A soldier's life21 December 1915It was cold this morning; frost coated the mud and dirt surrounding my “Dug Out.” Mud has seeped through my uniform, the humidity is making me feverish, I've been sleeping in everything I bought recently and I'm still shivering and today my coat is so wet I can't use it. Oh well, a slight fever must be better than the dreaded trench foot, poor Harry was carried off on a stretcher yesterday. He could no longer continue his work here. None of us can take our boots off, some feet swell and swell causing immeasurable pain. Then it goes gangrene and unfortunately for Harry it is irreversible, so his foot will probably have to be amputated. He had only been stationed here for ten days; It's a shame that all the fun is lost. The hardest part of this job is getting up morning after morning half an hour before sunrise, so we're ready for dawn raids. Then, at 8, we have the usual "daily hate" period, where verbal abuse and gunshots are exchanged. Things always calm down after this. Breakfast rations usually consist of Bully beef tea, hard biscuits and bread which almost always goes stale by the time we get it. The first duty of the day was sentry duty, which meant I spent the entire morning cleaning the smelly latrines and repairing the trench wall. which was damaged due to heavy rains. I spend most of my time here doing boring routine tasks, the daily grind is driving me crazy. The weather here for a few days has been wet and cold and the mud reaches knee-deep in some places, hundreds of rats thrive on food scraps and rubbish thrown into trenches. Some of them have grown to the size of cats feeding on the plentiful supply of rotting corpses. And at night I hear them swimming in the stagnant water