THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



507 



lies took charge of one platoon which, 

 through no fault of its own, had become 

 infested. 



At that billet there happened to be 

 plenty of gasoline — a condition which 

 rarely exists nowadays. The hospital 

 man managed to commandeer a quantity. 

 Then the men stripped and their clothes 

 were literally soaked with gasoline. 



An unusual spectacle followed. The 

 hospital orderlies armed themselves with 

 swabs tied to the ends of sticks. They 

 dipped the swabs in open cans of gaso- 

 line. Then they swabbed the men. 



"Ouch !" was the first remark made by 

 each man as the gasoline filtered into the 

 raw places where he had been scratching 

 himself. He rarely paused with that 

 exclamation; but the hospital crew was 

 relentless. 



"Stand up," they said sternly. 

 "Whoa !" 



It developed that they had immediately 

 before been swabbing horses with gaso- 

 line for the same purpose and the words 

 came naturally to their lips. The poor 

 men being swabbed danced and swore, 

 but they had to submit, for an under- 

 officer supervised the process. 



Physicians tell me that it is not at all 

 certain that gasoline will kill the nits of 

 lice, but the hospital orderlies had no 

 doubt whatever as to the efficacy of their 

 process. They manifested an artistic 

 satisfaction in the swabbing, so that not 

 a single nesting place in which eggs 

 might be hidden was overlooked. 



Later I asked the men who had been 

 swabbed what the result had been. 



"Fine," they said, their faces glowing. 

 "It's a bully hunch. We're going to 

 swipe some gasoline and go over our- 

 selves now and then. It sure does kill 

 the 'cooties.' " 



HOW THE COOTIE STARTED 



No army in the European field has a 

 preeminence in cleanliness over any 

 other army. The most that can be said 

 is that some armies are worse than others. 



It is assumed by those who have in- 

 quired into the subject that the louse ob- 

 tained his foothold in the early days of 

 mobilization, when Apaches from the 

 slums and ruffians from the docks were 

 herded into barracks along with men who 

 had never known what it was to be any- 



thing but clean. So the louse spread and 

 propagated until now its diffusion is 

 general. 



If every man and every stitch of cloth 

 in every army were to be thoroughly 

 freed from the pest today, in a week each 

 man might be infested again. Enough 

 "cooties" would be left over in unsus- 

 pected places to make a fresh start. 



With all Germany's boasted ability to 

 organize, the louse has fairly ravaged 

 her armies. In the latter months of 1914 

 I visited a great prison camp near Berlin, 

 in which 9,000 military prisoners of war 

 were herded behind a high wire fence. 

 They had no hot water and no soap and 

 no bathing facilities. Those who wished 

 might wash themselves in an iron trough, 

 such as horses are watered at, which 

 stood in the bleak openness of the prison 

 parade ground. 



fighting the pest in German prison 

 camps 



Only those who have felt the moist 

 cold of Germany penetrate through wool 

 and fur to the very bone can realize the 

 sturdy courage of the men who went to 

 that horse trough day after day and did 

 their heroic best to keep themselves clean. 



Others sat in long rows on the pail- 

 lasses of dirty straw in the cavalry stable 

 tents which sheltered them, naked to the 

 waist, while they attempted to kill the 

 plagues that were driving them mad. 



That was in 1914. I often wonder 

 what has become of those men — if they 

 have had the courage to live on amid 

 such infernal torture. 



The German armies were infested, so 

 that one of the most popular charities 

 in the Empire was the "Delousing Fund," 

 which furnished various insecticidal com- 

 pounds to the men at the front. 



The Russian prisoners were infested 

 to the last man — infested to a degree that 

 no one unacquainted with army condi- 

 tions would believe if I were to tell the 

 unvarnished story — and through their 

 plague brought the spotted fever to Ger- 

 many in 191 5. The Russians themselves 

 were fairly immune, but it is said to have 

 cost the Central Empires many lives be- 

 fore it was conquered. 



Nowadays it is realized by the sci- 

 entists who have given their time and 



