During World War I the cootie was a joke to many people who had never been bitten by one. Even itching soldiers stoically made a joke out of it. On the Western Front, thanks to frequent delousing and other precautions, the cootie seldom brought anything worse than a comparatively mild infliction called trench fever. But to millions of Germans today as to other millions in many of history's wars, the cootie means horror and death in the form of typhus.
Napoleon, who lost 300,000 men in Russia, lost tens of thousands of them to typhus. On the Eastern Front last week...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
