Land of Opportunity
by Lillie Ahearn
Are you a louse, trench rat, or disease-carrying bacterium? Are you starving from lack of food, such as humans? Have you been brutally driven from your home by a lighted candle or a delousing machine? Then do we have a place for you!
The outbreak of WWI has caused mass amounts of soldiers to gather in France in places called trenches. These trenches have everything a louse, trench rat, or disease-carrying bacterium could ever need!
Lice: The soldiers seldom wash their clothing, being in the middle of a war, and the seams are the perfect place to hide eggs from bathwater and delousing machines. Also, most of the men don't have enough practice to burn lice off their clothing with a lighted candle, so you'll be safe from death by fire. The body heat given off by the men provides the optimum temperature for eggs to hatch. Bite to your heart's content!
Trench rats: A world war means one thing to rats like you: food. And lots of it! Newly dead corpses litter the trenches every day, killed by gunshot or poison gases like chlorine and mustard gas. There's no shortage of food there. The soldiers really don't know how to dispose of their trash either. They just throw the empty tins all over the place! There are millions of tins just waiting to be scavenged through by rats like you. So what are you waiting for? All this food won't eat itself!
Diseases: How do you make a bunch of WWI soldiers even more miserable than they already are? Throw in some diseases! The trenches often become waterlogged, and the soldiers have no choice but to stand in wet socks and boots for hours and hours. This damp environment is ideal for the fungal infection we call trench foot. Need a large number of people to infect and a host to carry you? No problem! There are plenty of lice to carry diseases like pyrexia (trench fever) and many more. Those soldiers will have shooting pain in the shins and fever in no time!
As you can see, the French trenches are the perfect environment for all sorts of human annoyances- so pack your bags and travel to France today! You'll be glad you did!