“Either Socialism Will Defeat The Louse, Or The Louse Will Defeat Socialism”

Emily Willingham catalogues what lice have wrought on history, namely through typhus:

Typhus helped decimate the half-million strong Grand Armée of Napoleon in 1812 to a mere 35,000 men and kept the great general from conquering Russia. Many of the dead met their fates not on the battlefield but in louse-infested hospitals packed with dead bodies.