is much more subtle than this. It is short and pointed, and when
it strikes it turns completely over and goes through backwar