Others, the telegraphists and telephonists are in the Signalling Corps
and these are the only ones who wear Army badges. They work under the
Officers Commanding Signals and are so successful that the officers
want thousands more.
Another small group are called the "Hush Waacs." There are only
about a dozen of them and they have come from the Censor's Office and
between them have a thorough knowledge of all modern languages. They
are decoding signalled and written messages, script of every kind.
Numbers more are motor car and transport drivers working with A.S.C.
An intensely interesting piece of work at the front in which the Waacs
now are, and in which French women have worked for a very long time,
and are still working in large numbers, is the great "Salvage" work of
the Army. In the Salvage centre at one ordnance base 30,000 boots are
repaired in a week. They are divided into three classes--those that
can be used again by the men at the front--those for men on the lines
of communication--those for prisoners and coloured labour, and uppers
that are quite useless are cut up into laces. They salve old helmets,
old web and leather equipments, haversacks, rifles, horse shoes,
spurs, and every conceivable kind of battlefield debris.
The work of repair and of renewal of clothing, which goes over to
England to be dealt with, is a wonder of economy.
The women are helping in postal work and we handle about three million
letters and packets a day in France for our Army there.
One other piece of work that falls to trained women gardeners in the
Corps, is the care of the graves in France. There are so many graves
in little clusters, lonely by the roadside, and in great cemeteries.
They mark them clearly and they make them more beautiful with flowers.
No work they have come to do, is done more faithfully than this act of
reverence to our heroic and honoured dead.
The Y.W.C.A.'s Blue Triangle is going to be the same symbol for the
Waacs as the Red Triangle for the Soldiers. They are building huts
everywhere in France and in England, and the girls like them as much
as the men do.
In these recreation huts the girls enjoy themselves and there are
evenings when the soldier friends come in, too, and have a good time
with them, for Waacs and the soldiers know each other and meet at all
the Bases and Camps.
They dance and play games, and act, or sing, or come and talk, and one
visitor tells us of seeing a girl doing machining at the end of a hut
with one soldier turning the handle for her and another helping.
One evening at a dance some gallant Australian N.C.O.'s arrived
carrying two enormous pans of a famous salad, that was their
specialty, as their contribution to the provisions. So life in the
Waacs is not all work--there is play, too, wisely. Every camp has a
trained V.A.D. worker to look after the girls in case of sickness.
If the case is bad they are sent over to Endell Street Hospital in
London.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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