According to directions, I climbed the hill by my billet, went past the athletic field, past the warehouse and out along the edge of the rolling open upland. About half a mile out of town I came to a group of seven French barracks, covered with black tar paper, built at the edge of the railway cut. This was the Artillery School. I crossed the field, entered the nearest barracks which bore a Y. sign at one end, and found myself in a Greenwich Village Tea House. I stood and stared. Some modern-school interior decorator had been at work. The place was a riot of red, yellow, salmon-color and black, worked out from a nasturtium motif. In the wall panels were paintings, some conventionalized fruits and flowers, evidently done by the decorator; others, landscapes, Japanese scenes and some rather awful Indians just as evidently executed by the boys. The whole effect to be sure was a bit sketchy and in spots frankly unfinished, and yet to one used to such simplicity in the huts as I, the ensemble was startling. Back of the black and orange partition which screens the canteen and the kitchen from the hut proper, I found the staff, secretary and canteen worker. The lady whom I am to replace, it appears, belongs in reality to the Motor Transport Section. She turned canteen worker to help out in a pinch, and now is anxious to return again.
When dinnertime came the Motor Transport girl told me that we had been invited to dine at the camp. We went over to the mess-hall. “Let’s help feed the chow-line for a lark!” said the M. T. girl. So we stood behind the serving-bench and ladled out big spoonfuls of mashed potato and gravy. This amused the boys immensely; and as they passed they would sing out:
“When did they put you on K. P?”
“What have you done to deserve this?”
The kitchen was white-washed and specklessly clean, the earth floor was covered with cinders. These cinders which are in use for floors and walks in all the camps about, come, I am told, from a great heap down by the river which marks the site of one of Napoleon’s cannon foundries.
“Why are the boxers in a company always found on the kitchen force?” I asked one of the cooks.
“That’s so they can handle the boys when they come back for seconds.”
As soon as the chow-line had been fed, the M. T. girl and I had ours with the Top Sergeant. After dinner the Top Sergeant, who had formerly been mess sergeant, was moved to unburden his soul as to the sorrows of a mess sergeant.
“When I was mess sergeant,” he reminisced, “I sure got to know the way to a man’s heart all right. Why, the days when I gave them a good dinner there wasn’t a man in camp who wouldn’t positively beam at me; but if something had gone wrong and the chow wasn’t up to scratch, half the fellers in the company wouldn’t speak to me the rest of the day.”
Then he grinned. “I wouldn’t want Mother to know the way I used to get stuff for the boys last winter.”