The trench foot – Suffering in wetness and mud

With the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia on 28 June 1914, a fight began that developed into a world war. The passage at arms was supposed to be short, according to the military planners, but very fast it developed into a static warfare. A special phenomenon arose here – the trench foot.

 

"Everything is wet and dirty here, you literally go bad here," the soldier Fritz Niebergall wrote to his parents from the Western Front in January of 1915. Socks are top on his wish list in his letters. The young soldier describes a phenomenon that soon turned into a horror scenario for soldiers of all nations: Apart from the so-called "shell shock", the "war scrunched", meaning soldiers extremely disfigured by pieces of shrapnels, the "trench foot", medically "immersion foot" (French "Pied de trancheé), was a greatly feared consequence of the trench fight in the First World War.

Background Single reports about "immersion feet" already existed in the 19th century from wars in Russia. The phenomenon is testified by Dominique Jean Larrey, army doctor of the "Great Army" in the wars of Napoleon and also from the Krim War from 1853 to 1856. Also in the Balkan Wars preceding the First World War the disease was known, often associated with low temperatures in the mentioned war zones by army surgeons. But only in the First World War the immersion foot became a mass phenomenon. Since the fall of 1914 the soldiers in the West dug themselves in from the English Channel to the Swiss border in order to protect themselves at least provisionally against the devastating effect of the artillery, the splints and the machine guns. Especially in Flanders/Belgium they soon hit upon ground water. In other sectors of the front, week-long rain has turned the trenches into a bog. And in this bog hundred thousands of soldiers on both sides stood knee-deep in muddy water. This soon had serious consequences.