100 years ago in The Record
Friday, Sept. 6, 1918. With the next Liberty Loan drive of the world war scheduled to start on September 28. Mrs. George N. Patrick has been put in charge of women’s fundraising efforts in Troy. The new campaign will be Patrick’s fourth. “The success of the women has become a part of the city’s history in wartime accomplishment,” The Record reports. Patrick credits women with raising “about forty per cent” of Troy’s quota for the three previous campaigns. In Rensselaer County, the Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee has raised more than $2,500,000 for the U.S. war effort through the sale of Liberty Bonds, redeemable at interest after the end of the war. “The work which the women of this country have done in connection with the floating of government war loans will have undoubtedly a very definite place in the history of the war,” Patrick tells our reporter, “While the women’s committees throughout the country have some of the largest subscriptions to their credit, they have been instrumental in securing the smaller ones, those harder to get, but which mean the most from the standpoint of awakening the national spirit. “And it is [in] this awakening of the people to the necessity of their support of the government in this crisis that the value of women’s participation in financing the war is most clearly demonstrated.” Trojan Bearer of Message From War
Troy Chamber of Commerce president E. Harold Cluett recently visited France with an International Y.M.C. A. delegation. He describes some of his findings to the Waterford Chamber of Commerce at Waterford High School tonight.
Cluett arrived in Paris as thousands of civilians were fleeing the capital to escape shelling by German longrange artillery. “I know of the extent of the havoc wrought by this gun and of the lives lost, but I can not tell of it,” he says.
More evidence of German frightfulness emerged at a chateau recently converted into a Y.M.C. A. canteen. German troops “had stabled their horses in the dining room and destroyed most of the furniture and the building,” Cluett explains. This and other incidents “proved again and again that the Germans will stop at absolutely nothing.”
The most impressive sight in France, Cluett says, was “American troops marching into battle. He saw this a number of times and said it could be excelled by nothing else.”
Cluett himself nearly stumbled into battle on one occasion. Invited to visit troops in a communication trench, he and his soldier escort got lost. Starting back after half an hour, they were told by a French rescue team that they had wandered into “No Man’s Land.”