MINOR HORRORS OF WAR
CHAPTER I
THE LOUSE (Pediculus)
Care’ll kill a cat, up-tailles all and a louse for the hangman!
(B. Jonson, Every Man in his Humour.)
Lice form a small group of insects known as the Anoplura, interesting to the entomologist because they are now entirely wingless, though it is believed that their ancestry were winged. They are all parasites on vertebrates. In quite recent books the Anoplura are described as ‘lice or disgusting insects, about which little is known’; but lately, owing to researches carried on at Cambridge, we have found out something about their habits. As lice play a large part in the minor discomforts of an army, it is worth while considering for a moment what we know about them.
Fig. 1.—Pediculus vestimenti (Nitzsch). A, Magnified 20 times; B, natural size.
Recently, the group has been split up into a large number of genera, but of these only two have any relation to the human body. I do not propose, in the present chapter, to consider one of these two genera—Phthirius—which frequents the hairs about the pubic region of man and is conveyed from one human being to another by personal contact. We will confine our attention to the second genus, Pediculus, which contains two species parasitic upon man—(Pediculus capitis) the hair-louse and (Pediculus vestimenti) the body-louse. Both of these are extremely difficult to rear in captivity, though in their natural state they abound and multiply to an amazing degree.
Wherever human beings are gathered together in large numbers, with infrequent opportunities of changing their clothes, P. vestimenti is sure to spread. It does not arise, as the uninformed think, from dirt, though it flourishes best in dirty surroundings. No specimen of P. vestimenti exists which is not the direct product of an egg laid by a mother-louse and fertilised by a father-louse. In considerable collections of men drawn from the poorer classes, some unhappy being or other—often through no fault of his own—will turn up in the community with lice on him, and these swiftly spread to others in a manner that will be indicated later in this chapter.