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YMCA (see in Wikipedia) Secretary
Rev. Ch. H. Rose (from Southport Indiana)
A low hut. Some improvised tables, with glasses on them. Tea steaming in a pot. A display cabinet crammed pell-mell with disparate items, candles, combs, sponges, soap, all the meagre objects that make a soldier comfortable and everything that gives him illusion and poetry: pale coloured tobacco, flavoured with honey, for it is on the blue smoke of the cigarettes that dreams wander best, some letter paper which will carry beyond the seas the news of the Tommy, lost "somewhere in France", some lemon drops, some "candies" for these big kids who are the troops. Near the tables, a gramophone that plays ragtimes and tangos. It is the YMCA the welfare of the army. In this shack all is forgotten, the lethal shells, the mud that covers the roads with its sticky coating, the energy sapping rain; and the Ocean, that limitless Ocean that separates you from loved ones. Some clerics, some young women were given the task of bringing to these isolated people good cheer and comfort. They pitched their tent, put up their hut everywhere where the American soldiers needed them. You saw them in Lorraine, at St. Mihiel, at Verdun, at Chateau-Thierry, courageous in the face of danger, cheerful in the boredom, always beneficial. They have preserved the morale of a big army. And these auxiliaries, these civilians well deserve to be placed here among the courageous, as soldiers.