puttees

Puttees derive from the Hindi patti, meaning 'bandage,' 'strip,' or 'band,' itself from the Sanskrit patta, 'strip of cloth.' The garment is a long strip of cloth wound in a spiral from ankle to knee, providing leg support, warmth, and protection from thorns and insects -- functions that made it practical across the mountain terrain of the Hindu Kush and the Himalayan foothills. British officers in India encountered puttees on hill-tribe soldiers and frontier scouts who had worn them for generations, and adopted them into military dress during the latter half of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, puttees had been incorporated into the field dress of Indian Army regiments and were spreading to British units serving in similar terrain.

The Boer War of 1899–1902 accelerated puttees' adoption across the British military. The khaki uniforms adopted for South Africa were designed for practical efficiency, and puttees -- which could be wound to any leg's shape, provided warmth in cold nights and protection in brush, and were easier to launder and dry than leather boots -- proved their value. When the British Army standardized field dress before the First World War, puttees became part of the official uniform. Every British Tommy who went to France in 1914 wound his puttees in the morning as part of dressing routine. The skill of winding them correctly -- neither too tight nor too loose, with a uniform spiral ending in a neat tuck at the knee -- was a basic military competence.

The puttee's role in the Great War is one of the minor ironies of military history. A garment from the highlands of South Asia, adopted by an empire that had conquered those highlands, traveled to the industrialized slaughter of the Western Front where the ground conditions -- mud, water, cold -- made the leg-wrap's protective function genuinely important. Wet puttees could cause trench foot if they constricted circulation; properly wound ones protected against it. The medical literature of the First World War contains careful instructions for puttee winding as a hygiene measure. Soldiers in other armies -- French, Italian, American -- adopted similar leg-wraps by different names, all solving the same set of problems.

Puttees fell out of military use after the Second World War as boots with higher uppers made them unnecessary. They persist today in ceremonial contexts -- some Commonwealth military ceremonial dress still includes puttees -- and in certain outdoor sports and historical reenactment. Their broader cultural legacy is the word itself, which entered English so thoroughly that few who use it know its Sanskrit pedigree. The khaki puttee, wound by a British soldier preparing to go over the top, was the improbable descendant of a Himalayan hill-trader's practical bandage -- the empire always wore, literally, the evidence of what it had taken.