The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1918-03-09

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 Details from here have been sent down to ports in France to expedite mail. The sergeants have had to fight their way, have had to steal mail cars, and sometimes have even had to do switching in the yards. pushing the cars by hand. Lucky French freight cars are small and light, and easily moved.
 Even with all these trials, however, everybody is at present well supplied with all sorts of stuff. By the time this reaches America, however, there probably will have been another fam inc, especially in cigarettes
 Just at present the boys are royal ly generous with the French soldiers royalty scornful of 'makings" They even have preferences in brands, though only two months ago they were smoking leaves and ground cof- fee
 The moral is, don't stop sending stuff to your boys. They will need it, and will need surprising quantities of it-of everything. Auxiliaries like the Red Cross and the Y. M. c. A. are doing much, but even they cannot do everything.
 And there is constant improvement in the mail service; like everything else over here, it had to be organized from the ground up. and is still very new.
 Machine Beginning to Move
 The most difficult thing to remem- Der is that everything here is just starting. American troops are arriv- ing, and only a beginning has been made of arrivals.
 To the men who have been here for three or four months, and to the people whose boys left home last summer, it seems as if they must be settled and in the routine of life again. the thing is so unimaginably tremendous that it can't start all at once. The machine is only beginning to move now, with much grooming and failure of parts, and much shift ing of gears.
 By that is meant General of two stars rank never knows how long his personnel is going to stay put. He picks a chief of staff; bango! The chief of staff is taken away from him for Q line of communications. He picks another; whingo! The chief of staff goes to the command of a regi- ment. He names a couple of personal aids; cough! The more experienced of them gets the influenza, spends a month in a Paris hospital, and is or dered to the south of France, appar- ently for the rest of the spring. In cidentally, the next one gets a bar added to his shoulder straps, so the i'll winds of France are usually tenn pered for somebody.
 A chief surgeon barely gets his work assigned when he has to lose his right-hand man-needed some where else. A chief uuartermaster lines up his stream of supplies, and begins to look around for a comfor- table billet with "cheminee;" bloo- ey! Off goes his head.
 All these things, of course. are the mere incidents. The main current has gone along steadily enough; day by day and week by week the men have been learning the new sort of warfare, through the rain and the eternal mud and the snow, in discomfort unbeliev- able.
 Always the Mud
 This particular division lives in a triangle of villages, scattered about on the slopes of hills, or tucked into folds of the valley of a river, which just now, in the mild weather of the | last week, is in furious, muddy state The men live, some of them, in Ad- rian barracks. These are like the cri- ginal PIattsburgh barracks. and as soon as they were made weather proof, were comfortable enough. Others are in old French barracks and they, too, are comfortable enough.
 The rest are in bil1ets, which may be anything from old barns to hen houses. Sometimes there are COWS for neighbors in the next room; some times the front door is not much more than a fence.
 Always, in barracks or billets, it i: impossible to avoid tracking in the mud. Always the floors-if there are floors slippery. There is no get ting rid of it, clean as one will.
 And when men are wakened anG fed before daylight, marched out 1T cold and rain and mud five or SD miles, drilled all the morning, drilled again all the afternoon, and finally marched home in the wet. miserable dusk, there is not likely to be mucf enthusiasm over cleaning the floor.
 Left alone, many outfits get what i: called by the sanitary officers-per ! nit1T f01~ fa ii mud fever" It isn't exactly a sick. ness; it is a state of contentment witt the mud. It is a slackening off O:
 the feeling for neatness and it lead: to a dangerous lowering of morale Whereupon, the sanitary officer sneaks round and inspects when no body is looking, and then jacks III the major, and the major calls tht attention of the captains, and the scolding trickles down to the squad leaders, and certain men, not wei enough to go out on drill, but not sicl enough to go to hospital and so as signed to Tight duty" find that ligh duty includes cleaning up barracks rooms or billets.
 Wouldn't Know Your Boys
 The conditions are hard, put ever. time any one of the boys gets a feel ing that he isn't having the best time in his life he goes over for a lool round the French soldiers quarters land especially their mess. Then h, finds that he is really living like !; Prince.
 Meanwhile the training period ha,
 done everybody heaps of good. Phy sically, you wouldn't know your boys
 They have become soldiers-and tha