Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 241, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 October 1918 — “DOLL UP” FOR BOCHES [ARTICLE]

“DOLL UP” FOR BOCHES

Yanks Raid Trenches in Gro- , tesque Makeup. Soldiers Have Penchant for Attiring Themselves in Discarded Civilian Clothing. With the American Army in France. —Far up near the front, where one never sees a woman, a child nor a male civilian, it is no uncommon sight to come suddenly on a party of youths arrayed in high hats, frock coats, checked trousers and patent leather shoes. They are American soldiers, billeted in ruined French villages, who have picked up these garments from among the debris of the shell-shattered houses. Some of them even don women’s clothing, picture hats, feather boas, silk blouses and skirts, and I have even seen them wearing blonde wigs

which they raked up somewhere amid the wreckage of villas on the Marne. The boys go about various duties, cleaning horses, driving ammunition caissons, working about their billets and doing the thousand-and-one other odd jobs that fall to their lot, in their ludicrous makeup. Right on the Vesle some of the Americans picked up some “trick” clothes in gas-drenched Ftsmes and put them on. They crossed the river and raided a German machine gun nest tint had been annoying them during the day by spurting indirect fire on them. - They brought in a couple of prisoners who could not conceal their amazement from the German-speaking officer who questioned them that troops could masquerade in such attire in the midst of danger. Australian and Canadian troops have a penchant for “dolling up” in discarded civilian attire also, and the Anzacs negotiated a raid near Villers Bretonnaux under the same circumstances in June.