Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight

by Mathew Joseph Holt

The office building was arranged much on the order of a Chinese restaurant; in that as you journeyed skyward conditions improved. The ground floor was the worst, but as the elevator ascended you met with more courtesy and consideration. By the time you passed the fourth floor the man behind the desk had time to answer a relevant question, as he was not riled by his own incompetency.

After they had been in New York a day or two they learned that their passports had not been issued and therefore there was no immediate prospect for sailing. They were then ordered to a training conference for ten days, which many attended for months, retaining their rooms and eating at an expensive hotel at the expense of Mrs. O'Flannagan.

At the conference, with the exception of lessons in the language of the country where they were to be located and the physical training given them, to many the time seemed wasted. They were subjected to daily lectures on morals and patriotism by professors who talked to them as to a group of fourth-grade boys, and sought to impress upon them that it would be unbecoming in a Y secretary to flirt with the girls of the street of Paris and London, or to lie around drunk in a front-line trench. But the professors could not help it; they were fifty and their habits were formed. They had been talking to boys from eight to sixteen years old for thirty years. They could not understand that a lawyer or dentist or preacher past forty might be a little set in his ways and might know almost half as much about the girls of the street and a plain drunk as a Boston college professor. The pupil might even have had the experience.

Possibly some of the men before sailing during their hundred nights on Broadway received a few instructions first-hand about the girls of the street and the evils of intemperance, which in a small measure prepared their innocent souls for the shock of a short sojourn in Paris. Certainly that experience with what the professors had told them was sufficient to keep them from unconsciously being led astray, though I have been told that some of them offered the new and heretofore unheard-of excuse: "She did tempt me and I did eat."

Then they were further trained to march and to sing; since when they landed upon foreign shores they undoubtedly would spend most of their time marching in bands about the streets of London and Paris and Rome and possibly in due course Berlin, singing: "The Yanks are Coming" and "America Done It," because the French, Italians and Germans know little or nothing about music, and any American Y man, especially a blacksmith from Shoulder Blade, Kentucky, could give them a few lessons. And the British—why, they could do nothing, or would do nothing, till they got there. They were drilled for a month or more in squads right and squads left and taught by music masters to sing: "Here We Are, Hear the Eagle Scream."

The last time they marched was when they marched off the boat on the other shore; after that when they walked they hoofed it. And the last time they sang was just before they heard the Italians sing. The first performance by comparison with the second sounded as a tom-tom concert in competition with the celestial choir. Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle; the most absurd performance of the Y was exporting American singers to entertain the Italian army.

Have you thought about it? Since Woodrow Wilson has been President, America has been afflicted with what might be called the Professors' Age. The professors in the Y certainly had the pull. If a kitchen was opened in Flanders, a professor of chemistry was the director in charge; a chef was no better than a kitchen scullion. If a tooth was to be pulled, a professor of anatomy performed the operation because he knew the root from the crown, while a dentist handled freight in a warehouse. A professor of mathematics was put in charge of motor vehicles, while a machinist arranged the programme for a vocal concert. A professor of languages would be made chief accountant, while an expert accountant was put in charge of a moving-picture machine. Professor Brown was given charge in France; Professor Greene in England, and Professor Black in Italy; and their regional directors were professor this and that; a professor of penmanship in Rome, a professor of biology in Genoa, a professor of languages in Brescia, and a professor of something else in Naples, Milan, Venice, Trieste and Palermo. There was as much of school-teacher dictatorship in the foreign Y as Secretary Lansing found at the head of the State Department. When a doughboy referred to the Y as "the damn Y," it is possible he recognized the secretary in charge as his former professor of mathematics or languages.

But slowly as these professors returned to America order came out of chaos; the Y adjusted itself and became an efficient machine. We can probably look upon it as a permanent organization in foreign lands by the time these gifted and well-trained executives, these learned expatriates, have all been called home.

Because of mismanagement and disorganization in the beginning, many a Y man who had left home with the best intentions, became disappointed and disgusted and so unfit for service.

He began by traveling from pillar to post and ended by seeing France and Italy at Mrs. O'Flannagan's expense. He returned home saying unkind things of the Y. Those who saw him traveling about, usually in an expensive car, burning gasoline which cost more than a dollar a gallon or traveling free on overcrowded trains, needed to transport troops or civilians on imperative business, said unkind things of the Y.