“But we are calling for volunteers because we want to prevent any more soldiers from having trench fever. We want to know what causes it, so that we can find out how to prevent it. Fifty or sixty men, willing to suffer these pains once, may prevent millions of men ever again from suffering the same pains. They will do more, they will keep those men in the fighting lines instead of the hospitals, and hence they will importantly help to win the war. We want sixty volunteers. How many have we?” Four entire companies of field hospital and ambulance soldiers of a certain American division in France were thus appealed to. The entire four companies, as one man, stepped forward and volunteered. Of course they did. That is the kind of soldiers we raised our boys to be. I saw and talked to some of these men when they were recovering in a hospital near Paris. They were a fine-looking lot of men, American born, all of them, and all but one hailing from the New England states. It just happened so. The division was drafted in the Atlantic states, and these men were selected, regardless of their previous residence, simply because among five or six hundred perfectly fit men they stood out as being in the absolute pink of health and strength. “We thought,” said one of these volunteers to me, “that we were going to be sent up to a front-line trench and sleep in the mud with the cooties till we got it. But to our surprise, they took us up to a perfectly good hospital back of the British lines. Nice clean tents, good beds, and food--um-m! Everything we could ask for.” Even the cooties were clean, in a manner of speaking, for the doctors were taking no chances with their experiment. They sent the eggs of those unpleasant beasts to England, where no trench fever has ever appeared, and when the eggs hatched out they put the beasts on trench fever patients. Then they put them on the volunteers. About fifty or sixty of the loathsome insects were put on a square of cotton cloth and bound to the forearm of a soldier with strips of adhesive plaster. A piece of surgical cotton over the cloth was well bandaged on, and over the whole dressing a stronger cotton cuff was securely fastened with more adhesive plaster. No possible chance for the insects to escape remained. Thirty-five soldiers were thus inoculated with trench fever. The rest were reserved for blood inoculation tests. The men who had their arms bound up as described endured an endless biting and chewing from ten to fifteen days until they developed the fever. It was a tormenting ordeal. Their arms became open sores from which blood and pus penetrated the dressings. The first attack of fever and blinding headache must have come as a welcome relief to intolerable itching.