One of the many advertisements soliciting bakers and cooks in the early months of America’s entry in the war.
One does not find it in the drill-book that the way to keep coffee and slum hot after it left the rolling kitchens is to take out the boilers with the food in them, wrap these boilers in old blankets, put them on the two-wheeled machine-gun carts, which can go nearly anywhere, and work forward to the troops in this way. This is just one instance, one trick of the trade. It is something that only training and experience can supply, and yet it is of most vital importance. I have known divisions to help feed the more recently arrived divisions on their right and left, when all have the same facilities to start with. I have known new troops, fighting by an older division, to be forty hours without food when men of the older division had been eating every day.
–Lieutenant Colonel Theodore (Ted) Roosevelt, Jr.
Average Americans, 1919
(image/Library of Congress)
The Strawfoot 