MRS. ROOSEVELT'S DIARY

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVI, Issue 65, 14 September 1943, Page 4

MRS. ROOSEVELT'S DIARY

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Sydney, September 7.—lt only took us two hours and ten minutes from the field at Melbourne to the field here in Sydney, but we were above the clouds most of the Way so I was glad we had seen the country on our previous flight. This has been an easy day because we did not begin our rounds till we had fortified ourselves with a very good lunch at the hotel. At two o'clock the Press came and though I thought all the questions that could be asked had been asked they thought up some more and still seemed full of them when I was told that we had to go to our first engagement.

We visited first a Red Cross officers' club, which was crowded with young flyers down on leave from New Guinea for a few days of rest. Then on to a club run by the Americans in Sydney with the help of their Australian friends. General Eichelberger found two young officers in whom he is interested here and introduced them, and I noticed that both wore decorations. We spent a half-hour at the club run by the Red Cross for army and navy nurses, and they gave us a cup of tea, and the general sat surrounded by his army girls, while Admiral Jones had the navy girls draped around his chair.

There are times when I think the world is a very small place, and at other times it seems very large! This afternoon was one of the occasions when it seemed small, for one nurse looked up and said, "Say hello to Poughkeepsie for me, Mrs. Roosevelt." I found she had been at St. Francis Hospital and knew my sister-in-law who is on the board of the hospital. Later another girl said, "If you see Leo Casey say hello for me. I knew him at the hospital in Syracuse, New York."

These girls revel in a comfortable bed without a net over it. A real hot bath in a tub, the chance to get a hair-do. I tried to make them tell me

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some of their experiences and they were slow to come, but gradually one after another contributed something to the picture of day-to-day heroism. One of them found a rat in bed with her on waking, another woke to find a rock python beside her on the floor. The rats steal your socks if you leave them out, the crickets eat your clothes. One group was without hot water for days and had very little water to spare for their own use after making the patients comfortable. In fact they went nine, months without a hot bath when they first went to New Guinea. I know they slept on. army cots, and their evening uniform is a one-piece slack suit with socks into which the trousers are carefully tucked, and the clumsy G.I. (army) shoe is the final protection against the mosquito who may lay a nurse low with malaria as easily as he attacks a soldier. One nurse told me that she had pinned the silver star on her brother twice. He is Marine Sergeant James Kaufman, and was decorated for conspicuous gallantry in repairing lines of communication between headquarters and the forward area during the bitter fighting on Guadalcanal. She is Lieutenant Mary Kaufman and is spending her leave here.

At four-thirty I attended a gathering of women at the Town Hall where the Mayor introduced me and I spoke. At six o'clock several people came in to see me. At seven I made a fifteenminute broadcast, after which we dined and then went to a Red Cross Club for enlisted men' where a dance was in full'swing; There I met a young man who had been chosen by Helen Hall for his job, and felt a great responsibility to carry it out well. It is a tribute to Miss Hall when people tell of her achievements out here when to get things done was nothing short of a miracle. She has left many warm friends and admirers in every place that I have been so far. —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT.