Chapter 25. Busy Days, Busy Nights

Competing in space and in noise at the Shanty were the two ping-pong tables and all the guys around them rooting and making comments.  As with the record player, the pong-pongs never stopped.

Contrasting, quietly, a GI or two usually were painting with water color sets, making pencil or charcoal or ink drawings.  Early on we started holding art displays on our entrance wall bulletin board.

For a few weeks we discovered among our patients a guy or two that wanted to start a newspaper—and so they did.  For several months they or those who replaced them kept the issues of Shanty Times going to press, organizing the staff, interviewing in each ward, preparing the text and pulling off the gel Hectograph a few copies for bulletin boards in the Shanty and the wards.  It was astonishing!

We kept the Shanty open most nights.  Piano players and singers often stepped forth, day or night, and from time to time we had guys that worked on skits and would present them.  On at least one occasion there were days of preparation for a melodrama that a few guys wrote out.  They auditioned and selected actors, rehearsed, and the prepared publicity.  Our Red Cross Shanty became the Broadway of Bar-le-Duc

As the former ones departed, new GIs arrived at the crafts end of the Shanty bringing new ideas for useful products.  We kept running out of and having to scrounge more artificial leather from German dumps.  The GIs made scuffs and huaraches for themselves to wear in the wards and to leave for incoming soldiers.  Many had lost their wallets and made new ones.

Yards of felt in bright colors, which had been lying around unused, suddenly became extremely popular.  The guys figured out how to make skull caps with a long tail in back to keep their heads comfortable and warm under their lined steel helmets.   Even the non-crafters started working on these for themselves.

Almost every night the big attraction was bingo!  There wasn’t space to play in the daytime.  Bingo gained in popularity when, from the French parish of Champagne nearby, we began getting a steady supply of cases of the finest champagne in the world, Piper Heitzig, as well as one of the finest brandies, 4* Hennessey.  Some of the time we had so much on hand that we gave a bottle of each to the winner who completed a mere 5-square line, across or up and down on the bingo card.

As activities increased it seemed we needed to work longer hours.  We had to get help from Cecile and another French woman we hired to assist at the Shanty, dyeing some material as I recall.  Margaret our social worker, when Metz finally fell, managed to scrounge some drawers that she badly needed in the office.  Every month or so the Social Worker or Recreation Worker had to travel to Paris to check signals and to arrange for supplies from the Red Cross in Washington or from the Croix Rouge.  And so it went.

Our parents often became frantic because we hadn’t time, literally, to write to them.  Quoting from a letter I managed to write home that winter, “We usually go to work at 7am and work till 9:30 or l0:30 or 11:00 and then we get home. We never have a fire in our pot-bellied stove so we just jump into bed.  You can’t sit down in a frigid room and write a letter.”  I also added to my parents, “The nurses of course work on an 8 hour shift and have every other day off from 1 to 4 and other times are off after 4.  C’est la guerre!”