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    The men missed their wives and their fiancées, too. The Government and the army chiefs were well aware of the physical longings and the dangers of frustrated abstinence in an army made up largely of thousands of lusty young men, confused and ashamed of their feelings. Thousands of young British men had grown up in families where bodily functions and the natural instincts and affections of marriage went largely unmentioned. Even the coy enquiry concerning the proper functioning of the digestive system, ‘Are you consti?’, from a mother to her child was too intimate to express in full.
    Not many men however remained ignorant of the ever-widening spread of venereal disease. Just behind the battle lines only a mile or two from the front, girls waited to ‘comfort’ men, irrespective of whether they were German, British or French, waiting for them in abandoned chateaux, village houses, hay barns, caravans, farm buildings and the upper floors of inns. Different coloured lanterns indicated the rank of clientele allowed entry. Blue denoted a place reserved for officers, the light sometimes swinging from a pole that stood next to a sign declaring ‘No Admittance for Dogs and Soldiers’. Common soldiers were directed towards the red light establishments. Sometimes the queues outside these places could number a hundred men or more, with three worn-out French women waiting inside.
    The price per slot varied from two and a half to ten francs or two to eight shillings, although a bartering system involving breadand sausages was also prevalent. One innocent young officer, hearing his turn called, made his way to room number six where in the bitter-sweet, dirt-smelling near darkness he could see the outline of a female figure who, turning towards him, hiked up her black nightdress to her waist and fell backwards on the edge of the bed. He realised that the highly anticipated delights of seduction were already over. She was ready.
    These women estimated that operating a strict schedule of ten minutes per man, they could service an entire battalion every seven days, a production rate that most were usually able to sustain for only three weeks before retiring exhausted, and invariably unwell, but proud of their staying power. This experience had been, for many of the prospectively syphilitic young men, their introduction to the ‘joy’ of physical love. Even the virginal Prince of Wales went in 1916 with some fellow officers to watch naked girls performing erotic poses in a brothel in Calais, concluding from his own ‘first insight into such things’ that it was a ‘perfectly filthy and revolting sight’.
    Only the Austrian army paid much attention to either contraception or hygiene, the prostitute requiring her ‘guest’ to use a ‘preventative instrument’; if he refused, the girl was to ‘lubricate his organ with borated Vaseline’, a paste made of boric acid, and after the experience was concluded, he was required to visit the ‘disinfectant room’. No such rules had applied to British troops and the threat of venereal disease sometimes led soldiers to seek sexual relief with each other.
The Field Almanac
issued to Lieutenant Skelton cautioned men not to ‘ease themselves promiscuously’, although the detailed instructions on the necessity for cleanliness of the body at all times were impossible to implement in the filthy conditions of the camps. George V, hearing of the extent of homosexual activity in the army some two decades after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, had been heard to mutter: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves. ‘There was also a belief that homosexuality might be infectious and Scotland Yard kept a register of known homosexuals. Recovery from prosecution was at best rare and in reality unknown. Two hundred and seventy soldiers and twenty officers were court-martialled for ‘acts of gross indecency with anothermale person according to the Guidance notes in the Manual of Military