Letter from the Trenches

To My Deargonst Elsie, I know this is my 5th earn in 3 days notwithstanding I need to range the truth. I joined the army for adventure and the chance to see imper provideently places save instead I am living in a remains hole, freezing under constant fear of destruction. You may laughter and interpret that I am but whingeing and that I am in all likelihood the exactly scargond humans here but its non true. every last(predicate) 5,000 of us are terrified of what may come if we so a good deal as lift our heads into the view of the enemy. Every day I construct spent in this trench, we fuddle had shells fired at us.The noise is dread(a) and the despair in the eye of many a soldier is unpatterned as another comes over. If and when the shelling stops, many drink or ingest to try relax but you can tell that a a couple of(prenominal) are on the brink of breaking down. Some men break shot themselves in the arm or leg just to nourish an injury serious enough to get them o ut of the trenches but not bad enough to kill them. Apart from the threat of having your head short-winded off, the Germans are now trying to gas us to death. These gas attacks are few and far between but when one is launched the new recruits dissolve like flies mainly because they do not know anything. unrivaled called Jenkins lost his gas mask and when the Germans launched a chlorine gas shell, well, that was it for him really. The beastly stuff burns your lungs out. The newbies can do nothing but overstep up their burnt out lungs. The other gas they use is chinese mustard gas which is truly evil. It blisters the skin, blinding men who then roll near in agony, clutching their red raw flesh. Forgive me if I am scaring you but I need to talk about this. Our daily food is tough beef. When you first bulk the army and you are eating this you think its smooth but edible.After 3 months of bully beef and little else, you wonder whether you would actually feel better hungry or wit h a tin of bully beef inside you. Everyone is given some rum to start the day off which is rather uplifting for most of us. Smoking is allowed in the daytime which takes away the taste of bully beef but at night we arent allowed as the cigarette light makes us an easy steer for a German spy. Tea is freely available but the c at a timern is that it often freezes in your cup as it is so cold. We arent allowed coats as our superiors say that we wont be able to walk properly in them so cryopathy is common.We wear as many resters of clothing as possible which factor that our clothes are dirty and sweaty. Men in the front melodic phrase cant wash until we are sent back to support or reserve. Its do doubly worse by the mud. The mud is probably the worst construction or rather what comes with it. The mud is oten knee deep. We have to eat, sleep and defend in piles of the stuff. Putees are no use (thats slang for genuine wrapped around your shins). Do you remember little Billy Rawls on? He drowned in the mud. He was sleeping and his head went under.By the time we detect he wasnt perched up where he normally was, he was dead. Send Betty my commiserations and apologies. The mud brings trench floor with it. Trench foot is where your feet swell up to sometimes double their original size. To start off with, you lose all sensation in your feet. Someone who had trench foot stuck his bayonet into the afflicted foot and didnt even off flinch After a few days of having numb feet, the sensitivity comes back with avengeance. Men go forth often have the foot amputated rather than endure the terrific pain that ensues.Trench foot isnt the only illness that is rife amongst soldiers but Dysentery (stomach pains and diarrhoea), Nephritis (kidney inflammation) and VD are very common and, due to the nature of the illness, it makes life here even more difficult even if you yourself dont suffer from the illness. Every single man in this trench has lice of some variety. This m ay sound disgusting but hunting out lice becomes almost a social pastime. We search for to each one others lice and crush them between our fingernails or burn them with our candles but somehow I doubt chatting ordain catch on back home.Tabby would be happy here. Since there are no cats here, rats run rife. We call them mud rats because these rats will eat the bodies of the dead on the battlefield. Even injured soldiers have found these infernal creatures nibbling his wounds. There have been reports of rats as big as cats about 3 miles up the trench. That would be a great pillage for the soldier that killed it. Part of what annoys me about the army is how men lose their minds to the generals later a few weeks of training but then how they almost reawake once theyre in the thick of it all. To be quite frank, it all disgusts me.The battlefield is around as muddy as the trenches but with double the horrors. Masses of bodies are piled up out of the way whilst the rats feed upon the corpses. To step onto that field is death and every night this week that is what we have been sentenced to. The commander sounds his whistle, always at night, and we climb over. We run over the field and then you notice your compeer falling to the ground around you. The first time it happened, I cerebration that the commander had shouted an order and Id missed it so I lay down too but then I realised that their eyes were shut and they werent breathing anymore.I havent been shot yet but sure enough itll happen to me and then who knows if Ill be alive to tell the tale. After we attack, the Germans will attack us, with their bayonets attached to their guns just as ours had been and like us they will fall. Everyone hates that old butcher Haig. I tell you Elsie, Id like to see his grammatical case if he saw what hell he puts innocent men through. Please, enter this letter to everyone you know who is considering joining the army. Let them know what its really like. Love, as always J im