The Sword of Deborah: First-hand impressions of the British Women's Army in FranceJesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
History
The Sword of Deborah: First-hand impressions of the British Women's Army in France
Jesse, F. Tennyson (Fryniwyd Tennyson)
World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
This other house was as great a contrast to the bare little châlets as
it well could be. It also was at a Plage, it too had been built for
pleasure, but for pleasure _de luxe_, not of simple bourgeois families.
The wide hall with its polished floor, its great carved mantels, its
dining-room with gleaming woods and glossy table and sparkling glass,
its big lounge with tall windows, where the girls dance and play the
piano--all was as different from the bleached scrubbed wood of the
châlets as it well could be. Yet the spirit informing the whole was the
same, the bedrooms as austere in essence even if they boasted carved
marble-topped chests, and even here the Army had found things to
improve, such as the making of paths at the back of the house of round
tins sunk in the earth, and steps of tin biscuit boxes, ingenious
arrangements to save getting your feet wet on a muddy day as you go in
and out on the endless errands of domesticity. And, as I sat at lunch in
the gleaming dining-room, where the wood fire burned on the wide stone
hearth, I heard the girls practising for a musical play they were
shortly to produce.
* * * * *
A camp is, of course, a camp, but there is a certain satisfaction in
seeing how well even a necessary evil can be done. Where all was
excellent, the chief thing that really thrilled me was the bath-rooms.
The Waacs' bath-rooms are the envy and despair of the Army, who rage
vainly in small canvas tubs. The Engineers are by way of spoiling the
Waacs whenever possible, and bath-rooms, electric bells, electric light
and fancy paths of tin, spring up before them. There are in every Waac
camp rows of bath-rooms containing each its full-length bath, and
besides that, each girl has her own private wash-place, in a cubicle for
the purpose. For, as the Chief Controller said to me, "After all, it
does not matter the girls having to sleep together in dormitories if
each has absolute privacy for washing, that is so much more important."
To which it is quite possible to retort that there are those of us who
would not mind bathing in front of the whole world if only we are
allowed to sleep by ourselves. But that is just a different point of
view, and as a matter of fact, for the class from which the greater part
of the Waacs are drawn, privacy in ablutions ranks as a greater thing
than privacy in slumber, so the psychological instinct which planned the
camps is justified.
Besides the bath-rooms and the ablution cubicles, there is in every camp
one or more drying-rooms, which are always heated, and where the wet
clothes of the girls, who of course have to be out in all weathers, are
hung to dry. Laundry, kitchens, recreation rooms, mess-rooms, long
Nissen huts for sleeping, I went the round of them all, and, while
genuinely admiring them, admired still more those who lived in them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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