In the spring of 1919 most of the construction work at the embarkation camps was complete, and they became more comfortable. The camps consisted of miles of one-story, tar-papered, rough-board buildings connected with wooden sidewalks of duck-boards. Pontanezen was a complete American city set down amid the quaint roads of old Brittany. It had newspapers, banks, theatres, stores, public libraries, restaurants, hospitals, churches, telephones, and electric lights, and even a narrow-gauge railway for freighting about its supplies. The entire American military population in the camps at Brest quite outnumbered the French inhabitants of the region. The water system installed by the Engineers to serve all the American establishments at the port was sufficient for the city of 150,000 people. There was a special camp for casual officers. A section of this camp was set aside for the French, English, Belgian, and Italian wives that American soldiers had married abroad. There was a hospital camp, a camp for the white troops on permanent duty at the port, and another for colored troops so assigned. There were numerous small camps for labor battalions, and a special camp for engineer and motor transport organizations. Not far away was a large German prison camp. In one important respect embarkation in France differed from what it had been in the United States. It was extremely necessary to rid the home-coming troops of body vermin before placing them on the ships. The delousing process at our French ports of embarkation was the most thorough experienced by the doughboy during his foreign service, and this process chiefly distinguished embarkation abroad from that which the soldier had known at Hoboken and Newport News. Our forebears shared none of the modern aversion to discussion of the louse. One of the great monarchs of France set the stamp of his royal approval upon scratching publicly when one itched, and Robert Burns once addressed a poem to a louse. The louse, however, cannot survive American habits of personal cleanliness; and, justly enough, the insect has become associated with filth and has dropped out of polite conversation. The war revived the fame of this parasite. An inspection at one time revealed the fact that 90 per cent of the American troops at the front were infested. These men naturally wrote home about it, and then the louse, euphemized as “cootie,” became a national figure.