#72136 Private Sidney Vinall
134TH FIELD AMBULANCE, ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
WITH WINTER CONSUMING THE BATTLEFIELD, the question now became when it would be prudent to abandon the offensive and call a halt to the Battle of the Somme. On the one hand, it was almost impossible to effect any meaningful attack through the mud and slime, but on the other, Gough’s army was approaching a decisive attack. Beaumont Hamel, Redan Ridge, a stretch of raised ground blown sky high by mines and shells, and Serre had not been the subject of a large-scale offensive since 1st July. For now, at least, the battle would go on.
As the weather deteriorated further, sickness on the Somme increased. It was no wonder that the men grew ill. The battlefield was, quite simply, disgusting. Some areas were actually covered in bodies and the stink was overwhelming: decay mixed with substances such as chloride of lime thrown around to stave off disease, and worsened by bad sanitation and overflowing latrines. Men had not bathed in weeks and the smell of unwashed bodies mingled with that of cordite, gas, food and cigarettes. It was not a healthy environment, nor was it one that the men had to themselves. They shared their trenches with millions of rats, bloated on the endless supply of food they found on the battlefield. It didn’t matter how many vermin the troops shot. One single rat could give birth to hundreds of offspring a year, all of whom then scampered about the battlefield spreading germs and contaminating supplies. Then there were lice breeding in the seams of the men’s clothing. Not even washing them helped because the eggs remained and as soon as the troops’ body heat warmed garments up they hatched and the cycle began again.
There were obvious medical connotations of constantly being in proximity to piles of corpses, walking on them and sleeping with them. One Canadian soldier described them as, ‘inky black with a greenish tinge … [they] lay in rows on the parapet at the level of one’s heads, stuck into walls, buried in the floor, and felt like a cushion to walk on’. Body parts stuck out the walls of trenches, the floors were carpeted with them in some places, ‘several deep or a face with grinning teeth looked up at you from the soft mud’. There was also the odd limb or severed head with which to contend. The men simply had to learn to live with them and tried not to tread on them if at all possible.
The whole environment caused a multitude of ailments. Trench Fever was common, with more than half a million men affected during the war, causing high fevers and pain. Recovery could take months and some troops were struck down repeatedly. It was unknown for most of the war that lice caused this disease, which some 6,000 men still claimed as the source of their disability in the aftermath of the conflict. Nits were common, and many men simply shaved their heads to avoid them. Trench foot was a constant concern, a fungal infection caused by sitting in wet muddy trenches that at its worst could turn gangrenous and require amputation. Studies have even shown that many men might have also suffered from intestinal parasites due to a combination of dirty conditions and poor sanitation, or caused by living with and even eating rats.
One man who was to suffer the consequences of the battlefield’s dire environment was Sidney Vinall, a 25-year-old compositor from Merrow, near Guildford. Enlisting in October 1915, Sidney embarked five months later and was serving with a field ambulance in the Thiepval sector. The conditions in which he was suffering in November were clearly unimaginable, when one considered the nonsense being sent out to supposedly help the medical ranks do their work. On the subject of trench foot, one officer on the Somme received a ridiculous letter from a deputy director of medical services lecturing him on hygiene, when in reality the men were sitting in waist-high mud and had been living in inclement weather conditions for a month or more. It prompted ‘veritable apoplexy’ on the part of the reader and ended with an order to convey the inane drivel to the commanding officers of units that they deal with. The medical officer did just that, word for word: ‘We needed something to laugh at just then.’
Near Thiepval, Sidney Vinall’s outfit was operating out of an advanced dressing station called Cabstand. In November 1916, as well as all the illnesses and diseases a man could contract in the trenches, men on the Somme were susceptible to all the consequences of living in continual wet and cold. For days, Sidney had been part of stretcher-bearing teams hunting the battlefield for wounded and evacuating them back for further treatment. Some of the men the likes of Sidney were bringing in on a daily basis were in an awful state. One group of bearers found a young German who smelled ‘like a badger’ with somewhat superficial wounds, who had nonetheless been stuck in no-man’s-land for days ‘forced to eat biscuits and drunk his own urine’.
French soldiers relax in close proximity to bodies on the battlefield. Men simply learned to live with them. (Authors’ collection)
Royal Army Medical Corps men drag stretchers on sleds through the mud as the weather deteriorates on the battlefield. (Authors’ collection)
By 4th November Sidney was feeling distinctly unwell. Later that day he arrived at a casualty clearing station to the west of Thiepval with a temperature of 102 degrees. He grew progressively worse. By the 6th he was running a fever of 104, which the medical staff could not bring under control. His heart began to fail on 8th November and the following day, of all the things that could kill a man on the Somme, the 25 year old died of pneumonia. Sidney Vinall was laid to rest at Puchevillers British Cemetery, plot V.E.46.