Stereotyping In The Trenches Analysis

When soldiers employed these professional techniques they still battled the trench environment to no avail. Examining the men’s responses to these methods conveys their unsuitability. Private R. Read of the London Regiment stated that his gumboots regularly flooded. This was because the mud was ‘so tenacious that even gum boots are no use.’ Certain trenches were so muddy that boots were completely sucked into the thick slush. Lieutenant James Butlin of the Dorsetshire Regiment remembered ‘when the Bedfords came to relieve us many of them literally stuck in the mud and had to be pulled out.’ It was a regular occurrence that soldiers dug men ‘out of the mud who have sunk in it up to their waists merely standing in a trench.’ Soldiers were falling out of their swamped gumboots, inevitably walking through the mud in only their socks or bare feet. While working as an orderly, Lance Corporal Ernest Sheard of the West Yorkshire Regiment recalled ‘we had a bad case down’: …show more content…
It must have been torture to him every time he put a foot down, he was obliged to cry as he sat on the dug out steps…his feet were absolutely raw…when he left, the MO said he would not be surprised if the man did not lose both feet.

Clearly, gumboots caused more problems than they solved. Even when they did not flood, the condensation from the mens’ feet kept their socks perpetually wet as the gumboots’ rubber exterior prevented their sweat from evaporating. This meant that men often contracted trench foot or frostbite faster than when they wore their service