In the letters from the trenches they described the itch,
The body louse in the seams of the uniform’s switch,
From woolen warmth to the vector of the rickettsial spread,
The typhus that moved through the armies of the dead.
Napoleon’s campaign dissolved in the Russian cold and the,
Typhus that preceded the enemy by three,
Months and killed more soldiers than the cannon or the blade,
The disease that won the war before the plan was made.
Typhus letters, the accounts of the crawling skin,
Typhus letters, the pestilence moving in,
Through the seams and through the skin and through the blood,
Typhus letters from the fever and the flood,
Of history’s campaigns where the louse and not the sword,
Typhus letters, the disease that history ignored.
They wrote home describing the discomforts of the field,
In the specific censored language of what couldn’t be revealed,
To the families reading in the kitchens of the towns,
They couldn’t say the death toll or the way the spirit drowns.
But the itching and the headache and the rash they could describe,
The specific misery of the army and the tribe,
Of men in the same uniforms in the same mud at the front,
All carrying the same rickettsial brunt.
DDT came in the second war and changed the calculus,
The dusting of the soldiers was ridiculous,
In retrospect for what it did to everything else,
But it broke the louse chain and saved the shelves,
Of what would otherwise have been another typhus year,
The insecticide decision had a trade-off clear.
History is partly the history of the disease,
And the political and military destinies,
That the organism altered without a strategy,
Just the accident of the ecology.