Travel Regulations.
Before going on leave, a man must register his address, in his own handwriting. He must satisfy his company or detachment commander that he is neat and tidy in appearance. He must prove to that officer's satisfaction that he has the required leave ticket, and so forth, and [sufficient funds for the trip.]
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OFF FOR THE TRENCHES.
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When a certain regiment of American doughboys departed from its billets in a little town back of the front and marched away to our trenches in Lorraine, this poem was found tacked up on a billet door:—
By the rifle on my back,
By my old and well-worn pack,
By the bayonets we sharpened in the billets down below,
When we're holding to a sector,
By the howling, jumping hector,
Colonel, we'll be Gott-Strafed if the Blank-teenth lets it go.
And the Boches big and small,
Runty ones and Boches tall,
Won't keep your boys a-squatting in the ditches very long;
For we'll soon be busting through, sir,
God help Fritzie when we do, sir—
Let's get going, Colonel Blank, because we're feeling mighty strong.
TOOTH YANKING CAR
IS TOURING FRANCE
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Red Cross Dentist's Office
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Lacks Nothing but the
Lady Assistant
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The latest American atrocity—a dentist's office on wheels!
Gwan, you say? Gwan, yourself! We've seen it; most of the chauffeurs have seen it; the Colonel and everybody else who gets about at all has seen it. That's what it is, a portable dentist's office—chair, wall-buzzer and all, with meat-axes, bung-starters, pinwheels, spittoons, gobs of cotton batting, tear gas, laughing gas, chloroform, ether, eau de vie, gold, platinum and cement to match. Everything is there but the lady assistant, and even she may be added in time.
If you wanted to be funny about the thing, you might call this motorized dentist's parlor the crowning achievement of the Red Cross; for, strange to say, it is the Red Cross, commonly supposed to be on the job of alleviating human misery, that has put the movable torture chamber on the road, to play one-tooth stands all along the countryside. But no one wants to be funny about a dentist's office that, instead of lying in wait for you, comes out on the road and chases you. It's too darn serious a matter; you might almost say that it flies in the teeth of all the conventions, Hague and otherwise.
It looks part like an ambulance, but it isn't. An ambulance carries you somewhere so that you can get some rest; a traveling tooth-yankery doesn't give you a chance to rest. It's white, is the outside of the car, just like a baby's hearse, and just about as cheerful to contemplate. On its side it says, "Dental Traveling Ambulance No. 1"—the No. 1 part gleefully promising, no doubt, that this isn't the end of them by any means, but that there may be more to follow.