A soldier's mother in France

The Y. M. C. A. has started a new drive both for money and for workers. John R. Mott, general secretary of the National War Work Council of the Association, has announced that they must recruit four thousand new workers for France and Italy, and of course they must have money to support the work already going and that to be started soon.

The exact sum has not yet been announced, but whatever it is the people of this country will give it. To give to the Y. M. C. A. is to contribute directly to the comfort, happiness, and, to a very great extent, the safety of our own enlisted men in France. I have been in dozens of Y. M. C. A. huts and canteens, and I say emphatically that our army could hardly maintain its highest efficiency without these places. They are the nearest substitutes for homes that were ever devised for any army.

When troops are quartered in an interesting old French city, as some of our troops are, there are many things in which the soldier off duty can interest himself. But the vast majority of American soldiers are not quartered in cities or even in towns. They are in camps differing very little from the training camps at home. Or else they are billeted in villages. In that case they sleep in barns or in peasant cottages. When they are off duty there is not a blessed thing for them to do except walk up and down the muddy streets and talk.

Those French villages of the north, especially in winter, are picturesque in the extreme when viewed from a motor-car, but as a place of residence they leave much to be desired. A stranger might have some difficulty in distinguishing between the houses and the barns, the huge manure heaps, which are the chief wealth of the owners, being about equally distributed before all the buildings. I have seen scores of these little hamlets, with their signs on each door, giving the number of officers, men or horses billeted within, and I have sometimes wondered by what process the authorities decided which buildings were for hommes and which for chevaux. Those are the first two French words our soldiers learn over there.

But wherever our soldiers are quartered, they must have a Y. M. C. A. hut. They can not get along without it. It serves as a club, a night school, a shop, a library, a theater, lecture room, movie, gymnasium, writing-room. It is a great place in which to get acquainted with French people, for next to the Red Cross the Y. M. C. A. is the most admired of all American institutions with which the French have come in contact.

They pronounce it “Egrec, Em, Say, Ah,” and most of them have not the slightest idea of what the letters mean, but they highly approve of the thing itself. In the towns and cities they flock to the Y. M. C. A. entertainments, especially the military band concerts. There is very little music in France just now, aside from our bands.

The Y. M. C. A. hut and canteen does its greatest work in the isolated camps where the soldiers are cut off from all other recreation. I remember a hut in one of our largest aviation camps, miles away from any town or village. Life in an aviation camp is something like working in a planing mill. The sound of hundreds of aeroplane motors goes on in a ceaseless clatter for hours every day. There is always a strong wind blowing because aviation camps are located on the biggest, emptiest treeless plains that can be found.

The particular aviation camp of which I write was on the widest, flattest plain in France, I should think. There were not nearly enough machines there when I visited it in early April, and the men had very little to do. Hundreds of our flyers in France have never had a chance to do any flying at all, and in this camp, as they said, “If a fellow got a hop once a week he was lucky.”

What those boys would have done without their Y. M. C. A. hut I can not imagine. The secretary had been a professor of mathematics in a college somewhere. He was a middle aged, intellectual, rather shy man, and at first I wondered why he had been appointed to such a post. But when I saw him in a crowd of soldiers I no longer wondered. He was easy, genial, sympathetic, tactful, what the politicians call a perfect mixer. When he stood up to introduce the speaker of the evening the boys stamped their feet and whistled through their fingers like kids.

“How will you ever go back to teaching mathematics after this?” I asked him.

“I never will go back,” he replied. “I’m going to be human for the rest of my life.”

He was being human in that camp so successfully that he almost succeeded in offsetting the lack of planes. At least, he did wonders in keeping alive the spirit of courage and hopefulness among the men.

A dozen miles or so from a large southern seaport where many thousands of our men are at work I visited another Y. M. C. A. place, one which has become the social center of an entire French town. In the big town there is a flourishing Y. M. C. A., and when the building camps began to string along the river harbor for miles the secretary in charge saw that extension of the work would have to be made.

He picked from his staff a remarkable young Vassar girl who speaks good French and asked her if she would go down to a certain small town, the central point of half a dozen camps, and establish a Y. M. C. A. headquarters. She went. She found on the main street, which is also the river front, an old inn where business was getting duller every day, and she rented it. There was no electric light in the house, and the plumbing was early Victorian.

Within a week the house was scrubbed from top to bottom and freshly papered and painted. Within a few more weeks it was wired for electric lights, it had shower baths for soldiers and the only bathroom in the entire town. There was a canteen where six hundred men a day could get a sit-down meal of very good food and a counter where many more could buy chocolates and cigarettes. There was a writing- and reading-room, a room where French lessons were furnished, another where boxing and wrestling matches could be held. There was a piano and a phonograph, and a little way down the street there was a large hall for entertainments.

By this time Miss Christy had asked for and was given an assistant, another live wire of a young woman. They soon had three or four French women for cooks and assistants, and they were doing a land office business. When I visited them the entire house was so full of soldiers that the two secretaries were deploring the fact that they had not twice the room, especially for canteen purposes.

Everybody in town uses that headquarters. The mayor goes there to take a bath. Officers from the camps visit it almost as often as the men.

These are two samples only. All the Y. M. C. A. headquarters are doing good work. These two were notable because of the personality of the secretaries, which was above the average. There are many such working for the Y. M. C. A. There were half a dozen at Aix-les-Bains, where our men went for vacation leaves. Some of them had prominent names as well. Mrs. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., was on the staff at the Aix casino. Her tireless work, her frank and democratic manners delighted the men. “She works, too,” they said admiringly.

In another Y. M. C. A. canteen I saw young Mrs. Vincent Astor on duty. She walked up and down between the tables anxiously observing whether Private Bill Snyder, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Corporal Joe Morgan, of Weeping Water, Nebraska, got pie where pie was due, or an extra helping of jam where requested. Associated with Mrs. Astor was Ethel Harriman, now the wife of a lieutenant in the army.

The Y. M. C. A. wants more of those women, not because they are rich and “fashionable,” but because they have social experience, good manners, tact, agreeable qualities. There is no room in the world now for what used to be called society women. The place for leisure class women is nursing sick and wounded soldiers and helping to serve and to entertain well ones. The Y. M. C. A. wants at least eight hundred more women. It wants business women, executive women, talented women. It ought to get the eight hundred and a big reserve as well.

Of course, the Y. M. C. A. will get all the money it needs, and that without any controversy. Never mind if it has made mistakes. We can criticize the mistakes after we have given the money. And right here let me say that one of the head men in the Paris executive headquarters told me that the Y. M. C. A. was hard at work rectifying some of the mistakes they made in the beginning, and which were absolutely inevitable in the face of unknown conditions and unforseen problems.

“We know now,” said this man, “that it was a grave mistake to send over men of draft age. We shall not do that in future. We know that we have some useless timber over here, and we are going to weed it out. We know that a religious man, one who can lead in prayer and preach a good sermon, is not necessarily a good executive secretary in a war region. We are finding that out. We know that not all the women we have brought over here have made good. We will replace them. Just give us time.”

I have heard it mentioned as a mistake of the Y. M. C. A. that the leaders do not force prayer meetings on the men, that it has given up some of its religious quality. In my opinion, the Y. M. C. A. is much more religious now than it ever was before in all its history. It lives its religion every hour of the day, and it has learned a beautiful religious tolerance. To Protestant and Catholic, Jew and Gentile alike it gives the same generous and never failing love and charity.

To me it is an evidence of the true religious spirit that in Y. M. C. A. huts you may see displayed a notice that Father Maguire will hear confessions of Catholic soldiers on Saturday in such and such a room. Or that a Sedar service for Jewish soldiers will be held on such a date at the following addresses. It is the only kind of religion that appeals to me. It is the only kind I ever heard that the founder of Christianity preached. It is the strongest possible reason why we should give money, all that is asked for, to the Y. M. C. A.