Gwan, you say? Gwan, yourself! We've seen it; most of the chauffeurs have seen it; the Colonel and everybody else who gets about at all has seen it. That's what it is, a portable dentist's office—chair, wall-buzzer and all, with meat-axes, bung-starters, pinwheels, spittoons, gobs of cotton batting, tear gas, laughing gas, chloroform, ether, eau de vie, gold, platinum and cement to match. Everything is there but the lady assistant, and even she may be added in time.
If you wanted to be funny about the thing, you might call this motorized dentist's parlor the crowning achievement of the Red Cross; for, strange to say, it is the Red Cross, commonly supposed to be on the job of alleviating human misery, that has put the movable torture chamber on the road, to play one-tooth stands all along the countryside. But no one wants to be funny about a dentist's office that, instead of lying in wait for you, comes out on the road and chases you. It's too darn serious a matter; you might almost say that it flies in the teeth of all the conventions, Hague and otherwise.
It looks part like an ambulance, but it isn't. An ambulance carries you somewhere so that you can get some rest; a traveling tooth-yankery doesn't give you a chance to rest. It's white, is the outside of the car, just like a baby's hearse, and just about as cheerful to contemplate. On its side it says, "Dental Traveling Ambulance No. 1"—the No. 1 part gleefully promising, no doubt, that this isn't the end of them by any means, but that there may be more to follow.
Useful As a Tank?
Somebody had a nerve to invent it, all right, as if we didn't have troubles enough as it is, dodging the regimental dentist, and ducking shells, and clapping on gas masks, and all the rest. It is designed, according to one who professes to know about it, to kill the nerves of anything that gets in front of it; so we one and all move that it, instead of the tanks, be sent "over the top" and tried on the Boches. The minute they see a fully-lighted, white-painted car, with the dentist, arrayed with all his instruments of maltreatment, standing ready for action by his electric chair, those Boches will just turn around and run, and run, and run, and won't stop running till they get smack up against their own old barbed wire on the Eastern front. The crowned heads of Europe tremble before the advance of the crowned teeth of America, as you might say if you were inclined to joke about it; which we aren't.
For French Patients First
One of the Red Cross people, who was standing by ready for the command "Clear guns for action!" told THE STARS AND STRIPES that the peripatetic pain producer wasn't to be used so much for the American troops' discomfort as to fix up the cavities and what-not of the civil population of France. That was encouraging news, for while we don't bear our allies any ill-will, we think they ought to have the honor of trying out the experiment first ["Après vous, mon chere Gaston,"] as the saying goes.
After all the French people in need of dental treatment have been treated, however, the Red Cross person went on to say that it might be tried out on the Americans—yanks for the Yanks, as you might say, if you were inclined to be funny about it, as you ought not to be; but we prefer to think that the war will be over by that time. Anyhow, who ever heard of an American who would own up to having anything the matter with his jaw.
Be that as it may, when you see the cussed thing on the road, jump into the ditch and lie low. It's real, and it means business.