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
“If you want to see the next block, keep yours inside! Your head may be
hard but it’s not as hard as concrete!” Pithily it states the number of
casualties resulting from this trick, explains that the French bridges
and tunnels only allow six inches clearance above the top of the cars,
and ends;
“Your life may not be worth anything to you, but it may cost your
country $10,000.”
But the triumph of American sign art, a specimen of which hangs in the
Adjutant’s office, is the gas-defense poster. It starts off with the Gas
School slogan:
“There are two classes of men in a gas attack, the quick and the dead,”
proceeds to poetry:
“The hard-boiled guy said gas was bunk,
It couldn’t hurt you, only stunk....
The hard-boiled guy went up the line,
Fritz spilled the mustard good and fine;
And now some people wonder why
It’s flowers for the hard-boiled guy,”
and ends with the admonition that seems a little ironical to one who
must struggle to make green wood burn in a broken-down French range;
“Cook with it, don’t croak with it.”
Today we put up a sign fill of our own over the counter. For some
reason, transportation probably, there has been a most distressing lack
of supplies in this area recently. Not only are we suffering, but the
Salvation Army and even the sales commissaries have all been stricken
with the same famine. Indeed I was told of one commissary which bore the
warning; “We have salt, mustard and baking powder. That’s all.” Tired of
replying several hundred times a day; “I’m awfully sorry but we haven’t
any so-and-so,” I made a sign which was a list of all the “haven’t gots”
and tacked it up over the counter. Thinking to be funny I included
strawberry ice-cream among the rest, to be promptly punished by an
innocent-eyed youth who inquired hopefully; “What kind of ice-cream
_have_ you got?”
Another boy read through the list once, twice, then looked up at the
Infant disgustedly.
“Why don’t you put ‘Hell!’ at the bottom of it?” he queried.
“’Pears to me it would be easier to make a list of the things you _have_
got,” suggested another.
A little while longer and if no help comes, we shall be doing this. I
can see that sign in my mind’s eye now. It will read something like
this:
We have
chewing tobacco
indelible pencils
and
shaving brushes
Abainville, September 2.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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