THE AMERICAN UNIFORM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XL, Issue 1873, 5 September 1918, Page 1

THE AMERICAN UNIFORM.

A SARTORIAL PROBLEM,

When the rumoured change in American uniforms is made (says the New York Evening Post) the reconciliation of General Pershing’s famous antipathy for pockets with the yearning of our soldiers for much greater pocket space will present a sartorial problem. The general wishes our uniforms to have “more style,’’ hut how their present desperate tightness and starkness of outline could be increased on one would venture to guess, so it may be that the English rather, than the West Pint note is to he dominant. Sima* the An/.aes paraded so engagingly through our streets it has been clear (hat discipline and freedom in a soldier's dress are less hostile to one another than we had supposed—that a good-looking uniform, neither a straight, .jacket nor a kimona, was easily possible. The Aimacs stand as rigidly trim as our trained men, but they can accommodate something besides a silk handkerchief in their pockets when they crawl out across Xo Man’s Land — a cake of chocolate added to an American uniform becomes a physical defect; a letter is observable at a hundred yards; as one man obr jeeted, the outfit is “entirely too strict.” To live in the'trenches in company with such primness must be an ordeal. Tommy can carry three jars of strawberry jam, a game of draughts, extra socks, a novel, and a few hand grenades about his person, and no one is wiser, thanks to the fullness of his attire, but if General Pershing should meet one of his men thus equipped the occasion would become historic.