Yesterday's hero

Stefan Sauer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

“Amputation was a daily occurrence in Europe from 1914-18, as modern warfare tore men apart in unprecedented ways,” writes Alex Purcell in “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War.”*  

The Great War tore men apart, both physically and mentally. In France, the military documented over 3.5 million wounded soldiers, an estimated 40% of those who served. Staggeringly, half of those were wounded twice, while an estimated 100,000 French combatants were wounded three or more times.** 

The number of British First World War amputees is estimated to be at least 41,000; German amputees are estimated at 67,000, and French amputees numbered over 70,000.*** 

Marcel Sauvage was a young medical student in Paris when the Great War began. He served as a stretcher bearer, and while tending to the wounded at the Somme, he was seriously injured and gassed. Sauvage’s war poems were written between 1916 and 1920; “The Castigation” (translated from the French by Ian Higgins) describes a war that never ended for thousands who had fought and survived. 

The Castigation
To Frédéric Lefèvre

In the street
The carts
On the cobbles, like clacking rattles,
The taxis racing off,
Red, rear ends smoking.
The tramcars squeal
Under their trolleys.
On the pavements
People walking, walking by, walking on.
Life’s strident bellow.
The city: Paris.

1916 French postcard
"School of Glory"

Bowling along came a posh
Limousine.
A beast of burden,
A man,
A sweating man
Dragging a handcart,
Got in its way.
A gentleman leaned out
From the posh limousine,
An elderly gentleman of means,
And shouted the following observation
At the poor poverty-stricken devil
Trapped in the swirl of the street:
‘You blithering idiot,
Serve you right if you got run over.’

I looked at the man
Who was dragging the handcart.
He said nothing, did nothing.
He had a wooden leg,
He was dragging a heavy handcart,
He was sweating,
He had two medals on his dirty lapel,
The Military Cross,
The Military Medal.
This was yesterday’s hero,
A martyr sweating,
Frightened, resigned—yet another
In the swirl of life.
The posh gentleman of means
Should have done him a favour
And run him over,
Poor b—. 
        —Marcel Sauvage, trans. Ian Higgins

What is the “castigation” referred to in the poem’s title? The elderly gentleman in the limousine harshly rebukes the war amputee, but it is the body of the veteran that silently accuses all who ignore him, the “People walking, walking by, walking on.”

© IWM Art.IWM PST 13211

Those who do notice the man with the wooden leg dismiss him as no better than a “sweating man,” a “beast of burden,” and a “blithering idiot.” Yet the silent, sweating martyr who says nothing and does nothing is imagined in the poem as a Christ-like figure. The prophet Isais said of Christ, “He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.”****

Sauvage’s poem extends this one veteran’s suffering to hundreds of thousands of amputees, writing that the man with the wooden leg was “yet another / In the swirl of life.” Just one more of the broken survivors. 

The disfigured and mutilated bodies of the war’s soldiers were painful to confront, and the physical and mental agonies of veterans were typically disregarded by even physicians. Soldiers themselves seldom talked about their suffering: “in this sense, pain remained a family taboo .... The amputees explained, ‘We speak only when we know that we will be heard.’”** 

Not only did the war wound soldiers, but it blinded and deafened entire populations to the repercussions of the violence.
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* Alex Purcell, “Amputations & Prosthetic Limbs in the First World War,” Through Veterans Eyes, 18 Sept. 2017,  https://throughveteranseyes.ca/2017/09/18/amputations-prosthetic-limbs-in-the-first-world-war/
** Sophie Delaport, “Mutilation and Disfiguration (France),”1914–1918 Online, updated 24 Feb. 2015, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/mutilation_and_disfiguration_france
*** Source for number of amputees: British and German, French.
**** Isaiah 53:7, New International Version Bible. 

The Dream, Part I

For a long time, people have hand-copied poems that they love. The scribing of a poem slows our reading of it; writing out a poem makes us pay closer attention to the nuances of words, sounds, line breaks, and punctuation. 

Roland Leighton, the Great War poet who is perhaps best known for his engagement to the memoirist and writer Vera Brittain, copied poems. Shortly after his enlistment in the British Army in 1914, his mother found in his room an exercise book in which Roland had written out a poem that had recently been published in the Westminster Gazette by the young Cambridge writer Kathleen Montgomery Coates.*

© The Vera Brittain Fonds,
McMaster University Library
The Roland Leighton Literary Estate

The first person who seems to have read Roland’s copy of Coates’ poem was his mother, Marie Connor Leighton.  In the anonymously published memoir that his mother wrote and dedicated to Roland after his death, she writes, “I read the lines through carelessly at first; but when I came to the third or fourth line I knew that if he was to get out to the Front and get killed this poem would haunt me always.”**

A Year and a Day

I shall remember miraculous things you said
        My whole life through –
Things to go unforgotten till I am dead;
  But the hundredfold, adorable ways of you,
The tilt of your chin for laughter, the turn of your head
   That I loved, that I knew –
Oh, while I fed on the dreams of them, these have fled!

Vera Brittain

Words which no time can touch are my life’s refrain,
   But each picture flies.
All that was left to hold till I meet you again,
        Your mouth’s deep curve, your brows where the shadow lies,
These are the things I strive to capture in vain—
   And I have forgotten your eyes,
And the way that your hair spun curls in the beating of rain! †
            —Kathleen Coates

Before leaving for the front, Roland talked with his mother about his own efforts at writing poetry and about his admiration for Vera, the sister of his good friend, Edward Brittain. Describing Vera to his mother, he said, “I like her tremendously. You would, too, if you knew her. She’s not like other girls. She’s brilliant and can think for herself. She wants to be a writer some day. But first she’s going to Oxford.”

His mother, “a prolific author of serial fiction and melodramatic novels” replied, “Going to Oxford isn’t the way for a woman to be a writer—except of treatises. But that’s beside the point.”***

Several months later, Roland copied “A Year and a Day” yet again, this time sending his copy to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914. Vera relates the story of the poem in her memoir Testament of Youth, but in her account, Roland sends her the poem in the autumn of 1915. As she tells the story, in mid-August of 1915, Roland was back from the Western Front on leave. They became engaged, and she met his family for the first time. One day, they walked by the sea, and discussed “the callousness engendered by war both at the front and in hospital.” That evening, she told him, “If I heard you were dead ... my first feeling would be one of absolute disbelief. I can’t imagine life without you.”

Roland replied abruptly, “You’d soon forget.” Vera retorted that she was not “one of the forgetting sort,” but that “if you died I should deliberately set out to marry the first reasonable person that asked me,” because “if one seems to have forgotten, the world lets one alone and things one is just like everyone else, but that doesn’t matter. One lives one’s outer life and they see that, but below it lies the memory, unspoiled and intact. By marry the first reasonable person that asked me, I should thereby be able to keep you. My remembrance would live with me always and be my very own.” 

Roland conceded the argument, and Vera writes, “indeed nothing else did seem to matter; for the time being each of us remembered neither the past nor the future, but only the individual and the hour .... Some weeks later he wrote to me from the trenches of that evening, and sent me, copied from the Westminster Gazette, a poem by Kathleen Coates called “A Year and a Day.”

Roland Leighton's grave

Vera Brittain includes the poem in her memoir, then comments, “Reminiscent as the lines were, they embodied my own failure of memory as well as his. Try as I would I could never, once we were apart, recollect his face, nor even in the silence of night hear his voice, with its deep notes and its gay, high laugh. I used to think that if, by closing my eyes or sitting in the dark, I could picture his eyes as they looked when I last saw them, or in imagination listen to him speaking, it would not be so hard to be separated. It is years now since I have been able to recall his face, and I know that, even in dreams, I shall never hear the sound of his voice.”****

In the same season that Vera Brittain and Roland Leighton were becoming engaged and discussing what their future might hold, Kathleen Montgomery Coates’s only brother was killed in France while on patrol. Basil Montgomery Coates died on September 7, 1915.  His sister’s poem “The Dream” expresses the deep sorrow of that loss and will be shared and discussed in the next blog post.

 
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* I have been unable to find the poem in the Westminster Gazette, and it appears that others have also failed in the search, as various sources state that it was written/published “between 1910 and 1913.”
**Marie Connor Leighton, Boy of My Heart, Hodder and Stoughton, 1916, pp. 176–177.
† The punctuation used in this version of the poem is that from Roland Leighton’s copy that he sent to Vera Brittain in a letter dated 17 December 1914 (from the First World War Digital Poetry Archive). In Brittain’s memoir Testament of Youth, she changes the dash to a comma after vain and ends the poem with a full stop after rain.
***The information on Marie Leighton’s career as a writer is from Wikipedia. Her comments on Oxford as preparation for a woman’s career in writing is from Boy of My Heart, p. 179. 
**** Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, “Learning versus Life,” pp. 162 – 164, Virago, 2014 (first published in 1933). 

The Dream, Part II

Just four days before her twenty-fourth birthday*, Kathleen Montgomery Coates lost her only brother. Twenty-one-year-old Second Lieutenant Basil Montgomery Coates was killed on the Western Front on September 7, 1915. He would have turned twenty-two on September 16th.

from Oundle Memorials
of the Great War

Kathleen Coates went to Cambridge in 1909 as a student at Girton College, earning her degree in Modern Languages in 1914. In 1912, she was joined at Cambridge by her younger brother, who was pursuing a degree in medicine at Queens College. When war broke out, Basil volunteered with the Rifle Brigade, arriving at the front in France in the early summer of 1915. He was dead within months.

Basil was shot while on patrol duty; his commanding officer wrote to the boy’s mother, 

Your son was killed yesterday (7 Sept.) while on patrol duty, and unfortunately we were unable to recover his body, which the Germans have taken into their lines, and which they will no doubt give an honourable burial. He was out patrolling with a Corpl. Fenton, crawling about in the crops, was seen by the enemy, fired on and killed, and the corporal crawled home about 300 yards with three bullet wounds .… A young officer called Everard went out with a man, and at very great personal risk got up to your son, but was fired at so persistently that he was unable to do anything towards moving him. As soon as it was dark another party, under Lieut. Sanstone, went out to the place to try to bring the poor boy in, but only found tracks through the corn, showing the way the enemy had taken him into their lines.**

The British were never able to recover his body.

In 1918, Kathleen Montgomery Wallace (she had married in 1917) published a collection of poetry titled Lost City.*** Its dedication note reads Cantabrigiae Mortuisque Carissimus (Cambridge and the beloved dead). The book is divided into two sections: Before and After. This poem appears in the second section of the volume: 

The Dream

Through the still streets whose windows were shut down

I wandered in a dumb and unknown town,

Where streets wound on and on, and had no name,

Where unseen fingers brushed my sleeve, and came

To a walled place of trees, and a voice said,

“Seek here, seek here, and you shall find your dead!”

And stopping down beneath the boughs asway

I found your name, and knew that there you lay.

And the blue twilight fell, and the cold dew,

While I lay in the grass and spoke to you ....

So, when I rose, “Now God be thanked,” said I,

“Who set my feet to find you, where you lie.

My own, my own, I shall not dream again

You lie uncoffined in the pitiless rain ....”

And woke; and knew I dreamed; and turned, to see

There, on my pillow, the old agony ....
        —Kathleen Montgomery Wallace

The poem expresses the empty despair of loss and the desperate ache for ritual and burial. Without that closure, like Antigone, the sister is haunted by the image of her beloved brother’s body left to decay in the “pitiless rain.” 

In October of 1918, the Bookman reviewed Lost City:

Youth Mourning, George Clausen
© IWM Art.IWM ART 4655

The war sets more and more poets to singing as over the battlefields the birds sing the louder because of the guns. Some of these poets sing to ease their own pain and bring a bruised sweetness to those who listen .... Here in a bundle of new books of poetry and verse one finds a slender paper-covered volume on which the understanding reviewer will fasten with the thrill of the discoverer.  It is Lost City by Kathleen Montgomery Wallace and to the mind of the present reviewer it makes a trilogy with Rupert Brooke and Rose Macaulay. It is a book of Cambridge and the Fen Country and of those who went from Cambridge, that city of youth, never to return ....  This woman’s poetry, haunted by the shades and beauties of the university town, speaks for itself.****

Kathleen Coates Wallace was one of many sisters who lost brothers in the First World War. In the poem “To L.H.B. (1894 – 1915),” Elizabeth Mansfield ’s also recounts a dream of her dead brother. In the dream, her brother appears to her beside a “remembered stream,” offering her berries with the words, “These are my body.  Sister, take and eat.” 

With no known burial place, Basil Montgomery Coates is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial in Belgium, one of over 11,000 names. 
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*Kathleen Coates Wallace's obituary in the London Times (31 March 1958) states she was born in 1891; other sources give the year as 1890.
** From de Ruvigny’s Roll of Honour 1914–1918, http://mrcweb.org.uk/mrc2015/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Basil-Montgomery-Coates-report-of-death.pdf

*** Kathleen Montgomery Coates Wallace's poem "May Term, 1916" has been shared and discussed in this blog post. The post "The Dream, Part I" examines one of her pre-war poems. 
**** “New Books: The Singing Season,” Bookman, October 1918, No. 325, Vol. LV, pp. 16 – 17.

Song in That November

Charing Cross Station Detraining Wounded
Lobley J Hodgson,  ©IWM ART2758

In early May of 1916, Helen Mackay recorded in her wartime journal,

In other years also the spring was sad. There was always that exquisite lovely poignant sadness of spring. 

  These days are too beautiful. It seems as if one could not bear them. 

   I think it is because so much beauty makes one want happiness.

  One cannot understand, in such loveliness, why one is not happy.* 

Helen G. Edwards Mackay
from Find A Grave

Mackay, an American living in France and volunteering at Hôpital St. Louis in Paris, published a collection of vignettes that described her First World War experiences, Journal of Small Things (1917). She also published a small volume of war poetry, London, One November (1916). Read together, they describe a world reeling from the contradictions of war: glory contrasted with loss and mutilation; beauty juxtaposed with horror, destruction, and death.  As Margaret Higonnet writes of Mackay, “Her patterns of contrast and inversion capture social and psychological conflicts in wartime.”** One example of these contrasts and inversions is a poem Mackay wrote after visiting London in 1915.

Song in That November

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

and the daffodils shine in your ways,

and your thrushes sing,

and your walled winds swing,

down the gold of your glancing days,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London?

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

When the spring comes to you,

London, London,

with the gift of all life in her hands,

with her laughs and her lights,

and her throbbing gold nights,

and the hour-glass singing the sands,—

how then will you bear with her,

London, London? 

how will you bear with her light on your tears?

Out of the depths of your war and your mourning,

how can you pardon her promise of years?

—Helen Mackay 

The poem imagines Spring as a woman who visits the darkened wartime city of London, bringing light, laughter, and “the gift of all life in her hands.” But all of Spring’s gifts — from the delicate scent of daffodils to the song of thrushes and the glancing golden light — are fleeting and ephemeral. Every beauty and grace that is offered is set against the “hour-glass singing the sands.” 

In a world wracked and wrecked by war, Mackay understands the bitter ironies of springtime. Hope for a bright future seems cruel when set against the bleak lists of dead that fill the newspapers and the loss that permeates the city – the mutilated wounded who have returned and the absence of those who never will.

As Mackay explains in Journal of Small Things, in order to survive the daily traumas of war, “one has simply got to pretend.” Her entry “London, September” describes a scene on a train platform as soldiers are leaving for the war: 

 

Victoria Station 1918
Clare Atwood ©IWM ART2513

We all pretended as hard as we could that it was splendid.
There was a woman on the platform who must have been crazy, I think.
She did not belong to any one going out. She  was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress.
She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out.
She called out, “Oh it’s all very fine now, you laugh now—but you won’t laugh long. You won’t laugh out there. And who of you’ll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?”

Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there.*** 

Mackay’s account continues, “The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true.” 

“Song in That November” also speaks truth as it describes the psychological strain that oppressed civilians; Mackay’s poem “Quinze Vingt” (posted earlier on this blog) bluntly reports the trauma inflicted on soldiers. In both poems, Mackay challenges pretense and lays bare sufferings that outlasted the war. 

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* Journal of Small Things, “May 3rd [1916],” p.168.

** Margaret R. Higgonnet, “Helen Mackay, American modernist: Finding a form for the Great War,” First World War Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, 2021, p. 203.

*** Journal of Small Things, “London, September,” pp. 31–32.

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.”**
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* “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. 

Battling the Cooties: Part II

How bad were lice infestations in the First World War? One soldier’s shirt “was found to contain 10,428 lice, and more than 10,000 eggs were found under a microscope,” while nurses serving in the 1915 typhus epidemic in Serbia reported “gray patches the size of one’s two hands upon the bodies of men brought into the hospital. The pests were so thick in these patches that from a little distance they presented the appearance of felted cloth.”*

All armies struggled with the problem. The British reported that 95% of men who had served for six months were lousy. On average, they estimated that each man carried 20 lice, but some were super carriers, infested by 100 to 300 insects.*

In addition to examining the severe discomfort and intense itching caused by “cooties,” researchers had begun to learn that lice carried disease. A National Geographic article published in 1918 entitled “Hospital Heroes Convict the ‘Cootie’” describes a US Army medical research program that recruited 66 healthy volunteers for testing to determine if trench fever was “a germ disease.” Trench fever was a serious threat, causing recurrent chills and fever. It was sometimes accompanied by semi-paralysis, and in the average case, a man diagnosed with trench fever “was unfit as a fighter for six months.”**

In one experiment, healthy soldiers were injected with blood that had been taken from men with trench fever: 23 of the 34 men inoculated developed the disease. In another experiment, researchers collected lice from men with trench fever, then allowed these lice to bite 22 of the healthy recruits. Twelve of them developed trench fever. 

National Geographic celebrated the courage of those who had volunteered for medical experimentation:

The experiments conducted on America’s Sixty-six have fastened the guilt of contagion-bearing upon the body louse.... It is a simple problem in multiplication to appreciate how tremendously America’s Sixty-six may have contributed to the power of our blows against the Huns by giving science the information which will result in keeping our soldiers fit for service.**

Striking a different tone, a poem published in the AEF’s Stars and Stripes imagines weaponizing the cootie: 

If I were a cootie (pro-Ally, of course),
I’d hie me away on a Potsdam-bound horse,
And I’d seek out the Kaiser (the war-maddened cuss),
And I’d be a bum cootie if I didn’t muss
His Imperial hid from his head to his toe!
He might hide from the bombs, but I’d give him no show!
If I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat the Kaiser,
        Ah, oui.

And after I’d thoroughly covered Bill’s area,
I’d hasten away to the Prince of Bavaria,
And chew him a round or two–under the Linden–
Then pack up my things and set out for old Hinden–
(Old Hindy’s the guy always talking ‘bout strafing)–
To think what I’d do to that bird sets me laughing!
If I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat the Prince and old Hindy,
        Ah, oui!

I’d ne’er get fed up on Imperial gore–
I might rest for a while, but I’d go back for more.
I’d spend a few days with that Austrian crew,
And young Carl himself I’d put down for a chew;
There’d be no meatless days for this cootie, I know,
They’d all get one jolly good strafing or so.
For if I were a cootie, I’d deem it my duty
To thus treat their damnships,
        Ah, oui!
                —A.P. Bowen, Sgt., R.T.O. (published 1 Nov. 1918)

But the US Army was determined to eradicate the pest. Men were swabbed with gasoline, smeared with ointments (vermijelli—a mix of crude oil and melted paraffin—and mercury), and dosed with NCI powder (a mixture of naphthalene, creosote, and idoform). But the most effective way to combat the louse was with boiling water, the only truly effective way to kill the nits or eggs.  

Delousing machines, nicknamed by the troops “cootie mills,” were developed for the field. Jack Campbell, a soldier with the 317th Infantry, wrote in his diary, 

Double-barrelled cootie cannon

 A “cootie-mill” is a wonderful institution.  You go in infested with lice, and in vile shape – you come out sweet and clean. These “mills” are all built pretty much on the same plan and you can get everything – shower, shave, shoe shine. They are long narrow buildings only one room thick.  First you enter “the office” where you give your “case history.” From here you enter the “undressing room” and here all your clothes, except underwear and socks, are tied into a tight bundle with your belt and put into a wire basket which is carried, on a moving belt to the steam chamber – while you, minus your underwear and socks, are given a towel and a piece of soap the size of a loaf of sugar and herded into the showers. Naturally, with hundreds waiting in line each soldier's time under the shower is limited and since these showers “just drip” instead of  “shower” you are lucky if you get wet all over in the time allotted. From the shower you enter the dressing room where you are given clean underwear and socks, and also waiting you are your “deloused” clothes – two sizes smaller from the steaming and very, very wrinkled.”***

By April of 1919, the Stars and Stripes boasted, “Whole Cootie Clan Rapidly Dying Off.” In early November at the time of the armistice, it was estimated that 90% of all AEF troops were “lousy,” but four months later, no more than 10% of American soldiers were infected: “Of the 454,705 troops examined, only 8,820 were found to be harboring cooties.” The aggressive elimination of the disease-bearing pest was attributed to a combination of factors: “Better living conditions, increased facilities for bathing and individual determination not to be infested with cooties, together with the activities of the delousing and bathing outfits.”****

Ah, oui!
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* “Cooties and Courage” by Herbert Corey, National Geographic, June 1918, p. 509.
** “Hospital Heroes Convict the ‘Cootie,’” National Geographic, June 1918, p. 510.
*** Jack Campbell's Diary, Co. G, 317th Infantry, Virginia Historical Society, 9411.
**** “Whole Cootie Clan Rapidly Dying Off,” Stars and Stripes, 4 April 1919, 3. 

Horses he loved, and laughter, and the sun

Many of the posts on this blog have begun as secondhand bookshop finds: worn, slim volumes that bear witness to a war that changed the world. 

Browsing a Cambridge secondhand book shop several months ago, I spied on an upper shelf a faded spine with the title The Life I Love, Verses by WKH. As I reached for the book, I wondered at the identity of the mysterious W.K.H. The only writer I know with those initials is William Kersley Holmes, an obscure First World War poet. Holmes is listed on the Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War as serving with the Royal Horse Artillery and the Royal Field Artillery. 

He published two volumes of war poetry (Ballads of Fields and Billets and More Ballads of Fields and Billets). Two of his poems appear on this blog (“Singing Tipperary” and “The Soldier Mood,” one of my favorites), and both are included in International Poetry of the First World War. Holmes survived the war, publishing Tramping Scottish Hills in 1946, but previously, I could find no other mention of him until his death in 1966. 

Surprisingly, the volume I had found (and then purchased for £5) was authored by Holmes and labeled “author’s presentation copy.” Published in 1958, the collection was signed by Holmes with a personal note for “Dorothy, a token of friendship.” The inside jacket provides a bit more context: 

The title of this collection is the key-note of the contents. The verses, most of which have appeared in Punch, Country Life and other periodicals, though varying from grave to gay, are alike in expressing the philosophy of a ‘long-term optimist’. In one poem in memory of a friend killed in the First World War, the author records that ‘horses he loved and laughter and the sun’; these, with hills and the comradeship of his fellowmen, are the inspiration of W.K.H. His verse conforms, for the most part, to the long-established standards, for his aim is to share with as many readers as possible his love of nature, his appreciation of what has given him food for thought, and his amusement at what has appealed to his sense of humour.*

The volume’s Introduction, written by Sir William Robieson (former editor of The Glasgow Herald) adds further detail: 

Readers of my generation have savoured with pleasure all their adult lives the light verse which has appeared so consistently in Punch and elsewhere over the initials “W.H.K.”. Those who lived in Scotland have also expected to find—for example in The Glasgow Herald—over the same initials or perhaps over the name “W.K. Holmes’ verses of a more serious kind or descriptive pieces of great charm relating to the countryside. And a select group knew that those initials and that name concealed the pleasant personality of the senior editor of Blackie & Son—with a varied earlier career to his credit as banker, hill-limber, soldier and journalist. 

All these, whatever their degree of acquaintance with him, will welcome this collection of Mr. Kersley Holmes’s fugitive pieces. It shows better than any essay could do the range of his interests, the philosophy he has developed over what is now a long lifetime, and his mastery of a variety of verse forms. ‘W.K.H’ is here in many moods and over a great variety of experience—as a Gunner of the First World War, a connoisseur of Scottish place-names, a lover of the hills, and in his retirement an interested spectator of life.*

Despite being published forty years after the end of the First World War, the collection includes four war poems: “Bran Mash” (subtitled “A Flash-back to 1915”), a tender account of feeding war horses and finding comfort in their companionship; “The Truth about Ulysses,” a poem that relates the long-term effects of outsider status on returning soldiers; “The Ultimate Outrage, 1916,” an ode to a “favourite shirt” that was destroyed by enemy shell fire, and the poem “Killed in Action,” alluded to in the book’s jacket cover. 

© IWM Q 34105

Killed in Action
Messines, 1917

Horses he loved, and laughter, and the sun,
     A song, wide spaces and the open air;
The trust of all dumb living things he won,
     And never knew the luck too good to share.

His were the simple heart and open hand
     And honest faults he never strove to hide;
Problems of life he could not understand
     But as a man would wish to die he died.

Now, though he will not ride with us again,
     His merry spirit seems our comrade yet,
Freed from the power of weariness or pain,
     Forbidding us to mourn—or to forget.
               —W.K.H. (William Kersley Holmes)

This simple elegy for a man who died nearly a half-century earlier recalls the depth of friendship soldiers shared in the trenches as well as the heartbreak of losses that returned home with those who served, never to be forgotten. 

In June of 1915, the Glasgow Herald reviewed W. Kersley Holmes’ war poems, writing, “They range from the grave to the humorous, from the realistic to the romantic, but something of the brightness of youth is in them all, something of that gallant gaiety which makes a jest of the discomforts of life, yet never thinks of life itself as a jest.”**
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* The Life I Love, Verses by W.K.H, by W. Kersley Holmes, Blackie & Sons, Glasgow, 1958.
**Review qtd. in the Dollar Magazine, vol. 14, no. 54, June 1915, pp. 74–75 (a publication of Dollar Academy, Holmes’s alma mater).