Here on the village green stands a big tent, with the sign “The American Y M C A,” and the red triangle, which is already placed upon more than seven hundred British, French, and American Association centers in France.  Inside the tent, as the evening falls, scores of boys are sitting at the tables, writing their letters home on note paper provided for them.  Here are men playing checkers, dominoes, and other games.  Other groups are standing around the folding billiard tables.  A hundred men have taken out books from the circulating library, while others are scanning the home papers and the latest news from the front.

Our secretaries have been on the ground for a week, working daily from five o’clock in the morning until midnight.  They have unpacked their goods and are doing a driving trade over the counter, to the value of some $200 a day.  In certain cases goods are sold at a loss, as it is very hard indeed to get supplies under present war conditions.  The steamer “Kansan” was torpedoed, and sank with the whole first shipment of supplies and equipment for the Y M C A huts in France.

Outside a baseball game is exciting rivalry between two companies; while near the door of the tent a ring is formed and the men are cheering pair after pair as they put on the boxing gloves and with good humor are learning to take some rather heavy slugging.  Poor boys, they will have to stand much worse punishment than this before the winter is over.  Just beside the present tent there is being rushed into position a big Y M C A hut which will accommodate temporarily a thousand men, before it is taken to pieces and shipped to some new center.  The Association has ordered from Paris a number of permanent pine huts, 60 by 120 feet, which will accommodate 2,000 soldiers each, and keep them warm and well occupied during the long cold winter evenings that are to come.  On the railway siding at the moment are nine temporary huts, packed in sections for immediate construction, and a score of permanent buildings have been ordered to be erected as fast as the locations for the camps are selected by the military authorities.  Indeed, the aim is to have them on the ground and ready before the boys arrive and take the first plunge in the wrong direction.

What is the life that our boys are living here at the front?  Let us go through a day with the battalion quartered in this village.  At five o’clock in the morning the first bugle sounds.  The boys are quickly on their feet, dressing, washing, getting ready for the day’s drill.  In half an hour they are tucking away a generous breakfast provided by Uncle Sam, of hot bacon, fried potatoes and coffee, good home made bread, and as much of it as a man can eat.  They get meat twice a day, and we have found no soldiers in Europe who receive rations that compare with the food that our boys receive.