The Stars and Stripes, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 8, 1918: The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919United States. Army. American Expeditionary Forces
History
The Stars and Stripes, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 8, 1918: The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919
United States. Army. American Expeditionary Forces
World War, 1914-1918 -- Periodicals; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States -- Periodicals
No dinners are served at this canteen for the airmen. Those favors are
reserved for the convalescents in the hospital nearby. But the airmen
are dropping in all the time for sandwiches and hot coffee, particularly
after coming down, chilled and chattering, from a flight into the upper
regions of the sky. If they don't drop in to get warmed up in that
fashion, they know they are in for a scolding by the head of the
canteen, an Englishwoman possessed of all an American mother's motherly
instincts and all of the English army's ideals of discipline.
There was one night that the little Red Cross canteen was put to a
severe test. Eighteen hundred Americans arrived at the aviation camp
after a thirty-hour trip punctuated by no saving hot meal. The
manager-matron and her girl helpers, however, stayed up nearly all
night, minting hot coffee and sandwiches so that the hardships of
sleeping on the cold bare ground of the hangars was somewhat mitigated
for the 1,800 unfortunates.
A Repair Shop For Clothes.
In all the canteen disburses about 2,000 sandwiches a day, with mugs of
coffee to match. In addition to that, its workers, equipped with
Norwegian fireless cookers, sally forth to the aviation fields in the
mornings long before dawn so that the men who are going up may have
something warm to eat and drink to fortify them against the cold. Not
content with doing that for their charges the Red Cross people soon hope
to have enough workers to take care of mending the aviators' clothes,
for aviators have to wear lots of clothes, and, when they land in trees,
in barbed wire, on stone walls and so forth, their clothes suffer in
consequence. A doughboy, who wears one suit at a time, doesn't have a
hard job keeping it in order; but an aviator with heaven knows how many
layers of clothes--oh, my!
The young women who constitute the Red Cross working staff at this
particular base, are, for the most part, prominent in society in the
larger American cities. Voluntarily they have given up lives of luxury
to tackle the job, and a hard job it is. They live in small barracks of
their own, as do the "Tommywaacs" (Women's Army Auxiliary Corps) of the
British army; but they are "roughing it" gladly to help Uncle Sam win
his war.
----
OUR SANCTUM
----
It's an office, all right, for it has a typewriter in it. No, not the
feminine person who usually decorates offices; simply the typewriting
machine. It has a calendar too, as all well-regulated offices should
have. The only things every well-regulated office has which it lacks are
the red-and-white signs "Do It Now" and the far more cheerful wall
motto, "Out to Lunch."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account