On the Fringe of the Great Fight

by George Gallie Nasmith

The water details of the first Canadian Division were the best trained lot of men we ever ran across. The very first day we took samples from their water carts they were all sterile, and there were no complaints about taste. It was an excellent example of what training could accomplish, for they had all been carefully trained in their duties in Canada and England.

As the water details of any division were constantly changing, the efficiency of the treatment depended to a great extent on the constant supervision of the problem by the A.D.M.S., medical and sanitary officers.

We have found divisions coming into our area for the first time with only 25 per cent. of their water carts chlorinated, whereas before they left they would have 90 per cent. or more chlorinated, and the division thoroughly educated as to the necessity for sterilizing their drinking water properly.

Wells, springs, creeks, and ponds used as sources of supply were also examined, and not infrequently samples from "springs," encountered while digging new trenches, were sent in to be tested. The tremendous number of bacteria found in some of these "spring" samples we on several occasions reported as indicating the presence of buried animal matter in the immediate vicinity of the springs, and resulted in finding this to be correct. In one case in which a badly polluted water was so reported upon, the burial place of some fifty Germans was found only a few feet away.

One suspected epidemic of dysentery was a typically water borne infection which did not prove to be the real thing. Half of one company was in a front line trench and half in support. Part of the one section took their drinking water from a shallow well near at hand without treating it, and practically every one who drank it, thirty-one in all, came down with typical symptoms of dysentery, while all the others who did not drink it raw escaped. The well water was found to be badly polluted. The sick were all quite well in four or five days, and able to return to the front line, but it proved to be an excellent lesson in hygiene to that Division.

A curious phenomenon in connection with the army water supply was noted that first spring in Flanders. The flat surface of the country in our area consisted of a very tenacious clay, and the farm wells were usually sunk ten to twelve feet in that clay. In the months of March and April, though the fields were water logged and the ditches brimming over, the wells which were being used by the troops were going dry. In other words the soil was almost impervious so that once a well had been emptied it would not fill up again for days.

For this and several other reasons we reported the necessity for large mobile water purification units, which could take the water from larger bodies of water such as ponds, creeks, canals or rivers, purify it, and deliver it filtered and sterilized into the water carts or tanks. Such a system was subsequently adopted by the war office and is now in general use in the British Armies.

One hot morning in mid June we received a telegram from the Surgeon General to investigate a water supply complained of in the Festubert region. A premonition seized me that I was going to be killed, for the battery to be visited was in a very "unhealthy" spot. So I made a new will, and wrote a letter of farewell, to be posted in case of accident.

The battery was found nestling in the midst of an orchard, but the M.O. who knew all about the water supply, was not to be found. Reluctantly I accepted from the Colonel an invitation to dinner, for the feeling was still strong in me that some danger was impending. Half-way through dinner there came the well-known scream of an approaching shell, which burst at the other end of the orchard. A second shell burst a little closer; a third came closer still, and a fourth rained shrapnel on the roof; all the others, with one exception, fell short, and the shelling was over for the time. It was just another one of those "intuitions."

While the shells were flying we all kept on eating as if this were a usual everyday accompaniment to lunch, though I noticed that they watched me with as much interest as I eyed them during the process, each curious to know how the other took it.