A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

About fifty or sixty of the loathsome insects were put on a square of cotton cloth and bound to the forearm of a soldier with strips of adhesive plaster. A piece of surgical cotton over the cloth was well bandaged on, and over the whole dressing a stronger cotton cuff was securely fastened with more adhesive plaster. No possible chance for the insects to escape remained.

Thirty-five soldiers were thus inoculated with trench fever. The rest were reserved for blood inoculation tests. The men who had their arms bound up as described endured an endless biting and chewing from ten to fifteen days until they developed the fever. It was a tormenting ordeal. Their arms became open sores from which blood and pus penetrated the dressings. The first attack of fever and blinding headache must have come as a welcome relief to intolerable itching.

Not a man but that came down with fever. One man ran a high temperature for forty days and nights without a break, but with most of the men the fever and the pain were remittent. Some suffered so severely that the doctors were obliged to inject morphia.

Those men who were inoculated with the blood of the trench fever patients developed the malady almost immediately. They suffered variously with pain and fever, just as the others did.

“The monotony of it was bad,” said one of the men, a big teamster from Boston. “Nothin’ to do but lay there and burn up and curse the pains in your blasted legs. Next day you’d feel better, perhaps, but so weak that you couldn’t move. The nurses were fine, and there was plenty to eat. But we was too sick to care whether there were women around or not, and the best stuff they gave us to eat tasted like sawdust.”

They agreed that the monotony of existence in trench fever was worse than the pain. Life was a dreary waste. The eyes of the patients were so affected that they were even denied the solace of reading.

The worst was yet to come for these devoted servants of science. When the German drive began on the twenty-first of last March it was found that their isolation hospital, thought to be so safe, was directly in the line of attack. Lying in their beds, with nothing over them but tent walls, their fever-racked bodies and weakened limbs became tormented by the shriek of shells and the roar of artillery. German airplanes chattered over their heads and bombs exploded around them.

“They wouldn’t let us get up and see the show,” grumbled one lad in the rest hospital. “Some of us crawled to the door of the tent and saw a little, but those English nurses shooed us back, and when it got hotter they made us dive under the beds. They are dreadful stern, those English nurses. You have to mind them as though they were the doc himself.”

By March twenty-seventh the place had got too hot to hold invalids, and the men were taken down to Paris. The journey was a fright. No beds, little food or water, slow trains which took twenty-four hours to traverse a distance of fifty-odd miles; but the men stood it, and when I saw them in the hospital near Paris all but one was out of bed and on the road to health. They were eating well, and more than one begged me to “use my influence” to get them out of the hospital.

When a sick man begins to eat like a harvest hand and begs to get out it indicates that he has only a few weeks of convalescence ahead of him. At least that is what the head physician of the hospital told me when I put in their petitions.