Weekly journal-miner., 1919-09-03
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ries of articles on my experiences as
 an entertainer with the Y. M. C. A.
 overseas l really believed that it was
 going to be an easy job. However
 find that much like trying to tell
 the story from a public platform, "it
 just can't be did" The only way
 to try to tell anything about the war is just to sit down and have a heart to heart talk about it.
 As l try many times to recount my own experiences 1 find myself growing eulogistic about the others whose really wonderful work I had the good fortune to see; the canteen workers, the preachers, truck drivers and movie operators. It was an in teresting study to find what trades and professions the many men and women in Y work had come from. Here there was banker from Pitts burg unloading ships, there an cleo
 trical engineer from Schnectady driving a motor truck and again we would find a preacher who was our. vaudeville booking agent. It was a great melting pot over there and men who thought they would be put little use here and there soon found that a pair of hands and a willing heart meant much in the big work called service. And 1t was service service that meant many weary hours per day under the most impossible of conditions.
 Not long ago 1 was approached by a man who had been running a gamb- ling house for a good many years. He had donated $25 to the Y. M. C. A. and had heard some of the crit icism and howled out loud that he had been robbed. This same man stayed home and bought Liberty Bonds with the dollars that he had chased with his poker and faro games. He measured up his $25 alongside of the little girl who stood on the tailboard of an army truck reciting Marcus AureIius" until she dropped dead from a piece of shrap- nel And I wonder how that $25 will look ill the final great accounting alongside of Dick Little, the newspa- per man from Chicago, who read his own burial service out in the dense woods of the Argonne over a dead. doughboy from Iowa? They were the little things that counted over there, the little things, just plain service not the big things that won decora- tions in welfare work.
 If we stop to think a little before we lay any criticism at the feet of the welfare workers or their organi- cations we should realize that first of all these workers were volunteers they did not have to go, they went because they wanted to help in the great fight for humanity and decency and went where they were sent and stayed where they were put.
 There was no brass band to play the welfare worker away or to wei come him or her when they came back. There was no service flag hung in the window for them and no part of a roll of honor for them when they came back No ranks and titles and no hope of promotion, they were just the unsung service workers.
 As I often in my lecture recount the days spent over there cannot help but grow enthusiastic about the women workers, every one of them, from Liverpool to Coblenz. I can only too well realive what these women meant to the soldier. A cou pie of incidents will serve to illus trate this. At Revigny, France, a cold wet night in December an en- listed man on the Sunshine Division leaned over the canteen counter and was hailed by pretty little Y. M. C. A girl with, "Well, puddle, what can do for you?" He blushed, shuffled. his feet and stammered, "Nuthin, mann. I just wanted to look at yer. Again up along the far front in the St. Mihiel woods near the Grand Tranchee de Cologne, battery of artillery was perched on the top of a hill with its guns trained on Metz, waiting for the word to pull the string, a weary wait covering many days The night as usual was cold and wet and black as a coal pit, no light were permitted, not even cig- arctic, for lights meant boche planes. We. had given a show to battalion of the 3O4th Engineers of the 79th Division and had to walk five kilo- meters across this hilltop to the bOche trenches we were to sleep i'll