SOLDIERS'NERVES

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2339, 22 December 1914, Page 6

SOLDIERS'NERVES

EFFECTS OF MODERN WARFARE. Modern warfare has a marked- effect on modern nerves. The constant roar of - artillery affects young soldiers in various ways. Some lose their memories and' Wander away from their regiments, though without any thought of deserting. Others fainted under fire in the early days of the.war. The strain of waiting hours in the trenches is very severe. Normally, the men are relieved every 48 hours; but there have been times when the period has been doubled or. trebled. In some places there has been four feet of water in the trenches, and tho deeper the men dig the more water they. find. They get caked with mud until-they look like mummies. There is little to relieve the strain. The only sport available —the French are very fond of'indulging in it—is to stick lip dummy figures above the trenches and laugh at the clumsy German marksmanship.' Two months of this kind 'of thing, an army surgeon states, is about as much as the ordinary man can be reasonably expected to enduro without a_ collapse. British soldiers are not ordinary ; but rheumatism, dysentery, and pneumonia are not -uncommon, and a3 the winter advances the medical wards of the hospital may have-as many cases as the surgical. Cases of concussion among the'dispatch riders are frequent; The soldier, pathologically speaking, has a bad heart. "Soldiers' heart" is really a variety of at-hletes'_ heart. At •least, one-third of the recruits for Lord Kitchener's new army who were rejected on medical examination, were ' rejected because of heart trouble, while heart complaints were responsible for by far the greatest number of breakdowns among'soldiers during the first three months of thraining. The weighty arms that soldiers carry and the constrictive effect of belts and bandoliers combine to produce heart trouble, while in forced marches a number of men always fall out from cardiac failure.