iers and sailors for wear under
their tunics and are most beautifully light and windproof. The fingers
of kid gloves are made into glue, of wash leather gloves into rubbers
for household use. The big pieces of linenette over are made into dust
sheets and the small scraps go to stuff mattresses for a Babies' Home.
The buttons are carded and sold and the making up provides work for
distressed elderly women. It needs no funds--it is self-supporting--it
only needs old gloves.

In preventing waste and in food production and conservation, our
people have learned much, and a very great deal of admirable work is
being done.

THE WOMEN'S ARMY AUXILIARY CORPS

"Now every signaller was a fine Waac,
And a very fine Waac was she--e."

"Soldier and Sailor, too."

CHAPTER XI

THE WOMEN'S ARMY AUXILIARY CORPS

The Waacs is the name we all know them by and shall, it seems,
continue to. It will have to go into future dictionaries beside Anzac.

The deeds of the Anzacs in Gallipoli and France are immortalised in
many records--magnificently in John Masefield's "Gallipoli"--an epic
in its simplicity. The work of the Waacs is the work of support and
substitution and its records only begin to be made.

The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps is an official creation of this year.
At the Women's Service Demonstration in the Albert Hall in January,
1917, Lord Derby asked for Women for clerical service in the army and
official appeals were issued in February and repeatedly since that
time, and now all over the country we have Recruiting Committees
organizing meetings and securing recruits. They are recruiting at the
rate of 10,000 a month.

The Waacs had many forerunners in some of our voluntary organizations,
in the Women's Reserve Ambulance, of "The Green Cross Society,"
attached to the National Motor Volunteers--the Women's Volunteer
Reserve--the Women's Legion--the Women's Auxiliary Force and the Women
Signallers Territorial Corps. The Women's Signallers Corps had as
Commandant-in-Chief Mrs. E.J. Parker--Lord Kitchener's sister. They
believed women should be trained in every branch of signalling and
that men could be released for the firing line by women taking over
signalling work at fixed stations. Their prediction came true more
than two years later, for today they are in France. They drilled and
trained the women in all the branches of signalling semaphore--flags,
mechanical arms; and in Morse--flags,