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Show Life in New Army Camps Different From Days of 17 r Many Features of Civilian Life Are Retained; U. S. to Require Fortifying Bread With Vitamin B Complex. By BAUKHAGE National Farm and Home Hour Commentator. (WNTI Service, 1343 H Street N. W., Washington, D. C.) WASHINGTON. There is dry, white mud on my feet and white dust in my eyes. My nose has taken on a slightly more roseate tinge than usual. From early this morning I watched a segment of Uncle Sam's new army through a driving mist of memories which are all that is left of the "young army" with which I marched 25 years ago. I heard that irritatingly familiar cadence of reveille come floating across a Virginia parade ground a once green fields now scarred with thousands of hob-nailed boots. I saw the sleepy-eyed youths pile out of fresh, wooden barracks, looking no younger in their neat slacks and canvas leggings than we looked to each other in our lumpy wrap leggings leg-gings and baggy breeches. I saw the ones in blue denim, ready for fatigue duty, looking just as we did. Did we snap a more precise salute? Did our middle-fingers stretch down a little straighter along the seam of our trousers, and our chests puff out a little farther when we came to " 'shun"? Were we a little more solemnly important when we changed guard, with our sentries at a stiff "port" barking "special orders" or-ders" at each other in our best imitation imi-tation of the way the sergeant barked at us? Well, maybe.. And maybe the sun shone brighter then than it does today, to-day, too. Visit Fort Belvoir. The camp I visited is Fort Belvoir, down the road a bit from Mount Vernon, and the highway there divides di-vides the old and the new. Belvoir has been a permanent engineering camp since the last war and now, across the road, is a new soldier-city of fresh-cut pine, which stands where the pine trees themselves stood, only a few months ago. This replacement replace-ment camp eventually will accommodate accom-modate 10,000 men who, like the Sultan, Sul-tan, in Omar Khayyam, take their one day's rest only instead of a day, it is 13 weeks and it is no rest. Here the boys, classified for the Engineer corps, get their first taste of army life, drill and discipline. On this spot I saw familiar sights and others, strangely unfamiliar to a soldier of the emergency of 1917-1919. 1917-1919. There was the Post Exchange, an institution as old as an army post itself. it-self. But in one corner was a fountain foun-tain dispensing ice cream sodas, and in another, a taproom dispensing the amber fluid Both beverages unknown un-known in the camps of my soldiering days. I saw the familiar barracks but these were equipped with an air-circulating air-circulating system. I saw the neatly made cots but I also saw a hostess house at that moment housing a bevy of chorus girls who were putting on a Broadway Broad-way review for the boys that night. I met the hostess, a motherly woman and two junior hostesses but not so junior that the girls back home need be too jealous. Civilian 'Trimmings' Retained. Frankly, I went to the camp looking look-ing for signs of a "cream puff" atmosphere at-mosphere that some of the old-timers old-timers hinted were turning military life into a sort of prolonged college reunion. Perhaps that is happening. happen-ing. But the officers in charge of recreation with whom I talked were typical, serious military men. They said it was necessary to provide diversion di-version and entertainment. We are not at war. Important as the defense de-fense of democracy may be, so far the spirit of the crusade has not touched the people. The people in uniform and out must not be allowed to feel that this period before the colors is an interruption in citizen life, but rather a part of it. And the ' normal habits of the civilian must not be cut off from the boys in camp. That seems to be the theory of the "trimmings" which the selectee is being offered by Uncle Sam. I saw work, too! Men shouldering shoulder-ing shovels as well as rifles; swinging swing-ing pick-axes as well as doing sentry sen-try duty. I went over a military road that had been cut out of forest and swamp, crossed a bridge strong enough to carry a tank, all built between be-tween morning and mid-afternoon the work of the engineer officers and men. Most of the boys who did the actual work had had only a few weeks' training in the expert business busi-ness of construction and destruction which is the engineer's task. Government to Require Fortifying Bread Flour When the Bible succinctly compressed com-pressed the material needs of man into a single sentence "give us this day our daily bread" it put a world of meaning into a few short words. Unfortunately, while man still has needs which his daily bread once occupied, oc-cupied, the modern loaf does not satisfy sat-isfy them. So there is going to be a law or at least a regulation by the Federal Security administrator which will have the force of law. This regulation regula-tion will require standard bread flour to contain some of the ingredients ingre-dients vital to man's present needs, namely the "vitamin B complex." The Food and Drug administration has already promulgated a tentative standard. To meet it, certain properties prop-erties which bread flour contained before modern refining processes removed re-moved them will be artificially restored. re-stored. A new milling process which removes the indigestible hulls but not the health-giving qualities the thiamin chloride, the nicotinic acid, the riboflabin and the iron has just been invented also. There is a long scientific explanation explana-tion of why we need the "vitamin B complex" in our daily bread. To a layman this is the way a member of the department of agriculture explained ex-plained it: Thiamin Increases Courage. "Thiamin," he said, "keeps you from growing jittery and nervous; it calms your nerves and provides a wider path between irascibility and uncertainty on one side and calmness calm-ness and certainty on the other. It gives you courage. "And that," he added, "is one reason, rea-son, they tell us, for the bravery of the German troops under the terrific ter-rific strain of modern warfare. We understand that beside giving the soldiers bread enriched with vitamins, vita-mins, the German army has a ration of vitamin pills for its men." The nicotinic acid in the so-called enriched flour, prevents the dread pellegra. Unfortunately, enriching the flour does not help those people who do not get the white bread at all. Where people eat corn bread instead of bread from wheat flour, the new rules and regulations will have no effect. It is in such areas where pellagra flourishes. An expert dietician tells me that one way to tell a person who lacks thiamin is to tell him a real good joke. He will not laugh. But think of how easy to make a joke if everybody every-body has enough of this remarkable elixir! . Declining Tourist Trade Costly to Canada In America there is a man who, purely as a hobby, has constituted himself as a sort of one-man travel and publicity agent for Canada. His name is Schuyler Baldwin Terry. He started out to be a historian with a Ph. D. at the University of Chicago, Chi-cago, took a course at the University of London, wrote an authoritative book, entitled "The Financing of the Hundred Years War," quoted in debates de-bates in parliament. Then he suddenly sud-denly decided that he was more interested in-terested in economics than history and got a job as office boy in an old New England banking firm. He accumulated ac-cumulated a comfortable fortune, retired, and ever since has devoted his time to travel and talking and writing about the development of a closer bond between this nation and our sister-nation to the north. Mr. Terry is particularly disturbed dis-turbed about the falling off of American Amer-ican visitors to Canada of late which, he says, has cost Canada a hundred million dollars. False and malicious rumors, concerning conditions resulting re-sulting from the war and alleged difficulties which might be encountered encoun-tered in returning to this country, he declares are causing Americans to stay away from Canada. The dollars dol-lars which Canada has lost, he points out, mean just that many fewer purchases Canada can make in the United States. |