On my way up the road I passed an Italian who seemed so pleased with his new footwear that he just couldn’t help exhibiting them to me. “Look,” he said, waving his huge foot, shod with the trench shoes, about promiscuously, “look ad da shoos. I like t’ geev da Kais a keek in da face wid-a dose shoos. Bet he no smile some more dan.” Then he added, by way of showing his qualifications to muss up the Kaiser, “I belonga to ah wreckin’ crew sometimes when I don’t come down here.”
Tuesday:
SWEAR; If you can’t think of anything else to say, but do it softly—very, very softly, so no one else but yourself will hear you.
Thus reads the sign that hangs over the door of the Y. M. C. A. shack, at the end of our camp street. That’s what I call social work humanized. The Y. M. C. A. here is the most human institution in this big, rawly human community. It is the thing that puts the soul in soldier as one chap expresses it. And because it is that way, and because the men feel at home and have a real time, and can smoke and put their feet on the table, they think the red triangle is the best little symbol about the big camp. The “’Sociation” is making thousands of friends every day among these strapping big, two-fisted fellows who really never knew what the organization was. It’s bully. We all wander over there sometime during every evening, if it’s only to listen to a new record on the phonograph.
Our $10,000 a year song writer
The shacks (I don’t know how many there are, but there must be at least a dozen of them) are the centres of amusement and entertainment for us all. And we have some corking concerts and other forms of entertainments there. I don’t think I’ll ever forget our $10,000 a year song writer as he appeared last night, for instance, standing on top of the piano, his hair all mussed up and his army shirt opened at the throat, singing a solo through a megaphone. And it was some solo! About fifteen hundred huskies in khaki stood around and listened to him and joined in on the choruses.
Then they have lectures: “Ten Years as a Lumber Jack,” “Farthest North,” by a certain well-known explorer; “My First Year of the Big War,” and similar subjects appear on the bulletin boards every other night. Nothing of the Sunday School variety about that sort of thing.
And our prize fights!