The Ross Playfair Letters Project

In these days when the very life and existence of individuals and nations are at hair-trigger poise, it is well to have lived in Paris and at the Front. One longs to be in both places at once. Yet there is a veritable monotony of excitement in the first lines: we can kill in only a certain number of ways, and one has a fixed number of limbs and organs to be injured. But behind the lines, in Paris, the ways of living, of physical and mental healing, of readjustment, of temporary despair and sorrow, of eternal hope, of selfishness and altruism – these are myriad in number and wholly absorbing in interest. ...

Walking along the boulevards of Paris one feels somehow as if one had slipped back into mediaeval times, the emphasis of color and ornament is so reversed. Almost every man is clad in bright hues, or with some warm splash or stripe, and most are adorned with medals and citations. So many women are in dark colors, if not in crape, that one’s thought of their costumes in general is of sombreness of hue.

... One’s geography of Paris would read: the city is bounded on the north by supply dépôts, on the south by hospitals, and on the west by aerodromes. Its principal imports and exports are bandages, crape, wooden legs, and Colonials; its products are war-bread, war-literature, faith, and hope.

Part of any rest was a bath parade, ideally once a week, sometimes only monthly. Facilities ranged from former breweries with open vats to the elegantly tiled minehead showers near Vimy Ridge [see Ross’s letter of Nov. 25, 1917] where the men were crowded three to a stall. Many baths were housed in prefabricated metal huts where the winter wind whistled and water froze on the duckboards. Rusty nozzles emitted a few minutes of warm water, stopped for men to soap themselves and gushed a few more minutes of cold water, leaving the shivering men to dry themselves with a dirty towel or a flannel shirttail. Medical officers insisted that hot showers would be “enervating.”

“Imagine a watering can with all the holes but three blocked up, spraying tepid water for three minutes in a room without doors or windows, and a cold windy day,” Garnet Durham explained. A detail of men could be processed in thirty minutes. They were soon lousy again. Most baths included a laundry where Belgian refugee women washed, sorted, and sometimes repaired socks, shirts, and underwear. Attendants tossed “clean” clothes to shivering soldiers as they emerged. Sharp-eyed soldiers spotted the larvae that remained in the seams of flannel shirts and woollen drawers. In 1918, when lice were finally identified as the carriers of trench fever, a pair of Canadian medical officers finally had their ideas on effective disinfection adopted, and both baths and disinfection improved.