At a place called the Pont de Nieppe, beyond Armentieres--a most
“unhealthy” place in later years of war--a bathing establishment was
organized by officers who were as proud of their work as though they had
brought a piece of paradise to Flanders. To be fair to them, they had
done that. To any interested visitor, understanding the nobility of
their work, they exhibited a curious relic. It was the Holy Shirt of
Nieppe, which should be treasured as a memorial in our War Museum--an
object-lesson of what the great war meant to clean-living men. It was
not a saint's shirt, but had been worn by a British officer in the
trenches, and was like tens of thousands of other shirts worn by our
officers and men in the first winters of the war, neither better nor
worse, but a fair average specimen. It had been framed in a glass case,
and revealed, on its linen, the corpses of thousands of lice. That
vermin swarmed upon the bodies of all our boys who went into the
trenches and tortured them. After three days they were lousy from head
to foot. After three weeks they were walking menageries. To English
boys from clean homes, to young officers who had been brought up in the
religion of the morning tub, this was one of the worst horrors of war.
They were disgusted with themselves. Their own bodies were revolting to
them. Scores of times I have seen battalions of men just out of battle
stripping themselves and hunting in their shirts for the foul beast.
They had a technical name for this hunter's job. They called
it “chatting.” They desired a bath as the hart panteth for the
water--brooks, and baths were but a mirage of the brain to men in
Flanders fields and beyond the Somme, until here and there, as at
Nieppe, officers with human sympathy organized a system by which
battalions of men could wash their bodies.
The place in Nieppe had been a jute-factory, and there were big tubs in
the sheds, and nearby was the water of the Lys. Boilers were set going
to heat the water. A battalion's shirts were put into an oven and the
lice were baked and killed. It was a splendid thing to see scores of
boys wallowing in those big tubs, six in a tub, with a bit of soap for
each. They gave little grunts and shouts of joyous satisfaction. The
cleansing water, the liquid heat, made their flesh tingle with exquisite
delight, sensuous and spiritual. They were like children. They splashed
one another, with gurgles of laughter. They put their heads under water
and came up puffing and blowing like grampuses. Something broke in one's
heart to see them, those splendid boys whose bodies might soon be torn
to tatters by chunks of steel. One of them remembered a bit of Latin
he had sung at Stonyhurst: “Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor;
lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor.” (“Thou shalt sprinkle me with
hyssop, O Lord, and I shall be cleansed; thou shalt wash me, and I shall
be made whiter than snow.”)
On the other side of the lines the Germans were suffering in the same
way, lousy also, and they, too, were organizing bath-houses. After their
first retreat I saw a queer name on a wooden shed: Entlausunganstalt. I
puzzled over it a moment, and then understood. It was a new word created
out of the dirt of modern war--“Delousing station.”