Arthur Savage's Life In The Trenches

In 1914, World War I broke out and the Germans invaded France and Belgium, which led Great Britain to join the fight. For about three and a half years the countries fought each other in trenches four hundred miles long. Soldiers spent weeks at a time sitting in seven feet deep and six feet wide trenches consuming diseases and experiencing harsh conditions. Life in the trenches was hell on earth, men suffered from trench foot, body lice, and the attacks from trench rats that were almost impossible to prevent, and there were dead bodies everywhere. In a letter to parents living in East Grinstead, England in 1915, Private Livesay wrote, “Our trenches are... ankle deep mud. In some places, trenches are waist deep in water. One does not have time
to be weary.” Military men lived miserably and it was not at all easy, the conditions were horrible and the soldiers had very little time to rest and be healthy.
In World War I, there was a horrible outbreak of trench foot which was an infection of the feet caused by cold, wet and unsanitary conditions.
For days men stood for hours on end in waterlogged trenches unable to remove wet socks or boot. Their feet would gradually go numb and the skin would turn red or blue. To prevent trench foot they were told to cover their feet with a grease made from whale-oil. Even though the men put the grease on their feet it did not do much to prevent trench feet. During an interview in 1991, Arthur Savage, a British militant, was asked about his memories of life on the Western Front and he stated, "My memories are of sheer terror and the horror of seeing men sobbing because they had trench foot that had turned gangrenous. They knew they were going to lose a leg. Trench feet was horrible to look at the raw skin and bleeding blisters and big, angry sores.” By the effects, soldiers had on trench feet a lot of people had to be removed from the trenches to be treated. While men had diseases on their feet other insects were eating up their other body
parts
Body lice was a big problem with the men staying in the trenches during World War I which made their life in the trenches even harder.
Body Lice is pale fawn in colour, and they left blotchy red bite marks all over the body. They created a sour stale smell and men have to have baths in huge vats of hot water while their clothes were being put through delousing machines. This process rarely worked so the men could not really do anything about the conditions in the trenches. Not only did the lice cause itching, lice caused Trench Fever, a nasty and painful disease that began suddenly with severe pain followed by high fever. In a poem, The Immortals in 1918 written by Isaac Rosenberg, a British soldier who was on the Western Front wrote about how agonizing the body lice was. He said, “I killed them, but they would not die. For them, I could not rest or sleep. They made my hands red in their gore. I killed till all my strength was gone. And still they rose to torture me.” Not only did body lice hurt you physically but it also hurt you mentally because they were all you thought
about.
While the lice attacked soldiers bodies, rats would invade dug-outs in search of food and shelter and would crawl across the faces of sleeping men. Human waste littered the trenches, and with no proper disposal system, the rats would feast off food scraps. Rats in trenches grew extremely large and could carry diseases and make you sick . In The Last Post published in 2005, the last surviving soldier known British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the war, Harry Patch stated, “There were rats as big as cats, and if you had any leather equipment the damn things would gnaw at it.” Rats would attempt to take food from the pockets of sleeping men and as each day past the rats grew bigger and bolder and would even steal food from a soldier’s hand or take something that was only put down for a few moments. This resulted in missing or damaged goods. They bred rapidly in their millions so they were hard to avoid. Rats swarmed through No-Man's Land gnawing the bodies of fallen soldiers. Life in the trenches was very rough during the time of the World War I. Men suffered from trench foot, body lice, and the attacks from trench rats that were almost impossible to prevent. Military men lived miserably and it was not at all easy. The conditions were horrible and the soldiers had very little time to rest and be healthy. Most of their lives in the trenches were affected forever whether it was losing a foot, getting rashes and diseases from the body lice, or becoming mentally insane from the rats as big as cats. The living conditions people had to experience in the trenches in World War I were catastrophic and should never be forgotten.