First you take a basin, Place it on the stove, Wait about an hour or so, Shoo away the drove Of your jeering billet mates Betting you won"t dare; Then you spread a slicker On the floor with care.
Next you doff your O. D., And your undershirt.
Wrap a towel "round your waist, Wrestle with the dirt; Do not get the sponge too wet-- Little drops will trickle Down a soldier"s trouser legs-- Golly! How they tickle!
Then you clothe yourself again-- That is, to the belt; Strip off boots and putts and trou, Socks--right to the pelt; Send the gooseflesh quivering Up and down your limbs-- Gosh! You aren"t in quite the mood For singing gospel hymns.
Then you wash, and wash and wash, Dry yourself once more, Put on all your clothes again, Go to bed and snore, Wake up at the bugle"s call With a cold, and sore Truly, baths in France are--well, What Sherman said of war!
FOOLING THE FLEA.
You"ll march in the flea parade and be glad of the chance after you"ve lived a week in an old French sheep shed.
"Say, I"ll be glad to get back to the mosquitoes," said a young hand-grenadier from Dallas, Tex., as he dumped his "other clothes" in the flea-soup cauldron. "These babies chew you to death day and night. A mosquito"s a night-rider only."
The line forms on the right of the cook-shack. The cooks build big fires out in the open and set out great kettles of water. When the water begins to boil the parade begins, each man dumping in his flea-infested clothing--uniform, socks, underwear, wristlets and blankets. The cooks keep the fires stoked up with wood and the garments boil for a solid hour.
Then the men form another line and collect their stuff. They wring out the clothes the best they can and then sit down to "pick "em off."
"They"re fast little devils most usually," said the Dallas man, "but the sudden shock from warm water to cold air makes them stiff, and you can catch "em easy."
The A. E. F."s living in sheep barns simply can"t keep clear of the things. They"re in the rafters, in the hay, and in the planks. Weekly boiling of clothing only gives a short relief.
Really they aren"t fleas at all, but a form of sheep tick. But they don"t distinguish between sheep and American soldiers.
"b.u.t.tON, b.u.t.tON."
The Army gets some of its best ideas about equipment from the soldiers who have to use it.
Here"s an idea, making for efficiency and convenience, which comes from an Omaha boy in the ranks. He says:
"Why don"t they put bachelor b.u.t.tons on our uniforms and overcoats? I"ve got a "housewife" in my kit, but I"m working from 6.15 in the morning until 5 o"clock at night, and what little leisure I get I"d like to spend in the Y.M.C.A. playing the phonograph or shooting pool.
"And anyway, if I"ve got to do my sewing in the barn I live in, I might as well not try at all. My fingers are so numb the minute I take off my mitts that I couldn"t thread a needle."
Not only that, said the Omaha soldier, but you usually find you haven"t any thread in your "housewife."
There seems to be something in favor of bachelor b.u.t.tons, especially since the people who sew the b.u.t.tons on new uniforms and coats always do a poor job.
YES, HOW DO THEY?
Private Pat: "Mike, what th" h.e.l.l kind of fish be them ye"re eatin"?"
Corporal Mike: "Hush, Pat; don"t be disthplayin" yer ignorance--the ould Frinch la-ady might hear yeze! Thim"s sairdeens!"
Pat: "Sairdeens, is ut? They"re a small fish, ain"t they? An" where, pray tell, do they grow?"
Mike: "Pat, I"m asthounded at yer ignorance of gogerfy! Thim little fish grow in the Atla-antic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Injun Ocean, the Airctic Ocean, an"--oh, in all them oceans. An" the big fish, such as the whale, the halleybut, the shairk, an" all o" thim, they live off"n eatin" th" sairdeens!"
Pat: "They do, do they Mike? Thin phwaht I"d like to know is how th"
h.e.l.l do they iver open the box?"
SUPPLIES FIRST AID TO CHILLY AIRMEN
Red Cross Canteen Serves 2000 Sandwiches and Mugs of Coffee Daily.
The Red Cross does a lot of work over here. Its activities in taking care of the population of the Hun-devastated districts, in clothing and feeding the ever-increasing hordes of refugees that pour in over the Swiss frontier, in supplying French and American military hospitals and in furnishing the American forces with auxiliary clothing are well known. It is not known, however, that, somewhere in that nebulous region known as somewhere in France, the Red Cross has gone in a bit for what has generally been considered the Y. M. C. A."s own particular game--that of running the festive army canteen.
So far as can be found out at present writing, this canteen is the only one operated by the Red Cross in France. It is run primarily for the benefit of the young American aviators whose training station is hard by. And, because aviators, breathing rarer and higher ozone than most of the rest of us, are in consequence always as hungry as kites and cormorants, this particular Red Cross canteen does a rushing business.
It is situated in a long barrack-like building of the familiar type, which is part.i.tioned off into a social room and a combination officers"
dining room and a storeroom kitchen. The kitchen--as always in anything pertaining to the army--is the all-important part. This kitchen is noteworthy for two things: It has a real stand-up-and-sit-up lunch counter, and its products are cooked and served by the deft hands of American women.
Girls Worked All Night.
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 const.i.tute 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