An administrator receives a $100 grant for her uniform and is paid from $600 to $875 a year out of which $200 is deducted for food.  There is generally one officer to every fifty women.

The administrator must drill her girls.  The W.A.A.C. is proud of its tone and its discipline.  Its officers make the girls feel much is expected of them, because of the uniform they wear, and the girls have made a fine response.  There are very few rules and as little restraint as possible.  The girls are put on their honour when not under supervision.  The administrator has considerable disciplinary powers, but they are very little needed.

It does not seem to be by discipline that the officer succeeds best.  There is a nice story told of an Administrator who had been away from her unit some days, returning and being met at the station by one of the rank and file who had come for her bag.

“I am glad to see you, Ma’am,” was the greeting, so emphatic a one that the Administrator inquired nervously if something were wrong.

“Oh, no.  Seems as if Mother had been away, Ma’am,” explained the girl.

The Administrator can help her girls by sorting them out well, putting friends and the same kind of girls together; it makes so much difference.

The Administrator has not only to handle her own sex—­she has to deal with men officers and quartermasters, and she succeeds in doing that well, too.

Our Administrators are naturally women of education and carefully chosen and there is plenty of opportunity of rising “from the ranks.”

The girls cross over to France on the gray transports, are received by the women Draft Receiving Officers, and go up the lines to their assigned posts.

The women are billeted in some of the base towns in pensions and summer hotels that have been commandeered, in big houses and in one case in a beautiful old Chateau where the ghosts of dead-and-gone ladies of beauty and fashion must wonder what kind of women these khaki clad girls are.  The girls in these make their rooms home-like with photographs, hangings, and little personal belongings.

The greater number of girls live in camps, and different types of huts have been tried.  Some of the camps are entirely of wooden huts—­large and roomy.  Other camps have the Nissen hut of corrugated iron, lined with laths wood floored and raised from the ground.  These have been linked together in the cleverest way by covered ways.  In the sleeping huts the beds are iron bedsteads with springs and horse-hair mattresses.  Each bed has four thoroughly good blankets and a pillow.  No sheets are given—­there is no labour to wash the thousands of sheets, and the cotton is needed.  Each woman has a wooden locker with a shelf above, and a chair.  Washing and bathing is done in separate huts, and in every camp hot and cold water is laid on.

The mess room is a big hut.  The girls wait on themselves and the food is excellent.  They receive in rations the same as the soldiers on lines of communication—­four-fifths of a fighting man’s ration and whatever is over is returned and credited, and the extra money is used for luxuries, games and for entertaining visitors from other camps.