WHY COOKS WEAR IRON CROSSES
“There isn’t anything heroic about cooks,” wrote Herbert Corey in the New York Globe, “and when things go wrong one either apprehends a cook as chasing a waiter with a bread-knife or giving way to tears.” Yet the German army contains many a cook whose expansive apron is decorated with the Iron Cross. “And the Iron Cross,” Mr. Corey reminds us, “is conferred for one thing only—for 100 per cent courage.”
“‘They’ve earned it,’ said the man who had seen them. ‘They are the bravest men in the Kaiser’s four millions. I’ve seen generals salute greasy, paunchy, sour-looking army cooks.’
“The cook’s job is to feed the men of his company. Each German company is followed, or preceded, by a field-kitchen on wheels. Sometimes the fires are kept going while the device trundles along. The cook stands on the foot-board and thumps his bread. He is always the first man up in the morning and the last to sleep at night.
“When that company goes into the trenches the cook stays behind. There is no place for a field-kitchen in a four-foot trench. But these men in the trench must be fed. The Teuton insists that all soldiers must be fed—but especially the men in the trench. The others may go hungry, but these must have tight belts. Upon their staying power may depend the safety of an army.
“So, as the company can not go to the cook, the cook goes to the company. When meal-hour comes he puts a yoke on his shoulders and a cook’s cap on his head and, warning the second cook as to what will happen if he lets the fires go out, puts a bucketful of hot veal stew on either end of the yoke and goes to his men. Maybe the trench is under fire. No matter. His men are in that trench and must be fed.
“Sometimes the second cook gets his step right here. Sometimes the apprentice cook—the dish-washer—is summoned to pick up the cook’s yoke and refill the spilled buckets and tramp steadily forward to the line. Sometimes the supply of assistant cooks, even, runs short. But the men in the trenches always get their food.
“‘That’s why so many cooks in the German Army have Iron Crosses dangling from their breasts,’ said the man who knows. ‘No braver men ever lived. The man in the trench can duck his head and light his pipe and be relatively safe. No fat cook yoked to two buckets of veal stew ever can be safe as he marches down the trench.’”