CHAPTER XVI
HOW THE WAR AGAINST TRENCH FEVER WAS WON
One day last January four companies of so-called non-combatant soldiers of the American army in France were lined up to listen to an address from their officers. The men were members of the field hospital and ambulance service. Their officers were army physicians. Working with them were other eminent physicians, members of the medical research department of the American Red Cross. This, or something like it, is what these physicians said to the soldiers:
“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.
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.
The cause of trench fever, thanks to our keen army and Red Cross surgeons, and to the courageous men who volunteered to help them, has definitely been established. The trench louse, once called a nuisance, is now known to be almost as dangerous as the stegomya mosquito.
The trench louse must be got rid of, and that, happily, is not a very difficult affair. Our American army authorities will take care of that. And our sons, we may be thankful to know, are going to be spared one of the most frequent and most painful afflictions of the war.
The scientists and physicians who took part in the experiment by which trench fever is to be abolished will receive honors and rewards at the hands of their colleagues and the public. What I would like to know, is what honors and rewards those simple soldiers are going to receive.