Blood Brothers

The louse possesses qualities of dogged persistence and patient diligence which arouse that admiration, thinly masked by a pretense of loathing, which men similarly feel for competing races whom they fear, and, therefore, persecute. (We refer to the "Blond Aryan" complex. . . .) --Hans Zinsser: Rats, Lice and History.

Blond Aryans with the louse complex were threatened by their blood brothers last week. Typhus was spreading through Poland to the Baltic States. Most of it was spotted typhus, carried by lice. German officials, settlers and soldiers were warned to avoid all contact with Polish "natives." Schools were closed in at least one town, Krakivsk Visty, Poland.

Churches were closed in Kaunas and Vilna, markets suspended throughout Lithuania. Tass, Soviet News Agency, claimed a captured German medical report said that "100% of our soldiers (in one battalion) are more or less covered with lice" -- not an incredible statement to men who remember World War I.

In World War I the Serbs gained a nine-month breather because German and Austrian troops were afraid to attack lest they be swamped by the typhus epidemic in Serbia. Russia was the highest loser, with 10,000,000 cases, of which 2,000,000 were fatal. With the same fear and figures in mind, the German Army was not sure last week which it feared most, the Russian before or the louse behind.

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