The Red Cross does a lot of work over here. Its activities in taking care of the population of the Hun-devastated districts, in clothing and feeding the ever-increasing hordes of refugees that pour in over the Swiss frontier, in supplying French and American military hospitals and in furnishing the American forces with auxiliary clothing are well known. It is not known, however, that, somewhere in that nebulous region known as somewhere in France, the Red Cross has gone in a bit for what has generally been considered the Y. M. C. A.'s own particular game—that of running the festive army canteen.
So far as can be found out at present writing, this canteen is the only one operated by the Red Cross in France. It is run primarily for the benefit of the young American aviators whose training station is hard by. And, because aviators, breathing rarer and higher ozone than most of the rest of us, are in consequence always as hungry as kites and cormorants, this particular Red Cross canteen does a rushing business.
It is situated in a long barrack-like building of the familiar type, which is partitioned off into a social room and a combination officers' dining room and a storeroom kitchen. The kitchen—as always in anything pertaining to the army—is the all-important part. This kitchen is noteworthy for two things: It has a real stand-up-and-sit-up lunch counter, and its products are cooked and served by the deft hands of American women.
Girls Worked All Night.
No dinners are served at this canteen for the airmen. Those favors are reserved for the convalescents in the hospital nearby. But the airmen are dropping in all the time for sandwiches and hot coffee, particularly after coming down, chilled and chattering, from a flight into the upper regions of the sky. If they don't drop in to get warmed up in that fashion, they know they are in for a scolding by the head of the canteen, an Englishwoman possessed of all an American mother's motherly instincts and all of the English army's ideals of discipline.
There was one night that the little Red Cross canteen was put to a severe test. Eighteen hundred Americans arrived at the aviation camp after a thirty-hour trip punctuated by no saving hot meal. The manager-matron and her girl helpers, however, stayed up nearly all night, minting hot coffee and sandwiches so that the hardships of sleeping on the cold bare ground of the hangars was somewhat mitigated for the 1,800 unfortunates.
A Repair Shop For Clothes.
In all the canteen disburses about 2,000 sandwiches a day, with mugs of coffee to match. In addition to that, its workers, equipped with Norwegian fireless cookers, sally forth to the aviation fields in the mornings long before dawn so that the men who are going up may have something warm to eat and drink to fortify them against the cold. Not content with doing that for their charges the Red Cross people soon hope to have enough workers to take care of mending the aviators' clothes, for aviators have to wear lots of clothes, and, when they land in trees, in barbed wire, on stone walls and so forth, their clothes suffer in consequence. A doughboy, who wears one suit at a time, doesn't have a hard job keeping it in order; but an aviator with heaven knows how many layers of clothes—oh, my!
The young women who constitute the Red Cross working staff at this particular base, are, for the most part, prominent in society in the larger American cities. Voluntarily they have given up lives of luxury to tackle the job, and a hard job it is. They live in small barracks of their own, as do the ["Tommywaacs" (Women's Army Auxiliary Corps)] of the British army; but they are "roughing it" gladly to help Uncle Sam win his war.