THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



497 



or the gates of courts such legends as 

 this are written : 



"Company I, one officer and 12 men." 



Inside that house or that court or that 

 barn an officer and 12 men of Company 

 I are free to find such accommodations 

 as they may. 



Sometimes the officer sleeps between 

 sheets and sometimes the men roll in 

 their blankets on clean, sweet-smelling 

 hay. Sometimes the lodgings are more 

 primitive. Not long ago I visited a major 

 whose bed was only divided from the 

 bed of the household pig by a board par- 

 tition, ventilated by huge cracks. An- 

 other officer shared a room with a sick 

 cow. In another house the chickens and 

 the men roosted together. No one com- 

 plained; for this is war. 



It was in burlesque of these chalked 

 billeting orders that on the walls of the 

 bedroom of the headquarters company 

 had been written the names of the bed 

 owners. 



THE TYPE OF AMERICAN OFFICER IN 

 FRANCE 



I know them well. They average 24 

 years old, for I took a census of their 

 ages. One owns rich mines in Mexico. 

 One says he will be elected sheriff in his 

 county in central Tennessee when the 

 war is over. Another was an officer in 

 the Philippine constabulary and resigned 

 his commission to get into the greater 

 game. One is a six-foot-four youngster 

 from a clean home in Nebraska. He 

 does not speak of his home, but one can 

 always tell. Another was a Kansas City 

 newspaper man, and another had been in 

 business in Milwaukee when we declared 

 war. 



That is the sort of men they are — clean, 

 lively, energetic Americans. I wanted 

 to know why they were laughing, so I 

 fumbled my way to a dark door and 

 through a black hall and lifted a blanket 

 curtain and stepped in. 



"Thus," some one was saying in a 

 pompous, professorial way, "we observe, 

 gentlemen of the class in entomology, 

 that when confronted by danger even the 

 humblest — I might say the most despica- 

 ble — insect manifests a marvelous intelli- 

 gence." 



The members of the class were stand- 



ing on each other's blankets. A youth 

 who had left college to enter the army 

 was giving an imitation of the instructor 

 he had evaded by going to war. Two 

 men were seated on the floor. "Signals" 

 was picking "cooties" from the seams of 

 his clothes and depositing them on a 

 space that had been cleared. "Stokes" 

 was embalming them in drops of grease 

 from a guttering candle. 



A dozen white blotches on the worn 

 red bricks told of the success of the pur- 

 suit. 



HEROES WITHOUT GLORY 



Perhaps the reader thinks there is 

 something repulsive and disgusting in 

 this tale of clean-minded young Amer- 

 icans picking lice out of their clothing 

 and killing them by drops from a burn- 

 ing candle. Perhaps there is. Perhaps 

 my mentality has been warped by almost 

 four years of war. To my mind the men 

 who can do this and still laugh — bearing 

 in mind their rearing and the clean years 

 of their youth — are almost as nearly he- 

 roes as those who "hop over" when the 

 whistle sounds the zero hour. 



The ones are called upon to keep up 

 their courage under a day-long and night- 

 long degradation — a constant, crawling, 

 loathsome irritation — while the others 

 spend themselves freely in one fine burst. 

 I cannot distinguish between brave men. 



I call them "cooties" as the soldiers 

 do, and for precisely the same reason that 

 they nickname these minor, or are they 

 major? horrors of war. Only the sur- 

 geons and the surgical orderlies and the 

 men who run the steam cleaning ma- 

 chines come out bluntly with the word 

 "louse." They are practical men. Their 

 business is to deal with human ills and 

 weaknesses, and they are habitually 

 pressed for time. Their talk goes straight 

 to.the point, like a probe. The poor devils 

 who are lousy always shy at the word. 



"COOTIES," "TOTOS " "CODDLERS " "PANTS 

 RABBITS," OR "SEAM SQUIRRELS" 



The American soldiers speak of the 

 pest as "cooties." The French fighter 

 talks of "totos" and the British tell of 

 "coddlers." They know it is not their 

 fault that they are infested, but the effect 

 of years of civilian training persists. 



