When I first got here, I couldn’t believe the terrible stench. At first I could barely breathe, the smell was so bad but I quickly became accustomed to it, along with the other men. I knew I would be in the trenches for a while, as the directions the general said indicated such so. I soon grew accustomed to the rats running over my face at night, a source of infection and nuisance. There were two different types/kinds of rats, the brown kind and the black kind. The black rats were definitely a nuisance, but everybody feared the brown rat. The brown rats were known to grow to the size of large cats, and they would gorge themselves on the dead and decaying bodies lying in the trench. Men were so scared and exasperated by the rats that they tried to kill the rats with guns, a bayonet or any weapon they could find. I myself tried to club rats to death every chance I could get. It was useless though, for every rat I killed, ten more would take it’s place. …show more content…
The lice, it seemed, were everywhere. The only way I could prevent from getting lice was to shave my head and I wasn’t the only one. Many men preferred that option to their head being infested with lice. Lice were a nuisance and a bother to everyone, and without hair, we all struggled to keep their heads warm in the winter. Lice, it seemed, was a never-ending problem for us soldiers living in the trenches. Lice also bred in our clothing, not just our hair. Lice caused us to have bleeding and scabbed scalps from itching so hard. Our clothes were washed occasionally but lice eggs hid in the seams and once the clothes were worn again, the lice eggs started hatching because of the body heat we gave off by wearing those clothes. Lice also called trench fever. Trench fever was a particularly painful disease in which began very suddenly with a high fever. My friend John got trench fever and it was