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.