These men were all from the cotton fields of Georgia and Alabama and the levees of the lower Mississippi. They were magnificent physical specimens, but fully seventy-five per cent. were illiterate. Some officers would have looked upon them as animals only fit to work. But this officer was a real person, and to him each stevedore was an individual.
He made out of scanty materials a comfortable, sanitary, up-to-date camp for his regiment. He had a bath house and a swimming pool, a laundry, a big, cool, screened kitchen, a club for officers and a sitting-room for the men. He had a cooking squad that was the envy of the neighborhood and meals that were famous for miles around.
He told me how he did it. He said that he felt sure that among all those negroes there must be a lot of individual talent, and he went to work to find it. He found one man who was a soup and meat cook when he was not a cotton picker, and this man was made soup and meat cook. He found another cook to whom he entrusted the vegetables. Another man was taught in the town to cook desserts and pastry.
When spring came this resourceful young lieutenant planted a garden, detaching certain men from their stevedoring long enough to spade, cultivate and plant. He had one of the happiest, healthiest, most efficient working forces I saw in France. Why? Because he possessed many of the housekeeping instincts of a woman.
Not all, perhaps not many, officers in our army have housekeeping instincts, nor have they time to do what this young Yale man did. The housekeeping work of the army ought to a very great extent be in the hands of women. It is the work they know how to do. It is important, and women would be as proud to succeed in it as the soldiers are to win victories.
I would not like to be interpreted as being against all small organizations for war work. Many of the existing ones are doing good work. I know that all women can not leave their homes for regular work in any organization. But unless some miracle ends this war within a year, I hope to see a great army of American women enlisted like soldiers, for the duration of hostilities uniformed and paid workers behind the battle line here and in France, Italy, and wherever else the war calls for workers.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE DARK OCEAN LANES
In the quiet little hotel which is my home when I am on this side of the Atlantic, there have been staying until recently a group of army nurses. There were about one hundred and thirty of these nurses, fine, strong, skilled women, and they were in New York on their way to France.
They didn’t know where they were to be stationed. They were a California nursing unit and their goal was a base hospital—but in what part of France the base hospital was to be located, they knew no more than I did.
All they knew was that they were anxious to be off. They were as eager to get to work in that hospital as our soldiers are to get to the front. They fretted at the delay, and they asked me a thousand questions about France, about the medical service corps, about the hospitals. Soon after their arrival at the Atlantic coast the German submarines made their sudden, savage attacks on American shipping. American waters were reported full of these vipers of the sea.