THE GREAT WAR IN THE ZONE OF THE ARMY. 335 



"If you have clean latrines and burn your feces you need not 

 fear flies." 



In concluding this long paper we are compelled to the reflection 

 that, after all, the great point is that it was not only mechanical 

 sanitary appliances that we were after but the sensitizing of our 

 soldier's conscience by appealing to his sense of decency. The im- 

 mediate commander of troops must inculcate in his men, in addition 

 to a strict regard for military discipline, a decent regard for the 

 ornate, and as a result thereof, for the clean and neat. It should 

 be deliberately taught men that it is not enough to have merely the 

 " rough stufif," the bare necessities ; that civilized men are expected 

 to improve their natural condition ; that they should keep them- 

 selves and their surroundings clean if they expect to keep well ; that 

 they should keep their initiative, their ambition, their imagination 

 active ; that to make their barracks, their reading rooms, their camps 

 clean and attractive to the eye is to preserve those illusions of life 

 which are necessary to make men contented and happy. 



Nothing illustrates this spirit better than the following incident : 

 When the First Division was in a training area under the tutelage 

 of the famous and gallant 47th Division of Chasseurs, the disposal 

 of manure piles in the center of these tiny hamlets was a sore trial 

 to us American officers. The French had some towns for billeting 

 and we had others. One day in traveling over the French area with 

 Colonel Cultin, their division surgeon, I noticed that none of his 

 towns possessed the protruding manure pile beside the neat little 

 house in the main street. On inquiring how it was that no amount 

 of coaxing or threatening by French civil authorities had prevented 

 their reappearance in our towns, he replied : " We removed the piles 

 to the site the owner selected himself ovit of town, and planted 

 flowers where they used to be — and no good French peasant will 

 smother growing flowers with manure piles." 



Nor will an American soldier spit on a clean floor, nor befoul a 

 neat home, which he has been led to beautify by his own efforts. 



It may seem trite to mention that neither laws in a civil com- 

 munity nor regulations in the Army are alone potent to sanitate 

 one or the other. There is a difference between securing the pre- 

 cision of a machine in a military organization and considering a 



