Download or read book Books in Camp, Trench and Hospital (Classic Reprint) written by Theodore Wesley Koch and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Books in Camp, Trench and Hospital Most of the following articles were written during my long stay in London, and so bear the stamp of their English origin. This explains why more was not said in the section devoted to the Y. M. C. A. about the work of the young men sent out from America. A few anecdotes and facts that have recently come to my attention are added here. A German soldier and his son had come all the way from Verdun to the Russian front, where they were wounded and captured. They lay in adjoining beds in a military hospital, and the Y. M. C. A. furnished them with a copy of "Oliver Twist" and a Russian grammar which they were planning to study together. In the same ward was a young Berlin professor who had done research work in the British Museum. He brooded a great deal over his fate, but a gift of the "Christmas Carol" and a Russian grammar changed somewhat the tenor of his thought. Count L, a prisoner in a Russian camp, asked for a good American story, and the secretary brought him "Black Rock." The Count pronounced it to be one of the best novels he had ever read, and he asked the secretary to send him ten others of the same kind from America "after the war." The Y. M. C. A. man having occasion to go to Petrograd a few days later, purchased these books by Ralph Connor, Gene Stratton Porter, and Jack London, and gave them to the Count. The secretary says that no other volumes ever received such joyful reading. Since then they have been presented to the prison library where they are in great demand. Other books of the same class were later sent to the prison. An American Y. M. C. A. secretary in a Russian prison camp borrowed a Koran and the other books needed by the Mohammedans for a service which he arranged for them. A soldier wrote from the trenches to the London Headquarters of the Y. M. C. A.: "We sit in our dug-outs and just think! I wonder if you could send some books and magazines over here." A man in Egypt, begging for magazines, said that he didn't wonder that the children of Israel grumbled when they went that way! A Y. M. C. A. worker in France writes: "We never can secure enough reading matter to while away the hours in the long French train journeys." The magazines which the Y. M. C. A. has been able to supply the troops have frequently been cut into sections so as to make them go around. Even the printed wrapping paper in which parcels are sent is smoothed out and read as literature. If the Y. M. C. A. workers could get the thousands of magazines and "seven pennies" left lying about in clubs, railway carriages, and private houses, it would enable battalions of men to forget for a few moments the hardships, the risks, and the monotony of active service. A "seven-penny" book was given a soldier by a Y. M. C. A. worker as he went by train to the front line. It was read by every man in the platoon. The man was wounded and took the book to the hospital where it was read by every man in the ward. Now that he has regained possession of it, he intends to keep it for the rest of his life. English booksellers report a famine of sevenpenny and shilling books because of the demand for them from the trenches. Seven million copies are said to have been sent to the front. The Y. M. C. A. is trying to organize a collection of books and magazines in different districts throughout Great Britain and is instituting Red Triangle Magazine and Book Clubs which will collect and forward a weekly or fortnightly supply to the Library Department in London. In five months the Red Triangle Library has sent away 83,640 books and magazines: To Home Camps... 26,750 To France... 45,190 To Overseas Bases... 11,700 The Overseas Bases include Mesopotamia, Egypt, Salonica, Nairobi, Malta and Calcutta.