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

e.
 look at him. I must say I admire his spirit. He has beaten every order I've issued, and got here in spite of me. He certainly does deserve credit for his nerve"
 That General is generally recogniz- ed as a human being. But, being also a General, he wouldn't interfere with the tangled machinery which had failed to ditch Bill so far.
 So Bill is still added to go, and the medical staff is sitting up nights hop ing they get him home alive.
 They told Bill that he couldn't live six months over here, under the strain.
 How long will live if go home" asked Bill.
 Possibly a year," said the kindly meaning doctor.
 "Hades," said Bill, what do you care where I die? Trying to sell me Ia burial lot on the other side are your"
 "AlI right" said Bill. "I'll go; but you watch-Pn be on the dock to meet this outfit when it comes home, and I'll live to bury lot of you after that"
 And finally, with characteristic hu- man frailty he asked if he couldn't go home by the French line so as to be safe from the submarines! Polite Way to Dispose O; Him
 The polite way of disposing of a colonel is to detach him from his regi- ment and send him to departmental work. Now the jobs in the depart ments are important, and well worth a coloneFs while. There are several where a man might easily win dis tinction.
 But almost without exception the officers have taken the shift to mean that the skids were under them, and have lost interest. Thereupon one al least-a good man, too, in the Ma, tional Guard, with a fine record and a fine regiment, resigned.
 The supernumerary officers are mostly men trained in the Plattsburs camps. There are enough to fill any l F ossible number of vacancies in the lower grades of practically every regi ment about here.
 But they are not going to fill ir without further orders. Instead, there are to be promotions of sergeants; a | least 15 of one regiment are tC achieve shoulder straps and sa1utes | The supernumeraries took thi news with equanimity, recognizing that long service in the ranks, witl experience in many camps and on a 1n9Cf ha1 o, valuable as the five weeks of train ing they themselves have had.
 In only one case did one of then make any kick. And he said the cap tain and the lieutenant of the com pany to which he had hoped to b. attached had both been drunk-tak ing that, apparently, as reason wh. he should be kept on and a sergean be retained under the blue cord.
 Only One Kick-Slow Mails
 Aside from the weather, which nobody's fault, there has been reaIl cnIy one general kick here. That i over the mail service, which has bee. utterly inadequate. If the folks 6 lhome keep getting letters from thei boys over here saying that the boy have had no news, it is the fault o the mail service.
 Yet when one investigates the mai service he finds all hands are work ing their heads off to stand up unde the staggering load. The mail ser vice for the army is tremendous.
 It is shipped from an America1 port in closed sacks, addressed to me- by their organizations, and is suppos ed to come straight through.
 But the sorting is not always don : with accuracy in New York. The mai clerks there apparently do not under stand that letters addressed to tn , Umpty-third Infantry do not go t the same place at all as those address ed to the Umpty-third Engineers o
 the Umpty-third Ammunition Trair
 So infantry letters get into ammuni ! tion train sacks, and go gayly off t , a forsaken village in France whic has no cross-country connection 1 through which to forward it to tn
 proper destination.
 , The only thing that can be don 5 is to send those letters on the bac track to headquarters, where ther :. is a dead-letter office. There the IS SclII DS ISIOul6u. IOUS III lllO 1IlSdI e while two or three weeks may hay , elapsed.
 = In the regiments again, the sortin is done by men who often have T S experience in mail work. They ma e be detailed quite at random; yer d often they work under great difficu t ty. One squad has been sorting pacl . age mail out in the courtyard for lac f of office space.
 l. Everything but Cigarettes ', o Out of conditions like this gro '. complaints. Many men have not y t received their Christmas package
 There, have been cases. filled wit , packages, received here in bad cond .' tion. aPackages have been broken ol T. cn in transit, and often had bee ::f quite obviously and systematical
 robbed. Sometimes the packages hs l. vanished. and the contents were loo
 in the cases.
 There have even turned up pacl
 ages on which the original address l. had been marked out, and entire l. new addresses had been written { 1T the other side. A package whic e. started to John Smith, B Co.,, skizzt T. Second Infantry, now turns up f Id Eddie Jones, K Co., Hlngty-flfth. II