"'Stunt Night,' advertised in Base 69 Hut for March 13, brought a lot of inquiries," says Toot Sweet, in its issue dated April 1, 1919. "'Whadaye mean—stunts?' Probably the announcement of pies and doughnuts for prizes was responsible for the crowd that appeared that evening when a large part of the floor space was cleared and a couple of Red Cross hut workers started the stunts. The first stunt—with a large slice of apple pie as prizes—was to sit upon a piece of iron pipe, diameter six inches, place the heel of one shoe on the toe of another, and while thus insecurely balanced, light in one hand from a lighted candle in the other a cigarette. Shrieks and howls from the delighted mob who began betting on results encouraged a number of aspirants and the pie was finally won. Stunt after stunt followed in quick succession, all sorts of queer and absurd contortions varying from picking up folded newspaper from the floor with your teeth while holding one foot in the air with one hand to a 'puttee race,' when the contestants raced from one end of the hall, took off their puttees, and then put them on again, then raced back, with various obstacles in the way. Finally the boys began challenging each other to their favorite stunts, so that Private California might have been showing Private North Carolina a pet trick, while Sergeant Oklahoma and Corporal Louisiana gravely discussed the merits of their ideas on stunts. The winning team was presented with a large, juicy apple pie, vamped from the mess sergeant by a Red Cross girl.
"'Amateur night' was announced for the same hut two nights later by a stunning poster done in colors by one of the 309th Engineers. A box of homemade fudge was the prize for the best act. Seven of the best vaudeville acts ever seen in the huts appeared. The sergeant major of Base Hospital Number 69 was the master of ceremonies. A 'dummy' act, a 'wop mechanic' in song and monologue, a ballad singer, a 'song and minstrel man,' a mandolin and guitar player, who gave remarkable imitations of Hawaiian instruments, a 'tramp monologuist,' and a clog dancer composed the bill. Harry Henly, the 'song and minstrel man,' won the box of fudge which was displayed in all its glory and pink ribbons during the contest."
Sometimes there was not quite so much fun in the situation. The girls who ran the Red Cross hut in the tuberculosis hospital of the Savenay group, almost directly across the highroad from Number 69, had a far weightier problem upon their shoulders. To amuse there, was a vastly more difficult task. For they knew—as most of its patients knew—that the man who entered the portals of that particular hospital was foredoomed. If he had a fighting chance of conquering the "T. B." he was packed into the hospital ward of a transport and rushed home. If he did not have that fighting chance—well, why waste precious transport space? To Savenay with him. And to Savenay he went to spend his days—and end them—in a cheery, camplike place where there were croquet and less strenuous games and broad piazzas that looked down across the valley toward the embouchure of the Loire, while Red Cross girls came and went and did their womanly best to comfort and amuse a fellow—and make him forget; forget the back door of the little hospital where, night after night, four or five fellows went out—in pine boxes, never to return, and the rows of wooden crosses down in the American cemetery at the foot of the hill steadily grew.
Turn back with me, if you will, inland from Savenay to the curved streets of Vichy—little Vichy situated in the very foothills of the high Alps. It is January now, not April. We have turned backward in full earnest, and are breathing the air of those hard weeks and months that followed immediately upon the signing of the armistice.
Vichy, in its very compactness, with the flat yellows of its curious old buildings and its equally curious modern hotels, with the fifteenth-century tower in the background and the quiet River Allier slipping by, has the fascinating unreality of a stage setting—one of those marvelous effects with which the genius of a Belasco or a Joseph Urban from time to time delights in dazzling us. In spring or in summer we might find it prepared for carnival—with green-painted chairs and tables underneath the still greener foliage of its small park. But this is January and the park is deeply blanketed in snow. In such a serene midwinter setting it seems far more ready for silent drama than for the blare of carnival—the figures in olive drab are indeed quite the figures of pantomime—brown against the whiteness of the snow. The only touches of color in the picture—tiny splotches of green or blue or purple or yellow—are supplied by the tiny cloth bags that the men carry with them. They are preparing to entrain—the first step of many on the way back to the homeland—and the vari-colored bags, each marked with a crimson cross, are the comfort kits they genuinely cherish.
Before war was come upon France, Vichy was a resort to be reckoned with in the comings and goings of her elect. It was a watering place—and much more besides. There men and women ate as well as drank, bands played, beauties intrigued, wheels, flat-set, spun merrily, and entire fortunes were flicked away at the gaming tables; but war changed these things—as many, many others. It took the viciousness out of Vichy and brought back to it all of the gentleness which it must have possessed in the beginning. The small city, where formerly the ill and the bored made pilgrimages in search of health (health bubbling up to the lips in the faint concealments of a glass of sparkling water), became a city of wounded; all too often a city of death.
The French Army moved in; and, commandeering hotel after hotel, transformed them into its hospitals. On its heels came the American Army; it alone took more than eighty hotels for its own hospital purposes. That was the signal that our Red Cross would be needed, and without further urge it moved in. Wherefore the comfort bags in the hands of the doughboys as they moved across the park toward their waiting trains.
If memories were half as tangible things as war "souvenirs," those tiny bags of the crimson cross would have held other things than soap and razor blades and tooth paste and playing cards and tobacco and the like. They would have held definite memories of Vichy and all that it had meant to the wounded men of our army. Some of them would have carried the pictures of lights shining out through opened doors into the darkness of the night and litters coming in through those opened doors—litters bearing American men, when they were not American boys—men clad only in hospital robes, but whose first bandages were drenched with blood and spattered with the mud of No Man's Land. There would have been a multiplicity of pictures of this sort, for Vichy in the days of actual fighting never was an idle place. There were times there when, within a cycle of twenty-four hours, as many as six thousand men would be sent away from it—to make room for an equal number of incoming freshly wounded soldiers. In the early days of November that many came to it direct from the dressing stations, and the problem of our Red Cross there became a little bit more complex.