A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

“Men, we have set ourselves to find out the cause and cure of one of the worst diseases the allied armies have to suffer. It is called trench fever. It is not a fatal disease, but it is slow and painful, and it is so common as to be almost an epidemic. Its ravages are so great that it actually hampers the allies in their struggle to win the war. Something like five hundred thousand men a year are temporarily pulled out of armies because of trench fever.

“The men have to leave the fighting line, go to hospitals and lie there suffering and helpless for weeks on end. One fever does not give positive immunity from others, and it is a fact that many men have recurrent attacks. Trench fever is worst in Flanders, where the British hold the front, but the French, Belgian and Serbian soldiers also suffer from it. When the American army gets here in great numbers we shall undoubtedly see thousands and thousands of our soldiers go under from this disease. Before our men come we want to know what the cause of trench fever is, and how to prevent it.

“We believe that the disease is carried by body lice, but we are not sure. We have tried experiments on animals, guinea pigs and monkeys, but they have not developed the fever. Now we have got to try more experiments, this time on human beings. You remember that the cause of yellow fever was discovered only after brave and devoted men allowed themselves to be bitten by the stegomya mosquito, which was believed to carry the disease. Some of those men died and others were brought to the verge of death. But their deed banished the scourge of yellow fever from the world. Now we are asking for volunteers to help us banish trench fever.

“Men, what we are asking you to do is no easy or agreeable thing. We are asking you to risk a lingering, painful and weakening illness, one that will keep you in bed for five or six weeks and often make you wish you were dead and out of it.

“You will not die, but you will suffer. You will have horrible headaches, pains in your backs, shoulders, knees, abdomens. This disease has been mistaken for appendicitis. It has often been called shinbone fever. This will give you some idea of what trench fever feels like.

“But we are calling for volunteers because we want to prevent any more soldiers from having trench fever. We want to know what causes it, so that we can find out how to prevent it. Fifty or sixty men, willing to suffer these pains once, may prevent millions of men ever again from suffering the same pains. They will do more, they will keep those men in the fighting lines instead of the hospitals, and hence they will importantly help to win the war. We want sixty volunteers. How many have we?”

Four entire companies of field hospital and ambulance soldiers of a certain American division in France were thus appealed to. The entire four companies, as one man, stepped forward and volunteered. Of course they did. That is the kind of soldiers we raised our boys to be.

I saw and talked to some of these men when they were recovering in a hospital near Paris. They were a fine-looking lot of men, American born, all of them, and all but one hailing from the New England states. It just happened so. The division was drafted in the Atlantic states, and these men were selected, regardless of their previous residence, simply because among five or six hundred perfectly fit men they stood out as being in the absolute pink of health and strength.

“We thought,” said one of these volunteers to me, “that we were going to be sent up to a front-line trench and sleep in the mud with the cooties till we got it. But to our surprise, they took us up to a perfectly good hospital back of the British lines. Nice clean tents, good beds, and food—um-m! Everything we could ask for.”

Even the cooties were clean, in a manner of speaking, for the doctors were taking no chances with their experiment. They sent the eggs of those unpleasant beasts to England, where no trench fever has ever appeared, and when the eggs hatched out they put the beasts on trench fever patients. Then they put them on the volunteers.