Sensations Of Victims when Wounded

Some Varied Experiences.

It is impossible to standardise the sensations of a wounded man when first he is hit, and this because these sensations will depend upon four things, what he is wound by, in what part of the body, his state of health at the time, and his temperament.

It is true that Nature provides a beneficial shock which numbs the pain for some time. But there are at least four kinds of wound in which this numbing sensation does not appear. At Guilletmont a man who had a bullet through the centre of the palm at one hand started running round and round in a circle, shrieking, until a couple of stretcher bears caught hold of him. Whatever the medical theories may be in a case like this, arid however slight the wound might have turned out to be, it was obvious to a spectator that the man was in the last extremes of actual pain.

At High Wood, men hit in the ankle, by low-flying machine-gun bullets made far more noise  than men seriously hit.  In the third exceptional case, that of stomach wounds, the man lies and groans quietly, because he simply cannot make any louder noise; but be is in terrible pain all the time, which is made the worse because it is more than his life is worth to take any drink, even a drop of water.  And then of course, there is the fourth case of the man who had a limb blown off in action.

Struck By Shrapnel.

To return to the consideration of more ordinary cases, in which the beneficial shock, has its effect. Take the case of an officer who was hit by a small piece of  high explosive shrapnel, which took away the elbow joint and broke the upper arm. He said, It felt as if a giant had kicked me. Then came a warm tingling all down the arm, a rather pleasant sensation.” After that the excitement of walking a mile or two back through  the teeming crowds of relief  and supply  troops took  my mind off it. But when they put the tourniquet on to stop the bleeding. My word!”

An officer who was hit by a bullet which went through the lung and passed out at the back lays stress on the rather peculiar fact that he did not feel the entry of the bullet at all, but only the exit. The sensation, he says, was that of being hit full force in the back by a loaded stick. As an interesting fact, it may be added that nobody discovered the entry found for three hours after his arrival at the dressing station.

Another officer had a piece of a rifle grenade through his chest. “I felt at first as if a huge weight had been dropped from a height upon my shoulder. This was followed by the feeling of a red-hot wire being pushed into me. But a blessed numbness succeeded soon to all this, and I got up and walked at least twenty yards before I fell again.” A fourth man was hit in the forearm by a shrapnel bullet. “It was like a smack with a sledge-hammer. I said, “My God. I’m hit!’ and my arm felt like a piece of lead. A peculiar desire to weep took me, but I was able to stifle it.”

Worse Than Bullets.

It is possible to draw some sort of distinction between the sensations caused by a rifle bullet, a shrapnel fragment, and a piece of a bomb.  The German rifle bullet leaves the muzzle with a speed of at least 2,500 yards per second.  At under 100 yards range it is still wobbling slightly, and will probably hit a man broadside on, giving a most dangerous and painful   wound. At any range above 100 yards it is travelling steadily, and nearly always passes straight through the body, unless it hits a bone. The shrapnel, is always likely to stay in the  body, by reason of its irregular shape. A  bomb splinter is likely to stay inside for another reason, namely its comparative lack of  velocity. Thus it can be affirmed fairly generally, though it is by no menus a hard and fast rule, that the two latter will produce wounds both more dangerous and more painful than the simple rifle bullet. Lastly, to consider the effect of the wounded man’s health and temperament upon him at the time he is hit. A man in a bad state of health has little resiliency, as they say in the R.A.M.C.  He will feel his wound more than the healthy man, and takes longer to recover. And as regards the question of temperament if his nerves have been shaken by a heavy bombardment, his idea of the danger to himself will be magnified out of all proportion. In every action nerve-shaken men run about insisting that their death is at hand, when the chances are that three weeks will see them back in the trenches. By contrast, men of strong nerves walk quietly down to the dressing station, uncomplaining, with a cigarette in their mouths, even thought they may be mortally wounded and in deadly pain. It may sound strange, but mortally wounded men can walk, and do. Not far, perhaps. But still, they walk.

Last of all this article does not pretend to be either authoritative or comprehensive. It is just facts.

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Fighting in the Trenches

The campaign in France is a war of trenches for the opposing armies are both fighting burrowed in the ground, to escape as far as possible the deadly effects of modern artillery fire.    Trenches are not roughly constructed ditch-like holes in the earth, but are scientifically built shelters for troops. The type of trench varies according to the condition of the country in which it is constructed.  On flat ground a deep trench in the form of three big steps is generally built. In front of it is often a hedge which conceals it from the enemy, and also a thick mound of earth, for robbing bullets of their velocity. It has been found that two or three inches of soft earth will stop the average shot from inflicting any damage. Earth is also piled behind these trenches to catch splinters from shells bursting in the rear of the troops. In protecting woods a trench is constructed, in front of which are placed felled trees with branches pointing away from the defenders. Around these barbed who is twisted, and thus they form formidable opposition in case of a charge by the enemy.  The type of trench most used by troops is the ten-foot dug-out, which is shaped something like the interior of a railway-carriage.  At the base are two lines of hard earth, which form seats with a space between for the legs.  On these solid mounds of earth the troops stand when firing, and they rest on them, invisible to the enemy, when they wish to refresh themselves.  Planks are laid across the top of these deep shelters, and earth piled on the wood. This form of trench is the safest of any type, as splinters from shells bursting overhead are caught by the protective earth-roof, whilst earth-walls back and front stop rifle bullets.  Lines of trenches are invariably built in a zig-zag line, so that the enemy cannot train their guns at one end of the shelter and massacre those inside it, as they could were the trench constructed in a straight line.

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German Trenches and Dug-outs

Along many miles of the Western front, as it was till the end of June 1916, you can, now do what seems to trench dwellers almost the utmost reach of impossibility. You can stand at your ease in the middle of No Man’s Land and look at a German front trench on your right and a French or British front trench on your left. As soon as you do so you feel that the outward face of each wears a quite different expression, It is not merely the accident that the Allies wire is only cut across by neat lanes or gangways at convenient intervals, while the German wire lies in a trampled mess on the ground. The difference goes much further. For one thing, the Allies support their barbed wire mainly with wooden stakes, the Germans do it with iron. For another, the Allies parapet owes much more of its strength to visible sandbags The Germans build with sandbags too but not so much nor so openly. Their parapet makes more show of rough clay or chalk, even where a light layer of this covers two or more feet of reinforced concrete placed like a shrapnel helmet on the head of a dug-out or a gun emplacement.

If you now leave your first standpoint and explore the two trenches in turn, and also the support and communication trenches behind each of them, you find that the difference goes in more than one sense, deeper still. The Allied trench looks in every way like the work of men who hoped and meant to move on before long, the German trench looks like the work of men who hoped or feared, that they would be in it for years, Our trench housing has been much more of a makeshift, a sort of camping out with some ingenious provisions for shelter and comfort, but not more than the least that would serve. Most of our dug-outs are just roughly delved holes in the earth, with only props and rafters to hold the roofs up, their roofs are bare ground, with a little straw on it, their doors, if they have any, are a few odd pieces of plank with a couple of other pieces nailed across; often the floor is on the trench level, to save burrowing. Lighting is done with candles, mostly bought at the canteen, and if anyone owns an armchair or a two-foot mirror, it is the jest of the platoon. 

Village 300 Miles Long.

The whole German idea of trench life is different. The German front in the west is like one huge straggling village, built of wood and strung out along a road 300 miles long. Of course the houses are all underground. Still they are houses, of one or two floors, built to certain official designs, drawn out in section and plan.

The main entrance from the trench level is, sometimes at any rate, through a steel door, of a pattern apparently standardised, so that hundreds may come from the factor on one order, and missing parts be easily replaced. The profusely limbered doorway is made to their measure. Outside this front door you may find a perforated sheet of metal to serve for a doormat or scraper. Inside, a flight of from 12 to 36 stairs leads down at an easy angle. The treads of the stairs and the descending roof of the staircase are formed of mining frames of stout timber, with double top sills: the walls are of thick planks notched at the top and bottom to fit the frames, and strengthened with iron tie-rods running from top to bottom of the stairs and with thick wooden struts at right angles to these.  At the foot of the stairs a tunnelled corridor runs straight forward, for anything up to fifty yards, and out of there open rooms and minor, passages on each side. In many dug-outs a second staircase, or two staircases, lead to a lower door which may be thirty or forty feet below the trench level.

All these staircases, passages and rooms are in the best specimens, completely lined with wood and as fully strengthened with it as the entrance staircase already described. In one typical dug-out each section of a platoon had its allotted places for messing and sleeping, its own place for parade in a passage, and its own emergency exit to the trench. In another, used as a dressing station, there are beds for 32 patients, and a fair-sized operating room. A third, near Mametz was designed to house a whole company of 300 men with the needful kitchens, provision and munitions storerooms a well, a forge riveted with sheets of cast-iron, an engine-room and a motor-room. Many of the captured dug-outs were thus lighted by electricity. In the officers’ quarters there have been found full-length minors, comfortable bedstead cushioned armchairs, and some pictures.

One room is lined with glazed “sanitary” wallpaper, and the present English occupant is convinced by circumstantial evidence that his predecessor lived there with his wife and child. Clearly there was no expectation of an early removal.

Decent by ladders

Other German trench works the same lavish use of labour as in the dug-outs. In the old German front trench south of La Boisselle an entrance like that of a dug-out leads to a flight of 24 stairs, all well furnished. At their foot a landing three feet square opens on its further side upon a nearly vertical shaft. Descending this by a ladder of 32 rungs you finds a second landing like the first, opening on a continuation of the shaft. Down this a ladder of 60 rungs brings you to the starting-point of an almost straight level tunnel, three feet wide and about five feet high, cut for 56 paces through pure hard chalk. It ends in a blank wall. If you take its hearings with the compass, return to the parapet, and step 56 paces in the same direction as the tunnel, you find yourself in three huge craters which had evidently been held and probably made, by British troops. So that at the moment of the advance in July nothing remained presumably, for the Germans to do but to bring the necessary tons of high explosives to their end of the tunnel and blow up the mine under the under the base of the old crater. Some rungs of the ladders in the shafts are musing or broken, but, as a whole, the shafts and the tunnel are remarkable for amplitude and finish. Like an incomplete dug-out near Fricourt, this mine still contains part of the machinery for winding up the excavated chalk to the surface.

On the other hand, if our advance is made good, every German left in such a dug-out will be either a dead man or a prisoner. No doubt, again, the German dug-outs give more protection from very bad weather than ours. But they also remove men more from the open air, and there is nothing to show that the half-buried German army gains more by relative immunity from rheumatism and bronchitis than it loses in the way of general health and vitality.

In England troops have better health in tents than in huts, and better health in huts than in billets. For a man of sound constitution “exposure” often means something unpleasant rather than unhealthy, and it would not be surprising if the close under ground villages of the Germans yielded higher figures of general sickness than our own shelters.              

Nobody who reads this should leap to the conclusion that simply because German trench work is more elaborate than ours, it is a better means to its end—the winning of the war! No doubt the size and the overhead strength of German dug-outs keep down casualties under bombardment and sometime enable the Germans to bring up unsuspected forces to harass our troops in the rear with machine-gun and rifle fire when a charge has carried our men past an uncleared dug-out of the kind.

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War against flies.

No inconsiderable part of the war is being waged in a tiny top room at the Imperial College, South Kensington. No communiqués are issued, but the battle is being waged fiercely day and night by a little band of enthusiastic workers.

At the head of the company is Professor M. Howlett, the entomologist, and the enemy he fights is the housefly, whose disease-carrying properties causes infinite trouble and pain to the troops on all our fronts.

Speaking to our reported he said, “I want to get into touch with everyone who knows anything about the destruction of houseflies. I want manufactures to send me samples of every insect killer they are putting on the market, sprays, poisons, traps any patent device whatever, mechanical or chemical. Come in here and I’ll show you what I am doing with them.”

The professor opened a door covered with fine gauge, then another labelled “Flies. Not to be let out.” It was a small room, and on the benches in it stood great pans of rotting kitchen refuse, decaying vegetable matter, bits of banana, tea-leaves, cabbage stalks, potato peelings, a foetid mass of corruption.

Many Experiments.

The professor waved a hand, and from these bowls rose great crowds of flies, buzzing angrily, hundreds of thousands of them.

The tables were black with the crawling young just hatched, the air was thick and murmuring with the pests.

“I am breading these here,” said the professor, “and then trying various methods of killing them.”

All round the room were cages containing captured flies and in each cage was one of the many fly-killers now on the market. Beside each experiment were chalked the tabulated results.

“I have been called by the R.A.M.C.” said Professor Howlett, “and this is my laboratory. So far I have found no fly-killer which is of any use against flies in the quantities in which they exist at the front.”

“Here is one, for instant. You watch!” he took a cage containing about 60 healthy flies, and with a tube sprayed then with a cubic centimetre of a preparation now being sold as a fly-killer.

In ten seconds two flies fell to the bottom of the cage, and lay kicking. In thirty seconds more than half were knocked out, and in less than a minute not a fly in the cage was moving.

They lay at the bottom of the cage on their backs, dead to all appearances.

“That looks fine, doesn’t it?” said the professor. “But in a few hours they will all be alive again, and none the worse. The liquid merely paralyses their nerve centres for a time, and then they recover. So that’s no good.”

Thrive on Preparation

“Here’s another preparation sold in quantities to the soldiers. I have had 20 flies eating that for 12 hours, and 19 of them are still thriving on it. The other looks a bit sick, perhaps, but that’s all.”

Professor Howlett is giving lectures to many of the R.A.M.C. officers before they leave for the front, and keeps in touch with them when they go out.

On another floor of the college a student is investigating the antimony of house flies, with a view to finding out whether the insects are attracted to food and offal by smell or sight. At present the balance of evidence is in favour of smell as a guide.

“There are many swindles on the market,” said the professor, “that so far I have found nothing that it would pay us to take up. But if the manufacturers will send me their products, I can soon test them.”

“Another thing we want to discover is a preparation, an ointment for preference, which can be put on the flesh to keep the pests from settling, and I shall be glad to receive samples of any such things.”

“Getting at the flies in the egg is too difficult to be considered, as nature has designed the egg to resist all sorts of strange conditions.”

“Only certain oils will permeate the shells. The fly maggot also is unhurt by anything but kerosene and coal tar oils.”

“I want any and every remedy sent to me,” said Professor Howlett, “preventatives, poisons, and traps. Then I can sift out what is good and the R.A.M.C. will take the preparation up. Thus we hope to make life more tolerable for the soldiers who are fighting for us.”

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Tending Wounded Horses

The veterinary surgeon at the front need to be a brave soldier for he has to “round up” panic-stricken horses whilst shells are whistling over his head. Unless a horse is too badly mutilated to stand, it generally rushes blindly about the battlefield maddened by the pain of its wound. It is these animals which the “vets.” have to capture and place in special horse-ambulances. A soldier attendant generally sits on the head of the animal to keep it tranquil. Horse boxes are amongst the Army field equipment, but they have proved too cumbersome to move about with any speed.  Motor-ambulances in which the horse is laid flat, are generally used for conveying the suffering animals to the rear. The veterinary surgeon has amongst his equipment a bell-shaped gun, which fires a bullet into the brain of an animal whose sufferings are too acute to allow it to live. The military “vet” has to be somewhat of a strategist, for in cavalry charges and similar military movements the enemy’s horses are especially liable to rush wildly all over the field of battle when their riders fall. At such times the veterinary corps capture all the animals they can, for horses are very valuable at the moment. For some years there has been a shortage of horses for the Army, a state of affairs largely due to the fact that over 300,000 horses were lost in the South African War, and also because breeding has lessened so considerably since the general introduction of mechanical traffic on to the streets.

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