He did not receive his pay more regularly than his mail. If he had no money, though he might go to the "Y" motion picture show, he could not get cigarettes, chewing gum, or pie. On one occasion when a "Y" truck loaded with cigarettes came to the rescue of the tobacco-famished at the front, the besieging purchasers, when they opened the packages, found a slip inside, saying that they were from a newspaper's free tobacco fund. The fat was in the fire. The "Y" might give away all that truck load of cigarettes as it did, return the money of the deceived purchasers, and it might give away a dozen trucks of sales cigarettes; but the explanation that the quartermaster department had mixed the free cigarettes with sales cigarettes, the "Y" being officially credited for payment for all, could never overtake the circumstantial report of the "Y's" profiteering, which grew as it was helped on its travels, perhaps, by the "Y's" enemies. If a division commander wanted an errand done in Paris, a check cashed, or any comfort or entertainment for his men, he called on the "Y," which was not "volunteer," but "drafted." No one ever stopped to think what the army would have done without the "Y" huts, motion pictures, theatricals, and canteens. After the armistice, when a large number of returned British and American prisoners arrived at Nancy, I recollect how the local head of another auxiliary organization called up the "Y" on the telephone, saying: "We're helpless. Can you do anything?" "Send them on!" was the answer. "There are eight hundred, all hungry. Have you food for them?" "No, but we'll find it--" which was the spirit of the S. O. S. that kept us supplied in the Meuse-Argonne battle. Another type of "Y" man might, however, have thrown up his hands in despair. The "Y" was an enormous and mixed force, criticized, reasonably I think, for lack of organization to keep pace with its ambitions. Its home administration seemed disinclined to take the advice of men experienced at the front in the choice of personnel. A novelist, a college professor, a lawyer, or even a regular "Y" secretary is not as good at running a lunch counter or a hut as a man who regularly runs a lunch counter or a hotel. A young woman who stood high at college might not be as useful in the kind of work the "Y" had to do as a practical housewife who might not have heard of Euclid, but who did know how to bake, sew, and cook. The soldier judged personnel by the way they came down to earth, as he had a very earthly job in his fox-holes and charges. I have gone into this detail because it became the fashion to give the "Y" a bad name, which was hardly deserved considering the large contract it had undertaken to fill.