Oh What a Lousy War....

So like a soldier to make light of a serious subject when there is nothing that can be done about the situation and lice is certainly one such subject. Most American doughboys in WWI were familiar with lice before joining Uncle Sam’s Army, but they soon became intimately involved and focused on them in the European trenches. Pediculus humanus is actually two subspecies, Pediculus humanus capitas (head lice) which infest only human heads by laying eggs on the hair shafts and drawing blood from the scalp and Pediculus humanus humanus, or Body lice.  Body lice are morphologically similar to head lice, but they have a different life cycle. Body lice reside and lay their eggs on the clothing and fomites like blankets of infected soldiers and only migrate to their body to feed. They most often came out at night when their host was quiet or sleeping.  

These lice only take 7 days to mature after hatching and quickly multiplied into a real problem where men were forced into extremely close, unsanitary quarters. The lice at maturity could be the size of a grain of rice and were a real concern for the medical corps as they carried several diseases such as Rickettsia prowazekii (epidemic typhus), Bartonella quintana (to this day called trench fever), and Borrelia recurrentis (louse-borne relapsing fever).

To prevent the spread of Trench Fever in particular, when possible, men were sent behind the lines for a bath and their uniform for delousing by steaming them in mobile laundries. Unfortunately, the treatments of then were less effective than today, and more toxic to the human than the louse. A Creosote and Napthalene mixture was used in WWI, and Napthalene is known today to be a neurotoxin.

In WWII we dusted our soldiers with DDT to delouse them. Again, as toxic to humans as to the lice.  If the WWI uniform was extremely infested, they were simply burned and the soldier received a new one. In reality it was often weeks, or worse months, before the men were afforded a bath. Most of our WWI U.S. soldiers lived in clothing swarming with lice until they disembarked in their home port. It is estimated over 90% of the soldiers in the trenches were suffering with lice.

 Almost all humans react allergically to their saliva as they feed on us…causing extreme, relentless itching and discomfort.  To mitigate head lice, many soldiers simply shaved their heads. When you look at WWI images, more Germans have their heads shaved than doughboys. The ointments and treatments used on the skin were also largely ineffective and often made the itching worse rather than better.

Boredom in the trenches could be assuaged by daily hunting “seam squirrels,” and snapping them between fingernails was also known as chatting. “Boche” “chats” or “grey backs” were other English slang names for cooties. Many an overzealous “hunter” burned the very threads holding their uniforms together by popping lice in the seams with a red-hot end of a burning twig, the flame of a candle, or an overheated bayonet one too many times. If the louse had recently fed, they would pop and spatter the hunter with his own blood.  

There is a third louse, the Pubic lice, also known as “crabs,” because they look very similar to the crustaceans we Marylanders love to eat. Though primarily found in the groin area, and usually transmitted by sex, they could also infest other areas of coarse hair such as armpit hair and even beards. Again, because crab lice only take 6 to 9 days to mature, if leave took a doughboy to a brothel, he could bring back more than memories to his dugout mates. 

To bring it home, this ditty was found in the 79^th Infantry Division yearbook we have in the Maryland Military History Museum collection:

Atrocities in Verse.

Cooties

(To the tune of “Smiles”) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yh9CC-6CmWs

There are cooties that crawl around the ankles.

There are cooties that crawl around the knee

There are cooties that keep the soldier wondering

Where they are that they can never see

There are cooties that cause some awful scratching

That make a doughboy as mad as he can be

But the cooties that I had in the trenches

Are the cooties that appeal to me.

Parody by Private 1^st Class Ralph A. Downey, Co I, 316^th Infantry, whose hometown is Lititz Pennsylvania, U.S.A., the home of the “Lititz Pretzel”

March 20, 1919

(Note: The Cootie was probably the best known and most frequently mentioned name in the columns of “The Lorrain Cross”)

By Barbara Taylor

Director, Maryland Museum of Military History