"Whither Thou Goest . . ."

One day when Texas weather was at its sultriest, an ambulance clanged up to the big downtown Gunter Hotel in San Antonio, picked up a pretty blonde, not over 19, who was lying on a davenport, got her to Robert B. Green Memorial Hospital just before her baby was born. Later that week the young mother was able to tell her story. She had come from a north Texas town four days earlier to rejoin her husband, a cadet at the San Antonio aviation cadet school. Tired and worn down after fruitless room-hunting, she had spent three nights in the ladies' lounge of the Gunter, four days in the lobby waiting for a phone call from her husband.

On the fourth afternoon her hour came. For a while she sat in panic, then, when she could stand the pain no longer, asked a soldier sitting near by to call for help.

Woman's Battle. That case worked itself out to a happy ending, yet the girl and her baby had come perilously close to becoming casualties in a strange, unorganized home-front battle being fought all over the U.S. by a vast, unorganized army of women. They are the wives, mothers, sweethearts or fiancees of service men. Their only plan of campaign is to follow their men.

The enemies these women must fight are the painfully crowded transportation system, soaring prices and low military pay, appalling housing shortages and bru tal rent gouges, plus the thousand and one exasperating accidents of fortune--the missed connections, wrong addresses, misunderstanding of directions or appointments, the unpredictable changes in military orders which can cancel out months of planning and thousands of miles of travel.

No one knows how many women have packed up and moved to be near camps, naval stations or training bases, nor how many are traveling at any one time. No agency has any coordinated information on them. But several agencies can testify that the total is very large--such agencies as the Travelers Aid, U.S.O., Red Cross, Army & Navy Relief organizations.

Special war travel gave Travelers Aid 885,000 cases to handle last year. That was about six times the total for 1941. This year the total climbed to 1,250,000 in the first six months, is still climbing. Agencies come into contact only with women who have run into difficulties in their journeys and need help. They have no estimate of the many thousands who are luckier, or have greater means.

Woman's Reason. The social agencies, like transportation agencies, do their best to discourage unnecessary travel. But they are well aware that any Army or Navy wife may insist on writing her own definition of "necessary," and there is no pat answer to the kind of frank explanation given by one eastern girl who had made the long haul out to California: "I don't know why I came out here. It was such a terrible trip. . . . But when I heard Harry was in San Francisco, I just went wild. I had to get to him. He'd been in the Aleutians and I hadn't heard from him for two months."

Every agency worker who meets this woman's army on the move amasses a collection of anecdotes, startling, sad or funny. Many of them are sagas. Currently based in San Francisco is a Navy wife, an old hand at the moving game, who has made three transcontinental round trips with her two children since last December. Another and younger Army wife has trailed her husband from Ohio to California to New York, with several stops en route. Their baby is six months old and has lived at five army camps.

A Kansas girl went to Miami to be married, met her fiance at the station there, departing with his outfit. He had barely time to tell her to go to New York; he had it all figured out that her train would beat the troop train there and she could catch him in Newark, N.J., where he would have to change trains for a camp somewhere around New York--he did not know which one. The girl turned up in Newark utterly lost, hung around for two days watching for troop trains at all hours, finally collapsed on the shoulder of the gallant but baffled U.S.O. That story turned out happily; fast telephone work reunited the lovers within two hours,

Lacking any official traveling status, the service wife is at the bottom of the priority heap; even when she can afford better accommodations, she must usually expect to wind up in the coaches overnight, possibly sitting on her suitcase in the aisle.

Busses load military personnel first, and the service wife traveling alone is the rankest of civilians. She may win the privilege of standing up for hours. Navy wives traveling to & from the base at Corpus Christi, Tex. have worked out a fine technique of picking up uniformed escorts, because a serviceman is allowed to take his wife along to sit with him.

U.S.O. workers are frequently stunned by the valor of ignorance shown by some young wives who have led completely sheltered lives in small towns. They have had to instruct the girls on how to use dial telephones, how to ride a bus, how to press clothing. One southern girl, arriving in Boston, inquired about a convenient, low-priced eating place. She was directed to one of the city's best cafeterias, across the street, but bounced back in a few minutes, deeply hurt, to explain: "I've never waited on myself and I don't intend to start now."

But it is not always the naivete of the service wives that makes trouble. Three respectable young matrons, sharing an apartment in San Antonio, suddenly found themselves haled into court by their landlady, after their Army husbands had visited them and they were unable to produce marriage certificates at once.

Shelter Problem. When the service wife arrives at her destination, worn to a husk, her real troubles are just beginning.

She runs into the housing shortage, usually on the first night she is in town, when the hotels turn out to be full. After lining up some kind of temporary shelter, she and her husband then tackle the real job of finding a home within their means.

In some cases their approach is tragically unreal. A sailor and his wife, transferred to New York City, brought their three children along and told the Travelers Aid office that they hoped to find something in a four-or five-room apartment beside Central Park for around $18 a month.

At the other end of the scale are officers in overcrowded stations like San Diego or New Orleans, willing to pay even exorbitant rentals, who finally resort to placing newspaper advertisements offering "rewards" (polite translation of "bribes") up to $100 for any agent or landlord willing to sign a lease. Landlords in the tight zones are overstuffed with prosperity, pick & choose their tenants and enforce a virtual embargo against service people unfortunate enough to have small children. That sort of thing brought forth this enraged advertisement in a recent issue of the New Orleans Times-Picayune :

WANTED BY A NAVAL OFFICER'S WIFE

--whose husband is serving overseas --and THREE MONSTERS in the form of my little children--TO RENT--a 2-or 3-bedroom house, apartment, BARN or CAGE or whatever is supposed to serve as shelter when such terrible creatures as children have to be considered. . . .

Other apartment hunters take the human-interest approach. The San Diego Tribune-Sun carried this masterpiece: "I'm only three weeks old. My papa, a Navy officer, wants to live with Mommy and me. We need a furnished house or apartment. . . . Can you help me? Please!"

Judy

The San Diego situation is so bad that one Marine wife, from a well-to-do family, landed in town with her eleven-month-old baby and could get no place to live. In the end, although she had never so much as looked down a mop before, she took a housekeeping job in a private home to get permanent shelter for the child.

Just where the campaign of the woman's army will stop no responsible authority can predict. When a service wife sets out to follow her husband, nothing is sure to stop her except the man's departure overseas. Thus it seems certain that as large bodies of troops are shifted around in the U.S., the woman's army will move in their train.

Travelers Aid and other agencies will continue to do their best, and they will be greatly surprised if they do not continue encountering such cases as the 21-year-old wife who turned up, unannounced, at 1 a.m. in Corpus Christi with her five small children, to "surprise" her sailor husband. No one has found any way to exorcise the heart-wrenching truth from the simple statement: "I don't know whether I'll ever see him again."

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