November 2, 1998. Copyright, 1998, Graphic News. All rights reserved

THE PAINFUL LEGACY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
By Margot Staunton

LONDON, November 2, Graphic News:  A SOLDIER who spent five years living in a hot bath after being skinned alive is a poignant reminder of the human cost of World War One.
Trooper Samuel Rolfe suffered from an illness caused by mustard gas which removed all the skin from his body. Rolfe found his only relief from pain by taking a permanent bath at Randwick Military Hospital in Sydney, where he spent his last five years. He slept in the bath on a water bed, which was automatically raised by winding gear when the water level rose too high.
Doctors devised the treatment after eminent specialists in Australia and Britain failed to make his skin grow again. They discovered he could not even bear to rest in pyjamas which were thickly coated with vaseline. The extraordinary tale was published in the Sunday Express on January 25, 1925, the day Rolfe died, aged 35.
The article, displayed in LondonÕs Imperial War Museum, says Rolfe was bright and cheerful to the end, giving the impression he thought his plight was quite normal.
Rolfe was one of 9,296,691 men from the British Empire who served in the Army, Navy and Air Force during World War One Š 1,104,890 of whom died. Altogether the first World War accounted for 10 million deaths and a further 11 million injured or wounded.
The museumÕs exhibition marking the war focuses on the human toll of battle and includes touching last letters to loved ones from soldiers, some containing locks of hair.
Included are three postcards to mum from Stephen Brown Š who enlisted in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps when under the legal age. Despite appealing to his mother to try and secure his release, he was killed at the second battle of Ypres in France on May 10, 1915, ten days after he sent his last postcard.
The exhibition organiser, Angela Godwin, says the 80th anniversary of Armistice Day on November 11 will be special because only around 100 veterans of the war remain.
The museum will commemorate the day with two minuteÕs silence at 11.00am and the playing of the Last Post by a bugler from the Band of the Light Division.
Andrew McGee, a founding member of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, will play the Western Front violin, an instrument made out of wood from trees growing on battlefields in France and Flanders.
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Source: Imperial War Museum, London