"This is just a race for life. The point is, which will get there first, disease and sickness caused by drinking water unspeakably contaminated, or sterilising plants to avoid such a disaster."
Another letter from a different writer, also in Belgium at the front, says:
"A friend of mine has just been invalided home with enteritis. He had been drinking from a well with a dead Frenchman in it!"
The Belgian Soldiers' Fund in the spring of 1915 sent out an appeal, which said:
"The full heat of summer will soon be upon the army, and the dust of the battlefield will cause the men to suffer from an intolerable thirst."
This is a part of the appeal:
"It is said that out of the 27,000 men who gave their lives in the South African war 7000 only were killed, whilst 20,000 died of enteritis, contracted by drinking impure water.
"In order to save their army from the fatal effects of contaminated water, the Belgian Army medical authorities have, after careful tests, selected the following means of sterilisation—boiling, ozone and violet rays—as the most reliable methods for obtaining large supplies of pure water rapidly.
"Funds are urgently needed to help the work of providing and distributing a pure water supply in the following ways:
"1. By small portable sterilising plants for every company to produce and distribute from twenty to a hundred gallons of pure cold water per hour.