The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen GirlMorse, Katharine Duncan
History
The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl
Morse, Katharine Duncan
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
The main part of the hut, the big auditorium, is done in creamy yellow
and brown with rafters of bright blue, the windows hung with curtains of
sumptuous orange chintz. The writing-room is blue and yellow too, with
green and yellow curtains on which, in a bower of branches, black-birds
perch; runners of the same material lie across the writing tables, the
practical advantage of this pattern being that whenever anyone spills a
bottle of ink on a runner, it merely gives the effect of one more
black-bird. In each window of the writing-room is a little pot with a
scarlet geranium, while the walls of both writing-room and auditorium
are bright with beautiful French posters.
But the best of all the hut, to my mind at least, is the Tea
Room,—so-called until we think of something better to name it,—for the
Tea Room was my own particular pet scheme. According to the plans, the
ell behind the canteen counter was cut up into half a dozen little
rooms. By eliminating part of the central hall, the “mess-room” and the
“ladies’ room” and moving the office out to an unused corner by the
movie machine booth, we got space for a fair-sized room connected by a
serving-window with the kitchen. Our matched lumber having run short we
used rough lumber and covered it with burlap; each strip was a different
weave and texture, to be sure, but all the same it was burlap! The
woodwork and little tables we painted a bright green, hung vivid green
curtains at the windows, then, taking the covers of chewing tobacco
boxes, stained these green too, pasted in the centre of each a bright
little water-color reproduction cut from an English art magazine, tacked
them up on the walls, and _voilà!_ as pretty a little room as could be
found short of Paris!
In the Tea Room we serve pink lemonade, hot chocolate, jam sandwiches,
cookies and canned fruit. The boys are living on a diet of what they
call “goat’s meat” at present;—whenever it is time for a chow line to
form you can hear a chorus of bleats and baas half across the camp,—and
so sick of this have they become that many will sup off chocolate and
sandwiches in the Tea Room by preference. Yesterday I took a chance and
tried making a ten gallon boiler full of raspberry tapioca pudding,
using the bottled fruit juice. At first the boys were inclined to be
cautious.
“What do you call that?”
“How would raspberry slum do?”
“Well, I’ll try anything once!”
But after the first taste it went all too fast.
“Say, are there any seconds on this?”
“Lady,” said one lad solemnly to me, “with pudding like that I could
stay four years more in the army.”
One of the divisions from the lines arrived in this area, a few days
ago, for a short period of rest. A number of the men are encamped up on
the hill near the old Artillery School and they come straying down to
our hut. Poor lads, it is pitiful to see how wonderful it seems to them
to be in a place that is clean and pretty.
“This looks like a bit of heaven to me,” declared one boy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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