On the Fringe of the Great Fight

by George Gallie Nasmith

For typhus to get a grip on an army means that there must be at least one case of the disease, and there must be lice on the case. Some of these lice will fall off, wander away, or be left on the bedding, in the straw, or in the patient's discarded clothes. If these lice have bitten the typhus patient and thereby been infected, it seems to be necessary for a certain length of time to elapse for the organism to develop in the body of the lice before they are able to introduce the virus into uninfected individuals by biting them.

As yet there have been no cases of typhus fever in the British Army in France, though it has occurred to a greater or less extent in Germany, Austria, Russia and Serbia. The quarantine services at the ports of the countries bordering on the Mediterranean have prevented it spreading to any other country.

Typhus fever is known as a dirt disease, and its control is possible through the plentiful use of soap and water. The most difficult thing for a soldier to obtain in the field is a bath. Normally he is in the front line trenches for a week, in the reserve trenches for a week, and in rest for a week. This means that he cannot get a bath for at least two weeks, and he doesn't. So that though a soldier goes back into the trenches clean and free from vermin he is sure to become reinfected from lice left in the dugouts; or some lice eggs on his clothes perhaps have escaped destruction, and he may be as lousy as ever when he comes out of the trenches again. The old straw in the barns and the billets is sure to be infected with lice, and it is very difficult to sterilize the men's blankets. Consequently a persistent continuous fight against this variety of vermin must be kept up, for lice are not only a potential source of danger in transmitting typhus fever and relapsing fever, but they are a great source of irritation to the men and responsible for much loss of sleep.

The greatest luxury at the front is a hot bath, and these are provided in every divisional area on the British front. Three or four miles behind the trenches in the rest areas, in places where a plentiful supply of water can be obtained, the army has established bath houses. Sometimes a brewery, or part of it, has been taken over for this purpose, because the breweries all have deep wells from which a plentiful supply of water can be obtained. If the bath house is in a brewery they may utilize the large beer barrels cut in two for baths. These are filled with cold water and live steam turned into the water to warm it. After the bath the men dump the barrels, which are immediately refilled by attendants, for the next group.

Most of the bath houses, however, are in improvised shacks built upon the edge of creeks or ponds. The water is pumped into an elevated reservoir and heated frequently by means of a threshing machine boiler, rented or purchased from some neighboring farmer. One section of the shack is divided off for a bathroom with a number of showers and the other rooms devoted to the receiving of dirty clothing, storing the clean clothing, washing, drying and sterilizing.

As you pass along the road you will see perhaps a platoon or a section of a platoon marching to the bath house, without belt or equipment, and carrying towels. At the bath house a certain number, say twenty men, pass into the first room where they undress. Their underclothes and shirts are thrown to one side to be washed; their caps and boots are not treated in any way. The uniforms are hung on numbered racks and placed in the disinfection chamber where they are immediately treated with live steam, or they are taken into an adjoining room where the seams are ironed with hot irons to destroy lice and eggs.

The men then pass on into the bathroom where they are given about ten minutes to luxuriate with plenty of soap and hot water. As they pass out of the bath through another room they are given clean socks, underclothes and shirts, and by the time they are dressed their own uniforms, disinfected, are handed back to them. The whole operation takes from twenty-five to thirty minutes, and from a thousand to fifteen hundred men can be put through each bath house in a day.

The discarded clothes are washed by local peasant women paid by the army; in one of these establishments in our area there were 160 Belgian peasant women engaged in this work. Mending is also done by them, while socks and clothes too far gone to be mended are packed in bundles and sent away to be sold.

The waste wash water from the baths and laundries entering the creeks naturally causes trouble from troops down stream who may have to use it. Horses will not touch soapy water, and the brewers object to making beer with it; they say it spoils the beer.

Consequently the sanitary officers have in many cases been compelled to put in tanks to treat this dirty water and purify it. This is usually done by adding an excess of chloride of lime, which precipitates the soap as a curd and carries the dirt down with it. By sedimentation, and filtration through canvas, cinders and sand, the water is clarified and turned into the creeks again clean. So completely can this be accomplished that the experience at one bath house is worth narrating.