Categories : Body and Mind. Right on the dot of 6 PM a red lamp over the doorway of the brothel was switched on. A roar went up from the troops, accompanied by a forward lunge towards the entranceโฆ Coppard The British popular memory of the First World War has traditionally made little room for sex. As in the case of the then seventeen-year-old George Coppard, quoted above, the war opened the eyes of many more. In , there were 60, hospital admissions for VD in France and Flanders alone ibid.
Although Trench Foot has come to symbolise the squalor of the conflict in the popular imagination, a man was more than five times as likely to end up in hospital suffering from Syphilis or Gonorrhoea.
While almost never fatal, venereal cases required on average a month of intensive hospital treatment. The greatest number of venereal patients in hospital at any one time in was estimated to be 11, ibid. In British military law, only the concealment of VD, not the contraction of a disease itself, was punishable as a crime Manual of Military Law , In the days before a National Health Service, any man admitted to hospital for reasons not connected with his military service was liable to have money stopped from his pay to help cover the cost of his treatment.
This system had numerous disadvantages, not least of which was the injustice of levying stoppages according to the length of time spent in hospital. Different diseases took longer to treat than others, hardly the fault of the patient. Stoppages were of questionable use as a deterrent, as men could to hope to avoid Army sanctions by seeking treatment secretly from sympathetic doctors, and from a clinical point of view they could be positively harmful if they encouraged men to take quack remedies or to conceal the disease.
The latter was especially problematic as the longer such diseases went untreated, the longer the patient eventually had to spend in hospital. Hospitals and treatment might themselves form part of the problem. Besides targeting pay, the authorities originally counselled self-control and Christian chastity, hoping that by providing men with recreational facilities they could be kept occupied with clean and wholesome activities.
