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Show rM.fpj7Pj p THE PAPERS OF PRIVATE PURKEY Dear Ma: Well, ma, I now feel so tired and sore all over that I gess I am in the pink ol condishun. All feeling is gone from my feet and my legs are numb from the knees down so the drilling and marching don't hurt me no more witch shows how well trained I am. But the officers keep drilling me just the same and pay no attention to me when I tell 'em I have had enufT. We are sleeping five to a tent, but I am not getting any two much rest on account of the old saying that two is company and three more is overcrowding. over-crowding. There is always at least two buddies who want to tell stories or argue about ways and means to get promoted to be a kernel or sum- j thing. And we have a radio fan- j natick in our tent who thinks the best programs come after everybody every-body else is asleep. This guy is such a nut that if he was out in No ' Man's land be would carry a porta-1 ble so he could hear a broadcast of what he was doing. Another fellow in my tent don't1 sleep at all. He just sits on the edge of the bed moaning. It seams he was on a trip to see his best girl who lives 50 miles from his home town when he got a call to report for draft induckshun at once and he is still squawking. I also got a tent-mate tent-mate who was a union man in Pittsburgh Pitts-burgh before he was drafted and he keeps making speeches trying to convinse us that we shud picket the general's tent and demand more money and less drilling. We have movies every night in a big tent, but I do not like them mutch as it makes me soar to see all those tellers in citizen close lolling around on couches and sitting sit-ting in the moonlight moon-light with beautiful beauti-ful girls when they should be in some camp lern- ing how to take a gun apart and guard a latrine. But they do not make me as soar as news pitchers of congressmen when they was still chewing the fat over that lease-lend bill. I don't even know yet weather I am going to be lent to Europe or just leased or what? It sure has been a cold. winter to be in a army, but the old sarge who was in the last war says we shud of been around then and we wud not be kicking now. We have wood-burning stoves in tents here and he says in the last war he never saw a stove from the time he got his draft summons sum-mons until he got home three years later. They also have boilers so we can have hot water in this camp witch he says nobody had accept Pershing and Alexander Woollkott in the last one. When we got here we wuz given a saferty razzer five blades a cake of shaving sope and a a toothbrush and he lafted like everything ev-erything and sed we must be going to the opera or sum place like that as in the last war soldiers shaved with there bayernets and only cleaned their teeth when they had a friend who was a Y. M. C. A. secretary sec-retary and carried a spare. ' He says we are all getting better bet-ter considerashun in draft camps today to-day than he got in the best hotels on furlow in 1917 and he showed me a pitcher of an outfit in the last war witch backs him up when he says we are dressed like dudes in comparison. com-parison. He says that in those days they just chucked a bundle at you when you reported at camp and that whatever you found inside you had to put on as a uniform, even if it was just a slip cover off a piano. And he says he spent 18 months in France with a burlap bag over his head because the sergeant told him it was the regulashun army hat. So when I feel like kicking I just listen to him talk. Well there is not much more to say now. One of those new Ford pigmee trucks arrived ar-rived here yesterday. It is all made of armor steel and all I want when I get back home again is one of these to use in Main Street traffic and pay no attenshun to those taxi-cabs taxi-cabs what try to shove me around. Your loving son, Oscar. P. S. I need more bunion plasters. WAITRESSES I never leave the slightest tip For girls who let the gravy drip. Merrill Chilcote. Walter Brennan recently got the award for the best piece of support acting in pictures last year. And well did he rate it. There's an actor ac-tor so good he will probably never be starred by Hollywood. Mario Naldi says a dictator is a fellow who is always putting his best teud forward. |