Remember to take your training seriously—it pays.
CHAPTER II
HEALTH
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Be sober and temperate and you will be healthy." This is in the main true and is excellent advice for the soldier. But there are ills that are liable to affect the fighting man in spite of his temperance and sobriety and of these we must speak.
The health of men in the army is, on the average, much better than that of individuals outside of it. This is due to many causes chief of which is the fact that only healthy men are admitted to the army. Then the out-of-door life, regular and wholesome food, sufficient exercise and "early to bed and early to rise" tend to keep him well. If he enters the army fit, he must make it his business to remain fit and it will be well to remember that "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." To preserve good health is his Duty for only thus can he become an efficient soldier. If the bodily resistance is weakened, man becomes prey to the millions of germs that are to be found in the air and even within his own system. When he is healthy the body is able to keep them in subjection, but once let him permit his system to run down and these armies of microbes will attack him with all their forces.
Now let us begin first of all with Bodily Cleanliness. No soldier can come on parade unless his face and hands be clean. Shaving, though sometimes a bore, is an excellent method of keeping the face clean and fresh. It tends to smarten a man, and officers are not slow to pick out the careful from the slovenly soldier. We used to reserve the unpleasant tasks of the camp—latrine duties amongst others—for men who would not keep their hands and faces clean. But there are other parts of the body to which it is just as necessary to apply cleansing methods regularly even though no military punishment follows the violation of the rule. First of these that I would mention is the
Teeth. Soldiers, I find, are very careless in this matter till the first thing you know is that someone is absent from parade because of the toothache. On one occasion in the trenches, when we were very short handed, an officer had to leave us for a week to go to the hospital with a badly abscessed tooth due entirely to neglect. Cleaning the teeth night and morning freshens the mouth and makes food taste better. An excellent custom is to rinse the mouth after every meal, and while this may often be inconvenient it can be done if a soldier remembers to wash his mouth out with the first sip of water every time he takes a drink. If the teeth are allowed to get very bad a man's digestion suffers and he falls ill. This robs the army of part of its fighting strength, a result which every soldier has an interest in avoiding.
FIGURE 1:
Showing use of natural cover by soldier lying down.
FIGURE 2:
Showing use of sandbag and earth for protection.