It must be remembered that the soil in France and Flanders, where so much of the fighting has taken place, is highly cultivated, and is therefore splendid breeding-ground for these deadly bacilli. So much is this the case with tetanus that in the early stages of the war bits of uniform which have been driven into the body, however slightly, were infinitely more dangerous than serious wounds caused by clean shrapnel, for the cloth, by contact with the soil, had become infected with the bacillus. I have seen men with pieces of shrapnel left in their wounds and doing well, but a piece of uniform, sodden with the rich soil, was a very different thing. But so wonderful has been the advance in the method of treating tetanus that to-day, if taken in time, such a thing as a fatal result is extremely improbable. Every soldier is so quickly and skilfully treated that danger practically does not exist.
The very terrible gas bacillus caused another very common disease, for the gas produced a kind of gangrene; yet now there is very little mortality indeed from this cause.
In the beginning, too, any number of men were lost from typhoid fever, but now typhoid is getting so rare that if a case occurs anywhere on the front it is known the same night at the French General Headquarters. That remark applies to the whole of our armies, and so rigid is the control which is kept over these matters that, on the day following the report, a searching local inquiry is held as to the cause of the disease.
At the front I saw men who came from all parts of the country where I have been working for the past twenty-five years—Canadians, Americans, and so on. And in passing just let me say that in connection with this war we are misjudging America because of the attitude which the President has taken. I have stayed with Mr. Wilson and with Mr. Roosevelt, and I know that the spirit of America is with us. It is because the whole spirit of the American people is with us that thirty-three doctors and thirty-six nurses—most of them giving up splendid practices—went out from America to the front, as the Harvard Unit, to help us. Just so the Chicago Unit, and many more Americans fighting in the ranks.
I have seen at the front men of all ages and of every rank in life—veterans who were a long way over the army age, and immature youths of sixteen or seventeen. The spirit of loyalty and the determination to do their bit made them go. Often enough a boyish patient would smile when I looked at the chart and asked him how old he really was. “Oh, that’s my Army age,” he would say, and go on smiling.
I was right round the trenches two weeks ago, and as that was early in March and the winter has been exceptionally bad, the conditions were intolerable. There is no anxiety, because everybody is sure that the line is strong; but the wet, mud and exposure make you think that the men will get pneumonia and bronchitis; yet what mostly happens is trench-foot. I have seen a lot of that in Labrador, where we call it frost-bite. It is not, however, the same, though it appears to be. I have travelled many times in Labrador in winter, when the thermometer has been twenty and thirty degrees below zero, and I have never had frost-bite except once in my life. That was when I was driving my dog-team over the ice. The ice broke and my dogs went into the sea. They shared a floe with me throughout an awful night, and my life was saved at the sacrifice of theirs. I have told that story in detail elsewhere, so I need not tell it now.
I saw 150 men from a Highland regiment with frost-bite, but that was quite exceptional, and was due to the phenomenal weather and the impossibility of relieving the men when their relief was due, because they were fighting continuously for over forty-eight hours.
[To face p. 234.