William Cooper
September 19, 1915
3:00 p.m.
Germany
These trenches are downright filthy. The conditions we live in here are repulsive. Human waste fills the trenches. Dead men lay here and get eaten by flies. If we're lucky, we get one shower a week. Twelve of us sit in a huge vat of warm water with our clothes so we can clean our clothes and our bodies at the same time. The problem is that our clothes never get fully clean and there's still germs all over them. We're always scratching and the germs and bugs get spread from troop to troop. Not being able to bathe, sitting in dirty clothes brings in our worst enemy: lice.
Here we've learned that lice doesn't only cause excessive scratching but lice also brings disease which has attacked many of our men. We call this trench fever. The Germans have also had this problem with lice and it's taken a toll on their manpower. Along with lice are rats, some of our other notorious friends out on the front. The dead soldiers and food scraps attract them to the trenches. The rats are big in size and they seem to reproduce quickly so swarms of them will come at one time and feast on whatever they can get their grimy little hands on. We've tried so hard to get rid of them but they just keep on coming back. The rats too carry diseases. These abundant lice and rats have become a big threat to us troops here on the front.
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