Manure.

This is coolbert:

Yet one more aspect of combat on the Western Front during the Great War [WW1] not appreciated. Thanks once more to the Pritzker Military Museum and Library.

Trench warfare, that stalemated "senseless carve up" without amelioration, the wounds as suffered by the average fighting man very susceptible to infection, thanks to MANURE.

"Fighting on farmland fertilized by manure meant that wounds quickly became infected; gangrene was rife"

That battlefield area of northern France and Flanders for at least a period of one thousand years and perhaps even longer heavily fertilized with farm animal manure.

As a result, never anticipated and unexpected those soldiers wounded having their injury infected and diseased much more quickly, far faster than medical science of the period could respond.

AND WITHOUT SULFA DRUGS OR MODERN ANTIBIOTICS TO TREAT INFECTIONS THE LOSS OF LIFE AND LIMB VERY HIGH. AMPUTATION IN MOST CIRCUMSTANCES THE ONLY RECOURSE TO SAVE A LIFE FROM UNSTOPPABLE AND LETHAL INFECTION..

That enormous maze of trench works [digging] and also the multitude of repeated artillery detonations [barrages] so common during WW1 turning over and bringing to the surface animal stockyard waste and bacteria obviously essential to agricultural and as piled deep from decades or even centuries earlier only exacerbating a difficult and dangerous situation!!

Welcome to the nightmare.

coolbert.