100 years ago in The Saratogian

Friday, July 27, 1917

A bureaucratic mix-up is to blame for the fact that Saratoga County’s two draft districts must provide the same number of men to the military, even though one district, including Saratoga Springs, has much fewer men than the other.

Saratoga Springs city attorney Harold H. Corbin was tasked with investigating a situation many Spa City residents consider unfair. He’s learned that the two districts were drawn up with no geographical logic, but in order to divide the county into equal halves.

“For instance, Wilton, next door to Saratoga Springs, was placed in the opposite district,” The Saratogian explains, “The object was to divide the county into two districts of 30,000 each, whether adjacent towns were in the same district or not.”

The mistake occurred when Stillwater was assigned to the first district, while next-door Mechanicville was put in the second. Draft organizers thought this would help balance the two districts, but didn’t realize that Mechanicville, as part of its recent incorporation as a city, had annexed part of Stillwater, with a population of 3,000 people.

Draft officials in Albany “could not understand the large difference in the number of men in the two districts,” and insist that the disparity isn’t as bad as Corbin claims, once you subtract the unnaturalized aliens who are exempt from the draft.

As things stand, both districts must provide 158 men for the war against Germany, on top of men who’ve already volunteered for service.

WAR NURSE

Louise Clark is an Englishwoman who served as a Red Cross nurse in France early in the war and currently works as an interpreter. She’s spending her leave at The Geysers with her husband, an amputee veteran, and lectures on the war tonight at City Hall.

“Despite the warmth of the evening the chamber was filled when Mrs. Clark commenced to speak,” The Saratogian reports, “She did not attempt to give a formal lecture, but merely presented, in a sort of verbal moving pictures, an intimate view of some of the things she personally, and her native land as a whole, have witnessed.”

“All Englishwoman have been changed by the war,” Clarke says, “A doctor told me he feared his practice would be lost, for there were no more neurotic women in England.”

Noting that “I can’t bring myself to throw away a crust of bread now,” Clarke realizes “how trivial were many of the little pains and aches that we though were such trials before the war.”

Clarke describes German atrocities in Belgium, claiming that two-thirds of Belgian refugee boys arriving in England had had their hands cut off.