A Time-Travel Saturday in 1915

It has been a nice, sunny, market-going day, although the warmth and a hint of humidity have spread profuse eau de garbage into the air.

Landing in the year 1915 of the historical experiments on Saturdays, I started by tidying the kitchen, and then gradually the rest of the family woke up; we ate croissants and bread rolls, drank coffee, and had a long conversation about matters political and other, as usual.

Then I finished dusting shoes that stand in our hallway, but aren't used very often.

I went to the Winterfeldtplatz market again. Peaches, cherries, apricots, figs, and other high summer fruits were piling on the tables, alongside the artichokes and potatoes etc.. I bought red beets, potatoes, a fennel bulb, kohlrabi, English cucumbers, lemons, and eggs, before returning home fairly soon.

Because I lacked corned beef for the planned lunch or dinner of corned beef hash, and didn't want to eat anything heavy anyway, I was happy that T. had taken the initiative and ordered food for us. So we ate dumplings with pork, chicken, ginger, scallions, carrots, peas, and prawns. Then we had Belgian waffles with Spekulatius cream, cherries, and other fillings. I did mental gymnastics, arguing inwardly that dumplings are also British. Even if they're not mentioned in (m)any of the Edwardian cookbooks I've been skimming through.

Then T. and the others watched videos about Japanese cheesecake, the British government system, and the pros and cons of playing in a classical music orchestra on YouTube, in the living room. I listened in, pretending it was the radio, while I re-knitted the sock that I've already attempted to knit twice and had to unravel twice.

After 5 p.m. I prepared lemon curd, scones, and a rooibos-and-papaya tea for teatime. Sadly, T. had already departed and could not partake. Blueberries and strawberries were left over from Mama's breakfast purchases, so we ate those too.

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Then I began reading an old Merck's Manual: the articles about tetanus, trench fever, and trench foot, which all felt relevant to WWI. Reading about gruesome medical conditions for reasons of curiosity felt flippant, however, and so I stopped.

After reading the detailed and informative Diary of a nursing sister on the western front, 1914-1915 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1915) in the Internet Archive, I have the impression that a lot of lives were wasted not just due to bullets and shells.

When trains arrived from the front for her French hospital, the author writes:

One [soldier] told me he was wounded on Tuesday—was one day in a hospital, and then travelling till to-day, Saturday. No wonder their wounds are full of straw and grass. (Haven’t heard of any more tetanus.) Most haven’t had their clothes off, or washed, for three weeks, except face and hands.

After fighting around Rheims, it was an even more extreme situation:

The train I was put to had 510 cases. [… T]he men were lying on straw; had been in trains for several days; most had only been dressed once, and many were gangrenous.

It's sad to think — although I might be ignorant and unfair by saying so; the nurse certainly doesn't say it — that maybe a salt solution or alcohol might, if applied right after the injury, have prevented infection. Later, I think that liquid oxygen was also used. Or that the trains could have been cleaner. Maybe far fewer people would have died.

I was wondering how a government official could look a bereaved person in the eye, knowing that their relative or friend died because they didn't receive proper care that the government should have organized.

In the meantime it looks, based on an old British Pathé film, as if English stretcher-bearers on the battlefield were taught to wrap a bandage around the wound as it was, tie together the limbs, and lift them onto a stretcher for transportation — that was all.

The Diary reveals that the nurse had tended English soldiers during the Boer War in the late 1890s/early 1900s. She writes that shelling in the Western Front during WWI did far worse damage to the human body than the Mauser bullets in South Africa.

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At nighttime, in 1915, Britons used 'black-out curtains' to block the light from their windows so that their homes could not be targeted from the air. Per my notes from the Further Back in Time for Dinner television series: 'Zeppelin air raids killed 2,000 people in the southern UK.' I'd feel disrespectful if I played at being potentially air-bombed, however, and I wouldn't have educated anyone by doing so (unlike the TV series). So I left my curtains and windows as they are.

The Lusitania also sank that year and nurse Edith Cavell was executed for helping soldiers escape the German occupiers in Belgium, according to a British Pathé retrospective. It led, as a side effect, to anti-German vandalism in England: windows of German-owned businesses were smashed.

Walking out from the market I reflected that in a better parallel to the war years, I would need to volunteer for social service in my community. It seems like a good thought in general, but there's no way I'd do that for the mere sake of experimentation. So in the end, today has been enjoyably selfish and relaxing. Chatting with the family and looking at the flowers outdoors makes me unsurprisingly, while knitting socks makes me surprisingly, happy.