The amusing anonymously written letters of a YMCA canteen girl recounting her life serving the Doughboys of the First World War. As her mother who collected and published the letters explains:"May I in a few words explain why I have placed at your disposal the accompanying manuscript? It consists of selections from the home letters of our daughter, written in a Y.M.C.A. canteen "Somewhere in France." They were dashed off rapidly, in busy days, with many interruptions, addressed to members of our family circle; and they bear on their face everywhere the stamp of having been written without pre-meditation or the remotest dream of publication."But they tell the story of the daily life in a crowded canteen in France, as experienced by an intensely interested and enthusiastic participant, not only in its outward form, but also in its innermost spirit. The infinite variety of the life, its humour, its pathos, its confidences, its noble, its generous, its picturesque characters, its delights and its privations, its devotions and its gratitudes, its tragedies and its sorrows, the countless services and the priceless spirit of the Y.M.C.A. workers, all this and much more is disclosed in these vivid letters with an art that is wholly unconscious and to which the thought of publication would have been fatal." |