“Funds are urgently needed to help the work of providing and distributing a pure water supply in the following ways: 

“1.  By small portable sterilising plants for every company to produce and distribute from twenty to a hundred gallons of pure cold water per hour.

“2.  By sterilisers easy of adjustment for all field hospitals, convalescent homes, medical depots, and so forth.

“3.  By large sterilising plants, capable of producing from 150 gallons upward per hour, to provide a pure water supply for all the devastated towns through which the army must pass.

“4.  By the sterilisation of contaminated pools and all surface water, under the direction of leading scientific experts who have generously offered their services.

“5.  By pocket filters for all who may have to work out of reach of the sterilising plants, and so forth.

“6.  By two hundred field kitchens on the battlefield to serve out soup, coffee or other drinks to the men fighting in the trenches or on the march.”

Everywhere, at the front, I found the gravest apprehension as to water supply in case the confronting armies remained in approximately the same position.  Sir John French spoke of it, and the British are providing a system of sterilised water for their men.  Merely providing so many human beings with water is a tremendous problem.  Along part of the line, quite aside from typhoid contamination, the water is now impregnated with salt water from the sea.  If even wells contain dead bodies, how about the open water-courses?  Wounded men must have water.  It is their first and most insistent cry.

People will read this who have never known the thirst of the battlefield or the parched throat that follows loss of blood; people who, by the turning of a tap, may have all the water they want.  Perhaps among them there are some who will face this problem of water as America has faced Belgium’s problem of food.  For the Belgian Army has no money at all for sterilisers, for pocket filters; has not the means to inoculate the army against typhoid; has little of anything.  The revenues that would normally support the army are being collected—­in addition to a war indemnity—­by Germany.

Any hope that conditions would be improved by a general spring movement into uncontaminated territory has been dispelled.  The war has become a gigantic siege, varied only by sorties and assaults.  As long ago as November, 1914, the situation as to drinking water was intolerable.  I quote again from the diary taken from the body of a German officer after the battle of the Yser—­a diary published in full in an earlier chapter.

“The water is bad, quite green, indeed; but all the same we drink it—­we can get nothing else.  Man is brought down to the level of the brute beast.”

There is little or no typhoid among the British troops.  They, too, no doubt, have realised the value of conservation, and to inoculation have added careful supervision of wells and of watercourses.  But when I was at the front the Belgian Army of fifty thousand trained soldiers and two hundred thousand recruits was dependent on springs oozing from fields that were vast graveyards; on sluggish canals in which lay the bodies of men and horses; and on a few tank wagons that carried fresh water daily to the front.