scratchers twelve inches, but many a night when on guard, looking over
the top from the fire step of the front-line trench, they would have
given a thousand "quid" for the other six inches.

Once while we were in rest billets an Irish Hussar regiment camped in
an open field opposite our billet. After they had picketed and fed
their horses, a general shirt hunt took place. The troopers ignored
the call "Dinner up," and kept on with their search for big game. They
had a curious method of procedure. They hung their shirts over a hedge
and beat them with their entrenching tool handles.

I asked one of them why they didn't pick them off by hand, and he
answered, "We haven't had a bath for nine weeks or a change of
clabber. If I tried to pick the 'cooties' off my shirt, I would be
here for duration of war." After taking a close look at his shirt, I
agreed with him, it was alive.

The greatest shock a recruit gets when he arrives at his battalion in
France is to see the men engaging in a "cootie" hunt. With an air of
contempt and disgust he avoids the company of the older men, until a
couple of days later, in a torment of itching, he also has to resort
to a shirt hunt, or spend many a sleepless night of misery. During
these hunts there are lots of pertinent remarks bandied back and forth
among the explorers, such as, "Say, Bill, I'll swap you two little
ones for a big one," or, "I've got a black one here that looks like
Kaiser Bill."

One sunny day in the front-line trench, I saw three officers sitting
outside of their dugout ("cooties" are no respecters of rank; I have
even noticed a suspicious uneasiness about a certain well-known