The type of portable shower used in many cases was generally known as the "eight-headshower" or field douche. It consisted of a simply designed water tank with fire box, in which might be burned coal or wood, a pipe line with eight sprays, and flooring under the sprays. The thing was easily adjusted. In a building with water supply it was a simple matter indeed to connect the tank with the water supply; while in the open field, where there might be neither water pressure nor water connection, the precious fluid could be poured into the tank with buckets. The apparatus was durable and reasonably "fool-proof."
During the Château-Thierry drive nine of these portable showers were set up by our Red Cross, and in one week, seven thousand men were brought back from the firing line, bathed, given clean clothes, and sent back refreshed mentally and morally as well as physically. Sixty men an hour could easily be bathed in one of these plants, and two gallons of water were allowed to each man.
The delouser, as the army quickly came to know the sterilizing plant, almost always accompanied the portable shower upon its travels. It, too, was a simple contraption; a great cylinder, into which the dirty clothing was tightly crammed until it could hold not one ounce more, and live steam poured in, under a pressure of from sixty to one hundred and fifteen pounds to the square inch. This was sufficient to kill all the vermin; and, in some cases, the bacteria as well, although this last was not guaranteed. The delouser, with a capacity of fifty suits a day, could almost keep pace with one of the shower baths, and both could be set up or taken down in ten minutes.
A shower bath mounted on a Ford was one of the best friends of the Eighty-first Division as it played its big part in the defeat of the Hun. It made its first appearance in September, when the Division was stationed in the Vosges, with headquarters at St. Dié. After a few hard days in the trenches the men would return to their headquarters, well to the rear of the lines, and beg for some sort of bathing facilities—and these, apparently, were not to be found.
Captain Richard A. Bullock was our Red Cross man with the Eighty-first. It bothered him that the men of his Division could not have so simple a comfort when they asked for it and needed it so much. He determined to try and solve the problem, and so found his way down to the big American Red Cross warehouse and there acquired one of the portable field equipments such as I have just described. It was a comparatively easy trick to mount the device on a Ford, after which Bullock paraded the entire outfit up and down the lines of the Eighty-first and as close to the front-line trenches as fires were ever permitted. In a mighty short time he could get the bath in order and showering merrily, and when all the men who wanted to bathe had been accommodated the contraption would move on.
For the camps where larger numbers of men must be bathed, the Red Cross, through its Mechanical Equipment Service of its Army and Navy Department, provided even larger facilities, although still of standardized size and pattern. This was known as the pavilion bath and disinfecting plant and could easily take care of 150 an hour. Where the sterilization of their clothing was not necessary this number was very greatly increased. In fact at one time a record was made in one of the large field camps of bathing 608 men in two hours through a single one of these plants. In another, which was in operation at the Third Aviation Center, 3,626 men bathed in one week in a total of twenty-eight operating hours and some 4,200 men in the second week. It was estimated that the plants could, if necessary, be operated a full twenty-four hours a day; but even on the part-time basis it was an economical comfort. It required the services of a sergeant and three privates—whose time cost nothing whatsoever—to operate it, and, based on fuel costs, each man bathed at an expense, to the Red Cross, of less than one cent.
They were handled with military simplicity and expedition. The men, told off into details, entered the first room—the entire outfit was housed in a standardized Red Cross tent of khaki—where they removed their clothes and placed them within the sterilizer, then went direct into the bath. While they bathed their garments were cleansed, sterilized, and dried, and the two functions were so synchronized that the clothes were ready as quickly as the men—and the entire process completed within the half hour.
Return, if you will, for a final minute with Gibson of the Red Cross, up with the Thirty-third Division at the front. I find a final entry in his diary record of his activities nearly three weeks after the signing of the armistice; to be exact, on November 29. It runs after this fashion: