The Jewish boy loves to repeat a good joke on his own kind as well as the others.  I myself saw the letter that a Jewish boy was writing to his uncle in New York, eulogizing the Y. M. C. A. He was not an educated lad, but he was a wonderfully sincere boy, and he pleaded his cause well.  He had been treated so well by the “Y” that he wanted his uncle to give all his spare cash to that great organization.  This is the letter: 

“DEAR UNCLE: 

“This here Y. M. C. A. is the goods.  They give you chocolate when you’re goin’ into the trenches and they gives you chocolate when you’re comin’ out and they don’t charge you nothin’ for it neither.  If you are givin’ any money don’t you give it to none of them Red Crosses nor to none of them Salvation Armies, nor to none of them Knights of Columbuses; but you give it to them Y. M. C. A.’s.  They treat you right.  They have entertainments for you and wrestlin’ matches, and they give you a place to write.  And what’s more, Uncle they don’t have no respect fer no religion.

  “Yours,

    “BILL.”

Yes, France is full of Silhouettes of Sunshine.  There was the eloquent Y. M. C. A. secretary.  And while he didn’t exactly know it, he too was adding his unconscious ray of light to a dull and desolate world.

The Gothas had come over Paris the night before, and so had a group of some one hundred and fifty new secretaries.  The Gothas had played havoc with two blocks of buildings on a certain Paris street because of the fact that the bombs they dropped had severed the gas-mains.  The result did have a look of desolation I’ll have to admit.  So far the new secretaries had done no damage.

Now there is one thing common to all the newly arrived in France, be they Y. M. C. A. secretaries, Knights of Columbus workers, Red Cross men, or just the common garden variety of “investigators,” and that is that for about two weeks they are alert to hear the bloodiest, most drippy, and desolate-with-danger stories that they can hear, for the high and holy purpose of writing back home to their favorite paper, or to their wives or sweethearts, of how near they were to getting killed; of how the bombs fell just a few minutes before or just a few minutes after they were “on that very spot”; of how the raid came the very night after they were in London or Paris; of how just after they had walked along a certain street the Big Bertha had dropped a shell there; of how the night after they had slept in a certain hotel down in Nancy the Germans blew it up.  We’re all alike the first week, and staid war correspondents are no exception to the rule.  It gets them all.