Braving the Cooties: Pt 1

 

An Ode to a Cootie, sketch by Pvt. Walter R. Sabel
National WWI museum

The French called them totos; the British called them coddlers; the Americans called them cooties—or more colorfully, pants rabbits or seam squirrels. All the armies of the First World War battled lice infestations, and in the Great War, the louse was as ever present as shellfire, mud, and rats. 

In November of 1918, the newspaper of the AEF, the Stars and Stripes, published a letter written by Jimmy Murrin, serving with the 112th Infantry. Murrin wrote, “Some day when you are looking for space fillers, and you are hard up, you might want to slip this cootie ode and essay it; perhaps you have had enough of that sort of stuff—anyhow, I’ll take a chance.”* 

Up the Line, October 27

Photo from Murrin's memoir

We have slept in barns and barracks,
    In the mud and in the rain;
We have slept in broken buildings,
    Everywhere—in each campaign;
We have bunked with cooties rampant,
    We have slept on lousy straw;
And we’ve slept where shells have whistled
    In dugouts—but, oh, pshaw!
Well, we have hit a new place,
    Since we’ve wiggled up the line;
We are sleeping in a hen-house,
    And, say, the sleepin’s fine!
That is, we sleep when all is quiet
    And shells aren’t overhead;
Be it known, we’ll nap or slumber
    When the cooties aren’t in bed.
For, no matter where you travel,
    And no matter where you roam;
The doughboy’s got a partner—
    There’s a cootie in his home. 
—Jimmy Murrin, Hq. Co., 112th Inf.† 

Murrin’s Stars and Stripes article flatly states that the only soldier who hasn’t encountered the cootie is the man who “was never up the line”: 

Along the hillsides of the Marne, in the valley of the Vesle, in the fastness of the Argonne — where our boys have met the Hun — there the cootie has kept him company. You may not think that is true; but the cooties who are with the doughboys are game, courageous and true; they’ll stick to a man under shellfire — and they’ll keep him in motion when he longs for sleep....  There are some millions of cooties in France; how many are with the AEF the censor will not permit being known, and doughboys are having a hard time finding out. One Yank who has been up the line and who saw plenty of the fireworks very soberly wrote home: “I have not seen a single cootie in France.” He was right. For he added: “They are all married and have large families.” 

In 1918, the National Geographic headlined its June issue with the article “Courage and Cooties: Heroes without Glory.” The author, Herbert Corey, described for those on the home front both the physical and psychological toll of lice infestations. He wrote that researchers had identified lice as disease carriers: 

In the eastern field of war the louse is a typhus carrier and there is no known reason why it shouldn’t carry typhus in the west. Trench fever has been traced home to it. Until a comparatively short time ago this was a mystery, with its recurrent chills and fever and the semi-paralysis that is an occasional result.**

Corey stated that unlike other pests of the trenches that soldiers battled (such as rats), cooties were accompanied by shame and stigma. Soldiers might “know it is not their fault that they are infested, but the effect of years of civilian training persists. They still feel, against all reason, that there is something shameful in their state. They try to assume a joviality they do not feel.”** 

Murrin’s ode to the cootie is an example of that use of humor, but his post-war memoir describes the discomfort and dirt that plagued the men: “Many soldiers had gone through the war with fewer than a dozen baths, and most of these had been in streams or under circumstances where a thorough cleansing was impossible.”*** 

Corey, writing for a civilian audience, defended the doughboys: 

Perhaps the reader thinks there is something repulsive and disgusting in this tale of clean-minded young Americans picking lice out of their clothing and killing them by drops from a burning candle. Perhaps there is.... To my mind the men who can do this and still laugh—bearing in mind their rearing and clean years of their youth—are almost as nearly heroes as those who ‘hop over’ when the whistle sounds the zero hour. The ones are called upon to keep up their courage under a day-long and night-long degradation—a constant, crawling, loathsome irritation—while the others spend themselves freely in one fine burst. I cannot distinguish between brave men.** 

Corey applauded the the cheerful endurance of the American soldiers who disguised their discomfort and repugnance “with a rough form of humor.... Perhaps that is not the courage that seeks a fleeting glory in the cannon’s mouth, but it seems to me it is a fine courage just the same.”** Demonstrating that peculiar courage, one American soldier of the war noted, “ “I don’t mind the hikes now.... for all I have to do is to sort of shoo my shirt along.”**
_____________________________________________________________________

* “Not a Single One,” by Jimmy Murrin, Stars and Stripes, 29 Nov. 1918, p. 4.
† Murrin (Corporal James A. Murrin) survived the war and returned home to Pennsylvania, publishing his memoir in 1919: With the 112th in France: A Doughboy’s Story. He returned to work as a journalist, except for a brief interlude when “He returned to France eight years after the war ended as a member of the Battlefield Memorial Commission” (from his obituary, “James Murrin Funeral Is Set for Friday,” Oil City Derrick, 3 Mar. 1971, p. 2).
** “Cooties and Courage” by Herbert Corey, National Geographic, June 1918, p. 501, 498–499, 497, 503, 509.
*** With the 112th in France, by James A Murrin, Lippincott, 1919, p. 385.