Work at an advance dressing station during a major battle was unrelenting. In July 1917 Major Martin Littlewood RAMC, who had already informed his diary that ‘I develop lice and a touch of scabies’, wrote that his dressing station, near Ypres, received a ‘constant stream of wounded and now and then some who have been out two days. Awful. Busy all night until morning.’
When he got out of the line in November he was so affected by the experience that he found he could no longer sleep in sheets, and when he raised the blinds to enjoy the sensation of a naked light, thought ‘of the men lying around the Menin Road’.
Source:
Holmes, Richard. "Steel and Fire." Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front, 1914-1918. London: HarperCollins, 2004. 475-76. Print.
Original Source Listed:
M. W. Littlewood Papers, Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum.
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