push cart peddler Education: None. Neither reads nor writes English.'
The members of the committee glance at each other. A tentalive whisper filters through the room. It isn't one whisper. It is a sibilant chorus.
“Ivan! Thou art the man!”
Aside from Trick Orders and routine paper work, there were family allotments, insurance allotments, and liberty loan allotments, And it mustn't be forgotten here that up to October 28th the regiment had gone into its pocket and subscribed $70,300 to the second liberty loan. All of these records figured on the pay-rolls, at the making up of which Paper Work had some of his cheeriest moments. Pay-rolls, too, gave the men rather more than their share of paper work. Everybody recalls that spirited lyric, set to the tune of "John Brown's Body."
"All we do is sign the pay-roll.
All we do is sign the pay-roll.
All we do is sign the pay-roll.
And we never get a blank, blank cent."
Like much poetry, this was a trifle exaggerated, for on pay day, when the long lines formed, there was always some real money on the orderly room table. Nevertheless, on pay day night groups could be heard intoning such another lyric of the war as this:
"The U.S. pays us thirty per,
Or so the papers say:
But if you get a dollar ten,
It's a heluva big pay day."
Yet consider the soldier who gets nothing—the replacement, perhaps, who was entrusted with his own service record and who has lost it.
