Crooked: Man-Made Disease Explained: The incredible story of metal, microbes, and medicine - hidden within our faces. by Forrest Maready

Author:Forrest Maready [Maready, Forrest]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Feels Like Fire
Published: 2018-01-30T22:00:00+00:00

The effects of little to no sleep, constant physical exertion with poor nutrition would take its toll on the healthiest men our country could offer. But cannon fire was not a new military tactic in 1915 and had been used in battle for over 700 years. Something was different about this war and the men who fought it. An ominous difference which I believe would foretell the appearance of another unexplainable neurological illness — autism — many years later.

The first World War differed from most conflicts before and after not in technology or death toll, but in tactics. Earlier wars were fought in open fields of battle, where keeping one’s distance might be considered the main defensive device. Later wars would rely on camouflage and subterfuge to provide cover.

World War I was fought chiefly from within trenches, long muddy ditches that snaked their way across Europe, often less than one hundred yards from their adversaries. Death was everywhere. Besides the constant threat of snipers, engineers might stealthily dig and place a collection of mines under a trench, blowing up the entire company. Airplanes flew overhead, logging their location for the artillery fire that would soon follow. Lice and rats shared the trenches with the soldiers and there was little they could do to keep them out. The stench of feces, urine and decaying bodies that littered the ground was pervasive. A single line from a soldier’s diary summed it better than anyone could, “He who had a corpse to stand on was lucky.”151

Rain worked against the soldiers as it turned the ground not into mud, but a thick sludge that could freeze at night and entrap the men for hours as they struggled to free themselves from the suction without alerting enemy snipers, ready to fire on anything showing signs of movement.

And there was nothing they could do about any of it. One soldier was a tiny cog in a great machine, and the only offense they could offer would be from charging over the top of their trench into a barrage of machine gun fire that would likely rip them to pieces. Running the other way, even in cowardly retreat, would likely suffer them the same fate. Yet those maddening options of escape, through victory or death, were denied to them. Weeks could pass without a significant change in strategy. They were to stay where they were and wait for further instructions — instructions that might come a day later, or a month later, once half of their fellow soldiers had already died from sniper fire, dysentery, or suicide.

Research into the factors that cause stress have grouped them into three common categories: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.152 Besides the constant threat of death itself, trench warfare in this era would seem to be capable of creating all of these perfectly. Additionally, the weeks and months-long engagement of their primal fight or flight response would have created chronic immune activation in portions of their brain.

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