April 24, 1918 - Don Martin lauds 'Mother Burdick' of the Salvation Army, and analyzes the war for his daughter

Don Martin diary entry for Wednesday, April 24, 1918: 

Didn’t go out today. Stayed in to write some mail stuff. Wrote 4 or 5 stories and took them to the censor preparatory to mailing them to New York. With Parkinson of A.P., Gregg and Lieut. Parks, called on [Major] General [Hunter] Liggett, the Corps [I] commander. He says he is an optimist but his talk didn’t indicate it.

Weather rainy and wretched. Fine climate!

      Don Martin wrote to Dorothy on April 24, 1918, on a rainy day in Neufchateau, mostly personal, but also about his situation regarding seeing the war.

Dorothy:

      ... I have been in quite a few places since I wrote to you in Paris. I went up North near where the great battle is being fought but no American correspondent is permitted to be with the French so, instead of staying with an artillery company, I came back here to be where things might happen. I go out somewhere every day, usually travelling from 75 to 150 miles in an auto. I go close to the front line now and then and see plenty of villages which have been shot all to pieces. I got a little glimpse of the battle in which the Americans were engaged a few days ago and wrote a piece about it ...  Mr. Bennett has written that he has asked the New York office to have me formally accredited as a correspondent with the American army, and if that is done I may be here a good part of the summer.... regarding the outcome of the war, I know practically no more about it than anyone else. That probably sounds strange, inasmuch as I am right on the ground, but it is true. My own opinion is that if Germany, by sacrificing hundreds of thousands more men, breaks through to the coast, separating the British and French armies, there will be peace. Most people don’t think so but I do. I think so because England will not stand for the thing much longer if things look bad. But I don’t think the Germans will break through. The French have taken over practically all the British line and the Germans cannot lick the French. They know it too. The Germans will never take Paris. ... if the Germans find they are unable to break through and are able a little later to resist any offensive the French and British make, I look for peace overtures from the Germans. Whether or not these overtures will be the basis of peace depends altogether on the attitude of the civil populations of England, France and United States. If England and France are willing to go on, as I confidently believe they will be, the United States will probably tell Germany that Germany will be officially notified when the time for peace comes. The Germans, I figure, will make peace overtures because it will be in the same position as the highway robber who has his pockets filled with loot and sees inevitable capture even though for the time being he is able to evade capture. Personally, everything considered I believe the war will last another year, and maybe two more and that Germany will be licked good and proper before it is all over...

With love,

              Dad

       Don Martin wrote a 'good one' about ministering angels serving doughnuts on April 24 that was published in the New York Herald on Thursday, April 25.

“MOTHER BURDICK OF TRENCHES” IS MINISTERING ANGEL TO MEN IN FRANCE, FROM TEXAS TO MAINE

By DON MARTIN

[Special cable to the Herald]

WITH THE AMERICAN ARMY IN FRANCE, Wednesday

           From one end of the line to the other she is known as “Mother Burdick.” When the boys come back from the land of the shivery patrols they drop in to say “Hello.” When they are resting after their shift in the trenches they hang around to help her or to do the heavy work for her understudies, Miss Myrtle Turkington and Miss Gladys McIntyre.

Miss Gladys McIntyre serving doughnuts
(National Archives photo no. 11-SC-10446, Ansauville, April 9, 1918)

          “Hello, Mother!” said a rough raw-boned, red haired private nicknamed Texas. “How are the doughnuts?”

          From head to toe he bore the grime of the trenches. His rough exterior camouflaged a rugged character.

          “You don’t want a doughnut—a great, big man like you. You want a meal. Now sit down—do’s I tell you.” 

          Texas sat down. Mother Burdick’s wish is a first line command.

          “You’ll have to excuse me if I keep on with my work,” she said apologetically. “We’re sending a thousand doughnuts over to the trenches to-day, and there’s no one to make them but me and Miss McIntyre here. The boys like them better than anything else we can give them except”---

          She gave a half dozen brawny soldiers an opportunity to finish the sentence and they all did, in chorus:--

          “Except apple pie.”

Pie Only on Sundays

          “But you can’t have apple pie only Sundays,” said Mother Burdick firmly. “It’s a luxury. I’ll stuff you so full of apple pie you’d bust if I had the apples and the sugar and the time to make it. You’re lucky to get doughnuts.”

          “Lucky! Say, Mother, the war’d be lost without your doughnuts!”

          All this and more you could hear any day in Mother Burdick’s camp. She and her husband, Floyd O. Burdick, both from Texas, are verily among the ministering angels of the war.  Not a soldier among the thousands who come to their shack for dainties and kind words but would go over the top for them any time.

          She pointed rather apologetically to four cots in a tented corner of the shattered building, the floor wet and earthy, the roof tent leaky and black.

          “It was a little cold in the winter. You see there is no way of keeping the wind out, although the boys here did the best they could to make us comfortable. But now the sum shines sometimes and we shall be perfectly contented. And anyhow it’s no worse than the boys have to put up with, is it, Sam?”

           Sam and the others made no reply.

           “We’re glad to help a little,” continued this Samaritan, dropping coil after coil of dough into the vat of grease. “I figured it out this way:--Our children are grown up. They don’t need us. There are thousands of women in the United States who would be here if they could, to do for the boys, but they are needed at home.

           “We decided we’d come over here and do the very things the boys’ mothers would do if they were here. They like doughnuts, the poor boys, and so we make doughnuts, and make ‘em and make ‘em and make ‘em, and if I had the flour and the lard I’d make tens of thousands more and send ‘em up in those trenches you can see from the top of the hill yonder. But if the officers would only let me and the girls here go up in the trenches! We want to carry the doughnuts and chocolate up there ourselves, but the officers say we can’t.”

          “That’s ‘cause they’re taking no chance on losing you,” said Texas.

     When you see the whiskered old Santa with kettle and bell who stamps his feet to keep warm as he watches the human currents swirl around him in Herald square or wherever else it may be, give him something. When the Salvation Army lassie comes around with her modest appeal to help the boys at the front, don’t turn her away, for the Salvation Army is a ministering angel to the boys in the fighting ranks.