CANT FORGET

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 117, 20 May 1931, Page 3

CANT FORGET

SOLDIERS STILL SUFFER

WAR WOUNDS

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

SYBNEY,-3rd- May.

There are thousands of ex-soldiers in Australia to-day who would gladly forget the war if the war would only forget them. They thought they had done with the war years ago, but some almost forgotten wound has again caused trouble and concern, with the result that the few big military hospitals that still remain open in Sydney and Melbourne are crowded to this day with victims of the Great War.

Thirteen and fourteen years after a wound is inflicted and apparently cured it breaks down, and its owner is sent back to the great human repair shops. There ho goes through the old sickening routine of dressings and operations, ether and castor oil, hot fomentations and temperature-taking, probing for "foreign bodies," and the endless dosings of medicines and pills. Of course, there are some men who have never known any other life since the war. They have been in these hospitals for tfine,! ten, and twelve years without a break, and they seem to bo as far off a cure as ever they were. They have wounds that never heal—stumps of arms and legs that can never carry an artificial limb without unbearable pain, or great holes in their sides or stomachs or chests through which rubber tubes are passed to drain off the poisons.

There is a man in the Bandwick Military Hospital, Sydney, who has carried such a tube in his chest for 14 years. Thero is another who has not been off his back for three and a-half years. Still another was struck off the pension list six years ago, and ho is being treated for the extraction of a bullet near the spine. The existence of the bullet was not even suspected until last week. A fourth has just had removed from his stomach a piece of shell which ho had been carrying since 1915. Others have returned again and again for treatment of a wound that behaves well one year and atrociously the next. Immediately they get themselves nicely settled in a job or on a farm or in some business, away goes the unruly leg or arm or head, and the job has to be dropped until repairs are carried out all over again. It may be months ■ before they earn their discharge, and in the meantime they may have lost hundreds of pounds.

Apparently no one foresaw the full implication of this problem of recurring disability when plans were first laid for the repatriation of the wounded. Or if they did it was never contemplated that the trouble would continue to recur so long after the war. This partly explains why war pensions arc increasing instead of decreasing, with the passing of the years. As the men grow older their resistance diminishes, and the old wounds more easily reassert themselves. This lowered resistance is sometimes contributed to by underfeeding duo to unemployment.