100 years ago in The Record
Saturday, Jan. 12, 1918
The state government could equip an army regiment on the money wasted on irrelevant and overly wordy telegrams from local draft boards, the state adjutant general tells The Record today. “Hundreds of telegrams are received at the adjutant general’s office every day,” our reporter explains, “Practically all of them are charged to the government and cost at least a cent a word.” Adjutant General Charles H. Sherrill has applied a sharp editorial eye to telegrams from draft boards. “Going over some of the large telegrams received today, I find that in almost every instance it is possible to convey the information or request embodied in messages from twenty to thirty words less than are generally used. “In one instance alone, I deducted forty-five words from a telegram and this did not in any way impair its sense or meaning. In many other instances the subjects covered in the telegrams could be just as well handled through the regular mail.” Sherrill believes that “it will readily be seen how urgent it is to conduct the affairs of each local board on the strictest business basis.” He’s ordered boards to “Write – do not telegraph unless of great importance, and in that case do not use unnecessary words in telegrams; boil them down.”
British slackers
There could be as many as 500 British subjects of military age living in Troy, Captain K. G. Strachan tells the city’s British Association tonight. Many may be guilty of “hiding back of Uncle Sam” when both their mother country and their adopted country need them for the war against Germany.
Strachan runs a British recruiting station in Albany “so that British subjects can not have the excuse that they are too far away from their country to volunteer their services.”
As resident aliens, Britons aren’t subject to the U.S. military draft. Strachan protests that they “should not take advantage of their alien rights and stay here to grab the good jobs of young American men who are drafted.”
Britons past military age owe something to the U.S. as well, says Rev. Joseph H. Odell of First Presbyterian Church. They should “show their gratitude to this country by subscribing to the Liberty loan, the Red Cross, by conserving food and all other things necessary for the successful prosecution of the war.”
No occasion like this can pass without reminders of German wickedness. Strachan recounts an incident in an army hospital where a slightly wounded German officer demanded immediate surgery ahead of his more gravely wounded fellow POWs, stomping one of them to death after tripping over his legs.