Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 62, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 April 1899 — Awful Nice When You Havn’t Got Them. [ARTICLE]

Awful Nice When You Havn’t Got Them.

A private in a volunteer regiment, who is somewhere in the wilds of Cuba wrote home as follows: “Two monhs ago I left for the blasted land we are trying to liberate. For forty-five days I nevei saw a woman, Fellow citizens if you want to appreciate a woman get away from her. You know what the creator did when he performed the first surgical operation on Adam. If you want to know what a grand, glorious, sugarcoated thing a woman is, join the army as I did. See nothing but men from morning till night. Join the army and loaf with men, talk with men, carry men, shoot men, succor men, see men, men, men, men, men, and nothing but men. Live in a perpetual atmosphere of suppressed profanity, boot smell and tobacco smoke and at the end of three weeks you will be passionately enamoured of the mummy of an Egyptian servant girl and give her an electric kiss that would turn 3,000 years of dried hide into fresh and velvety animation,