[NeilE]

Hi Pete;

Soldiers in The Great War exposed to prolonged artillery barrages exhibited similar behaviour to those you described for soldiers in Stalingrad. Germans who survived the seven day barrage before the 1st of July described similar symptoms occurring as did some Australians after Pozieres.

Trench foot could be ascribed to poor foot maintainance but the circulatory problems it was often caused by had a lot to do with the boots they wore and lack of sock changes etc. Regular foot inspections helped and certainly apathy contributed but there were a complex of reasons for it I think.

I've been browsing the digitized soldiers records in the National Archives website lately and it surprised me the numbers of soldiers sent home sick or accidently injured over the course of the war. In my browsing so far sickness has predominated over battle wounds in reason why shipped back to Australia. There is no system to my browsing, its just random. Most common illnesses have been rheumatism/rheumatic fever, and strangely, nephritis (kidney disease). Reading some of the terse comments from MO's following examinations deciding to send them back to Australia, I get the impression that shirking was suspected in some of these illness cases. On a different note, one poor fellow fought through Gallipoli as a Light Horse Engineer, then fell off his horse in Egypt, contracted a chronic stomach complaint while in hospital, was scheduled to return to Australia, and then died of what may have been influenza on the troop ship near Mauritius and was buried at sea...

And then there were the VAD cases... Venereal disease, the curse of the common soldier. Soldiers with VD were treated very harshly as it was seen as a self inflicted injury - nevermind that soldiers were issued no forms of protection and were encouraged to attend official brothels (where despite denials from the brass, soldiers often regarded as being rife with STD's). I reminded by Patsy Adam-Smith's chapters on the treatment of VD cases in "The ANZACS".

Overall, as I said there was a tendency, born out of ignorance, to blame soldiers for some of the afflictions they suffered as a result of their service. Shellshock, desertion, illnesses, skin complaints were all seen as the individual soldier's fault - a small part of these things may have been true but in the majority it was clearly not.

cheers

neil