They have good food in the front trenches, the men have told me. But they are sometimes short of water. They sleep in constantly interrupted snatches. They are wet to the skin and sometimes very cold. They work hard, and are tormented with the noise, the blasting of bullets, the shriek of shells. Often when they go over the top they are tired as dogs, their circulation is sluggish with cold, their bodies are full of waste products.
The mad excitement of battle is followed by the shock of a wound. Icy cold grips them. Their pulses stop. They have wound shock. The doctors now know all this. They have devised, even in the advanced dressing stations, means of keeping wounded men warm in heated blankets over alcohol stoves. The hot tea they give the wounded now contains medicine to counteract the intense acidity of the blood which experiments on animals revealed as a part of shock.
Now, when a poor shocked wounded man struggles with air hunger, the doctors can do something for him. A single injection works a miracle. The struggle ceases immediately. In a few minutes he is asleep. In a few hours he is smoking a cigarette and joking with the man in the next bed. Thousands of lives, perhaps those of your son and my son, have been saved already, because the doctors now know what to do to prevent most wound shocks, and to cure the favorable cases.
Another thing that has killed thousands in this war is an infection called gas gangrene. It is unlike any other gangrene known to the medical world. It is caused by bacteria bred in the mud and filth of the trenches, and by foreign bodies, bits of cloth and the like which contaminate wounds.
But the gangrene does not always confine itself to the wound. A man wounded in the shoulder may first show gangrene in the wound in his arm. A few days later the gangrene may appear in his legs, and he dies. The blood is not contaminated; that has been proved. The gangrene just mysteriously moves around.
The army physicians have got to find out all about this frightful condition, and how to combat it. They can do it only in a laboratory and through animal experimentation. Why should we sentimentalize about it? The animals die, but they suffer little, if at all. Our men suffer most horribly, and all too often they die.
Remember also that when we send our soldiers out into the hell of battle, artillery fire, machine guns, bombs, shrapnel, liquid fire, poison gas, and all the other hideous inventions of German science, we are subjecting them to vivisection of the worst possible kind.
They throw their bodies between the murderous Huns and the rest of the world. Would you save a few thousand or a few million guinea pigs at the expense of the ghastly suffering and death of one of those men? I would not.
CHAPTER XVI
HOW THE WAR AGAINST TRENCH FEVER WAS WON
One day last January four companies of so-called non-combatant soldiers of the American army in France were lined up to listen to an address from their officers. The men were members of the field hospital and ambulance service. Their officers were army physicians. Working with them were other eminent physicians, members of the medical research department of the American Red Cross. This, or something like it, is what these physicians said to the soldiers: