This statement is particularly applicable to Pontanezen, which was pitched on high but poorly drained ground. Ordinarily the Army would not have occupied such a location without first making permanent improvements. The continual rains, the lack of strong drainage, and the heavy traffic of men, animals, and trucks combined to make the Pontanezen site in 1919 a morass of quaking mud. Only the strongest of emergencies justified its use. Because of the daily cost of maintaining the A. E. F. and because the expeditionary soldiers themselves wished to return home as soon as possible, regardless of the conditions of their travel, it was decided to make use of these port camps even while they were being constructed, instead of holding up the whole movement until the camp arrangements could be made perfect.
Tales of suffering among our soldiers at Pontanezen came to the United States and were even aired on the floors of Congress, but the suffering alleged was more apparent than real. Those who went through the experience of residence in Pontanezen, even at its worst, were not injured in health. Despite appearances, the camp’s sanitary arrangements were of high merit. The medical records of Camp Pontanezen show that its sickness and death rates, leaving the domestic epidemic of influenza altogether out of the comparison, were as low as those of the best camps in the United States.
In the spring of 1919 most of the construction work at the embarkation camps was complete, and they became more comfortable. The camps consisted of miles of one-story, tar-papered, rough-board buildings connected with wooden sidewalks of duck-boards. Pontanezen was a complete American city set down amid the quaint roads of old Brittany. It had newspapers, banks, theatres, stores, public libraries, restaurants, hospitals, churches, telephones, and electric lights, and even a narrow-gauge railway for freighting about its supplies. The entire American military population in the camps at Brest quite outnumbered the French inhabitants of the region. The water system installed by the Engineers to serve all the American establishments at the port was sufficient for the city of 150,000 people. There was a special camp for casual officers. A section of this camp was set aside for the French, English, Belgian, and Italian wives that American soldiers had married abroad. There was a hospital camp, a camp for the white troops on permanent duty at the port, and another for colored troops so assigned. There were numerous small camps for labor battalions, and a special camp for engineer and motor transport organizations. Not far away was a large German prison camp.
In one important respect embarkation in France differed from what it had been in the United States. It was extremely necessary to rid the home-coming troops of body vermin before placing them on the ships. The delousing process at our French ports of embarkation was the most thorough experienced by the doughboy during his foreign service, and this process chiefly distinguished embarkation abroad from that which the soldier had known at Hoboken and Newport News.
Our forebears shared none of the modern aversion to discussion of the louse. One of the great monarchs of France set the stamp of his royal approval upon scratching publicly when one itched, and Robert Burns once addressed a poem to a louse. The louse, however, cannot survive American habits of personal cleanliness; and, justly enough, the insect has become associated with filth and has dropped out of polite conversation. The war revived the fame of this parasite. An inspection at one time revealed the fact that 90 per cent of the American troops at the front were infested. These men naturally wrote home about it, and then the louse, euphemized as “cootie,” became a national figure.
There was a serious aspect to the situation, however, that the military authorities could not overlook. Besides being a source of discomfort, the louse is the sole carrier of one of the most dread diseases that afflict mankind—typhus fever. In bygone times typhus was known variously as army fever, camp fever, or jail fever. It was particularly prevalent in this country at the time of the Revolution, and it existed to some extent here during the Civil War—an indication of what must have been the condition of individual American soldiers in those days. Typhus exists to-day practically as an endemic on the central plateau of Mexico, the range of the disease touching the border of the United States. The disease cannot invade this country, however, because of the lack of carriers. But if the A. E. F. had returned to the United States with its 2,000,000 men lice-infested, the demobilized soldiers might have distributed typhus carriers from one end of the country to the other and exposed the nation to a terrible menace.
The sanitary regulations of the A. E. F. kept typhus away from the troops by controlling the lice. The Quartermaster Corps operated a number of mobile delousing plants just behind the front lines and in the billeting areas to the rear. It is interesting to note that these plants had to be camouflaged because the airmen of the enemy sometimes mistook them for batteries of artillery and directed gunfire upon them. As these plants increased in number and efficiency they reduced the lousiness of the combat troops to a scant 3 per cent.
As long as our troops remained in France largely billeted on the French population, it was unlikely that the field sanitary measures could extinguish the louse altogether; but the command of the expedition determined that at the ports of embarkation the American doughboy should bid good-bye to P. vestimenti forever. The importance of completely delousing the troops was emphasized in the same G. H. Q. memorandum that had set up the embarkation system.
In pursuance of this policy every embarkation camp in France was established in two isolated sections. One section was known as the “dirty” camp and the other as the “clean” camp. Upon arrival from the front the troops first took quarters in the “dirty” camp. Between the two sections lay the buildings in which the camp administration conducted all the various processes of preparing soldiers for embarkation for the United States. One of the most important of these activities was bathing and delousing the troops. As far as scientific measures could prevent it, not a louse was permitted to cross from the “dirty” camp to the “clean” camp. The measures were highly effective. Only a few men were found to be infested upon arrival in America. For these there were final delousing facilities at all our debarkation camps. When the overseas veterans took trains for home at the Atlantic ports they were completely verminless. The medical officers at the demobilization centers in this country failed to discover a single exception.
The embarkation plant at Bordeaux was known to returning soldiers as “The Mill.” Its processes were typical of those at all the embarkation camps in France. The Bordeaux mill ground swiftly, yet ground exceeding fine. To it came the raw material—dirty, ragged, weary humanity. It reached out for this material, whirled it into its machinery, and a little while later delivered from the other end its finished product—clean, well-clothed, deloused, and comfortable American soldiers, their service records compiled up to the minute, American money in their pockets, and a mighty self-respect swelling their chests.