! ;i i! : ; *l 
 
 UNCEN50RED LETTERS 
 OF A CANTEEN GIRL 
 
Class 
 
 Book _ 'J&- 
 GopyiightN Afe> 
 
 COPYRkGHT DEPOSIT. 
 

THE 
 T NCENSORED LETTERS 
 
 OF A 
 
 CANTEEN GIRL 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 1920 
 
u 
 
 Copyright, 1920 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 w 
 
 / 
 
 AUG 12 1920 
 ©CU576043 
 
TO 
 
 PAT 
 
 GATTS 
 
 BRADY 
 
 SNOW 
 
 NEDDY 
 
 BILL 
 
 NICK 
 
 HARRY 
 
 JERRY 
 
 and 
 
 THE REST 
 
 THIS BOOK 
 
 is 
 DEDICATED 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 BOURMONT 
 
 Company A i 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 GONCOURT 
 
 The Doughboys 59 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 Rattentout 
 The Front 87 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 GONDRECOURT 
 
 The Artillery 112 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 Abainville 
 The Engineers 132 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 Mauvages 
 The Ordnance 167 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Verdun 
 The French 214 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CONFLANS 
 
 Pioneers, M. P.'s and Others 237 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 ToM. D. M. andM. H. M: 
 
 My dears , 
 
 These letters were all written for you; scratched down on odds 
 and ends of writing paper, in a rare spare moment at the canteen; 
 at night, at my billet, by candle-light; in the mornings, perched 
 in front of Madame's fire-place with my toes tucked up on an orna- 
 mental chaufrette foot-warmer. Why were they never sent? Simply 
 because all letters mailed from France in those days, must of course 
 pass under the eyes of the Censor. And as the Censor was likely to 
 be a young man who sat opposite you at the mess-table, it meant 
 that one mustn't say the things one could, and one couldn't say the 
 things one would. So, after my first fortnight over there I decided 
 to write my letters to you just as I would at home, putting down 
 everything I saw and thought and did, quite brazenly and shame- 
 lessly, and then keep them, — under lock and key if need be, — until 
 I could give them to you in person. 
 
 Written with the thought of you in my mind, these letters are 
 first of all for you, and after that for whoever they may concern, 
 being a true record of one girl's experience with the A. E. F. in 
 France during the Great War. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 BOURMONT 
 
 Company A 
 
 Bourmont, France, Nov. 24, 191 7. 
 
 My village has red roofs. When I first came to France and saw 
 that the villages were two kinds; those with red roofs and those with 
 grey, I prayed le bon Dieu that mine should be a red-roofed one. 
 Heaven was kind. Every little house in town is covered with rose- 
 colored tiles. We came here yesterday from Paris. Our orders, 
 which were delivered to us in great secrecy, read: Report to Mr. 
 T , Divisional Secretary, Bourmont, Haute Marne; then fol- 
 lowed a schedule of trains. That was all we knew except that some 
 one told us that at Bourmont it had rained steadily all fall. 
 
 "It cleared off for several hours once," concluded our informant. 
 "But that was in the middle of the night when nobody was awake 
 to see." 
 
 Bourmont is a city set upon a hill, a hill that rises so sharply, 
 so suddenly, that no motor vehicle is allowed to take the straight 
 road up its side, but must follow the roundabout route at the back. 
 Already we have heard tales about our hill; one of them being of a 
 lad belonging to a company of engineers stationed here, who in a 
 spendthrift mood, being disinclined to climb the hill one night after 
 having dined at the cafe at its foot, bribed an old Frenchman with 
 a fifty franc note to wheel him to the summit in a wheel-barrow. 
 The Frenchman, for whose powers one must have great respect, 
 achieved the feat eventually, the spectators agreeing the ride a bar- 
 gain at the price. 
 
 Two-thirds of the way up the hill on the steep street called gran- 
 diosely Le Faubourg de France we have our billet, at the home of 
 
2 BOURMONT 
 
 Monsieur and Madame Chaput. These are an adorable old couple; 
 Madame a stately yet lovably gentle soul, Monsieur le Command- 
 ant, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War and member of the 
 Legion oVHonneur. His wonderful old uniforms with their scarlet 
 trousers and gold epaulets rub elbows with my whipcord in the 
 wardrobe. 
 
 Outside, the Maison Chaput resembles all the other houses 
 which, built one adjoining another, present a solid grey plaster 
 front on each side of the street. Like all the rest it has two doors, 
 one opening into the house and one into the stable, and like every 
 other house on the street the doors bear little boards with the 
 billeting capacity of house and stable stenciled on them, so many 
 Homines, so many Off. (for Officiers). It is told how one lad after 
 walking the length of the street exclaimed; 
 
 "Gee! Looks as if this were Dippyville. There's one or two off 
 in every house!" 
 
 Another boy gazing ruefully at the sign on his billet door, groaned; 
 
 "Twelve homes! Why, there ain't one there!" 
 
 One stable door nearby wears the legend in large scrawling let- 
 ters; "Sherman was right." At first the owner was furious at this 
 defacement of his property, but when someone explained the sig- 
 nificance of the words to him, he became mollified and even took 
 a pride in them. 
 
 "Where are you stopping?" asks one boy of another. 
 
 "Me? Oh, at the Hotel de Barn, four manure-heaps straight 
 ahead and two to the right." 
 
 The distinguishing feature of the Maison Chaput is the corner- 
 stone. This shows as a white stone tablet at one side of the door. 
 On it is carved "Laid by the hand of Emil Chaput, aged one year. 
 Anno. 1842." It is the same Emil Chaput who with his tiny baby 
 hand "laid" the corner-stone who is now our genial host. 
 
 "It is droll," said Madame; "When strangers come to town they 
 must always stop and read the corner-stone. They think the 
 tablet is placed there to mark the birthplace of some famous man." 
 
 The Gendarme and I, — Madame has christened G my com- 
 
COMPANY A 3 
 
 panion the Gendarme on account of her vigorous brisk bearing, — 
 live in the Salle des Assiettes, at least that is what I have named it, 
 for the walls of the room which evidently in more pretentious days 
 served as a salle a manger, are literally covered with the most 
 beautiful old plates. Not being a connoisseur I don't know what 
 their history is nor what might be their value; I only know that 
 they are altogether lovely. The designs are delicious; flowers, in- 
 sects, birds, little houses, Chinamen fishing in tiny boats, inter- 
 spersed with spirited representations of the Gallic cock in rose and 
 scarlet. I exclaimed over them to Madame, whereat Monsieur, 
 candle in hand, bustled across the room and called on me to regard 
 one in particular. 
 
 "Qa coute," he averred proudly, " quar ante francs!" 
 
 Since that moment I have been vaguely uneasy. What if, in a 
 moment of exasperation, I should throw an ink-bottle at the Gen- 
 darme's head, and — shatter a plate worth forty francs! 
 
 Our room is the third one back. The front room is kitchen, din- 
 ing and living room. The in-between room is quite bare of furni- 
 ture, lined all about with panelled cupboards, and quite without 
 light or air except that which filters in through the opened doors. 
 In one of these cupboards Monsieur le Commandant spends his 
 nights. When the hour for retiring comes, he opens a little panelled 
 door and climbs into the hole in the wall thus revealed, leaving the 
 door a crack open after him. When we pass through on our way 
 to breakfast we hurry by the cupboard with averted faces. The 
 family Chaput are not early risers. 
 
 Already Madame has taken us into her warm heart. She will 
 be our mother while we are in France, she tells us. Everything 
 about us is of absorbing interest. When the Gendarme exhibited 
 her wardrobe trunk, she was fairly overcome. 
 
 "Ah, vive VAmerique" she cried, clapping her old hands, and, 
 11 Vive V Amerique\" again. 
 
 Bourmont, it seems, is army Divisional Headquarters. It is also 
 headquarters for this division of the Y. There is a hut here, a ware- 
 house, and headquarters offices, employing a personnel of sixteen 
 
4 BOURMONT , 
 
 or seventeen. By tomorrow the Gendarme and I will know what 
 our work is to be. 
 
 Botjrmont, November 28. 
 
 I have a canteen; the Gendarme, who has had some business 
 training, is to work in the office. My canteen is in Saint Thiebault, 
 the village next door. In the morning I go down the hill, past the 
 grey houses built like steps on either side — some with odd pear 
 trees, their branches trained gridiron-wise flat against the fronts, 
 — over the river Meuse, here a sleepy little stream, to Saint Thie- 
 bault. On the way I pass lads in olive drab with whom I exchange 
 a smile and a hello, villagers bareheaded, in sabots, and poilus 
 in what was once horizon blue. In Paris the uniforms were all so 
 beautiful and bright, but here at Bourmont one sees the real hue, 
 faded, discolored, muddy, worn. The soldiers, middle-aged men 
 for the most part, slouch about, occupied with homely, simple 
 tasks, chopping wood and drawing water. One feels there is some- 
 thing painfully improper in the fact that they should be in uniform; 
 they should, each and every one, be propped comfortably in front 
 of their own hearthsides reading VEcho de Paris, in felt slippers while 
 their wooden shoes rest on the sill outside. And yet these very 
 ones, I think as I look at them, may be the defenders of Verdun, 
 the victors of the Marne, the veterans of a hundred battles! 
 
 The Bourmontese, who are proud and haughty folk, and call 
 themselves a city though they number only a few hundred souls, 
 look with disdain on the smaller village of Saint Thiebault, Saint 
 Thiebault des Crapauds they call it, Saint Thiebault of the Toads. 
 Approaching Saint Thiebault one sees two unmistakable signs of 
 American occupancy; first, a large heap of empty tin cans and then 
 the Stars and Stripes fluttering from a flag pole in the centre of the 
 village. For Saint Thiebault is Regimental Headquarters and it is 
 the boast of the old Colonel that wherever the regiment has gone 
 that flag has gone too. Down the main street of the town I go, 
 past the drinking fountain placarded; "Do not drink, good only for 
 animals," but at which, nevertheless, the doughboys frequently 
 
COMPANY A 5 
 
 refresh themselves, cheerfully risking death, not to mention a court- 
 martial, in order to get a drink of unmedicated water; and out 
 along the Rue Dieu until I turn off the highway just beyond the 
 village wash-house. The wash-house, known to the French as la 
 Fontaine, is a beautiful little building like a tiny stone chapel, 
 with tall arched windows filled with iron grills. Through the 
 centre runs a long oblong pool; at its brim the women kneel to do 
 their scrubbing, handsome peasant wenches many of them, with 
 fresh, high coloring. Often one sees a soldier leaning against the 
 grill, engaged in some attempt at gallantry through the bars. 
 Sometimes one even glimpses a form in olive drab kneeling by the 
 side of one of the peasant girls, he scrubbing his sock,s, and she her 
 stays, while she gives him a lesson in French and in laundering a 
 la Franqaise. When the Americans first came to Saint Thiebault 
 they had only a small-sized guard-house. Then came one historic 
 pay-day when after months of penury the troops were paid. That 
 night the accommodations at "the brig" proved inadequate and 
 the wash-house had to be requisitioned for the over-flow. This 
 was well enough until the lodgers fell to fighting among themselves 
 and so fell headlong into the pool. Then such a hullabaloo broke 
 loose that the whole camp turned out to see who had been mur- 
 dered. 
 Back of the wash-house lies a group of long French barracks, 
 
 and here lives Company A of the Regiment, infantry and 
 
 "regulars." Beyond the mess-hall is the hut, a French abri tent 
 with double walls. Ducking under the fly, one finds oneself in a 
 long rectangular canvas room, lighted by a dozen little isinglass 
 windows. The room is filled with folding wooden chairs and long 
 ink-stained tables over which are scattered writing materials, 
 games and well-worn magazines. Opposite the door, at the far 
 end, is the canteen counter, a shelf of books at one side, a victrola 
 and a bulletin board, to which cartoons and clippings are tacked, 
 on the other. Back of the counter on the wall, held in place by 
 safety pins, are the hut's only decorations, four of the gorgeous 
 French war posters brought with me from Paris. There are two 
 
6 BOURMONT 
 
 stoves resembling unbrella-stands for heating in the main part of 
 the hut and behind the counter another, about the size and shape 
 of a man's derby hat, on which I must make my hot chocolate. For 
 lights at night I am told that occasionally one can procure a few 
 quarts of kerosene and then the lamps that stand underneath the 
 counter are brought out and for a few days we shine; but usually 
 we manage as our ancestors did with candle-light. Our candle- 
 sticks form a quaint collection; some are real tin bourgeois brought 
 from Paris, some strips of wood, some chewing-gum boxes, while 
 others are empty bottles, "dead soldiers" as the boys call them. 
 As for the bottles, I am particular about the sort that I employ 
 and none of mine are labeled anything but Vittel Water. Others 
 I observe are not so circumspect, — yesterday I chanced in at a can- 
 teen in a neighboring village kept by a Y man; on a shelf three 
 "dead soldier" candlesticks stood in a row and their labels read; 
 Champagne, Cognac, Benedictine ! For the rest, the hut is equipped 
 with a wheezy old piano, a set of parlor billiards, and a man secre- 
 tary. It is invariably dense with smoke, part wood and part 
 tobacco, and usually crowded with boys. 
 
 The first night after the Chief had taken me over to call at my 
 canteen and I had had one cursory glance at them, I came back 
 feeling that my hut contained the roughest, toughest set of young 
 ruffians that I had ever laid eyes on. The second night I came 
 home and fairly cried myself to sleep over them — they seemed so 
 young, so pitiful and so puzzled underneath their air of bravery, 
 so far away from anything they really understood and everybody 
 that was dear to them. It was Cummings in particular I think 
 who did it for me. He owns to seventeen but I would put fifteen 
 as an outside estimate. A mere boy who hasn't got his growth yet, 
 with soft unformed features and a voice as shrill as a child's, I 
 am sure he ran away from home to go to war just as another lad 
 might have run away to see the circus. Although the regiment is 
 a regular army organization, a large part of the men were raw re- 
 cruits only last summer, a fact which causes the old-timers, whose 
 service dates from Border days or before, no little regret. 
 
COMPANY A 7 
 
 "This Man's Army ain't what it used to be," they complain; 
 "it's getting too mixed." 
 
 The "veterans" have a stock saying which they employ to put 
 the youngsters in their places; 
 
 "Call yourself a soldier do you? Why I've stood parade rest 
 longer than you've been in the army ! " 
 
 This is sometimes varied, when the speaker happens to be the 
 tough sort, by; "Huh! I've put more time in the guard-house than 
 you have in the army!" 
 
 Tonight a boy came up to the counter and asked: " Goin' to serve 
 hot chocolate tonight? " 
 
 "Sure thing!" 
 
 "Then I guess I won't go out and get drunk." 
 
 It's going to be hot chocolate or die in that hut every night after 
 this! 
 
 Bourmont, November 31. 
 
 I don't like my uniform. I don't like women in uniform any- 
 way. I suppose it is because one is so used to the expression of a 
 woman's personality in dress that when she dons regulation garb 
 she seems to lose so much. And then to really carry off a uniform 
 requires a flair, a dash, a swagger, and such are rarely feminine 
 possessions. The consensus of opinion seems to bear me out. 
 
 "Of course I think women in uniforms look very snappy, "con- 
 fided a lad to me today; "but somehow they don't look like women 
 tome!" 
 
 "Pas joli" says Monsieur le Commandant severely, referring to 
 my hat. "Pas jolil" But when I put on my old blue civilian coat 
 he fairly goes into raptures. 
 
 "Be-u-ti-ful!" he ejaculates. "Be-u-ti-ful! Toilette de mile. Pas 
 toilette de Y. M. C. AJ" 
 
 Besides the suit and cape I had made in Paris, they gave me two 
 canteen aprons, aprons such as French working women wear, 
 voluminous, beplaited, made in Mother Hubbard style. Now 
 there is one point on which I am resolved. They can court martial 
 me, they can send me home, or they can lead me out and shoot me 
 
8 BOURMONT 
 
 at sunrise, but they cannot make me wear those aprons! What's 
 more, the very first minute that I have to myself I'm going to cut 
 them up and make them into canteen dish-cloths. 
 
 Bourmont, December 3. ! 
 
 This French money is the very plague; not because it is French 
 but because it is so flimsy. It may perhaps measure up to the na- 
 tional standards, but it fails utterly to meet American require- 
 ments; the difference lying chiefly in the fact that the French don't 
 shoot craps. It comes into the canteen in all stages of disintegra- 
 tion. 
 
 "She's kinder feeble. Will she pass?" inquires a lad anxiously. 
 
 "With care maybe, and the help of a little sticking plaster," 
 I reply; and getting out the roll of gummed paper kept handily in 
 the cash-drawer, I proceed to patch up the tattered bill. 
 
 "Guess this one must have been up to the front; it's all shot to 
 pieces," another lad apologizes; then, at my casual references to 
 shooting craps, grins guiltily. "But say now, ain't it the rottenest 
 money you ever did see?" "The United States ought to teach these 
 Frenchies how to make paper money," remarks a third; while 
 still another adds; "When I'm to home I write to my girl on better 
 paper than that." 
 
 Sometimes the bills come in as a mere mass of crumpled tatters; 
 then one must play picture-puzzle piecing it together. Sometimes 
 they are beyond repair; for at times you will receive two halves of 
 different notes pasted neatly together, or at other times one with 
 the corner bearing an essential number lacking. The French banks 
 refuse to pay a cent on their paper money unless it is just so. 
 
 "I'm sorry, but that bill's no good," you will occasionally have 
 to tell a boy. Usually he will grin cheerfully as he stuffs it back 
 into his pocket. 
 
 " Oh well, I'll pass it along in a crap game." 
 
 Then too, the boys have no respect for foreign money and so 
 handle it carelessly with an obvious contempt that is irritating 
 to the French. 
 
COMPANY A 9 
 
 "Tain't real money," they declare. 
 
 The paper francs and half -francs they call "soap coupons." 
 
 "Why, you might just as well be spendin' the label off a stick 
 o' chewin' gum!" they jeer. 
 
 Next to the paper money that comes to pieces in their fingers, 
 the boys detest the big one and two cent coppers. Known to the 
 navy as " bunker-plates," in the army they pass as "clackers." 
 "You get a pocket-full o' them things and you think you've got 
 some money, and all the time it ain't more than ten cents alto- 
 gether," they grumble. 
 
 "I can't be bothered carryin' that stuff around," they declare 
 when I beg them to pay me in coppers. "I always throw 'em away 
 or give 'em to the kids." A prejudice which greatly complicated 
 the matter of making change until I had an inspiration. Now I 
 give them their small change in boxes of matches or sticks of chew- 
 ing gum. 
 
 Then there is the annoyance of the local money. Since the war, 
 the cities of France have taken to issuing their own paper francs 
 and half-francs. We accept all this local money in the canteens 
 and send it to Paris to be redeemed. But the French tradespeople 
 in general refuse to honor these bills except in the city that issues 
 them or its immediate vicinity. Many a puzzled dough-boy has 
 been driven to indignant protest or even to "chucking the stuff 
 away" in his exasperated disgust when told by the shop-keepers 
 that his paper money was pas bon. But the grievance is not quite 
 all on one side: no small amount of worthless Mexican money, 
 brought over by Border veterans, I am told, was palmed off on 
 shopkeepers at the port when the Americans first landed! 
 
 In contrast to their disdain for this foreign currency the boys 
 cherish to a degree that is half funny, half pathetic, any specimens 
 of "real money" that they are lucky enough to possess. 
 
 "Say, I had an American dollar bill in my hand the other day, — 
 I felt just as if the old flag was waving over me!" And another lad; 
 "Saw a U. S. Dollar bill today. Oh boy! but it looked a mile 
 long to me!" 
 
io B0URM0NT 
 
 If anyone displays an American greenback at the counter a little 
 riot is sure to ensue. All the boys nearby crowd about, feast their 
 eyes on it, touch it, pat it, kiss it even. 
 
 "Lemme see!" " Ain't she a beauty?" "That's the real stuff!" 
 "Say, how much will you sell her for?" 
 
 Even the half-dollars, quarters and dimes are precious. 
 
 "You don't get that one," they say as they pull a handful of 
 change from their pockets. "That's my lucky piece. I'm savin 7 
 that there little oP nickel to spend on Broadway." 
 
 French money, Belgian money, Swiss money, English money, 
 Spanish money, Italian money, Greek money, Canadian money, 
 Luxembourg money, Indo-Chinese money, money from Argentine 
 Republic, and yesterday a German mark even, all come across the 
 counter and go into the till without comment. But when any 
 American money comes in I always feel badly over it. For, be it 
 a crisp five dollar bill, an eagle quarter or only a buffalo nickel 
 I know it signifies just one thing, — bankruptcy. 
 
 Bourmont, December 7. 
 
 To be a corporal in the Ninth Infantry, it is said, a man must be 
 able to speak eight languages, one for each soldier in his squad. The 
 same could be said with almost equal truth of our regiment. I 
 don't know whether it is this mixture of many nationalities that 
 gives my family its flavour; be that as it may, Company A has 
 more color, more character, more individuality to the square inch 
 than I had dreamed any such group could possess. And they are 
 so funny, so engaging in their infinite variety and their child-like 
 naivete! 
 
 First there are Gatts and Maggioni; Gatts, lean, tall, honest- 
 eyed, with a grin that won't come off and a quaint streak of humour, 
 — Gatts who looks pure Yankee, but is, if the truth were told, 
 three-quarters German, — Gatts who hangs about my counter 
 hour after hour; and by his side sticks little Maggioni, who told 
 the recruiting officer that he was seventeen but whose head just 
 tops the canteen shelf, and who looks, with his pink cheeks and his 
 
COMPANY A ii 
 
 great dark eyes, like nothing in the world but an Italian cupid in 
 the sulks. The two have struck up the oddest comradeship. 
 
 "Me an' Gatts, we're goin 'to stick side by side," explains Mag- 
 gioni, " an' if I see a crowd o' Germans pilin' onto him, why I'll 
 just go right after 'em, an' if too many of 'em come for me ter 
 oncet, why Gatts here, he'll just lay right into 'em." 
 
 And Gatts nods, looking down at Maggioni with a parent's 
 indulgent eye. 
 
 "He thinks he's a tough guy for sich a little feller," he comments 
 reflectively; "but he's the only one in the regiment that knows it." 
 
 "You all think I'm mighty little!" snaps the cupid. "When I 
 joined at Syracuse everybody said to me 'Baby, where'd you leave 
 your cradle? ' But lemme tell you, I've growed since I've been in 
 the army!" 
 
 "Waal I do believe there's one part of him that's growed;" 
 Gatts is very solemn. 
 
 "What's that?" I ask. 
 
 "His feet." 
 
 Private Gatts has promised me one of the Kaiser's ears! 
 
 Then there is Brady, "Devil Brady" the little black Irish coal- 
 miner from Oklahoma, who spends his days trying to get put in 
 the guard-house, so he won't have to drill. 
 
 "I'm plumb disgusted," he confided to me today. "I never 
 worked so hard in my life as I did the other night gettin' drunk, 
 an' then the guard was so much drunker than I was, I had to carry 
 him to the guard-house. I thought sure they'd give me thirty days 
 at least, but they only kept me twenty-four hours and then out!" 
 
 "Hard luck," I sympathized. 
 
 "I just knew how it would be," he mourned. "It was Friday 
 the thirteenth when I joined the army; there were just thirteen of 
 us fellers, and the thirteenth was a nigger." 
 
 He tells me the most wonderful yarns about the miners and their 
 pet rats, about explosions and disasters and rescue parties. Last 
 night he told me the story of one mine-horror that will stick in my 
 memory. 
 
12 BOURMONT 
 
 "And we shoveled the last three men and a mule into one bag," 
 he finished. 
 
 Now and then I catch a glimpse of Jenicho the Russian giant, 
 but he is very shy. A huge lumbering fellow, sluggish, and seem- 
 ingly stupid, with little pig eyes that are quite lost to sight when he 
 smiles, Jenicho is the butt of the Company. When he joined the 
 regiment last summer, they tell me, he knew no word of English. 
 The first phrase that he acquired was; " You no bodder me." For 
 the boys can't resist the temptation to plague Jenicho, and though 
 his strength is such that if he once should get his hands on his 
 tormentors he could break them into bits, he is so slow withal that 
 they always can elude him. Not long ago Jenicho was walking 
 post one night when the Officer of the Day hailed him and an- 
 nounced himself. To which Jenicho lustily responded; "Me no 
 give damn. Me walk post, gun loaded, bay'net fixed. You no 
 bodder me. Me shoot!" And the Officer of the Day discreetly 
 walked on. 
 
 Then there is little Philip R. who plays our decrepit old piano 
 quite brilliantly by ear, and who is, he tells me, half Greek and 
 half Egyptian. Philip R. is the pet of a French family in one of the 
 neighboring villages. He stopped at a house to ask for a drink of 
 water when out walking one day. Madame asked him in, pressed 
 him to stay to supper. The family made much of him, and all 
 because forsooth he was the first "American" they had ever seen. 
 Since then he has been a constant welcome visitor. 
 
 There is St. Mary too. If you can conceive of a cherub eating 
 watermelon you have a perfect picture of St. Mary. St. Mary 
 converses entirely in words of one syllable and very few at that. 
 He makes smiles serve for speech. St. Mary loses everything he 
 owns; not long ago he lost his overcoat, now he has lost his bayonet. 
 Yet St. Mary is the best natured boy in the company; he needs to 
 be. When St. Mary helps me stir the chocolate it seems as if half 
 the company fined up on the other side of the counter to shout; 
 "St. Mary! Take your dirty hands out er that there chocolate!" 
 and St. Mary never says a word but grins until his eyes are nothing 
 
COMPANY A 13 
 
 but little slits and ducks his head until only the curls on top are 
 visible. 
 
 "St. Mary, he's kind o' simple," explains Private Gatts. "But 
 there ain't anybody in camp that's got a better heart." 
 
 And there is Bruno, Angelo Bruno, a little grinning goblin of a 
 man, but strong, they say, as a gorilla. Bruno gives the non-coms 
 no end of trouble; he's a "tough nut to manage." Whenever he is 
 told to do anything that does not suit his tastes, he merely shrugs 
 his shoulders, " No capish," and that's the end of it. The other day 
 while on guard he was interrogated by the Officer of the Day. 
 
 "What's your name?" 
 
 "Bruno." 
 
 "What are your general orders?" 
 
 "Angelo." 
 
 The Officer gasped, thought he would try again. "What are 
 your special orders? " 
 
 Bruno saw a light. "They're ina my pock!" 
 
 When I first came to Saint Thiebault I was puzzled by the silver 
 half-francs in my cash drawer which were bent in the middle, 
 some of them so far as almost to form a right-angle. Then the 
 boys explained. Bruno was once a strong man in a circus side- 
 show. He did things with his teeth. The crooked half-francs were 
 the results of his exhibiting his prowess to the boys. So now when 
 damaged half -francs appear I know that our little Angelo has been 
 trying his teeth again. At present our social intercourse with 
 Bruno is limited. He is serving thirty days in the guard-house. 
 But every day or two he slips into the hut to do his shopping, the 
 kind-hearted guard standing at the door, as he does so, a sheepish 
 look on his face. If there is one military duty which the dough- 
 boy hates above all others, it is this job of "chasing prisoners," 
 and when you meet a file of guard-house habitues escorted by a 
 rifle in the rear, it is invariably the guard, and not the prisoners, 
 who looks the culprit! The interest of Bruno's visits lies largely 
 in seeing what is his latest acquisition in the way of jewelry. For 
 Bruno has a pretty taste for finery and enlivens the dull evenings 
 
i 4 BOURMONT 
 
 of his captivity by winning away the ornaments of his fellow 
 prisoners. Already he has come into the canteen decked out with 
 seven large rings and a fat watch and chain. Today he appeared 
 with his latest prize, a pair of gold-rimmed eye glasses. They are 
 hideously unbecoming, they pinch his nose so that it hurts, more- 
 over he can't more than half see out of them, and yet it is quite 
 evident those eyeglasses are the pride of his heart. 
 
 Last week our Secretary conceived a big idea. He would edu- 
 cate A Company. He would teach them to read, write and speak 
 English. He started a class. On the first night there was a large 
 crowd, eager and interested; the second night there were six, the 
 pupils when sought out complaining they were " tired" or "busy;" 
 the third night there was Saint Mary who made one; the fourth 
 night the class died an easy death. I am afraid Company A is 
 going to continue uneducated. As Brady said: 
 
 "There were just two things I learned in school; one was to throw 
 a spit ball, the other was to bend a pin convenient for somebody 
 to sit on." And it looks as if it would have to go at that. 
 
 "Why, those birds don't even understand their own names," 
 complain the officers; "except on pay-day, and then they'll answer 
 no matter how you pronounce them." 
 
 Bourmont, December q. 
 
 There is something queer about me. I don't mind the mud, I 
 don't mind the rain, I don't mind the hill, I don't even mind the 
 mess. Of course I admit that the food isn't quite what one is 
 used to, and the surroundings are a trifle unsavoury, but it is, 
 after all, so much better than the state of semi-starvation that I 
 was led to half anticipate, that I for one am quite content. 
 
 Our mess is held at the house of an old couple who live a little 
 way above our billet on the hill. The house was differentiated from 
 the others in the row by a spindling and discouraged tree which 
 stood in a green tub outside; as this was the only tree in front of a 
 house on the whole street it has always been easy to pick out our 
 otherwise undistinguished entrance. Last night however, the 
 
COMPANY A IS 
 
 weather waxing colder, the tree moved indoors. This morning the 
 whole Y. personnel wandered distractedly up and down the hill 
 trying to identify the mess-house door, until some kindly villagers, 
 sensing the situation, came out on their front steps and pointed us 
 to the place. 
 
 The house, like most of the village dwellings, consists, down- 
 stairs, of just two rooms. In the front room the family cooks, 
 eats and spends its days. In the back room the family sleeps, and 
 here we have our mess. The drawback of this arrangement is 
 that one has to pass through the kitchen in order to reach the dining- 
 room and this is likely to spoil one's pleasure in the meal that 
 follows. As for me, I go on the principle that what one doesn't 
 know won't take one's appetite away, and so hurry through the 
 kitchen with one eye shut and the other fixed on the door ahead 
 of me. 
 
 Said my right-hand neighbor to my left-hand neighbor at supper 
 the other day, as he offered him the piece de resistance of the meal: 
 
 "You aren't taking rice tonight? " 
 
 "Thanks no. Saw the old lady picking 'em out this noon." 
 
 " That's nothing. I saw the old man picking 'em out of the beans 
 yesterday." 
 
 But why should people come to war if they are going to be so 
 squeamish? 
 
 A few days ago one rash soul among us conceived a hankering 
 for salad. She went to Madame and, being ignorant of the French 
 word, demanded simply. 
 
 "Avez-vous lettice?" 
 
 Madame shook her head uncomprehending, but finally as the 
 words were repeated a fight dawned. 
 
 "Ah ouij oni, ouiV 
 
 She turned and hurried upstairs, descending triumphantly a 
 moment later with a large bundle of old letters! In just what form 
 she expected us to have them served I have not yet been able to 
 ascertain. 
 
 The mess-room is so crowded that to reach a seat often requires 
 
16 BOURMONT 
 
 considerable manceuvering. In one comer stands an ancient dress- 
 maker's dummy — by popular vote awarded as sweetheart to the 
 most bashful man at table; in the corner opposite is the bed of 
 Madame and Monsieur. The men who get up for early breakfast, 
 swallow their bread and jam and coffee with Monsieur watching 
 from his couch of ease. Today Madame was indisposed and when 
 we came to supper we found that she had retired already. All 
 through the meal she lay there, under the red feather-bed, looking 
 like a dingy, weazened old corpse, staring at the ceiling, her mouth 
 wide open. 
 
 For the last few days we have had a visiting clergyman with us. 
 To all appearances a meek and long-suffering little man, he has been 
 giving special revivalistic discourses at the huts and eating at our 
 mess. This morning he was asked to say grace. In the middle of a 
 long and earnest exhortation I was startled to hear these words: 
 "Oh Lord, Thou knowest we are apt to grow lean and to starve in 
 Thy service!" I fairly had to stuff one of the one franc canteen 
 handkerchiefs, which serve as napkins at the mess, into my mouth 
 to keep from laughing. 
 
 Bourmont, December 12. 
 
 In Paris a man who lectured to us said : " Get the fellows who have 
 influence with you, and you can swing the crowd." Sometimes 
 I think that if Pat were our enemy instead of our friend we might 
 almost as well shut up the hut. For Pat the sharp-shooter, Pat the 
 dare-devil, Pat, who in company phrase "has Harry Lauder and 
 George Cohen stopped in a hundred places," Pat the happy-go- 
 lucky adventurer is one of the leading spirits in Company A. He 
 has served, it seems, already in the war with the Canadian army. 
 
 "But how did you get out of it?" I asked. 
 
 Whereupon Pat regaled me with a wonderful rigmarole involving 
 an extraordinary case — his own — of shell-shock out of which I could 
 make neither head nor tail. Later, from one of the Secretaries 
 who had been at Saint Thiebault before I came, I learned the truth. 
 
COMPANY A 17 
 
 When America had declared war, Pat had deserted from the Canad- 
 ian in order to enlist in the American army. Pat had showed him a 
 letter from one of his old-time friends; it ended: 
 
 "Of course I wouldn't think of splitting on an old pal like you, 
 Pat, but I do need twenty dollars like hell." 
 
 "What did you do?" asked the Secretary. 
 
 "Sure an' I sent him the money," grinned Pat. 
 
 Shortly after I first became acquainted with him, Pat, who is 
 naturally gallant, with a tongue inclined to blarney, extracted a 
 promise from me. Some day, after the war, if we should happen to 
 meet, say, strolling down Fifth Avenue, Pat "dressed in a nice 
 blue serge suit" is going to "take me away from the other feller" 
 and take me out to dinner. It was after solemly pledging my word 
 to this agreement that I learned that Pat had formerly been a 
 saloon keeper and had had an extensive police-court record. Im- 
 mediately I began to hope that Pat would forget that post-war 
 party, but not he. Instead, he is constantly reminding me of it, 
 always before an audience, dwelling on it and elaborating it, until 
 now I find it has grown from a mere dinner, to dinner, the theatre 
 and a dance! 
 
 Lithe, wiry, lean-faced with close-cropped hair, pale blue gimlet 
 eyes and an almost unvarying expression of intense seriousness on 
 his face, Pat, when present, is the life of the hut. Forever at his 
 clowning, you would never dream from his demeanour that Pat's 
 domestic affairs are in a state little short of catastrophic. His wife, 
 according to her photograph a handsome, sullen, passionate type, 
 half Mexican, ran away about a year ago, taking with her all his 
 money that happened to be handy, together with his new auto- 
 mobile. Encountering some of Pat's friends, she had explained 
 her apparently care-free single state by telling them that Pat was 
 dead. Now she has discovered that Pat is in France, she is all for 
 reconciliation. She has written him a letter in which she addresses 
 him as her dear husband about six times to each sheet, informing 
 him that she needs money, and inquiring of him what he wished her 
 to do with his clothes. 
 
18 BOURMONT 
 
 "What did you answer?" I asked, for Pat, who must always 
 share his correspondence, had shown me the letter. 
 
 "I told her," grinned Pat, "she cu'd keep the clothes and maybe 
 she'd find another man to fit 'em." 
 
 But there is another and more serious side to the matter. It 
 seems that the lady in the case has written to the Captain of A 
 Company, requesting him to forward a large proportion of Pat's 
 pay to his deserving and indigent wife. Whether or not this will 
 be done is still uncertain. Pat refuses to discuss the possibilities, 
 but from the glint in his eyes I have a premonition that if next pay 
 day Pat finds any considerable deduction made from his pay, that 
 that night one wild Irishman will run amuck in Saint Thiebault. 
 
 Occasionally in the midst of Pat's racy discourses I overhear 
 things not meant for my ears, such as his remarking how in 
 Rochester once he "went on a seven day's pickle in company with 
 a female dreadnut." But usually he is very careful to only "pull 
 gentle stuff" in my hearing. The other day he delivered himself 
 of a wonderful dissertation on the deceitfulness of pious people, 
 ending with this gem; 
 
 "So whenever I see one of these guys comin' towards me with a 
 gold crown on his bean, looking' as if he couldn't sin if he had to, 
 why I nip tight on to my pocket-book and I cross to the other side 
 of the street!" 
 
 To-day Pat came into the canteen with a newspaper clipping 
 and a letter to show me. The letter was from the Chief of Police of 
 
 K. , one of the many cities in which Pat has resided during his 
 
 short but crowded life, the clipping from the K Daily Sheet. 
 
 The clipping was comprised of a letter which Pat had written to 
 the Chief of Police giving in humorous phrase his version of life in 
 France and an accompanying paragraph stating that though the 
 writer had given the police force no little anxiety during his resi- 
 dence in K , still he had been in spite of all, a good-hearted 
 
 and likable rascal, and now that he had gone to war for his coun- 
 try, bygones should be bygones and K must be proud of him. 
 
 The letter from the Chief was in much the same vein. 
 
COMPANY A 19 
 
 "Yes," ruminated Pat; "I kept the old feller pretty busy, though 
 me an' him were friends just the same. But it sure would get the 
 old man's goat, just after he'd had me up and fined me, to come 
 home and see me settin' at his dinner-table alongside of his pretty 
 daughter." 
 
 Bourmont, December 14. 
 
 Because it took too much time right in the most important part 
 of the day to climb Bourmont Hill for mess at night, I have ar- 
 ranged to take my suppers with two little old ladies here in Saint 
 Thiebault. The suppers are to consist of a bowl of cocoa and a slice 
 of bread with jam. The little ladies supply the bread and milk for 
 the cocoa and I supply the rest, paying them one franc a day. 
 
 At half-past five I put on my things, light my little candle- 
 lantern and set forth. The boys, coming in after mess, will be 
 crowding the hut; a chorus of anxious voices queries. 
 
 "You're comin' back sure, ain't you?" 
 
 And, "What time is that hot chocolate goin' to be ready?" 
 
 I pick my way down the slippery duck-boards to the highway. 
 Trudging along the muddy road, friendly voices hail me from the 
 dark. I am known by the little light I carry. At number two 
 Rue Dieu I rap and enter, trying desperately to leave some of the 
 mud from my boots on the door-step, for in this land of wooden 
 shoes scrapers are as unknown as they are unnecessary. Once 
 inside I have to fairly strain my eyes in order to be able to see any- 
 thing, for all the light in the room is supplied by the embers on the 
 hearth and one tiny gasolene lamp with a flame not much bigger 
 than the point of a lead pencil. Kerosene is unobtainable for civilian 
 use; the price of candles is prohibitive. 
 
 "C'est la guerre. Cest la inisere" say the little old ladies. "One 
 must sit in the dark — "C'est triste comme qa." 
 
 My candle doubles the illumination, yet in spite of that, so 
 strong is the instinct for economy, they will not rest easy until they 
 have blown it out. 
 
 The little old ladies are cousins. The elder of the two, "Ma- 
 
20 B0URM0NT 
 
 dame," is lame and has snow-white hair. She sits by the fire always 
 in the self -same spot. The younger, "Mademoiselle," is a tiny 
 dwarfish creature with a back that is not quite straight. Over her 
 dark dress she wears a jaunty little scarlet apron sewn with black 
 polka dots. I am grateful for that apron; it makes the one bit of 
 color in the sombre room. 
 
 I sit in front of the fire at the round table and sip my chocolate. 
 The table has an oil-cloth cover on which is printed a map of 
 France, so as I eat my supper I can take a lesson in geography. 
 It is a pre-war tablecloth I fancy; over at one edge shows a slice 
 of Germany. The little old ladies point to that side of the table 
 with scorn, "Les sales Bodies sont la!" they explain. 
 
 I wonder that it doesn't give them heart-burn to look down and 
 see the captive and devastated districts of France lying beneath 
 their tea cups. Think of setting your salt-cellar on the city of 
 Lille or your mustard pot on the sacred citadel of Verdun! 
 
 As I sup I endeavour to converse politely, but as my French 
 is little more than camouflage, this is a dubious proceeding. 
 Whenever I prove particularly stupid, out of the corner of my eye 
 I catch Madame shaking her old head at Mademoiselle despair- 
 ingly. 
 
 "Elle ne comprend pas!" she murmurs sotto voce, pityingly; 
 "elle ne comprend pas! " 
 
 At odd times they turn an honest penny by doing a little sewing 
 for the villagers. But life is very difficult these days: the prices 
 of everything have gone so high. Why, wooden shoes that cost 
 five francs before the war now fetch fifteen ! 
 
 Tonight I noticed an item in a Parisian Journal lying by my 
 plate. It was to the effect that at the Madeleine that day Mile. 
 X had married Lieut. Z., a veteran of the war who had lost both 
 arms and both legs. I showed it to the little ladies. 
 
 "Ah out!" sighed Mademoiselle with a shiver. "Elle a beau- 
 coup de courage, celle-la!" 
 
 And Madame shook her white head and echoed. "Oui, elle a 
 beaucoup de courage!" 
 
COMPANY A 21 
 
 Upstairs an American officer is billeted. I fancy his presence 
 supplies a certain dash of romance to the little old ladies' lives. 
 The Americans are nice, they say, and make little noise in the 
 village; when the Russians were here it was different. 
 
 "It will be lonely when the Americans are gone," sighs Madem- 
 oiselle. "The houses will seem empty." 
 
 Bourmont, December 18. 
 
 Yesterday I explored the top of Bourmont Hill. It is here that 
 the Quality Folk live, and here are some stately old houses with 
 beautiful carved doorways and even an occasional gargoyle. Here 
 too the general commanding the Division lives, and I have often 
 observed with glee corpulent colonels and rotund majors puffing 
 and blowing and growing red in the face as they climbed the hill to 
 Headquarters. At the top of the hill there are two churches. 
 Some two weeks ago, it is whispered, a spy was caught signaling 
 from the tower of Notre Dame. His signals, it is said, were flashed 
 to another spy stationed on the hills to the east, who in turn sent 
 the messages on to the lines. The Cure* of Notre Dame is being 
 held under suspicion of complicity. 
 
 From Notre Dame an avenue bordered by magnificent old trees 
 sweeps around to the Calvary, a tall wooden cross surmounting a 
 curious structure of rough stone, ringed about with shallow steps — 
 the Mecca of many pilgrimages. Beyond the Calvary one comes 
 to the Mystery of Bourmont. A faded sign declares Defense d J entree, 
 but one looks the other way and slips by. For once past the gate 
 you are in an atmosphere of enchantment. No one seems to know 
 just what it is, nor how it came about; I can get no intelligent ex- 
 planation from Madame or Monsieur. To me it seems like the for- 
 gotten playground of an old mad king in some fantastic legend. 
 For here among the trees are stone stairs, walls and terraces, and, 
 cut in the curiously cleft rocks, are niches and tunnelled passage- 
 ways, all mantled over now with green moss and ivy, the whole 
 making one think of a dream garden out of Maeterlinck. 
 
22 BOURMONT 
 
 Coming down Bourmont Hill afterwards I was startled by the 
 beating of a drum; looking back I saw a woman, bare-headed, her 
 blue apron fluttering in the wind, descending the street after me; 
 from her shoulders was slung the drum which she was beating with a 
 martial vim. It was the town-crier, le tambour as the French put 
 it. Arrived at an appropriate spot, she stopped, pulled out a paper, 
 cried "AvisI" and began to read in a rapid high official monotone. 
 The wash-house was to be closed between two and four o'clock the 
 following afternoon on account of the new water system the Amer- 
 icans were installing. Certain requisitions of grain were to be 
 levied. . . . The villagers were notified to call at the Mayory 
 for their bread cards, without which, after such a date, no bread 
 could be obtained. . . . One or two women came to the doors of 
 the houses and listened. She took no notice of them. The reading 
 over, she rolled the paper up with a quick decisive gesture, and re- 
 sumed her march, the sharp rub-a-dub-dub of her drum pursuing 
 me all the way to Saint Thiebault. 
 
 Of late the air has become fairly vibrant with disquieting rum- 
 ours: one does not know what to believe, what to reject. 
 
 The Germans are massing for a gigantic drive on Nancy. In 
 three weeks, some say, the offensive is to begin; three days, say 
 others. Nancy is to be another Verdun. If they break through 
 they will pass this way. The American troops are being withdrawn 
 from this neighborhood: any day the order may come for us to 
 leave. At Paris the political situation is dark. Some people even 
 fear a popular uprising against the government. I hinted at this 
 to Monsieur, he shook his old head hopelessly. But yes, things 
 were in a bad way. Now if France only had Veelson at her head! 
 France and Veelson! His gesture indicated the grandeur of such a 
 contingency. As it was, France lacked a leader. And under- 
 neath all this runs another rumour, still darker, still more dis- 
 quieting. The French, the gallant French, they say, are "laying 
 down." They are ready to make peace at any price. They are 
 played out, sick to death of it all! 
 
 "Forty- two months in the trenches!" cried a sergeant en per- 
 
COMPANY A 23 
 
 mission last night; "It is enough! I am through. Let the Ameri- 
 cans do it!" 
 
 And this feeling, they tell us, is wide-spread. The people see 
 our soldiers day after day, in the training camps, inactive. " What 
 are they here for?" they are asking. "Why don't they fight? 
 Are they going to wait until it is all over?" 
 
 Will our soldiers, half-trained as they are, and a mere handful, 
 be forced, to satisfy them, into the trenches? 
 
 In the canteen I look inco the boys' faces and smile, but my heart 
 turns sick within me. 
 
 Bourmont, December 20. 
 
 Such a strange, incredible thing has happened, — a thing that has 
 upset all my preconceived ideas of human nature. It began with 
 Malotzzi. Malotzzi as his name betrays is a "wop;" he is also the 
 smallest fellow in the company which contains many small men. 
 Nor is he only small, but with his thin olive-tinted face and his 
 slender body, he looks so delicate, so ethereal that you feel a breath 
 of wind might fairly blow him away. To the company he is "a 
 good kid, quiet, never makes any trouble." To me he has always 
 seemed an elfin, changeling creature, a strayed pixie, whose imp- 
 ishness has turned to gentleness. Child of the tenements that he 
 is, he is possessed of the most exquisite old-fashioned courtesy that 
 I have ever yet encountered; and he has the starriest eyes of any 
 mortal born. 
 
 Not long ago he came to the counter to show me a postcard from 
 his sweetheart. It had an ugly picture of a red brick city block 
 upon it, and the message scrawled in an unformed hand beneath 
 contained little except the simple declaration that when he came 
 home she would go with him to the photographer's over the candy 
 store at the corner and they would have their pictures taken to- 
 gether. Yet no flaming and lyric love-letter could have rendered 
 him more naively proud. Malotzzi with a sweetheart! It was 
 absurd, he was nothing but a child! I can well believe that 
 Malotzzi wouldn't make a very "snappy" soldier. 
 
24 BOURMONT 
 
 This afternoon when the company was out for drill, a certain 
 Second Lieutenant discovered that Malotzzi hadn't got his pack 
 rolled up right. This was not the first time he had offended in 
 this manner. The Lieutenant had warned him. He was angry. He 
 took Malotzzi over to the bath-house, stripped off his blouse, 
 tied his hands so he couldn't struggle, and beat him with a gun- 
 strap until he fainted. 
 
 The story flashed around the camp. When I came back from 
 supper I found the boys at white-heat with indignation. They 
 fairly seethed with anger. I think if the Lieutenant had happened 
 in, they might have killed him. Presently a little crowd carried 
 Malotzzi in. They rolled back his sleeves and showed me the great 
 purple welts upon his arms. His back was all like that, they said. 
 He had to be held up in order to keep his feet. 
 
 "You had better take him to the hospital," I told them. 
 
 They carried him out again. He is at the hospital now, where 
 he is likely to stay for some time. His lungs are delicate and the 
 beating caused congestion. The medical officer made a report 
 and the Lieutenant has been placed under arrest. 
 
 I have never met the Lieutenant to know him, but curiously, 
 the Secretary, who messes with the officers, asserts that of all 
 the men there this Lieutenant has always appeared as the most 
 clean-spoken, the most cultured, the most gentlemanly. And the 
 boys have always considered him a very decent sort. The whole 
 thing is absolutely and blankly incomprehensible to me. There 
 is one explanation the boys offer; which is that the Lieutenant, 
 having a yellow streak, has lost his nerve at the prospect of going 
 to the front, and has done this as a desperate expedient, in the 
 hope of being dishonorably discharged. The only other possible 
 explanation which I can come upon is that the Lieutenant has a 
 German name. 
 
 Bourmont, December 23. 
 The burning question that is on every lip: Will the Christmas 
 turkeys come? 
 
COMPANY A 25 
 
 We had been promised turkey. What's more I had been prom- 
 ised some of that turkey too, at Company A's mess table. Now 
 uncertainty holds us in torment. Every sort of a rumor is rife. 
 Some darkly insinuate that neighboring organizations have side- 
 tracked those turkeys. Others declare that the turkeys, having 
 been smuggled in by night, are now actually in camp among us. 
 
 ''Huh!" snorts my friend the Tall Kentuckian. " Funny tur- 
 keys they have in this army! I done heard those turkeys had 
 four legs and a pair of horns!" 
 
 Of course Christmas won't be Christmas without the turkeys, 
 but anyway we have done our best to bring Christmas into the 
 hut. The question of Christmas trees was taken up in the Bour- 
 mont office some days ago. An application was made to the Mayor; 
 the Mayor referred the matter to the representative of the Bureau 
 of Forestry. The Bureau of Forestry proved to be a good scout. 
 He ruminated a while, "Mademoiselle," said he, "this matter is 
 so tied up with red tape, that if one were to unwind it all, it would 
 be New Year's before you got your tree. My advice is that you 
 select your tree, wait until after dark, then go out, cut it down 
 close to the ground, and cover the place carefully with snow." 
 
 Tonight when the subject of Christmas trees came up in the 
 canteen I repeated this anecdote to the boys. It was then growing 
 dusky. Several boys immediately disappeared. In an hour they 
 were back again, dragging not one, but two beautiful hemlocks. 
 We set up the more perfect one, and cut the other up for trim- 
 mings. With flags, paper festoons, Japanese lanterns, tinsel which 
 the French call " angel's hair," and tree ornaments the hut was 
 transformed in a twinkling as if by magic. Now it is no longer a 
 muddy-floored tent, but a green bower threaded with myriad bits 
 of bright color, and I have really never seen anything of the sort 
 that was any prettier. 
 
 Yesterday several cases of free tobacco from the Sun Tobacco 
 Fund arrived in camp. The boys in the orderly room opened the 
 cases last night and hunted through and through them, trying to 
 find packages which bore the names of unmarried lady donors. 
 
26 BOURMONT 
 
 Unfortunately the Misses who contributed were few and far be- 
 tween, but hope dies hard. 
 
 "Say, mightn't Asa be a girl?" the lads are asking me eagerly 
 today. 
 
 "Lucien ain't a man's name, is it?" 
 
 Enclosed in each package is a postal-card on which one may, 
 if so inclined, return thanks to the giver. The boys who are tak- 
 ing the trouble to write are doing it frankly with the hope that 
 this may encourage the recipient to repetition. How to tactfully 
 suggest this without seeming greedy is a problem whose delicacy 
 proves difficult. 
 
 "You tell me how to say it," they tease. 
 
 "Say, won't you write it for me, please ma'am?" 
 
 I saw one postal-card accomplished after an evening of con- 
 centrated effort; "Your precious and admired gift," it began. 
 
 Already Santa Claus in the person of Mr. Gatts has presented 
 me with a beautiful white silk apron embroidered with large 
 bunches of life-like violets. 
 
 Bourmont, Christmas Day. 
 
 Joyeux Noel! 
 
 As I came in last night there was a great log burning on the 
 hearth. 
 
 "Cest la louche de Noel" said Madame and explained how it 
 would burn all night, then Christmas morning she would take the 
 little end that was left and put it away in the loft until the next 
 Christmas: it would protect the house from lightning; it was a 
 very ancient custom. 
 
 Back in the Salle des Assiettes I found our table spread as for 
 a little fete with a wonderful cake and a bottle tied up with a 
 bouquet of chrysanthemums and long ribbon streamers of red white 
 and blue. I was so innocent that I supposed at first that the 
 chrysanthemums were in the bottle, an improvised vase, but Ma- 
 dame quickly enlightened me: "Cest le vin blanc" she explained to 
 my embarrassment. 
 
COMPANY A 27 
 
 The Gendarme and I took counsel together as to how we could 
 best express our feelings on this occasion toward the Family 
 Chaput, the household having been increased over night by the ar- 
 rival of the married daughter and her small boy and girl. After va- 
 rious projects had been considered and abandoned, we finally took 
 the little stand from our room, dressed it with evergreen and tinsel, 
 then heaped it with nuts, candies, chocolate bars, and little jars 
 of jam all from the canteen, together with a few small toys, and 
 carried it in and placed it in front of the hearth. The family ap- 
 peared delighted. We observed, however, that after the first toot, 
 baby Max's whistle was swiftly and silently confiscated. Later 
 when La Petite, the little maid-of-all-work who takes care of our 
 rooms, came in, we had a few trinkets dug from the depths of our 
 trunks to bestow on her. Later still I carried chocolates and con- 
 fiture to my little old ladies of the Rue Dieu. 
 
 This Christmas day I fancy will be long remembered by the 
 inhabitants of this part of France; for in every one of the villages 
 about, our soldiers have given the French children a Christmas 
 tree. I went to see the tree at Saint Thiebault. The ancient 
 church, its chill interior ablaze with light, was crowded with vil- 
 lagers all dressed in their fete day best. The old people were just 
 as excited and eager as the children; not one had ever seen a Christ- 
 mas tree before. They stood on the pews in order to get a better 
 view. The tree which was very large and beautiful stood just 
 outside the altar rail. It bore a gift for every child in Saint Thie- 
 bault. While the tree was slowly being unburdened of its load, 
 the band-master's choir, high up in the choir-loft sang an accom- 
 paniment. Some of the selections were of a sacred character, 
 others frankly secular, such as Drink To Me Only With Thine 
 Eyes; but as one of the choristers remarked; 
 
 "As long as we sing them slow and solemn the Frenchies won't 
 know the difference." 
 
 After the Christmas tree I went around to the little local hos- 
 pital to take some gifts to the patients. There were half a dozen 
 of them lying on cots in the bare barracks room, a dreary set in a 
 
28 BOURMONT 
 
 drearier setting. In one corner lay a boy who muttered incoher- 
 ently. He had just been brought in, they told me, and was very ill: 
 the doctors were puzzled to know what was the matter with him. 
 I left some little gifts for him when he should be better. 
 
 It was half -past four when I reached the hut. Suddenly it popped 
 into my head that we ought to have a Santa Claus. At half-past 
 six Santa walked in through the door. It was Pat in a big red 
 nose, a red peaked cap, much white cotton-batting beard and whis- 
 kers, rubber boots, the Chief's fur coat, covered over for the night 
 with turkey-red bunting, and a fat pack slung over one shoulder. 
 I had just dressed him in the mess hall, and for an impromptu 
 Santa Claus, I flatter myself he was quite effective. The boys 
 whooped. When they discovered who it was behind that nose, 
 they yelped like terriers. 
 
 "Ain't he the beauty! Oh you whiskers! Say Pat, kiss me 
 quick!" 
 
 We got Santa safely behind the counter and then opened the 
 pack. It was full of foolish little things; tricks, puzzles, games, 
 mottoes, whistles, tin trumpets, paper "hummers". The boys went 
 wild. It was the musical instruments that made the hit. For two 
 hours that hut shrieked pandemonium. Every last man in the 
 company tootled and squawked as if his life depended on it, and 
 every last one of them was tootling a different tune. 
 
 "Cest des grands gosses!" Truly, as Madame Chaput says, 
 they're nothing after all but so many big little boys. 
 
 After the stuff was distributed the Secretary and I invited the 
 boys to partake of hot chocolate and sandwiches. But to our 
 disappointment they only took a languid interest in the treat. 
 Instead of the five and six cups apiece which many often swallow, 
 not one of them consumed more than a cup and three-quarters. 
 Too late we realized; they had already gorged themselves on the 
 contents of their Christmas boxes from home. 
 
 Reports coming in from the village stated that one American 
 Christmas custom had made a strong appeal to the feminine por- 
 tion at least of the population. Quantities of mistletoe grow here- 
 
COMPANY A 29 
 
 abouts. The French, although averring that it brings good-luck, 
 consider it a pest and let it go at that. It took the American dough- 
 boys to enlighten the Mademoiselles as to its Anglo-Saxon signif- 
 icance. It would be curious, I have been thinking, if the adoption 
 of this ancient privilege should prove one of the lasting evidences 
 of the American troops in France! 
 
 As I left the canteen I learned that the boy who had been so 
 sick at the hospital was dead. 
 
 Bourmont, December 26. 
 
 Last night was a wild night in the barracks. This morning the 
 hut was full of echoes of it. Company A indeed wore a jaded 
 look. They had had very little sleep it was explained. And it 
 was all on account of the Christmas hummers. 
 
 "I ain't got nothin' against you people, but I shore don't think 
 you gave A Company a square deal," remarked my friend the 
 Tall Kentuckian as he lit his cigarette at the counter. 
 
 "Why, didn't you like the present that Santa Claus brought 
 you? " I teased. 
 
 "Huh! I would shore have singed the ol' gentleman's whiskers 
 for him last night if I could have caught him!" He went on to 
 explain; "We'd just get settled down good to sleep when some guy 
 or other would start up a-squawkin' on one of them things. An' 
 Sergeant — , well he'd had just enough to make him fightin' mad, 
 an' he shore would rare around that there barracks tryin' to find 
 them fellers. Why, half the corporals in the outfit was marchin' up 
 and down the place most all the night long, shyin' hob-nailed shoes 
 in what they guessed was the direction of them noises." 
 
 I began to discern what a night of terror it had been. 
 
 "Yes suh!" declared the Kentuckian. "There was one feller 
 with a hummer we couldn't get. He kept blowin' Tipperary. He 
 must have blowed it for two hours steady, on an' off. I guess he 
 had every last hob-nailed shoe in the hull barracks throwed at 
 him." 
 
 Nor is this all. It seems I have committed a ghastly faux pas. 
 
3 o BOURMONT 
 
 I have gotten the Y. in dreadfully dutch with the officers. It 
 is all along of the Christmas calendars. The Christmas calendars 
 arrived at the canteen just the day before Christmas. They were 
 designed to be sold to the boys for five cents a-piece in order that 
 they might have something to send to the folks at home as a Christ- 
 mas greeting. But since they reached us so very late the Secretary 
 and I decided we didn't have the face to put them on sale. 
 
 " Let's give them away," I suggested, and on his agreeing, laid 
 them in heaps on the counter and invited the boys to help them- 
 selves. The boys weren't bashful. They helped themselves with 
 enthusiasm and zeal. They came back for more and more. For 
 the rest of the day no one did a thing at the hut but sit at the tables 
 and address envelopes. One boy, I learned later, sent off as many 
 as thirty-five. I was awfully pleased to have the boys appreciate 
 the calendars so. And I never once for a moment thought of the 
 censors; but presently I heard from them. The company censors, 
 two of the younger lieutenants, had been looking forward, it seems, 
 to some leisurely care-free hours at Christmas. When the stacks 
 of calendars started coming in they saw their holiday vanish 
 into thin air, nay more, they saw themselves sitting up nights for 
 weeks to come censoring those precious calendars. And they 
 were swearing, raving mad. They were going to run the Y. out 
 of the town! They were going to shut down the hut! Finally 
 they compromised the matter with their consciences by censoring 
 half and chucking the other half into the stove. But even then 
 they couldn't stop fussing and fuming over it. Tonight just to 
 top the matter off, we received a sharp reprimand from the Busi- 
 ness Manager at Bourmont for being so extravagant as to give 
 the calendars away, unauthorized. Was there ever such a tragedy 
 of good intentions? 
 
 Bourmont, December 27. 
 Today we buried the lad who died on Christmas night. I had 
 never seen a military funeral before and I had never dreamed 
 that such a ceremony could be so thrillingly beautiful. 
 
COMPANY A 31 
 
 The company formed at three o'clock in the road in front of 
 the canteen, then filed slowly through the streets of the little 
 grey age-old village. The band marching at the head of the pro- 
 cession played the Marche Funebre of Chopin. After the band 
 came the officers of the company and then the firing squad of 
 eight sharp-shooters, followed by an ambulance carrying the boy's 
 coffin covered with a great flag. Behind, marched the whole of 
 Company A and after them crowded a throng of villagers. All 
 the men in town, with the innate respect that the French have for 
 death, stood uncovered as we passed, while many of the women 
 watched with tears streaming down their faces. 
 
 We passed through the village and down the road to the little 
 grey-walled cemetery, ringed around with evergreens and now deep 
 in freshly fallen snow. All about stretched virgin shining snow- 
 fields and over them to the east rose Bourmont like a dream city, 
 etched as delicately as by a silver-point against the soft dove- 
 colored sky. 
 
 The majestic phrases of the Catholic burial service rang out 
 clearly on the frosty air: 
 
 Eternal rest grant him, Lord, 
 
 And let perpetual light shine upon him! 
 
 The coffin with the great flag burning in blue and scarlet was 
 lowered into the grave. Slowly, with perfect expression, a bugler 
 blew the poignant, unforgettable notes of Taps. The rifles of the 
 firing squad cracked sharply; three volleys, it was over. 
 
 "Will they leave him there?" An old Frenchwoman asked one 
 of the boys afterwards. 
 
 " 'Till the war is over, then likely they will send him home." 
 
 "But why? He won't be lonely here. There will always be 
 some one to put flowers on his grave." 
 
 Tonight I was talking to the Supply Sergeant about the lad. 
 
 "I think he died of a broken heart as much as anything," he 
 told me. "They wouldn't let his mother see him at the dock when 
 we sailed. She came to say good-bye but it was against the rules. 
 He never could get over that; he kept brooding all the time and 
 
32 BOURMONT 
 
 fretting for her. I read some of her letters to him. They seemed 
 more like a sweetheart's than a mother's." 
 
 The doctors, however, diagnosed his disease as spinal menin- 
 gitis. They have ordered the barracks in which he slept to be 
 quarantined. Already a half a dozen boys in quarantine have 
 taken to their beds, but this we hope is largely due to over-stimu- 
 lated imaginations. Even if the disease doesn't spread, however, I 
 am wondering what will become of ninety-seven lively boys bottled 
 up for two weeks in one barracks. Already various ones have 
 eluded the guard and come sneaking furtively into the canteen to 
 buy their cigarettes and chocolates. Whenever one of these un- 
 fortunates is recognized a regular howl goes up all over the hut. 
 
 " Outside! You're one of the crumby ones!" they jeer, or; 
 " Convict! Get back to your cell!" 
 
 Bourmont, December 28. 
 The worst of my job is playing dragon to the French children. 
 In view of the fact that if allowed in the hut at all they swarm in, 
 in such numbers as to fairly overrun it, and pester the boys with 
 their insatiable appeals for "goom" and chocolate, it has seemed 
 best to make a strict rule against their admission. (Besides which 
 I don't approve of giving them gum, for in the face of anything 
 one can do or say they will insist on swallowing it, which is, 
 I'm sure, not at all good for their tummies!) But in spite of this 
 prohibition the place holds an irresistible attraction for them. At 
 night one can often see their faces pressed flat against the isin- 
 glass windows as they peer inside; while chiefly on Saturday and 
 Sunday afternoons they will slip slyly in, and then if the dragon 
 isn't on the jump to explain to each and every one in her very best 
 French, that she is so sorry but it really is forbidden, why in a 
 twinkling the hut becomes full of them. And they are so pictur- 
 esque, so appealing, so full of shy wonder at the gramaphone with 
 the wheel that "marches by itself" that it is very hard to turn 
 them out. 
 
COMPANY A 33 
 
 Since Christmas I have been kept busy by a tiny tad of a raga- 
 muffin with a funny round cropped black head and a face as sol- 
 emnly expressionless as a little carved Buddha. He slips in among 
 the tables and he is positively too small to be seen. The Christmas 
 tree with its shining ornaments is his stealthy objective. In vain 
 I explain matters politely to him; without a sound, without the 
 hint of a flicker in his little beady black eyes, he turns and clumps 
 out in his ridiculous sabots, only to presently slip in again. And 
 now it seems he has lain low and sagaciously observed my habits; 
 for returning to the hut after mess this noon, I met him trudging 
 along the Rue Dieu, his eyes encountering mine blandly without 
 embarrassment, his absurd little figure bulging all over with pur- 
 loined Christmas tree ornaments. In the hut I found our poor 
 tree stripped to a height of four feet from the floor of all its finery. 
 
 These last few evenings the hut has been given over to writing 
 Christmas thank-you letters home. The official writer of love 
 letters for the company has been working overtime; not that his 
 clients cannot write themselves, but because they feel he is more 
 able to do justice to the subject. Every night now I see him sitting 
 out in front of the counter, his Jewish profile bent low over the table 
 as he covers sheet after sheet with his fine and fanciful hand-writ- 
 ing, while next him perches anxiously the interested party, watch- 
 ing developments and occasionally proffering a suggestion. When 
 it is done they must bring it to me for my approval. 
 
 " That's a real classy letter, ain't it? " the lover will query proudly 
 and I assure him that it is indeed. 
 
 "When she gets that, I bet she'll come across with that sweater 
 she told me she was makin' for me, all right!" 
 
 "Say do you think that ought to be good for a cartoon of cigar- 
 ettes? " another one inquires. 
 
 Of course there are many who, no matter what the effort, 
 prefer to write their own. Sometimes when cleaning up the 
 canteen tables I come upon specimens of such, first drafts dis- 
 carded on account of blots. One such love letter, classic in its 
 brevity, picked up the other day, ran: 
 
34 BOURMONT 
 
 Dear Sweetheart, 
 
 I am writing you a few interesting 
 lines which I hope will be the same to you wishing you 
 a merry Xmas and a happy New Year 
 
 Your loving friend 
 
 Pvt. 
 
 Of late I have been moved to speculate wonderingly on the men- 
 tal processes of the American public. I have been going through 
 the stacks of magazines in the warehouse sent from the States for 
 one cent per to provide amusement for the doughboys' leisure 
 moments. Among the rest I found the Upholsterer's Monthly, 
 The Hardware Dealer's Journal, The Mother's Magazine, Fancy 
 Work and The Modern Needleworker. I showed some of these 
 prizes to one of the boys; "Gee, but that's the kind of snappy stuff 
 to send a feller over the top!" was his comment. That numbers 
 of the Undertaker's Journal have also been discovered among the 
 donations from home I have heard asserted on excellent authority, 
 but as yet I have not personally come across any. 
 
 Just as we were closing tonight, Pat came up to the counter, 
 solemnly leaned across it: 
 
 "Have you seen the new shoes they're issuin'? he demanded. 
 "They've got pitchers on them so a feller can't see his own feet!" 
 
 Botjrmont, January 2, 1918. 
 
 Once a week our peripatetic movie-machine makes its appear- 
 ance among us. Louis, the sixteen year old French operator, un- 
 packs the big cases, sets up the apparatus, and, if our luck holds, 
 we have a show. Owing to the short range of the little machine 
 the screen must be hung in the middle of the hut. This means 
 that half the audience must view the pictures from the back, the 
 essential difference being that the lettering is then reversed; "The 
 Jewish Picture Show," the boys call this. But then as half of us 
 can't read anyway, why should we mind? 
 
 The joy of the show lies in the audience. Just as soon as the 
 lights are put out the fun begins: "Everbody watch their pocket- 
 
COMPANY A 35 
 
 books!" goes up the shout and from that moment we are never 
 still. 
 
 The curly-headed heroine makes her coquettish entrance. 
 
 "Ooo la la! Oooo la la!" rises the enthusiastic welcome. 
 
 A bottle is displayed; "Cognac!" the yell shakes the roof. 
 
 The neglected wife begins to waver in response to the tempter's 
 wiles; "Now don't forget your general orders, little lady!" ad- 
 monishes an earnest voice. 
 
 Lovers indulge in a prolonged embrace; "Aw quit! Quit it! 
 Yer make me home-sick!" goes up the agonized appeal. 
 
 The enraptured lover stands registering ecstacy; "Hit him 
 again, he's coming to!" comes the derisive shout. 
 
 And so it goes. The actors aren't on the screen, they're in the 
 house, and truly there isn't a dull moment on the programme! 
 
 Last night, however, instead of the joyous chorus of running 
 comment a subdued and decorous silence reigned, broken only by 
 a few half-hearted sallies. What was the matter? I racked my 
 brain to find the cause. All the joy had gone from the show. The 
 evening was stale, flat and unprofitable. When the lights were lit 
 again the mystery was immediately made plain. At one end of the 
 counter stood an officer. I wonder if he dreamed what a spoil- 
 sport he had been? 
 
 Once a week also a lady comes from the Bourmont office to give 
 us a French lesson; not that Company A betrays any burning 
 desire to learn to parlez-vous, but just that it seems obviously the 
 proper thing to do under the circumstances, so French they must 
 be taught willy-nilly. There were two lessons to be sure in which 
 they took a degree of interest; the lesson about buying and count- 
 ing money, and the lesson about food and drink. But when they 
 had once learned to ask the price of things and to understand 
 the answer, and had learned the words for eggs, bread, butter, beer, 
 ham, beefsteak, chicken and French fried potatoes, their interest 
 lapsed until it became positive boredom. Of late it has seemed to 
 me that it was only the boys with French blood that learned any- 
 thing and they, of course, knew it all already. 
 
3 6 BOURMONT 
 
 For entertainment Company A can upon occasion furnish its own 
 show. This was demonstrated by an impromptu programme staged 
 in the hut the other night; there's no use we have discovered in 
 planning things beforehand, if one does, as sure as fate, all the 
 star performers " catch guard" that day! Pat by request acted as 
 stage-manager and master of ceremonies. To stimulate the artists 
 we announced prizes. 
 
 Private Dostal opened the programme; a large red-faced lad 
 with a bland and simple cast of countenance, he is the comic bal- 
 ladist of the company. His first contribution was a selection 
 popularly known among us as Beside the dyirf boxcar, the empty 
 hobo lay, a piece with a vast number of verses in which the dying 
 hobo repents an ill-spent life, only, in the last line, to "jump 
 up and hop the train." For an encore we had Papa Eating Noodle 
 Soup which could best be described as a '"gleesome, gruesome" 
 recitative, the chorus of each of numerous verses consisting of a 
 realistic imitation of Papa partaking of the Soup. Mr. Gatts gave 
 us a jig. Then Bruno who, as the boys say; "Could sing pretty 
 good, only he don't sing nothin' but wop," favored us with Oh 
 Maria, prefacing his performance with the earnest admonition, 
 "No lafim! nobody!" and after that with an Italian folk dance 
 in which he looked more like a grotesque little punchinello than 
 ever. Our light-weight boxing champion then gave us Love's Old 
 Sweet Song and the heavy-weight champion popularly known as 
 Magulligan, together with Mr. Bruno rendered Bye low my Baby, 
 antiphonal fashion. The last number was furnished by a poilu 
 who had wandered in, in company with one of the boys. He sang 
 a long dramatic ballad, entitled The Last Cuirassier, depicting 
 some incident in the Franco-Prussian War. Just what the boys 
 made of it I don't know, but to me it was intensely thrilling, not 
 on account of the words for I couldn't catch them, but on account 
 of the fervor, the imaginative sympathy, the martial spirit which 
 that old fellow in his faded trench coat threw into his tones. 
 
 When the show was over Pat stood up on the counter and an- 
 nounced that as long as all the performances had been of such 
 
COMPANY A 37 
 
 superlative merit, it was impossible for the judges to decide be- 
 tween them. So we handed out a couple of packages of " smoking" 
 to each one of the artists, and everybody was satisfied. 
 
 Once too we had a party, an athletic stunt party. There were 
 potato-races and sack-races, string-eating contests, three-legged and 
 obstacle-races; but the sensational, the crowning event was, of 
 course, the pie-race. The pies which were of French manufacture 
 had only been arranged after difficulties: consulting the houlanghre 
 at Bourmont I had discovered that the calendar now only allows 
 two pie-days per week, Sunday and Wednesday; since the party 
 was to be Friday, pie was unlawful, unless — and here the law, like 
 all good laws allowed a loop-hole — unless the pie be made with 
 commissary flour! The pie-race was the "dark horse" on the 
 programme. Fearing that if the boys learned beforehand of the 
 prospective pie not only would we be mobbed by would-be con- 
 testants but also that their interest in the rest of the programme 
 would suffer, we had kept the pie-race a profound secret. Smuggled 
 in when the hut was empty those pies had reposed serenely under 
 the counter all afternoon and contrary to my fears not a boy had 
 sniffed them! When the proper moment came the pies were placed 
 on a board in the middle of the floor, the contestants, of whom Pat 
 was one, knelt with their hands tied behind them. At the word go! 
 they fell to. The hut howled. Then it was discovered that Cor- 
 poral G. laboured under a cruel handicap; his pie was a cherry pie 
 and every cherry had a stone in it. Half-way through his pie, Pat, 
 jerking one hand loose, seized a large piece, plastered it on the head 
 of his opponent opposite ; the race ended in a riot. Strangely enough, 
 when peace was restored not a trace of pie could be found any- 
 where, — nowhere, that is, except in the back hair of the contestants. 
 
 Bourmont, January 6. 
 
 Now I know how the prince in the fairy tale felt when he was 
 
 bidden to climb the mountain of glass. For Bourmont Hill is 
 
 sheeted with ice, and it is fairly as much as one's life is worth to 
 
 attempt to go up or down. Every morning I stand and look at 
 
3 8 BOURMONT 
 
 that dizzying slide aghast, and wonder if I may possibly reach 
 the foot alive; then assistance comes, sometimes in the shape of a 
 French lad in sabots, sometimes as a stalwart doughboy with a 
 sharp-pointed staff, and together the two of us go slipping, slither- 
 ing down the hill-side. In the middle of the road yelling doughboys, 
 seated on cakes of ice, whiz by at a mad rate of speed; long before 
 they reach the bottom of the slope, the ice-cake splinters into bits, 
 but the doughboy shoots on downward, sprawling, spinning like 
 a top, while you hold your breath and gape to see that his neck 
 isn't broken. For the French people all this supplies the sensation 
 of a life- time; they crowd their front doors and their front yards 
 laughing, shrieking warning or encouragement, as they watch the 
 progress of the mad Americans up and down the hill. 
 
 " If one could only have a movie of Bourmont Hill on a day like 
 this! " sighs the Gendarme. 
 
 The other day I encountered a sergeant of engineers on the hill- 
 side. 
 
 "You ought to have a sled, Little Girl," he told me. 
 
 "Well why don't the engineers make me one?" I unthinkingly 
 retorted. 
 
 "Sure and they will!" he answered. 
 
 Since then I have gone in terror. If the sergeant should have 
 that sled made for me, as he likely will, why I shall have to use it. 
 And as for starting down Bourmont Hill on a sled, I would just 
 as soon attempt Niagara in a barrel. 
 
 Ever since Christmas it has been cold, bitter cold. At the can- 
 teen I wash my chocolate caps with the dishpan on the stove in 
 order to keep the water fluid; hanging the dish-cloth up to dry 
 at the corner of the counter, in a few minutes I find it stiff with ice. 
 At night the ink-bottles freeze and then burst, spreading black 
 ruin all around them. What to do with the still unfrozen ones is a 
 vexing problem; I might I suppose take them home each night with 
 me and sleep with them underneath my pillow. In the little um- 
 brella-stand stoves the green wood, which comes in so freshly cut, 
 that the logs have ivy still unwithered twined around them, simply 
 
COMPANY A 39 
 
 will not burn, and the stoves will smoke, mon Dieu, how they will 
 smoke ! Every time the wind blows, the stove-pipes, secured shakily 
 by the canvas walls, become disjointed, parting company with the 
 stoves, and thenthe clouds pour forth as if we housed a captive Etna. 
 In the barracks the boys teU me their shoes freeze to the floor 
 over night. They have taken to sleeping two in one bunk for the 
 sake of warmth. Blanket-stealing has been elevated to the rank of 
 a deadly crime. Even the problem of keeping warm by day is an 
 acute one. The boys who have money to burn are spending it to 
 purchase extravagantly priced fur-lined gloves. The boys who 
 can't afford them, wait until they see somebody lay a pair down. 
 The taking of baths has become an act of heroism. 
 "Took a bath today," growls a lad. "Think I ought to get a 
 service stripe for that." 
 
 While another boy grins; " Gee but I'm feelin' rich ! Took a bath 
 today and found two pair o'socks and three shirts I didn't know 
 I had!" 
 
 "Now ain't you sorry you cut off the bottom of your coat!" 
 a long-coated doughboy taunts an abbreviated one. "I told you 
 not to. First, you're out of luck at Reveille 'cause the Top Kick 
 can see you ain't got no leggin's on. An' now before you know it, 
 you'll be havin' chilblains in your knees." 
 
 "You should worry," growls back the short-coated one. "I 
 couldn't stand that thing flappin' 'round my feet no longer. An' 
 most of the other guys done it too." 
 
 Which is true. Before this cold spell set in, half the boys in 
 the company had taken a slice off the bottom of their overcoats, 
 a procedure which leads to an odd effect en masse as each has 
 chosen his own length which means everything from knees to 
 ankles, and drives the exasparated Loots to demanding; "D'you 
 want to know what you look like? Well, you look like heUI" 
 
 In the village streets snow-ball fights are in order. As soon as 
 the boys start an offensive, all the inhabitants of the Faubourg de 
 France run out and put up their shutters. Better to sit in the dark 
 while the battle rages than to risk a pane of precious window- 
 
40 B0URM0NT 
 
 glass! Yesterday out at Iloud the boys caught the Y Secretary, 
 a meek and mild little man, in the road and started to give him 
 a thorough pelting. He ran for the hut, they chased him, he gained 
 his refuge, locked the door after him; they proceeded to heap about 
 half a ton of snow against it, making it immovable. The unhappy 
 man had to remove a window frame and crawl out through the open- 
 ing, then spend the rest of the afternoon digging out his hut door. 
 
 Here at our billet our little pea-green porcelain stcve with the 
 lavendar thistles growing over it has proved to be more ornamental 
 then useful. Since the Gendarme is one of your naturally efficient 
 souls, I feel that such practical details as building fires belong to 
 her. If she wishes to coax and cozen the wretched thing for an hour 
 on end, well and good. As for me I prefer to go and hug the cook 
 stove in Madame's parlor. French fires don't burn the way Ameri- 
 can fires do, I tell Madame. But to her the matter is quite simple. 
 The stove, she says, doesn't understand English. 
 
 Today I met the sergeant of engineers. Some imp impelled 
 me to question jovially; 
 
 " Where's that sled you promised me?" 
 
 "It's almost done." My knees went weak beneath me. 
 
 Tonight I confided my apprehensions to the Gendarme. She 
 looked at me with an unpitying eye. 
 
 "The more goose you, for encouraging him," was her cold com- 
 fort. "What are you going to do about it?" 
 
 "I'm going to pray for a thaw," I told her. 
 
 Bourmont, January 8. 
 
 Life at the Maison Chaput doesn't flow quite so peacefully these 
 days as it did before Christmas. The disturbing factor is four- 
 year old Max, left by his mother to visit his grandparents. Max 
 is a spoiled child according to the Chaput point of view. He is ex- 
 pected to walk a chalk line with his little red felt toes, and failing 
 this, he is spanked early and often. It is unlucky for him that the 
 fagots by the hearth afford a continual supply of handy switches. 
 
 "The little Jesus will never bring you anything again at Christ- 
 
COMPANY A 41 
 
 mas," warns Grandmamma; " never again! And neither will the 
 Pere Nicolas!" Then she appeals to me; "All the little children 
 in America are always well-behaved, are they not?" "But yes, 
 certainly!" I reply, avoiding Max's eye. 
 
 Coming home in the evening I often stop on my way back to 
 the chilly Salle des Assiettes, in response to an urgent invitation, 
 to warm myself at the fire-place. Old Monsieur will be sitting on 
 one side of the hearth and I on the other, while Baby Max toasts 
 his toes in their scarlet slippers on a stool between us. Sometimes 
 they will sing for me. Monsieur had a fine voice when he was 
 young and even now he sings with a delightful air, a sort of inde- 
 scribable old gallantry that is a joy to me. When he and Max sing 
 together the effect is irresistible. 
 
 "Now we will sing Le Drapeau de la France" cries Monsieur. 
 "We must stand for this!" And Monsieur in his gay red neck 
 cloth and little Max in his blue checked pinafore stand up before 
 the fire and sing with their hearts in the words. "Saluons le drapeau 
 de la France" When they come to that line, Monsieur le Comman- 
 dant veteran of 1870 and baby Max salute together. 
 
 Then, " Vive la France! " I cry, and " Vive la France!" they echo. 
 
 When new troops pass through town Max must always run to 
 the door to cry ll Bon jour les Americains !" a salutation which is 
 often followed I fear by a request for cigarettes, for Max, baby 
 that he is, enjoys a smoke, much to his grandparents' amusement. 
 
 Among the chinaware at the Maison Chaput there is a funny 
 little jug which the Gendarme and I use for fetching hot water. 
 It is made in the shape of a fat frog with a blue waistcoat and a 
 pipe in one of his webbed feet. I had thought it was the famous 
 frog who would a-wooing go, but Monsieur has his own explanation. 
 It is the original St. Thiebault toad he declares, to tease me. Every 
 time I come to draw a little hot water from the stove he must 
 crack the self-same joke. 
 
 "C'est le crapaud de Saint Thiebault" he cries and baby Max 
 pipes up; " II a sol}!" 
 
 Yesterday as I was passing through the front room on my way 
 
42 BOURMONT 
 
 to the canteen Monsieur stopped me to draw me into conversation. 
 There were several neighbors present. They gathered in a ring 
 around me. I could see they had some weighty question to put 
 to me. After a moment's hesitation it came out: 
 
 "Pourquoi," they demanded, "pourquoi, does the American sol- 
 dier blow his nose with his fingers? " 
 
 I stared, taken aback. In order to make their meaning quite 
 clear they illustrated with expressive gestures. 
 
 "Why," I stammered, "does the poilu never do such a thing?" 
 
 "But never!" they declared in chorus. "The poilu always uses 
 his handkerchief!" And again they illustrated in pantomime. 
 
 I labored to explain; the French climate had given the boys 
 colds, and the question of laundry and clean handkerchiefs pre- 
 sented difficulties 
 
 "But," declared old Monsieur sagely, "in America I have heard 
 it is the custom. There all the haut monde, it is said, lawyers, 
 doctors, ministers, statesmen, blow their noses in that manner!" 
 
 This was too much. I hurried from the room. 
 
 This morning Monsieur accused me of being a coquette. Hotly 
 I denied the charge. But why then, he rejoined triumphantly, had 
 I asked for a looking-glass in my bed-room? 
 
 Bourmont, January 9. 
 
 Company A is going to China! Somebody heard somebody 
 say that somebody told him that the Chaplain had said so. The 
 boys are all excitement over the idea. 
 
 "Won't that be jolly! You'll all be coming home with little 
 shiny pigtails hanging down your backs!" I tease them. 
 
 "Yes sir! an' we'll learn to eat our chow with chopsticks!" I 
 have solemnly promised the boys that if Company A goes to China 
 I will go too. What's more I will learn to make Chop Suey for 
 them. I have always wanted to visit China. 
 
 Thus does the army rumor make sport of us. Reports of this 
 sort incessantly spring up among us, flourish for a day, to be for- 
 gotten on the morrow. It is just a sign I suppose of the restless- 
 
COMPANY A 43 
 
 ness that is rife among the boys, the nostalgia, the rebellion at the 
 grinding monotony of their lives. Half the men in the company, 
 it seems, have gone to their officers begging to be transferred into 
 one of the two divisions that have already been in the lines. 
 
 "I'm sick o' this kind o' life; what I came over here for was to 
 fight," they growl. 
 
 In the canteen they look at the French National Loan poster 
 which has the Statue of Liberty on it, and speculate as to their 
 chances of ever seeing her again. 
 
 "Oh boy! but I bet there'll be some noise on board ship when 
 we catch sight o' that ol' gal again!" 
 
 "They wouldn't be breakin' my heart if they gave out orders 
 tonight to start for home termorrer." The chorus groans assent. 
 "No sir!" speaks up Private Gatts, "I don't want to go home until 
 I've killed some of them Germans." 
 
 "Aw, come off," rises the incredulous jeer; "you know, if they'd 
 let you, you'd start out to walk to Saint Nazaire tonight if you 
 had to carry your full pack an' your rifle an' your extra shoes." 
 
 To beguile the tedium they indulge in what appears to be, next 
 to crap-shooting, the most popular indoor sport of the A. E. F. — 
 mustache raising. I don't believe there's a man in the company 
 outside of Cummings and Maggioni who hasn't tried his luck at 
 it. Sometimes it seems as though an epidemc of young mustaches 
 will break out overnight as it were. The second lieutenants jeer 
 and witticize in vain. There is one squad who have solemnly 
 pledged themselves to remain mustachioed until they "can the 
 Kaiser;" but for the most part, the little "Charlies" are fleeting 
 affairs that come and go according to their owner's whim. This 
 makes it quite confusing for me, because no sooner have I got to 
 know a lad with a mustache by sight, than he shaves it off and alters 
 his appearance so that I have to learn him all over again. But even 
 the excitement of raising a mustache and having your picture 
 taken and sending it back home to your best girl and then waiting 
 to hear what she will say about it, affords only a brief diversion. 
 And when that is done, we are face to face again with the stark 
 
44 BOURMONT 
 
 sheer stupidity of drilling and hiking, hiking and drilling, day after 
 day, week in and week out, in the slush, the mud, and the rain. 
 
 "Another day, another dollar," remarks my friend Mr. Brady 
 with philosophic resignation as he comes in from walking post at 
 night, "Betsy the Toad-sticker," as he familiarly terms his rifle, 
 over his shoulder. 
 
 "I sure was strong on the patriotic stuff when I enlisted," mourns 
 a lad cast in a less stoic mould, "but since I got over here 111 tell 
 the world my patriotism is all shot to pieces." 
 
 "Who called this here land Sunny France, I'd like to know?" is 
 the indignant question which someone is bound to propose at least 
 once a day. 
 
 "I've only seen the sun twice since I've been here," complained 
 one lad, "and then it was kind of mildewed." 
 
 "It stopped raining for three hours the other day," remarked 
 another, "an' I wrote home to my folks an' told 'em what a long 
 dry spell we'd been having." 
 
 Altogether we are inclined to take a very pessimistic view at 
 present of our surroundings. 
 
 "This land is a thousand years behind the times," is the re- 
 iterated comment, and who can blame them, having seen nothing 
 of France but these tiny primitive mud-and-muck villages? "It 
 ain't worth fightin' for. Why if I owned this country I'd give it 
 to the Germans and apologize to 'em." 
 
 "It ain't the country, it's the people in it," asserted another lad 
 darkly. 
 
 While the Tall Kentuckian declared, "When I came to France, 
 the height of my ambition was to kill a German. Now the height 
 of my ambition is to kill a Frenchman." 
 
 What can one say to them? I try fatuously to comfort by re- 
 minding them of the good time coming when we all get home again. 
 I paint rosy pictures of a grand parade of the division up Fifth 
 Avenue, but they are sceptical. 
 
 " Huh ! That won't be for us ! All the fuss will be for the National 
 Guard and the draft guys. The reg'lars don't never get no credit." 
 
COMPANY A 45 
 
 Then someone will start to hum the song which goes; 
 "O why didn't I wait to be drafted? 
 Why didn't I wait to be cheered?" 
 "Well I'll tell the world that you deserve the credit!" 
 Anyway Company A has settled one point: if they ever march 
 up Fifth Avenue I am to march with them. 
 
 Bourmont, January ii. 
 
 The "convicts" are out of quarantine, and none the worse it 
 seems for the experience. Yet my family is still depleted. Forty 
 boys from the company have been sent out on a wood-chopping 
 detail. Detachments from each of the four companies in rotation 
 are being sent out into the forest to cut fuel for the use of the First 
 Battalion and now it is our turn. 
 
 The boys, we learn, are billeted in a twelfth century fortress 
 in a tiny village at the forest's edge. From time to time some of 
 them hike the four miles in to Saint Thiebault after the day's work 
 is done, in order to get a cup of hot chocolate and to tease a candle 
 out of me. For the chateau boasts none of the modern luxuries 
 of heat and light. 
 
 "What do you do in the evenings?" I asked Mr. Gatts. 
 
 "Sit in the cafe. It's the only place there is to go." 
 
 "I'm sorry." 
 
 "Well you needn't worry about the boys drinkin'. They ain't 
 none of them got no money. All they can do is to sit and watch 
 the Frenchies." 
 
 Indeed such a long time has passed since our last payday that 
 the whole company is feeling the pinch of poverty. Canteen sales 
 have narrowed down to the three essentials; chocolate, cigarettes 
 and chewing gum. I am running accounts on my personal re- 
 sponsibility, giving them "jawbone" as the boys say, a proceeding 
 at which our Secretary looks with a disapproving eye. To be sure 
 the air is full of rumours of impending payday but meanwhile there 
 is no disguising the fact that the great majority is "dead broke." 
 
 Says Sergeant X to Sergeant Z, a boy with a curious cast of 
 
46 BOURMONT 
 
 countenance; "Say, Bill, do you remember the time I paid ten 
 cents to see you in a cage at Bamum's? Well I want that dime 
 back now." 
 
 Another lad in answer to the appeal of "got a cent?" replies 
 with feeling; " One cent? Why man, if I had a cent I'd go to Paris!" 
 
 They have court-martialed the lieutenant who beat Malotzzi. 
 His punishment is to be transferred to another regiment. 
 
 Bourmont, January 14. 
 
 Madame is sick and I am worried. It isn't so much that she is 
 dangerously ill as that she is dangerously old. She lies in the big 
 blue room upstairs, looking like a patient aged Madonna, without 
 a fire, and with no one to look after her. Monsieur it seems has 
 made up his mind to her demise and piously resigned himself. I 
 called in an army doctor. 
 
 "She's pretty low," he said, "but it isn't medicine she needs so 
 much as nursing." 
 
 I informed Monsieur. He must get a woman to come in and take 
 care of her. But there was no such woman. He must try to find 
 one. But no, it was impossible! "Well at least, you can make 
 a fire in her room," I told him. As for La Petite , she has proved 
 herself a broken reed. Lacking Madame's rigid eyes upon her, 
 she has become lazy and negligent. Moreover she is indubitably 
 in love with some doughty doughboy, the proof being that she 
 spends the time when she should be gathering the harvest of dust 
 from the Salle des Assiettes in copying English phrases from our 
 books on to the Gendarme's pink blotting-paper. Yesterday we 
 found "Welcome Americans" scrawled all over it. Meanwhile 
 Monsieur seems to consider himself as qualifying for a martyr's 
 crown because he gets his own meals and washes his own dishes. 
 "Mais, regardez Mademoiselle!" he calls to me as I pass through 
 the living-room, and flourishes the dish-cloth at me with a tragic 
 air. So between excursions to the canteen I am trying to play 
 nurse to Madame, and a pretty poor one I make, I fear. Worse 
 still, I must act as interpreter for the Doctor, whose French is 
 
COMPANY A 47 
 
 absolutely nil, at every visit and since my scanty stock of French 
 phrases hardly includes a sick-room vocabulary I am often abso- 
 lutely at a loss. But we muddle through somehow and the Doctor 
 gets his reward when we stop to speak to Monsieur in the front-room 
 afterwards, for then Monsieur must bring out a bottle of cham- 
 pagne and together they sit in front of the fire and toast each other. 
 
 Yesterday the Doctor prescribed fresh eggs. I told Monsieur. 
 But there were none in Bourmont he declared. 
 
 "Very well," I said, "then I'll get them." 
 
 I started out to search. I knew of course that eggs in France 
 these days were difficult. In some places the Americans have been 
 forbidden, on account of the scarcity, to buy either eggs or chickens; 
 a ruling which officers have been known to evade by the simple 
 expedient of renting laying hens. But no such prohibition exists 
 at present in Saint Thiebault. Just the other day a lad told me 
 he had consumed twelve fried eggs at one sitting. 
 
 "Yes and Corporal G. ate more than I did." 
 
 " How many did he eat? " 
 
 "Oh, just thirteen." 
 
 "No wonder," I observed, "that the French talk about la fa- 
 mine!" I started a house-to-house canvas of Saint Thiebault only 
 to be met by a shake of the head and "Pas des oeufs" everywhere 
 I went. Finally back at the canteen I put the question in despair 
 to the boys. "Have you been to the tobacco shop?" they in- 
 quired. So to the tobacco shop I hurried and sure enough there 
 they were, all one wanted at the rate of seven francs a dozen. 
 
 Last night Madame had an egg-nogg and this morning an 
 omelette. Now the Doctor says that she is better. 
 
 Bourmont, January 17. 
 If my fairy god-mother should lend me her magic wand, the 
 very first thing I would wish for would be a dinner, a real dinner 
 just like Mother used to cook, for Company A. It would start with 
 turkey and cranberry sauce and end with several kinds of pie, 
 ice-cream and chocolate layer cake. There would be no soup on 
 
48 BOURMONT 
 
 the menu. Such a meal I am sure would do more to raise the morale 
 of Company A than the news of a smashing allied victory. It is 
 the everlasting sameness, the perpetual reiteration of a certain few 
 articles of food, I suppose, that makes the boys' "chow" so de- 
 pressing. 
 
 "I've eaten so much bacon since I've been in the army," re- 
 marked one boy mournfully, "that I'm ashamed to look a pig in 
 the face." 
 
 There is one question which the whole A. E. F. would like to 
 have answered. They've "got the bacon," but what became of 
 the ham? 
 
 Far more hated than the bacon, however, is the "slum," a word 
 which Pat informs me is derived from the " slumgullion" of the 
 hobo. It is this "slum" that gives the doughboy his horror of 
 anything like soup. 
 
 "When I get back to New York," said a lad to me the other day, 
 "I'm going to go into a real swell hotel and order a big dish o' 
 slum. Then I'm going to order a regular dinner, beefsteak and 
 oysters and all the fixings, and then I'm going to sit and laugh at 
 the slum." 
 
 Pat came in with a whoop after dinner yesterday. "We had a 
 change today," he sang out, "they put a pickle in the beans!" 
 This noon he bounced in again. "We had a change today," he 
 shouted, "they cut the beans lengthwise instead of cuttin' them 
 acrosst." 
 
 I made a fatal error. "Don't you like beans?" I asked. "Why 
 I'm very fond of them. I wish they'd give them to us at our mess 
 once in a while." 
 
 Pat looked at me with his sharp eyes narrowing. "D'you mean 
 it?" 
 
 "Why of course I do!" 
 
 He turned and walked out of the hut. Two minutes later he 
 returned with a hunk of bread and a mess-kit brimfull of beans; 
 he laid them on the counter in front of me. I gasped but did my 
 best to rise to the occasion. I was delighted to see those beans, 
 
COMPANY A 49 
 
 I assured him. I had just been starting out to go to mess; a little 
 bird had told me they were to have roast pork, French fries, and 
 peach pie for dinner, but now I would stay at the hut and eat 
 beans instead. Then I tasted the beans. They were as hard as 
 bullets, they stuck in my throat; I had never known anything 
 could be quite so awful. But Pat's eyes were upon me. There was 
 nothing for it but to swallow those beans. So swallow them I 
 did, every last one, and there were positively at least a thousand. 
 Then I washed the mess-kit and returned it to friend Pat with 
 effusive thanks. At least, I complimented myself, I had been 
 game. Tonight, just as I was starting out for my supper of toast 
 and chocolate with the little old ladies of the Rue Dieu, Pat sud- 
 denly appeared on the other side of the counter. 
 
 "We had 'em again tonight," he announced joyfully, "and I 
 thought since you were so fond of 'em," — he pushed another 
 mess-kit full of beans across the counter. I glared at him. I had 
 vainly been trying to recover from the dinner beans all afternoon. 
 
 "Take those things away," I snapped, "I don't want to lay eyes 
 on another bean as long as ever I live!" Pat had called my bluff. 
 
 For the last week Company A has had guests in the mess-hall. 
 Several French soldiers have been sent here to instruct the boys in 
 some special drill; it was arranged that they eat and sleep with the 
 Americans. Dreary as the boys find their chow, it proved a treat 
 to the poilus who evidently spread the news of their good fortune 
 among their friends in the vicinity, for day by day the number of 
 Frenchmen messing with Company A was mysteriously increased. 
 
 "Yes sir!" the indignant Mess Sergeant declared to me. "They 
 started in with five and now they've grown to be fifteen. I can't 
 tell one from t'other because all these frogs look alike to me, and 
 they know as how I can't sling their lingo. That's a nice thing for 
 them to be putting over on me!" 
 
 But yesterday he got his chance to get even. He caught one 
 of the Frenchmen putting a piece of bread in his pocket. It is of 
 course a military offense to carry food out of the mess-hall. 
 
 "I just sailed right into that guy" — the Mess Sergeant is a 
 
So BOURMONT 
 
 large and husky specimen — "and I sure did wipe up the floor some 
 with him. And since then the whole gang of 'em has been scared 
 stiff. Those frogs just watch me all the time. There ain't a minute 
 when I'm in the mess-hall that one of 'em takes his eyes off me." 
 
 The other day, they tell me, one of the boys in the company, 
 possessed of a practical turn, employed his newly-issued "tin 
 derby " as a kettle in which to boil some eggs. The delicacy 
 proved dear. Betrayed by the blackened helmet, he was tried and 
 fined twenty dollars. 
 
 Bourmont, January 20. 
 
 I'm off for Paris! My eyes have been in a horrid state for the 
 last week. I have had all the doctors in the neighborhood treating 
 them and they only get worse and worse. The Chief is going up 
 to Paris tomorrow and has decided that the best thing to do is to 
 take me along to see a specialist. 
 
 Madame is so much better that I don't feel uneasy at leaving 
 her. But I hate to desert the boys, especially as the hut is in such 
 a state. Yesterday we had a storm and the wind almost wrecked 
 our tent. There was one moment while I was out at dinner, when 
 such a gust hit it, that, as the boys said, " She sure seemed a goner." 
 At that moment there was a stampede for the door, the boys shoot- 
 ing out of the tent "just like seeds from an orange when you squeeze 
 it." But thanks to the Secretary and a crowd of boys who got 
 out and hung for dear life on to the guy ropes, the tent came through 
 damaged but still standing. When I returned after mess I found 
 our hut with two great gaping rents torn in the outer walls and 
 the inner lining all ripped loose and hanging down from the ceiling, 
 so that one felt exactly as if one were inside a punctured zeppelin. 
 
 Reports coming in this morning from other points on the divi- 
 sion state that two tents actually did collapse during the tempest, 
 and that one man, caught beneath the wreckage, had his collar- 
 bone broken. So we can count ourselves lucky. 
 
 Tonight I said au 'voir to Company A, telling them that if pay- 
 day should occur during my absence, I hoped they all would be 
 
COMPANY A 51 
 
 very, very good. Some of the boys lugubriously predicted that 
 I would never return, while others darkly insinuated that they 
 suspected I was "goin' to Paris to git married." To show them 
 what my intentions honestly were, I inquired if there were any 
 errands I could do for them in the city. Corporal G. looked at 
 me, stammered, hesitated. There was something he would like, 
 only he didn't want to bother me. What was it? He paused, grew 
 red, then blurted it out. 
 
 "If it ain't too much trouble, could you send me a picture post- 
 card while you're away? I ain't never had a post-card from Paris." 
 
 H6pital Claude-Bernard 
 
 Porte D'Aubervilliers, 
 
 Paris, January 25. 
 
 This is a hideous hospital. They wake you up in the middle of 
 the night to wrap you in a mustard poultice. They wake you up 
 in the wee sma' hours and order you to brush your teeth. And 
 nobody in the whole establishment from head-doctor to scrub-lady 
 knows a word of English; except the night-nurse and she knows 
 "mumpsss!" like that she says it, "MUMPSSSSS!" Not that 
 I have them; I have the measles. I don't know where I got them. 
 They were, so far as I am aware, almost the only known malady 
 which we didn't have at Bourmont. Probably some lad who was 
 passing through the town and stopped in at the canteen gave them 
 to me. It was undoubtedly the measles that were affecting my 
 eyes; sometimes it seems they act that way. 
 
 They sent me to this hospital because it was the only hospital 
 in Paris admitting women that had room for me: known officially 
 as the city hospital for contagious diseases, among Americans it 
 passes as " the pest-house." 
 
 They think I'm a weird one here, because I want my window 
 open. Twenty-nine times a day at least an infirmiere will come 
 hurrying in and bang it shut and twenty-nine times a day I crawl 
 out of bed and open it again. 
 
 The nursing here is all done by infirtnttres, or untrained women 
 
52 BOURMONT 
 
 under the direction of two real nurses, one in charge of this wing 
 during the day, the other during the night. Some of these infirm- 
 ieres go about in curl papers, others wear sabots. They mean well 
 enough, but they are overworked, and frankly peasant types, with 
 little education and almost no notion of cleanliness or of much 
 else that is supposed to pertain to nursing. Last night a fat old 
 soul without many teeth came waddling into my room to have a 
 look at that interesting curiosity, la pauvre petite Dame Americaine. 
 When she saw my open window she was so overcome with aston- 
 ishment that she hurried out and fetched a companion to regard 
 the phenomenon. The two of them stood and stared at it and dis- 
 cussed the matter between themselves for quite a while, then the 
 fat one turned to me and remarked with a toothless but engaging 
 smile ; it was very warm in America where I lived, was it not? When 
 I replied that, instead, it was much colder in winter there than here 
 in Paris, they looked aghast and flatly incredulous. Their only 
 explanation of the matter had been, it seemed, that I was accus- 
 tomed to living in the tropics and just didn't have sense enough 
 to suit my habits to the atmosphere. 
 
 Just outside the hospital there is a munitions factory. At night 
 the light over the front door shines into my room and day and 
 night the machinery keeps up an incessant thudding hum that says 
 as plain as words over and over and over: Kill the Bodies. Kill the 
 Boches. Kill the Bodies. Once in a long while the machines stop for 
 a few moments in order, I suppose, to catch their breath and then I 
 grow dreadfully worried, for I know that if someone doesn't keep 
 on killing the Boches every second, they will be breaking through 
 the lines and pouring in over France in great drowning grey waves. 
 
 January 27. I haven't got the measles after all; I have the Ger- 
 man measles, only they don't call it that in French I am glad to 
 say. At first I was so very red and speckled that they thought 
 I had the rougeole, but now they have decided it is only the rubeole 
 after all. A concourse of doctors considered me yesterday morning 
 and pronounced the verdict. "But then," I demanded, "if it's 
 
COMPANY A S3 
 
 only the rubeole can't I be leaving tout de suite? " For the French 
 do not consider quarantine necessary for the rubeole. " Eight 
 days," they answered, and when I expostulated they turned on their 
 collective heels and marched callously out the door, each one hold- 
 ing up eight fingers apiece as a parting rejoinder. 
 
 Last night I resisted a great temptation. This place is full of 
 doors with little glass panes in them. As I lay awake in bed in 
 the middle of the night, a wild desire grew on me to seize my big 
 green bottle of mineral water by the neck and see how many panes 
 of glass I could account for before they nabbed me. I had a per- 
 fect vision of myself, flying down the hall in my little flour-sack 
 chemise of a night-gown, long legs stretching out beneath, going 
 zip, bang, right and left into those window panes. I have seldom 
 wanted to do anything quite so badly. And then just to top 
 off with I was going to wring the interne's neck. He is a little 
 shrimp of a man — that interne, with no chin and a sort of scrawny 
 picked-chicken neck, a neck that gets on one's nerves. 
 
 When they sent me to this hospital I comforted myself with the 
 thought that I would at least learn a little French while staying 
 here, but the only thing I have learned so far is that gargariser 
 means gargle and any goose might have guessed that. 
 
 January 28. The Chief has sent me a rose-pink cyclamen. 
 It is a lovely thing and very elaborately done up with pink crepe 
 paper and a large bow of shell-pink ribbon. Now I am no longer 
 an object of any interest. Every last doctor, nurse, interne and 
 infirmiere who comes into my room to take a look at la petite Mees, 
 immediately turns his or her back on me and admires the cyclamen 
 instead. I gather such objects are rare in French hospitals, for 
 they examine and discuss it at the greatest length, always winding 
 up with the remark that it must have "cost very dear." 
 
 Not having anything else to do I lie with my eyes shut and think. 
 And of course I have been thinking chiefly about Company A. I 
 have thought among other things of a play, or rather a dramatic 
 charade in three acts, which we might give in the hut. It is to be 
 
54 BOURMONT 
 
 entitled Slum. In the first act, — BUI — three doughboys hit on a 
 plan to encompass the Kaiser's death and so become rich by gain- 
 ing the proffered reward: — they will send him a dish of slum! The 
 second act, — et — shows a room in the Potsdam palace with Kaiser 
 Bill and His Side Whiskers, the Lord High Chancellor, discussing 
 the food situation. The slum appears; the Kaiser partakes of it 
 and falls writhing to the floor. The last act shows a typical barn- 
 loft billet, with rats squeaking, chickens clucking et cetera, where 
 the Soldiers Three of the first act have their lodging. They receive 
 the tidings of the Kaiser's death; wild rejoicings ensue, as in fancy 
 they spend their fortunes; only to be cut short by the discovery 
 that the cook who made the slum has already claimed the reward. 
 I think we can stage it successfully, though the costumes for the 
 Kaiser and His Side Whiskers present some difficulties. One thing 
 only troubles me; will it hurt the Mess Sergeant's feelings? 
 
 January 30. They have relented. They have shortened my 
 stay. I am to be let out tomorrow, but I must reposer a few days 
 before going back to work. Bother! I haven't heard anything 
 from Bourmont for ten days and I am full of uneasy apprehensions. 
 Since I have been in the hospital the cyclamen has been the only 
 word I have had from the outside world. I have been cut off as 
 completely as if I were in a tomb. Ah well, some day I'll get back 
 to the hut again I suppose, and when I do, if those boys aren't 
 almost half as glad to see me as I am to see them, why I'll know 
 that some other canteen lady has been surreptitiously stealing their 
 affections, and I shall put poison in her soup. 
 
 Hopital Claude-Bernard, 
 
 Paris, January 31. 
 
 I have been in a big air raid; this is just how it all happened: 
 
 It was a white night in the hospital for me. I had lain for hours, 
 
 it seemed, in the little blue room watching through the glass panes 
 
 of my door the coiffed head of a young infirmiere bent over her 
 
 embroidery. She sat outside my door because there was a light 
 
 in the hall just there. Suddenly my drowsy ears were pierced by 
 
COMPANY A 55 
 
 a long weird hoot. In an instant the girl had leaped to her feet 
 and switched off the light, then she turned and ran down the hall. 
 A moment later and the building was in darkness. I jumped from 
 my bed and ran to the window. The light in front of the munitions 
 factory was out, there seemed an uncanny silence, the machinery 
 had been stopped. I hurried to the door. The corridor was full 
 of hastening forms, infirmieres, their loose white robes showing 
 dimly in the grey light. 
 
 "Qu'est ce qui arrive?" I demanded. 
 
 11 Les Bodies!" 
 
 The night nurse was peering from my window. 
 
 "It's the first warning," she whispered. "See! the lights of 
 Paris still shine." 
 
 But even as we looked, the light across the sky that was Paris 
 flickered, dimmed, flashed out. At the same moment two great 
 golden stars rose over the munitions factory. 
 
 " Les avions!" cried the night nurse. 
 
 And all the time the sirens kept up their ghostly wailing, like 
 nothing one could imagine except a vast host of lost souls. Then 
 the guns began. A moment later a crashing thud told that a bomb 
 had fallen in our neighborhood. The night nurse drew me hurriedly 
 into the hall. 
 
 "Lie down against the wall, — close — like this," she ordered. 
 
 Up and down the corridor every space by the wall was occupied 
 by the huddled form of an infirmiere buried beneath a mattress. 
 The night nurse, who had a whole heap of mattresses to herself, 
 pushed one across to me. I lay on the top, finding it more com- 
 fortable that way. 
 
 The bombs were falling nearer. A child in one of the wards woke 
 up and began to wail fretfully. No one heeded her. There was 
 a flash and then a tearing thud that shook the hospital. I had one 
 ghastly moment, a thrill of panic terror at our utter helplessness 
 as we lay there awaiting what seemed the inevitable coming of 
 destruction. The moment passed. I got up and slipped down the 
 side corridor to the glass door. The sky was full of moving lights; 
 
56 BOURMONT 
 
 some burned with a steady brilliancy, some flickered and went 
 out like fireflies, a few flashed red. There was no telling which was 
 friend or foe. They seemed to be proceeding in all directions with- 
 out plan or purpose. The air pulsated with the humming drone of 
 their motors. They were like a swarm of angry hornets I thought. 
 Across the road, standing on the top of a high wall, in sharp sil- 
 houette against the sky, three poilus stood to watch. Every now 
 and then an infirmiere, curiosity outweighing caution, would leave 
 her hiding-place and creep to the door beside me only to burrow 
 like a bug, a moment later, underneath her mattress once more. 
 
 " Mees! N'avez-vous pas peur? " 
 
 "Maisnon!" 
 
 "Ah, vous etes un soldat!" 
 
 I went back to my room and climbed out on the window-sill. 
 At first I thought the lights of Paris had been turned on again, but 
 this time they were color of rose. As I looked the pink flush deep- 
 ened, grew ruddy, flamed across the sky. I called the night nurse. 
 "Cest une incendie" she wailed staccato. "Quel malheurl" 
 
 So Paris was on fire. 
 
 As we watched two big puffs of white smoke rose over the muni- 
 tions factory, spread into a cloud, drifted slowly toward us. The 
 night nurse sniffed, then shut the window hurriedly. 
 
 "La gaz" she whispered. I questioned it but left the window 
 shut. 
 
 An aeroplane swung low over the munitions factory, so near 
 that it looked like a great lazy fish with the rose fight from below 
 shining on its belly. Was it friend or enemy? 
 
 The bombs were dropping close again. One could see the flashes 
 and feel the jar of the explosions which made the windows rattle. 
 
 "Oh les sales Bochest" 
 
 "Ohlalal" 
 
 The agonized wails sounded half stifled from beneath the mat- 
 tresses. 
 
 "Taisezl Ecoutezl" It was the night nurse's voice. 
 
 The front door slammed. A fat infirmiere in a badly shattered 
 
COMPANY A 57 
 
 state of nerves stumbled down the hall weeping out unintelligible 
 woes. At my mattress she came to a standstill, then ducked and 
 tried to crawl beneath it; failing, she sat down on top of me. I 
 ventured a polite protest, — in vain. The night nurse heard me. 
 She emerged from beneath her heap. Followed a scene dramatic, 
 unforgettable. Mattresses scattered to each side of her, heedless 
 of the falling bombs, with Gallic passion she proceeded to point 
 out to the sobbing infirmiere the shortcomings of her behaviour. 
 But the fat lady proved unrepentant, her terror at the bombs 
 superseding even her awe of the night nurse. She sat tight, hold- 
 ing her ground. She even ventured to answer back. The scene 
 grew more intense. After I had heard the night nurse discharge 
 the infirmiere some six times over, feeling a trifle out of place, I 
 managed to crawl from beneath and made my way back to the 
 window. No more bombs were falling but the guns still barked. 
 As I watched, a burning plane looking like a great tinsel ball seared 
 its way through the sky, falling just to the right of Paris. 
 
 '"Pray God it is a Boche!" I thought. 
 
 A round-eyed infirmiere peered in at the door, staring curiously 
 at me. 
 
 "Meesf Vous allez retourner en AmeriqueV 
 
 1 1 Mais out! A pres la guerre! ' ' 
 
 The red glare over Paris was fading out. The machines in the 
 munitions factory began to throb once more. In the grey light 
 at the window I looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes past 
 one. I turned to crawl into bed feeling cold and very sleepy. Some 
 one touched my sleeve; it was the night nurse. She was staring 
 out the window with eyes that saw nothing. 
 
 "And how many little children will be dead in the morning do 
 you think?" she asked. 
 
 Bourmont, February 5. 
 
 The blow that I somehow dimly apprehended while I was in the 
 hospital has fallen. Last night late I arrived from Paris. The 
 first thing I learned was, that with the addition of some new workers 
 a general shuffle of the women at Headquarters was to take place. 
 
5 8 BOURMONT 
 
 This morning the Chief called us together and gave us our new 
 assignments. The Gendarme and I are to leave Bourmont. Since 
 I have been away regimental Headquarters have been moved from 
 Saint Thiebault to Goncourt, a town about two miles to the south, 
 and the whole regiment with the exception of the First Battalion 
 concentrated there. The Y. at Goncourt has had a hard time of it. 
 Originally it occupied a barracks; then the regimental machine-gun 
 company moved in and the Y. must move out. So the Y settled 
 itself in an old stone mill by the Meuse, only to have the military 
 authorities decide that they needed that mill for a guard-house. So 
 once more the Y. moved, this time to a little old house in the centre 
 of the village; and here according to last reports it still is, for the 
 simple reason that nobody else has any use for the little old house. 
 Meanwhile, however, they are putting up a Big Hut which is to be 
 ready in from one to three weeks, all according to who is making the 
 estimate. It is to Goncourt that the Gendarme and I have been 
 assigned. According to the Chief this is a " promo tion." 
 
 "It's the largest, the most important place on the division 
 now," he declared; "I'm sending you there because you made good 
 at Saint Thiebault." 
 
 But this little piece of taffy doesn't seem to help matters a bit. 
 The only way to look at it is that it's a case of the greatest good 
 for the greatest number, and of course numerically Goncourt is 
 about ten times as important as Saint Thiebault. And anyway 
 it wouldn't do the least good to kick against the pricks because 
 when all is said and done one is under orders like a soldier. After 
 all it isn't as if I were going to Greenland or to Timbuctoo. And 
 yet at even only two miles distance, so tied to the work one must 
 be, one might almost as well be in a different planet. 
 
 As for Saint Thiebault, they are going to have to do with just 
 a man secretary there. The place is too small, the Chief says, to 
 be allowed more than one worker. 
 
 We won't be moving for several days yet. I'm not going to say 
 a word about it to Company A until the very last moment. I 
 hate partings. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 GONCOURT 
 
 THE DOUGHBOYS 
 
 Goncourt, February ii. , 
 The little old house which now harbors the Y. formerly served, 
 it seems, as guard-house. To some it must have a strangely fami- 
 liar air. Downstairs there are two small rooms; the front one 
 stone-paved, with a dark carved cupboard in one corner which 
 formerly enclosed the family bed, and a huge fireplace; the back 
 one with a dirt floor over which uncertain boards have shakily 
 been laid. The front room we use for the canteen, the back, with 
 four rough tables, serves as a make-shift writing room. The walls 
 are dim with smoke and grime, the windows in both rooms lack 
 half their panes, yet the odd little place has an atmosphere, a 
 charm all its own. Upstairs soldiers are billeted. When the din 
 of business dies down in the canteen, one can hear the crisp rattle 
 of dice as the boys shoot craps on the floor overhead. 
 
 In accordance with military regulations here we cannot open 
 the canteen until four in the afternoon. But a large part of the 
 morning is easily spent in cleaning out the hut and arranging the 
 stock for the afternoon and evening onslaught. At Saint Thie- 
 bault the detail that " policed up" the camp in the morning swept 
 out our tent for us, but here one wields one's own broom and 
 shovel, — for first of all one must shovel out the mud that's on the 
 floor! Cleaning the canteen, however, I find, though a dirty, is 
 quite a remunerative job, for in the heaps of litter on the floor 
 money lurks. According to the ethics of the game if money is 
 found back of the counter it belongs in the till, but if in front it 
 goes to the finder. Sometimes the find is five centimes, sometimes 
 fifty and once it was five francs! The litter — chocolate wrappers, 
 
6o GONCOURT 
 
 orange peels and cigarette boxes — is all swept into the fireplace 
 and then touched off with a match; a regular bon-fire ensues. This 
 morning we had left the front door open; immediately the fire was 
 started a throng of villagers crowded around to look in. They were 
 scandalized at the conflagration. The house was old, they cried; 
 we would set the chimney on fire, we would burn up the building, 
 we would burn down the whole town! One ancient and portly 
 dame in a frenzy of protest dashed into the room and fairly danced 
 about the hearth, shaking her apron at the flames and calling for 
 ashes to cover them. But before she could get her ashes the fire 
 died down and the excitement with it. 
 
 The Gendarme and I are billeted in a tiny house just at the vil- 
 lage edge. Our low second story looks down upon the street, so 
 narrow that it seems one could almost reach out and touch hands 
 with the houses opposite. But what a street it is! Underneath our 
 low window the whole world goes by; American officers on horse- 
 back, French officers in limousines, American mule teams, French 
 wood teams with three white horses harnessed one in front of the 
 other, and always the troops; going by at dawn in the semi-dark- 
 ness, their rhythmic incessant tramp weaving itself into one's 
 waking dreams, passing by at noon, swinging back down the hill 
 as it grows dusk, singing snatches of song as they tramp. As I 
 lie a-bed in the morning before getting up to peer out the window 
 into the yellow misty atmosphere I can always calculate the exact 
 state of the weather by the amount of squelch which those march- 
 ing boots make in the muddy road. 
 
 Company H is billeted on this same street with us. The first 
 morning after we arrived the Gendarme and I were startled out of 
 sleep by First Call blown directly underneath our window. Hardly 
 had the last note sounded when a shout fit to wake the dead went 
 up. 
 
 "Get to hell up, all of you! Rise and shine!" 
 Followed a tremendous banging and kicking at all the stable doors 
 along the street accompanied by a torrent of vivid and spicy ad- 
 monitions. The Gendarme and I gasped and chuckled. This was 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 61 
 
 rich. Were we always to be awakened in so picturesque a fashion? 
 But the next morning we listened in vain. First Call was blown at 
 the far end of the street and followed by a solemn silence; and so 
 it has been ever since. Now that American ladies are known to be 
 living on the street Company H must get up decorously. 
 
 Goncoxjrt, February 12. 
 
 The fireplace is easily the feature of our funny little hut. 
 Around this at night the lads crowd perched on packing-boxes to 
 smoke, chew gum and gossip. As the first mad rush of business 
 at the canteen dies down a little I edge up towards the fireplace 
 in order to get a wee share in the conversation. 
 
 They have caught a spy! One of the cooks in F Company. He 
 was a deserter from the German Army some one said. They 
 caught him putting dope in the slum. The doctors were analyzing 
 it now. It's a wonder the whole company wasn't poisoned. Yes, 
 and they found plans of the camp in his pocket too. He hasn't 
 eaten a thing since they arrested him. All he does is just to walk 
 up and down the guard-house. Seems as if he were kind of crazy. 
 
 And so they gossip. A sad-eyed bugler remarks to me that he'd 
 be a rich man if he only had all the hob-nailed shoes that had been 
 thrown at him. Another boy wonders what he'd do if he had " both 
 arms shot off and then the gas alarm sounded." And always they 
 must be rowing about their respective states. 
 
 "Neebraska! Where's Neebraska? Is that in the United States 
 or Canada? " 
 
 "Noo Hampshire! Huh! There ain't nothin' but mountains 
 there. Why my old man told me that when they let the cows out 
 to grass there they had to put stilts on one side of 'em so they won't 
 fall off'n the pasture." 
 
 Then they turn on me. 
 
 "Boston! When you get ten miles from Boston you can smell 
 the beans bakin'." 
 
 "But I don't come from Boston," I protest. 
 
 "Well there ain't nothin' much in Massachusetts outsider Bos- 
 
62 GONCOURT 
 
 ton. Why the state of Noo Hampshire is goin' to rent the rest o' 
 Massachusetts for a duck-yard." 
 
 And so it goes. 
 
 "Gee! but it's good to get into one shop where you don't have 
 to talk frog talk!" exclaimed one lad tonight. 
 
 "I've just heard the greatest compliment for you," another lad 
 declares solemnly, " the greatest compliment that could possibly 
 be paid any woman." 
 
 "Why, what was it?" 
 
 "I just heard a feller say; 'My! don't she look different from the 
 French girls!'" 
 
 A flushed-faced lad leans over my end of the counter; 
 
 "You know to talk to an American girl like this again, it's like, 
 it's like— " 
 
 Again and again he tries only to become helplessly inarticulate. 
 Then pulling a large bunch of letters "from lady friends" from 
 his pocket, nothing will do but he must tell me about each one. 
 Finally in a fit of prodigal generosity he bestows a handful on me, 
 "Because I'm an American and you're one too." As he makes the 
 presentation something falls to the floor with a little click. We 
 search among the litter on the floor, the lad on all fours; finally 
 the lost is found, — a broken bit of comb about two inches and a 
 quarter long. This is a happy chance, he explains, for he is com- 
 pany barber and with the company comb gone E Company would 
 be out of luck. 
 
 Always our presence here is something that seems so strange 
 to them as to be almost incredible. 
 
 "Will you please tell me," asked a serious-looking lad tonight, 
 "what consideration could possibly induce two American girls 
 to come to a place like this?" 
 
 Continually I am encountering boys who are sure that they've 
 "seen me somewhere." 
 
 "Say, didn't you use to live in Milwaukee?" 
 
 "Haven't I seen you in Seattle? Well, if it warn't you, it was 
 somebody that looked just like you!" 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 63 
 
 I suppose it is simply because I look American that I look 
 familiar to them. But the facts in the case seem to be that I have 
 been observed by some member of the A. E. F. in practically every 
 one of the large cities of the U. S. A. One boy nearly started a 
 fight in camp the other night by declaring that in spite of the evi- 
 dence of my nose he knew I was of Hebraic origin. He had seen 
 me, he solemnly insisted, "goin' with a Jew feller in Philadelphia. " 
 
 Undoubtedly it is because they have so little to think about in 
 these drab days that they are so pathetically curious. Every little 
 thing you say or do is repeated, discussed all over camp. Sometimes 
 curiosity gets hold of one of the bolder spirits to such an extent 
 that he ventures the question; 
 
 "How much do you get paid for smiling at the soldiers?'' 
 
 And when they learn that you are a volunteer and are paying 
 for the privilege of being there, their amazement is so blank as to 
 be positively ludicrous. 
 
 Goncourt, February 13. 
 
 One of the nicest things about Goncourt is our mess. This we 
 have at the House Across the Street, which is next to the House 
 of the Madonna. We mess en famille with the family Peirut, the 
 Gendarme, Mr. K. and I, and we eat the family fare which con- 
 sists chiefly of soup, boiled meat and carrots, supplemented by 
 various additions such as sugar, cocoa, jam and canned corn from 
 the commissary. I can never quite decide which is quainter, the 
 family or the setting. 
 
 In America we have the phrase living-room, in France they have 
 it. In this one high-ceilinged room the daily life of the family 
 is complete. Here is the kitchen stove and the dinner table, here 
 are the beds of Madame and Monsieur, Madame's in one corner 
 hung with dim flowered chintz, Monsieur's in another brave with 
 a beautiful old red India shawl. Here is the broad stone sink under 
 the window, with the drain running out into the street, where the 
 family makes its morning toilet. Here are the great dark armoires 
 which hold clothing, china-ware and stores of all sorts. Here is 
 
64 GONCOURT 
 
 the littered desk where the family correspondence is carried on; 
 and here is the larder, a huge slab of pork and a ham hanging from 
 the beams over one's head, while on a stick in front of the fireplace 
 a row of little fishes hang by their tails in dumb expectation of a 
 Friday. And here too is the family shrine, a little wooden Madonna 
 in red and blue, found as Madame tells us in the ancient city of 
 La Mothe, which, destroyed in 1645, now exists as a wonderful 
 ruin crowning a hill some two miles to the west. 
 
 If the stove-wood is found lacking at meal-time, Monsieur rises 
 from his chair and saws an armful beside the dinner-table. If 
 Madame decides while we are eating our soup that a piece of ham 
 will improve the menu she stands upon her chair and cuts a 
 slice in the air over our heads. On wash days one picks one's way 
 to the table past the pails which hold the family linen in soak, 
 and later eats one's soupe a pain under a brave array of drying 
 garments slung from wall to wall. 
 
 The family, which consists of Monsieur, Madame and Mademoi- 
 elle, the two sons being in service, are the most hospitable souls 
 alive. Continually they urge, "Mangez, mangezV and then, 
 "Vous ties timide!" Their feelings are dreadfully hurt if each 
 one of us refuses to eat enough for two. They seem somehow to 
 have acquired the idea that Americans need a vast deal of sweeten- 
 ing, so they offer you sugar, commissary sugar, with everything, 
 and they are gently but definitely disappointed when you decline 
 to heap it on your mashed potato. 
 
 Mile. Jeane, clear-skinned, bright-eyed, capable, energetic yet 
 possessed of a warm charm withal, is forewoman of the little glove 
 factory in town. 
 
 "Are there many employees?" I asked. 
 
 "But no. Eight only. Since the Americans came to town all 
 the women have deserted the factory in order to wash the Ameri- 
 cans' clothes." 
 
 Monsieur, it appears, is a wood-cutter by profession. He comes 
 home from a hard day's chopping looking like a genus of the woods 
 himself with his worn brown velour suit, his wrinkled brown skin 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 65 
 
 and his ragged brown beard which resembles exactly those bundles 
 of fine twigs which the French burn in their fireplaces. When 
 Monsieur was ten years old the Germans occupied the town and 
 sixteen of them slept in this very room. They were perfect pigs, 
 he says, and ate everything they could lay their hands on; "But," 
 he adds, "they didn't like our bread!" 
 
 Sunday mornings all the men in town, including the Man With 
 One Leg, and all the dogs start off together, the men armed with 
 guns and each carrying a musette bag or knapsack. Papa puts on 
 his shooting coat with the fancy buttons each depicting a different 
 bird or beast of the chase, takes down his old shot-gun from the wall, 
 and joins them. At dusk they come back again, empty-handed, 
 but seemingly well content. Their modus operandi, I gather, is to 
 proceed to a comfortable spot in the woods, then all sit down, 
 drink vin rouge and wait for the game. Indeed one doughboy 
 declares, that passing by one of those open alleys which intersect 
 the forests here, he once saw an old Frenchman standing with his 
 gun in a drizzling rain, patiently waiting for a shot while by his 
 side stood another "old frog " holding an umbrella over him. 
 
 Goncourt, February 14. 
 
 The woman who lives in the House of the Madonna is an un- 
 conscionable old scalawag. Not that you would ever suspect it 
 to look at her, for with her round rosy face, her smooth parted hair 
 and her comfortably rotund figure she resembles nothing so much 
 as somebody's genial and respected grandmother. Yet the facts in 
 the case remain. She sells doped wine to the soldiers at ruinous 
 prices and she sells at forbidden hours. Moreover we have reason 
 to suspect that at odd times she carries on an utterly illicit com- 
 merce. According to our hostess, when the time from the last pay 
 day grows too long, certain soldiers are not above smuggling in 
 their extra shoes and shirts to her, and she pays them back in 
 drinks. 
 
 This morning while I was at breakfast she came bouncing in and 
 proceeded to fill the house with lamentations. Last night a tipsy 
 
66 GONCOURT 
 
 soldier had stolen the key to her front door! Then she delved into 
 history for my benefit, recounting how, some weeks before, two sol- 
 diers, having sent her out of the room on an errand, had pro- 
 ceeded to rob her till, the sum amounting to almost three hundred 
 francs! 
 
 "Oh! lis sont des monstres, des cochonsl" she wailed. 
 
 Whereat I, with some asperity, remarked that if the French 
 people wouldn't sell drink to the Americans, the soldiers wouldn't 
 become zig-zag and do such things. Immediately she became con- 
 ciliatory. Of course, everyone knew that there were good people 
 and bad people in every nation, but certainly! Then she changed 
 the subject abruptly, demanding; why, why in the name of common 
 sense did I do anything so contrary to all the dictates of reason 
 as to sleep with my window open? 
 
 Last night, as Mr. K. and I were coming home from the canteen, 
 the door of the cafe opposite was suddenly opened and a man's fig- 
 ure appeared, half pushed, half thrown outside. The door slammed 
 shut, — it was long after closing hour for the cafe, — the figure fell 
 like a log to the ground. We watched a minute to see the fellow 
 pick himself up, but he lay motionless. It was a freezing night. 
 Mr. K. went over to investigate. The man was in a drunken stupor. 
 
 "You go along," he called to me, "I've got to get this fellow 
 home." 
 
 I left reluctantly. Subsequently Mr. K. told me the night's his- 
 tory. After considerable coaxing, he had finally succeeded in ex- 
 tracting the information that the boy belonged to F Company. 
 So to F Company barracks, a good half-mile north of the canteen, 
 they had proceeded, Mr. K. hah dragging, half carrying the fellow 
 who was head and shoulders taller than he, and broad to boot. 
 
 When they had nearly reached their journey's end, Mr. K. by 
 this time fairly in a state of collapse, his burden suddenly baulked. 
 The barracks evidently didn't look like home to him. Mr. K. began 
 to have a sickening sense of something gone wrong. At last the 
 wretch drowsily recalled the fact that he didn't belong to F Com- 
 pany at all, but to I Company far on the other side of town. So 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 67 
 
 around they turned and back through town they crawled until 
 finally they arrived at I Company's abiding-place; and this time 
 the derelict was satisfied. 
 
 Indeed a walk home from the canteen at night with Mr. K. at 
 any time is likely to prove an adventure. For should we meet a 
 boy who has had more than is "good for him" and is in an irritable 
 mood, we must stop and talk with him, in order, as Mr. K 's theory 
 puts it, to divert his mind. " Get them thinking about something 
 else," is his slogan. The other night we stood out in the sleety 
 drizzle until my feet fairly froze solid into the freezing mud, carry- 
 ing on polite conversations with two boys who had just been put 
 out of the House of the Madonna and were in a state of mind to 
 wreck the town. One of them Mr. K. got started on the subject 
 of taking French lessons. He was ambitious to study French he 
 explained and would Mr. K. kindly arrange for a teacher and a 
 course of lessons? I listened with one ear; here was the first man I 
 had found in France who expressed an earnest desire to learn French 
 and he was tipsy! The other one, evidently ashamed, explained to 
 me at length how he hadn't wanted to get drunk, the trouble was 
 that he was just naturally "dishgushted with this country, just 
 dishgushted." And that it seems to me is the whole thing in two 
 words. The boys are "just dishgushted." Considering it all, who 
 can blame them? 
 
 Goncourt, February 15. 
 
 The M. P.s who live in the second story of the Guard-House 
 are my good friends. They help sweep out the hut often in the 
 mornings and when they make taffy in their mess kits they bring 
 me some. These M. P.s are in reality cavalrymen detached from 
 their regiment for the time being in order to do police duty. As 
 far as I can see, there seems to be no special hard feeling between 
 them and the doughboys. 
 
 One slim young M. P. in particular is a crony of mine. He keeps 
 me informed as to the gossip of the town. He tells me how the 
 French women who run cafes, our neighbor of the House of the 
 
68 GONCOURT 
 
 Madonna among them, seek to curry favor with the law in Gon- 
 court, by bringing him out coffee and sandwiches as he walks his 
 beat in the middle of the night; and how, the other night after 
 closing hour, he put his head inside the door of one of these cafes 
 to be greeted by a frantic shriek of "Feenish! FeenishI" from the 
 hostess, only to find, when he insisted on entering, a crowd of dough- 
 boys making merry in the back-room; how he took their names and 
 then was inspired to look at their "dog tags" in confirmation and 
 found that not one of the names agreed! He tells me about the 
 cross old Frenchman whose beehives have been stealthily, inexpli- 
 cably, disappearing one by one, in spite of the fact that the French- 
 man had tied his unfortunate and much suffering dog underneath 
 the hives to guard them; until now the old gentleman had taken to 
 sitting up nights with a shot-gun in order to watch the remaining 
 ones. "He's a kind o' snoopy old man and nobody likes him. I 
 reckon the boys are taking his beehives just to spite him." He 
 tells me about the old lady who wants to marry him to her daughter; 
 but chiefly he tells me, — under the strictest oath of secrecy, — the 
 latest development in the case of the old woman whom he suspects 
 of being a spy. I advise him to hand the matter over to the In- 
 telligence Officer, but no, he must have the honor of catching her 
 red-handed himself. It's quite like reading a detective story in in- 
 stallments. 
 
 The other night while I was talking to one of the M. P.s in the 
 canteen, we heard a shot up the street. The next moment another 
 M. P. appeared at the door. After the exchange of a few whispered 
 words, the two of them ran out of the hut, and as they went, I saw 
 them both draw their revolvers. Fifteen minutes later the dough- 
 boys coming into the canteen brought a ghastly tale. There had 
 been a fight between the M. P.s and the soldiers. The M. P.s had 
 shot and killed two. "Yes, so-help-me-God, it's the truth!" The 
 narrator had himself seen the two slain doughboys lying in the 
 street; one had been shot through the head, the other through the 
 heart. So the story went around. We went to bed that night with 
 a dull sense of horror hanging over us. 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 69 
 
 The next morning I confronted my friend the M. P. with the 
 story. Then I learned the true version. He had been on his beat 
 not far from the church, when down a dark alley he had heard 
 sounds of a tremendous fracas. In spite of the fact that he didn't 
 have his stick with him he had plunged down the alley to come 
 upon "a bunch of wops beating each other over the head with 
 beer bottles.'' When they caught sight of the M. P. they had 
 quickly abandoned their family disagreement in order to turn upon 
 the intruder. He had shot his revolver into the air and this had 
 been enough to frighten them into taking to their heels. The two 
 fellows who had been seen lying on the ground were the casualties 
 resulting from the bottle-fight: they had been stunned and gashed 
 so badly as to bleed a good deal, but were later patched up with 
 complete success at the hospital. 
 
 Indeed life at Goncourt is seldom unrelieved by incident. Last 
 night I was sitting by our open window reading — the Gendarme 
 was out — after my return from the hut, when I heard an angry 
 voice snarl something abusive directly beneath me; a moment later 
 a fusillade began. I jumped for the candle, blew it out, then stood 
 close against the wall. After a minute the shots ceased; immedi- 
 ately excited people began to pour into the street. I heard the 
 M. P.s pounding on the door of the House Across the Way, de- 
 manding information; I leaned from the window and told them 
 what I knew. All the French people in the neighborhood stood out 
 in the street and chattered excitedly for hours afterward it seemed. 
 This morning Madame told us what had happened. In the house 
 next door lives a tall and handsome girl. A sergeant suitor of hers, 
 crazy with jealousy and cognac, had shot wildly at a rival entering 
 her door, emptying his automatic, fortunately without effect. 
 
 Goncourt, February 16. 
 Twice a week each one of us goes to pay a visit at the local hos- 
 pital. This is a depressing place — two large dingy rooms in what 
 was once, to judge from the inscription over the door, some sort 
 of ecclesiastical school. We take the boys magazines and news- 
 
7 o G0NC0URT 
 
 papers, oranges and jam. This week I had a new idea. I would 
 read aloud to them. In the Bourmont warehouse I came across 
 a volume of W. W. Jacobs' short stories. Here was just the thing, 
 I thought, such simple slap-stick humour must appeal to the most 
 unsophisticated understanding. 
 
 I hurried to the hospital with my prize. The orderlies, not ex- 
 pecting a lady visitor, were in the midst of a Black Jack game. Red 
 and flustered, one lad tried to hide the little heaps of money on 
 the floor by standing on them; I pretended not to see. Yes, they 
 thought it would be all right if I should read to the patients. They 
 went ahead to the ward to announce me. All the cots were full, 
 making sixteen invalids in all. I selected a story — an old favorite, 
 I was sure it would prove irresistible — and started to read. The 
 story tells of an eccentric skipper with a fad for doctoring. One 
 by one, his crew, realizing his weakness, develop mysterious mala- 
 dies. They are excused from duty, put to bed, petted and cossetted. 
 Finally the mate becomes desperate. He guarantees that he will 
 cure them all; the skipper is sceptical but allows him a free hand. 
 The mate sets to work to compound some "medicine," a wonder- 
 ful and fearful brew made of ink, vinegar, kerosene and bilge- water. 
 After a few doses, presto! the crew is hale and hearty once again. 
 
 I read with all the animation I could muster, and to me the story 
 had never appeared funnier, but try my hardest, I couldn't seem 
 to "get it over." Not a chuckle, not a grin lightened my solemn 
 audience. They were utterly, blankly, unresponsive. I began 
 to wonder if it were possible that not one of them could understand 
 English. At last I ended. As I closed the book a whoop of de- 
 light went up from the orderlies; 
 
 "That's you all over, Johnny!" 
 
 "Gee, that guy must have wrote that story about you, Slim." 
 
 "Say, Miss, can't you let us have the recipe for that medicine? 
 We need it in our business." 
 
 The invalids grinned sulkily. In one awful moment I realized 
 what I had done. 
 
 "Of course," I stammered, "this wasn't meant to have any per- 
 
THE DOUGHBOY 71 
 
 sonal application!" But the mischief was already done. There 
 was nothing to do but to retire with dignity. 
 
 However, I couldn't bear to give up my scheme entirely. Today 
 I went again; this time having carefully selected my story. To 
 my astonishment the ward proved empty, all except for three boys 
 who were crouching on the floor shooting craps; I drew back. 
 
 "Perhaps they would rather not be disturbed." 
 
 "They ought to be in bed anyway," growled the orderly, and 
 chased the patients back to their cots. 
 
 I read to them ; there was no way out of it. They listened politely 
 to the end, but all the while I felt they were longing to resume their 
 interrupted game. Tonight I expressed my surprise over the de- 
 serted ward to Captain X. He roared at my innocence. 
 
 "You didn't expect to find any fellows in hospital today did you? 
 Why, this is Saturday, and there isn't any drill tomorrow!" 
 
 Goncourt, February 18. 
 
 Every day we must go to see how the new hut is progressing. 
 This involves wading through a wilderness of mud. I had thought 
 that Bourmont had taught me everything that one could learn 
 about French mud this side of the trenches, but Goncourt has 
 shown me that it has possibilities hitherto undreamed. 
 
 The new hut is on the far edge of the town, on the east bank of 
 the Meuse. Near it are grouped the barracks of the Milk Bat- 
 talion, so called not because, as I first supposed, it is composed of 
 heavy drinkers, but because it is comprised of Companies I, K, L, 
 and M. These barracks, which were bequeathed to us by the 
 French, are, the boys tell me, infested with vermin. In the mess- 
 hall of Company M we hold our weekly movie-shows and our 
 occasional concerts. 
 
 The hut, which is very large, and shipped here in sections, goes 
 up slowly. Army details are proverbial in their ability to consume 
 time. Then we are constantly being held back by shortage of 
 materials; lumber and nails and such things being desperately hard 
 to obtain in France at present. Not long ago the divisional Con- 
 
72 GONCOURT 
 
 struction Man, who is a young fellow with poor eyes and consider- 
 able initiative, was driven to the desperate resort of appropriating 
 French Army lumber. For a while all went well, then the thefts 
 grew too bold, and the Construction Man was summoned before 
 the French colonel in command. As the colonel knew English, 
 and so could not be put off by any " no compris" bluff, the Construc- 
 tion Man had a pretty bad quarter hour of it, but in the end was 
 let off with a warning. 
 
 The window frames of the hut are to be filled in with vitex, a 
 curious glass substitute, which looks like a thin celluloid glaze over 
 very fine meshed wire. It is only slightly transparent, rather fragile 
 and very costly but it does admit the light, in this respect being 
 far better than the oiled cloth in use in most barracks. When the 
 vitex is cut to fit the frames, many odd scraps are left over and these 
 I have been distributing among the boys so they can substitute 
 them for the old newspapers or sacking now in vogue for billet 
 windows. 
 
 If they only could hurry up that hut! 
 
 " You wait and see," say the boys; " just as soon as that hut is 
 finished we'll be moving. That's always the way with this regiment. 
 Sure as you five, when that hut's done, we'll be off for the front." 
 
 And it begins to look as if this might come true. 
 
 "Do you really think so?" I asked Mr K. today. 
 
 "There's no telling," he replied. "Perhaps. But anyway the 
 boys will know we did our best." 
 
 Meanwhile the state of the men is worse than ever. An order has 
 been issued in Goncourt that no soldier may enter a civilian house 
 without a special permit. The reason given is that certain of the 
 townspeople have been illegally selling the men strong drink. The 
 soldiers, however, declare bitterly that the real reason is that the 
 officers wish to have a clear field with the village damsels. 
 
 Goncourt, February 21. 
 We have had our first taste of the trenches; these are not real 
 trenches to be sure but simply practice trenches which lie on the 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 73 
 
 hilly uplands west of Goncourt. For two days we have been in a 
 tumult with a dress rehearsal of manceuvers at the front. The 
 whole brigade in battle array has passed under our window. 
 Colonels and soup-kitchens, mules and majors, supply trains, am- 
 bulances, machine-guns, everything. Yesterday as Company F 
 was starting on its hike to the trenches, word came that the mules 
 who pulled their field-kitchen were indisposed. Company F had 
 no mind to eat corn-willy and hard bread for dinner. They seized 
 the soup wagon and pulled it by hand, all the way up the hills. 
 Meeting their major on the way, they shouted in unison; "The 
 mules went on sick report and got marked quarters. We went 
 on sick report and they marked us duty." But they got their 
 dinner hot. 
 
 Tonight I heard the sad tale of Mr. B. the new secretary at 
 Saint Thiebault. Company A had marched off to spend the day in 
 the trenches. Mr. B. had an inspiration; he filled a large suit-case 
 full of chocolate and cigarettes: hailed a passing ambulance and 
 set out to carry first aid to Company A in its ordeal in the trenches. 
 Unluckily neither Mr. B. nor the driver knew just where the field 
 of operations lay. Two miles north of Goncourt Mr. B. got out 
 and started to " cut across lots." It was raining; he waded through 
 swamps, he scratched through thickets, he wallowed in ploughed 
 fields, with that suit case which must have weighed a good eighty 
 pounds growing heavier at every step. There being no sun to 
 guide him, he got lost and wandered about in circles. Finally, 
 after several hours, he arrived in a state of collapse at the field 
 of manceuveurs. Then instead of A Company he encountered an- 
 other company, a perfectly strange company; they demanded 
 chocolate and he didn't have the heart to deny them. After the 
 last cake of chocolate and the last package of cigarettes had dis- 
 appeared an officer came up, an officer from still another company, 
 and proceeded to tell Mr. B. in very plain language what he thought 
 of him for leaving his men out. And when that officer had done 
 with Mr. B. an officer from the company which had been fed came 
 up in an awful temper and "bawled out" Mr. B. because forsooth 
 
74 GONCOURT 
 
 his men had made such a mess, throwing away the chocolate wrap- 
 pers that when the others left, his company would have to stay 
 behind to " police up" the trenches! 
 
 Poor Mr. B ! My heart goes out to him. 
 
 This evening as we were about to close the canteen, my friend, 
 the mule-skinner from Texas appeared in the hut. He had a sort 
 of a weak-in-the-knees expression on his face. 
 
 "What's the matter?" 
 
 "Met the Old Man," he answered ruefully,— the ' 'Old Man" 
 is the general in command of the division — "Gee! but he sure did 
 give me some bawlin' out!" 
 
 "But why?" 
 
 He explained that his sergeant had misunderstood orders and 
 told him to go out in his usual rig. The general, encountering the 
 mule-skinner without his proper war-paint, had expressed his mind 
 to him on the matter. 
 
 "Jumpin' Jupiter! but the langwidge that that old bird used! 
 I sure will hand it to him! Why, my ears ain't done burnin' yet!" 
 And he shook his head like a man half dazed. 
 
 "What did he say?" 
 
 The mule-skinner grew red as a beet, stared at me horrified. 
 
 "I couldn't repeat it, ma'am! I couldn't repeat nary word of it!" 
 
 That a general should so scandalize a mule-skinner, and a Texas 
 mule-skinner at that, by his address, was so intriguing to my fancy 
 that I laughed all the way home. 
 
 We have a new colonel; he has declared that the regiment is 
 not fit for the front, and so has laid out a two weeks' programme 
 of gruelling hikes and intensive training, in order at the eleventh 
 hour to try to jack us up to standard. 
 
 The Gendarme leaves tomorrow to go en permission. 
 
 Goncourt, February 25. 
 If I were God I would lay a blight on every grape-vine in France; 
 then I would sink every still, wine press, distillery and brewery to 
 the bottom of the sea. 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 75 
 
 We have had pay-day. It happened Friday. The total results 
 didn't make themselves evident immediately; it was instead a 
 cumulative effect, a crescendo, beginning Friday and reaching its 
 climax yesterday. On these three days, out of the twenty-five 
 hundred men stationed here, twenty-four hundred and ninety-three, 
 I could take my oath, have come into the canteen and leaned over 
 the counter, drunk; — that is to say, visibly and undeniably under 
 the influence of liquor. When a lad, as some half dozen did, — 
 those composing the regular attendance in the group about the 
 fire, — came into the canteen entirely and unmistakably sober, one 
 welcomed him as a drowning man does a spar. For a moment one 
 had come in touch with something stable in a reeling world. 
 
 Out of a company of two hundred and fifty last night ninety were 
 capable of standing Retreat. 
 
 I have learned to gauge the stages. When a man looks you 
 squarely in the eye and declares vociferously, "Never took a drink 
 in all my life! " he is very drunk indeed. And there is always some- 
 one nearby to wink and comment; "He must have joined the gang 
 that pours it down with a funnel. " 
 
 Saturday night a very red-faced lad came up to the counter 
 and insisted on conversing; from each pocket in his rain-coat pro- 
 truded a long-necked bottle. I stood it for a few minutes, then: 
 
 "Please/ I said, "won't you take those bottles out of here? 
 I just hate to see them." 
 
 "Bottles!" he expostulated. " What do you mean, bottles!" 
 
 "I mean just those." I pointed. 
 
 "Why I ain't got a bottle on me!" he burst out indignantly, 
 fairly glaring at me. Seeing it was hopeless, I edged away toward 
 the other end of the counter, leaving him standing there, a perfect 
 picture of outraged and insulted virtue, with those bottles bristling 
 all over him. 
 
 The whole town is pervaded by a warm glow of geniality. Boys 
 that used to nod shyly in answer to your " Good morning" now lean 
 from their loft windows as you pass to call a greeting. Last night, 
 my friend the M. P. tells me, he heard a racket in one of the sheep- 
 
76 GONCOURT 
 
 folds up on our street. Going to investigate he met a "bunch o* 
 drunken wops" coming out of the door, every man of them carry- 
 ing a struggling sheep under each arm. He shouted at them; they 
 dropped the sheep and fled. 
 
 The French find it all vastly amusing. "Beauoup zig zag" they 
 cry. It means, I suppose, riches for them. 
 
 And yet in all this orgy I have not yet encountered a single word 
 of disrespect, nor heard one objectionable expression uttered. Last 
 night I caught an angry splutter from the crowd in front of the 
 counter. One boy, evidently a shade less tipsy, had admonished 
 another boy apparently a shade more so, to be careful of his lan- 
 guage out of respect for me. "Whu'd 'y° u think? D'you think 
 I ain't got sense enough to know how to talk when there's an Ameri- 
 can lady present? " For a moment it looked as if there might be a 
 fight. 
 
 Meanwhile the guard-house, the real guard-house, is so crowded 
 that they have had to put duck-boards across the rafters for the 
 prisoners to sleep on. 
 
 From a nearby town where part of another regiment is stationed 
 come even more startling stories. Certain officers there went so 
 wild that they started to blow up the town with hand grenades. 
 And one of them coming into the Y. held up the secretary at the 
 point of his pistol until he sold him — instead of the ordinary 
 allowance of one or two packages — several cartons of his favorite 
 brand of cigarettes. 
 
 The new colonel is said to be horrified. But what could he ex- 
 pect? Take an odd lot of twenty-five hundred boys, remove them 
 from every decent restraining influence, hike them all day through 
 the interminable mud and rain until they drop by the roadside, 
 bring them back at night to dark, cold, damp, filthy, vermin-ridden 
 lofts and stables, add the nerve strain of the imminent prospect 
 of their first time at the front, close every door to them except the 
 door of the cafe, give them money; — what could anyone expect? 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 77 
 
 Goncourt, February 27. 
 
 My friend Pat is in the hospital; not the local hospital, but 
 Base 18 situated at Bazoilles, some six miles to the north of Gon- 
 court. This afternoon, having our time free between one and 
 four, Mr. K and I decided to go to call on him. 
 
 "Are we going to walk?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh we'll get a lift; one always does.' , 
 
 But the lift didn't heave in sight until we were half way there; 
 then it was an ambulance that slowed down in answer to our 
 signals. 
 
 "Give us a ride?" 
 
 "Sure, if you aren't afraid of the mumps." 
 
 I was, dreadfully afraid. But Mr. K. wasn't, he had already 
 had them, on both sides. I hesitated, then decided to take a 
 chance. We rode into Bazoilles in an ambulance full of mumps. 
 
 As for Pat, we hadn't an idea in what sort of shape we might 
 find him. Once, Mr. K. told me, he had come upon Pat in one 
 of his visits to the Saint Thiebault infirmary. Pat was lying on 
 a cot with his eyes closed and a sanctified look of patient suffering 
 upon his face. 
 
 "Why what's wrong with you, Pat?" 
 
 "Ssh!" Pat squinted about to see that neither doctor nor orderly 
 was within ear-shot, then an Irish grin spread over his impudent 
 features. "Nothin' at all," he whispered joyously, "just no thin* 
 at all!" 
 
 But this time we found Pat's ailment real enough. He was 
 in the "bone ward" with a badly broken wrist. 
 
 "How did it happen?" we inquired. 
 
 "Sure an' it happened this way," and he told us both the offi- 
 cial and the confidential versions. Confidentially, Pat's wrist 
 had been broken by a blow from an M. P.'s billy in an after-pay- 
 day argument at Saint Thiebault. Officially it had been broken 
 two days later in the barracks by an accidental knock from a 
 gun-barrel. Pat had hiked and drilled with a broken wrist for two 
 solid days in order to be able to claim that he had been disabled in 
 
78 GONCOURT 
 
 the line of duty\ After the second day, convinced that the en- 
 counter with the M. P. was sufficiently a matter of past history 
 to be discredited, Pat had reported at Sick Call with his trumped- 
 up tale and had as usual gotten by. Now as he lay on his cot he 
 was occupying himself by conjuring up visions of the party to 
 which he and his buddy were going to treat that M. P. just as 
 soon as he (Pat) should get his hospital discharge. 
 
 As we talked I noticed a lad who was walking about the ward 
 with his right hand done up in bloody bandages. He looked 
 self-conscious and embarrassed as if he half hoped, half feared 
 to be recognized. I caught Pat's eye, his voice dropped to a 
 whisper. 
 
 " That's Philip R. Don't you remember him?" 
 
 Of course! I smiled at Philip, but he turned away and wouldn't 
 come to speak to me. Mr. K. went over to him; they talked for 
 a long while in undertones. Later I heard the whole pitiful story. 
 He had been drinking, the terror that was haunting him had 
 suddenly gripped. He had taken his rifle and shot himself through 
 his right hand, mutilating it, in order that he might not be sent 
 to the front. Placed under arrest on suspicion, his nerve had 
 utterly given way. He had made a full confession. It was likely 
 to go hard with him. 
 
 While Mr. K. was listening to Philip, Pat was telling me about 
 the regiment of southern negro engineers who had come to Baz- 
 oilles to help build the new hospital. Every time there was an 
 air-raid alarm, Pat declared, they knelt down and prayed by 
 companies. 
 
 I emptied out my musette bag onto Pat's cot. Pat looked at 
 the oranges, dates, chocolates and cigarettes that we had brought, 
 then took a squint along the hungry-looking ward. 
 
 " Well, I guess I'll get a taste," he said. 
 
 He was "in soft" he told us. The nurses let him help serve the 
 meals. He had free run of the kitchen and all the milk that he 
 wanted to drink. Yet he was already chafing at the restraint 
 and in his wicked head he was scheming schemes. Some day in 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 79 
 
 the not-too-distant future he was going to give the hospital guards 
 the slip, make a night of it, and paint "Bazooie" red. 
 
 Tonight word reached us that a Y. M. C. A. woman worker 
 has been killed in Paris in an air-raid. She was sick and they had 
 sent her to the Hopital Claude-Bernard. This time the bombs 
 found it. 
 
 Goncourt, March 2. 
 
 The new hut is opened. Finished or unfinished, we made up 
 our minds that we would open that hut Saturday night, and open 
 it we did. The last two days have been fairly frantic. Yesterday 
 we washed up; today we dried out and decorated. The cleaning 
 was the worst of it. The hut, as I have hinted, is a sort of island 
 in a sea of mud. Consequently as the building went up, the floor, 
 walls, counter, ceiling, everything was splotched, streaked and 
 plastered with dirt. Thursday night as I looked around the hut 
 my heart sank. The place was a sight. 
 
 "You can't do anything about it," they told me. 
 
 "But something has got to be done!" 
 
 Friday morning arrived a detail of eight prisoners from the 
 guard-house. They had come to scrub. The guard in charge 
 took his stand, leaning against one of the pillars, his loaded rifle 
 in his hands; to see that no one escaped was his only responsibility, 
 the rest was up to me. My detail proved a sullen, stubborn lot, 
 slouching, cursing under their breath, all their self-respect turned 
 to a smouldering rebellion; after the first few minutes I saw just 
 how much work left to themselves they would be likely to ac- 
 complish. So I told them in a matter-of-fact way just how things 
 stood: that we had promised to open the hut the next day, that it 
 was, as they could see, in a frightful mess, that I realized they 
 were up against a stiff job, but I did so hope that we could put 
 it through. Then I got a pail and a scrubbing-brush and went 
 out and scrubbed side by side with them. It is of course strictly 
 against the rules to talk to prisoners, but all the while I worked 
 I "jollied" my "jail-birds" for all my wits were worth. I ad- 
 
8o GONCOURT 
 
 mired ecstatically the spots which they had scrubbed, I moaned 
 in despair over the unscrubbed places. Inside of an hour the 
 prisoners were all grinning cheerfully as they worked like beavers. 
 When the guard was looking the other way I sneaked them cigar- 
 ettes. By night the hut was very damp and somewhat streaky, 
 but it would pass, at least by candle-light. I didn't care though 
 my arms were so lame I could hardly lift them, and my hands 
 in ruins. 
 
 "I congratulate you," said the new Secretary, "I never thought 
 it could be done." 
 
 "If only nobody looks at the ceiling! " 
 
 For the ceiling was beyond our reach, and back and forth over 
 every one of its boards had tramped the hob-nailed boots of the 
 A. E. F. and every step had left its muddy print. As I looked 
 I thought; if we only had the signatures to put beside each foot- 
 print, what a fascinating autograph collection it would make! 
 
 Today we spent in a mad tear, making the hut beautiful and 
 moving our effects over from the " Guard-House." The moving 
 was accomplished by the aid of the Wall- Eyed Boy and his donkey. 
 These are two of Goncourt's leading citizens, the donkey, an 
 ancient moth-eaten beast, being particularly intimately known 
 to a certain group of doughboys who would joyfully murder 
 him. His stable is directly beneath the loft in which they are 
 billeted and every morning, prompt as an alarm clock, at 4 A. M. 
 that donkey brays, and brays until the soundest sleeper is awak- 
 ened. The Wall-Eyed Boy's name is Martin, and as a donkey 
 in France is slangily called un Martin, as we call a mule "Maud," 
 the two go under the title of Les Deux Martins. When les Deux 
 Martins and I went trudging along the muddy streets of Goncourt, 
 side by side, with the little tippy cart loaded with canteen truck 
 bumping along behind, the M. P.s thought it a rare joke. "I 
 wish Sister Susy could see you now," called one. 
 
 The last few hours were spent frantically decorating. Our color 
 scheme is red and blue. This came about through accident rather 
 than intention. We had a bolt of turkey-red cotton bunting for 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 81 
 
 curtains, only to discover that this did not darken the lighted 
 windows sufficiently to comply with the now strictly enforced 
 aeroplane regulations. So I asked a secretary starting for Paris 
 to bring me a bolt of black cambric in order to make a set of inner 
 supplementary curtains. The secretary returning, brought bright 
 blue; black, on account of the demand for mourning, had proved 
 too expensive. At first I was non-plussed, but then discovered that 
 the bright red and blue made rather a jolly combination. So each 
 one of our many windows is now giddy with red and blue draperies 
 and the seat that runs all around our writing room is brave with 
 blue and red cushions (stuffed, if the truth must be told, with 
 shavings!) Between each two windows is tacked one of my stun- 
 ning big French war posters, the long counter is covered with red- 
 checked oil-cloth, a bouquet of flags flies from the proscenium arch 
 over the stage which, for the occasion, is banked beautifully with 
 evergreens. Altogether we present rather the appearance of a 
 perpetual Fourth of July celebration, but then who cares? If one 
 can't be aesthetic one can atleast be gay, and it's anything to take 
 one's mind off the mud! 
 
 The Gendarme came back from her leave tonight just in time 
 for the Grand Opening. This took place at seven o'clock. The 
 hall was packed to the last inch. As one boy said; " There's plenty 
 of room for me, but there ain't none for the buttons on my coat." 
 There was a reason for this. The new colonel was to make a speech 
 and he had advised all the officers and non-coms, in the whole 
 regiment to be present. I caught a glimpse of Company A wedged 
 in among the suffocating mass. Everything, I understand, went 
 off very nicely; there was much music by the band and somebody 
 sang Danny Deever very thrillingly, but I was too busy in the 
 kitchen to pay much attention. The new Secretary had wanted me 
 to sit on the platform, but after a three days' debate, he had finally 
 agreed to let me off, and luckily, for the minute the last note of the 
 S. S. B. had sounded we were ready to start handing out the hot 
 chocolate and cookies over the counter to the mob. When every- 
 one else had been fed the colonel himself appeared back of the 
 
82 GONCOURT 
 
 counter, to graciously accept a cup of chocolate, and make himself 
 generally charming. 
 
 When the last guest had gone and we were getting ready to 
 shut up the hut for the night, the Chief who had come over from 
 Bourmont for the occasion drew me aside, looking solemn. 
 
 "I have a question to put to you." 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 "The division leaves for the front within a short while. Do 
 you wish to go with them?" 
 
 "Of course! "said I. 
 
 Goncourt, March 8. 
 
 This week has gone by in a whirl. Because it was our first and 
 presumably our last week in the big hut we wanted to make it just 
 as nice as was humanly possible. And this hasn't been an easy task 
 because with the regiment putting on the last touches before they go 
 to the front, there hasn't been a bit of spare man-power available 
 to help us; and the mere problem of keeping that huge place any- 
 thing like clean has almost swamped us. After mess at night, to 
 be sure, we have no lack of assistance. The boys swarm into the 
 little kitchen in droves, eager to help stir the chocolate, or cut the 
 bread for the sandwiches. If only ten out of every dozen would 
 be content to stay the other side of the counter, it would simplify 
 matters, but much as they may be underfoot one hasn't the heart 
 to turn them out. Those who can't get into the kitchen hang 
 about the doors, looking in, teasing for a "hand-out" of bread and 
 jam. "I'm just so hungry," sighed a lad plaintively today, looking 
 at me out of the corner of his eyes, "I could eat the jamb off the 
 door!" 
 
 We have a Frenchwoman to help us in the kitchen. She is a 
 treasure, shy and bright-eyed as a brown bird, and so tiny that we 
 have to set a packing-box by the stove for her to stand on when 
 she stirs the chocolate. She is deaf and speaks patois, so between 
 her strange French and mine still stranger we have droll times 
 making each other understand. Yet, none the less, she and the 
 boys manage to keep up a running fire of badinage and when they 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 83 
 
 become too rowdy, the tiny thing turns ridiculously bellicose and 
 threatens to whip them all with her chocolate paddle. At night 
 we all go home together and one tall lad must always come along 
 in order to help Madame over the road of a thousand mud holes 
 that leads from the hut to the highway, lest she be drowned in 
 transit. She carries a funny little gasolene lamp that gives about 
 as much light as an ambitious fire-fly and all the way to the main 
 road one can hear her moaning; "Mon Dieu } quel chemin! Mon 
 Dieu, quel cheminl" 
 This has been our week's programme: 
 
 Sunday. 
 
 Hot chocolate and cookies 
 
 
 Religious Service with special music 
 
 
 Song Service. More chocolate 
 
 Monday. 
 
 French Classes 
 
 
 Hot chocolate and jam sandwiches 
 
 Tuesday. 
 
 Boxing and Wrestling Matches 
 
 
 Hot chocolate and sardine sandwiches 
 
 Wednesday. 
 
 Band Concert 
 
 
 Hot chocolate and jam sandwiches 
 
 Thursday. 
 
 Movies 
 
 
 Hot chocolate and cookies 
 
 Friday. 
 
 Sing Fest with Solos 
 
 
 Hot chocolate and jam sandwiches 
 
 Saturday. 
 
 Stunt Programme 
 
 
 Canned fruit and cookies 
 
 The hut has been filled every night, hundreds and hundreds of 
 soldiers, the auditorium packed and the writing-room holding at 
 least a hundred more, while the chocolate line, coiling and curling 
 about like a monster snake, has for hours seemed absolutely end- 
 less. We have worked out a system for the chocolate serving — 
 the Gendarme is cashier, taking the money and making change, 
 fifty centimes or nine cents for a cup of chocolate and a sandwich, 
 or six spice cookies, or four fig ones. One boy ladles out the choco- 
 late. I push the cups over the counter, another boy hands out 
 
84 GONCOURT 
 
 the cookies, a third gathers up the dirty cups and carries them to 
 the kitchen, where three or four others are busy washing and wiping 
 them, while Heaven only knows how many more are around the 
 stove, helping Madame stir the next kettleful, opening milk cans, 
 or dipping water into a third container. Thus we keep the line 
 merrily wagging along. 
 
 Last night, quite unknown to the men, Pershing himself came to 
 town, whirled in after dark in his big limousine and whirled away 
 again as suddenly and secretly as he had arrived. He came to 
 give the officers final instructions as to their conduct at the front. 
 
 The first faint wistful scents of Spring are in the air. This morn- 
 ing Madame brought to our room a tiny bouquet of snow-drops. 
 And one hears from Saint Thiebault a rumour of early violets. 
 
 Goncourt, March io. 
 This morning shortly after I reached the hut, one of the men 
 from the Bourmont office came in with a note for me, it read: 
 
 My dear Miss 
 
 I am glad to be able to tell you more or less con- 
 fidentially that you will probably go to the front very shortly. 
 You had better have everything ready so you could leave on short 
 notice any time after tomorrow noon. 
 
 Very sincerely yours, 
 
 Enclosed in the envelope was a little slip headed Suggestions for 
 Men going to the Front. It began "Go light, take no trunk," and 
 ended " We provide helmets, gas masks, etc." The note was dated 
 yesterday. 
 
 I left the canteen and hurried back here to my billet to pack, 
 while the Gendarme, who does not wish to go with the division but 
 prefers to stay back and be reassigned, remained at the hut. What 
 with sorting and mending things, the packing took all afternoon. 
 What to leave behind in storage and what to take is no end of a 
 question. Unfortunately the Suggestions were compiled with a 
 view strictly to masculine necessities. 
 
THE DOUGHBOYS 85 
 
 It has been a grey dismal afternoon. A melancholy donkey in 
 somebody's back-yard has kept up an incessant braying. " He does 
 not please himself at Goncourt," explained Madame. "He is a 
 Saint Thiebault donkey. 3 ' Meanwhile half the regiment, it seems, 
 has strayed by under my open window. I never knew before how 
 consistently and persistently profane the A. E. F. could be when 
 left to its own devices. The amazing part of it is; — since this seems 
 to be their natural style of expression, how do they manage to 
 slough it all and talk with such perfect prunes and prisms propriety 
 in the canteens? 
 
 At supper time we were surprised by a Concert Party which had 
 arrived today unexpectedly in this area. We were particularly 
 glad to have them as the nervous tension among the boys is marked 
 enough to make us welcome anything to divert their attention. 
 We could have the regular Sunday evening service first, we decided, 
 and then the concert to finish off with. The Concert Party came to 
 supper at our mess. There was an ornamental Russian violinist, 
 male, an American accompanist, also male, and a little French 
 actress-singer. The minute we laid eyes on her we knew that the 
 concert would be a success. She was all frills and frippery; lace, 
 pink-rose buds and pale blue silk, with yellow curls and great blue 
 eyes peering from beneath a quaint little rose-wreathed poke bon- 
 net; an amazing vision of femininity to appear suddenly in the mud 
 and dingy squalor of Goncourt! 
 
 The family Peirut was in a great state of mind over such dis- 
 tinguished visitors. They brought out food enough to feed the 
 company a week, and kept hovering about the table, urging the 
 dishes on our guests and emitting little wails of dismay when 
 any one of the artists refused to eat enough for all three. 
 
 I stayed at our billet to finish up my packing, and went over 
 to the hut late in the evening. The concert was half finished. 
 As we anticipated, the little singer had made a hit. She gave 
 some French songs, accompanying them with clever pantomine. 
 Then she sang Huckleberry Finn and Oh Johnny! As the phrase 
 has it, she "got them going." She proved a past-mistress in the 
 
86 GONCOURT 
 
 art of using her eyes. They winked at her and she winked back. 
 Every last man in the first six rows was flirting with her, and 
 every one was convinced that he was making a hit all his own. 
 Several, it was confided to me afterwards, developed matrimonial 
 aspirations on the spot. Then a tragic thing occurred. For the 
 closing number they must give the Star Spangled Banner. Every- 
 body rose, and everybody in duty bound removed their hats. The 
 little singer took one wild survey of the audience, gasped, choked, 
 then retreated precipitately in order to conceal her giggles. A 
 week ago an order was published that the regiment should have 
 their hair shaved off before going to the front; — every head in the 
 whole auditorium, thus suddenly laid bare, was bald as an egg! 
 From latest advices it appears that the troops will start entrain- 
 ing the middle of the week. We are going on ahead in order to 
 be there to serve them hot chocolate when they detrain after the 
 journey. Every one has a different idea where that will be, but 
 the best guess seems to be the Luneville sector. What sort of 
 conditions we will find at the front I haven't the least idea. I 
 missed the special conference held at Bourmont the other day, 
 in which instructions and information to the personnel bound 
 for the front were given. The driver who was to call for us, failed 
 to do so; I set out to walk, only to find on arriving at Bourmont 
 that the conference had been cut short, and was already over. 
 Nobody has told me a word except to tease me by telling me that 
 I will have to have my hair cut off in order to wear a gas-mask. 
 Mr. K. amuses himself by predicting cellars and cooties. The 
 Peiruts shake their heads and talk about my courage, but I can 
 see that they mean folly. As for the Gendarme's friends, Lieut- 
 enant Z. warns: "Take my advice, stay out of it. It's a man's 
 game out there.' , While Captain X. splutters; "Sending you 
 to the front without any gas-drill, it's nothing short of cold-blooded 
 murder." Thus do our friends encourage us. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 RATTENTOUT 
 THE FRONT 
 
 Bar-le-Duc, March 12. 
 
 It's not to be the Luneville sector after all, it's to be the sector 
 just south of Verdun! 
 
 We arrived here at Bar-le-Duc last night after a six-hour trip 
 by motor car. Mr. K. came by motor-cycle; most of the other 
 men travelled by truck, sitting perched on top of a load of luggage, 
 canvas cots, and chocolate boilers. The truck broke down some- 
 where en route and never reached Bar-le-Duc until this morning, 
 when it rolled in carrying a rather weary-looking lot of passengers. 
 
 Tomorrow we go on to our station behind the lines. Today 
 we have spent shopping for supplies. We have bought writing 
 paper; materials to make hot chocolate, paying two francs and a 
 half apiece or almost fifty cents for a small-sized can of condensed 
 milk; and dozens of gross of little jars of confiture. Ever since 
 I was a child Bar-le-Duc has meant just the one thing to me, — 
 those little glasses of delectable currant preserve which bear its 
 label. We went around to the wholesale houses which handle 
 the famous Confitures Fins de Bar-le-Duc. The sight of all those 
 gleaming rows of glass jars filled with deep crimson or amber- 
 colored currants was one that I shan't easily forget. 
 
 Bar-le-Duc is a city which shows the wounds of war. Time 
 and again, unfortified, defenceless as she is, she has known the 
 terror that flieth by night. Last summer several blocks in the very 
 heart of the city were completely demolished by bombs and the 
 wilderness of ruins lies there untouched. All over the city great 
 black signs are painted on the houses; Cave, Cave voutee, — vaulted 
 
88 RATTENTOUT 
 
 cellar, — Place Pour 40 Personnes. At the end of the afternoon 
 we climbed, Mr. K and I, to the top of the ancient clock-tower 
 which stands on the edge of the fortress-citadel of the Dukes of 
 Bar, overlooking the city. Just above the clock we came upon a 
 tiny platform transformed for the time being into light-house- 
 keeping apartments for two poilus who night and day keep watch 
 there for enemy aircraft. As we stood on the little balcony out- 
 side and looked down on the house-tops of the city spread be- 
 neath us, with the little children playing in the streets, a telephone 
 bell in the tower tingled. A moment later one of the poilus an- 
 nounced; "A squadrille of Gothas has just crossed the lines, 
 headed for Paris." 
 
 Alas, poor Paris! Yet the news brought a feeling of relief with 
 it. The little children of Bar-le-Duc are safe for the night, it 
 seems. The avions are out after bigger game. 
 
 Rattentout, March 14. 
 
 Out from Bar-le-Duc one swings into a separate world, the 
 World-Behind-the-Lines. Here one is at the back door of the 
 war, as it were. Passing through the half-abandoned villages 
 one sees war in its deshabille; you get no sense of the thrill of it, 
 nor even of its horrors; only the weary disgust, the stultifying 
 stupidity, the unutterable ennui. 
 
 Here everything that moves or lives, it seems, is blue; faded 
 blue, dingy blue, purplish or greenish blue perhaps, but blue 
 nevertheless. Everywhere the color insists. It streaks along 
 the roads in long, broken lines, the meagre trodden villages are 
 blotched and patched with it. Indeed the whole horizon, at this 
 season of the year, might be expressed in just two tones; the 
 almost uniform grey-yellow tint that washes over the fields, the 
 rolling hills, the dusty roads, the squalid villages, and the ever- 
 insistent poilu-blue. 
 
 You pass by tilled fields labeled Culture Militaire; great grey- 
 green aerodromes with flocks of little planes resting in rows beside 
 them, in their gay paint resembling nothing in the world so much 
 
THE FRONT 89 
 
 as dicky birds fresh from the toy shop; and always dotted here 
 and there over the open fields, the little lonely graves, sometimes 
 hedged in by fences made of sticks and always marked by a grey 
 wooden cross on which hangs, in painted tin, the tricolor. Farther 
 on you come to the world where men live underground, burrowing 
 in the earth like hunted animals. Scattered along the road-side, 
 or in rows under the shelter of a hill-slope, everywhere you look, 
 are dugouts, some with the entrances covered with pine-boughs, 
 others thatched with sticks, still others hidden beneath earth- 
 colored camouflages. 
 
 We arrived here last night about dusk. The poilus as we passed 
 stared at us as if we were so many lunatics. Rattentout is on the 
 right bank of the Meuse, about six miles from the trenches. This 
 means for one thing that you must carry a gas-mask with you 
 wherever you go. One even sees the little children, what few of 
 them are left, trudging about with small-sized masks slung over 
 their shoulders. The Y. here is short of masks and as yet M. — 
 the only canteen worker besides myself to come with the advance 
 guard — and I have none. This morning when the Chief went out 
 he hung his mask on a peg in the hall. "If anything happens," 
 he said to M. and me, "you two can settle it between you, which 
 shall have it." 
 
 Our home here is in a lordly mansion, evidently the Big House 
 of the village. French officers were living here before we came. 
 The regiment to which they belonged moving out just as we 
 arrived, they graciously made over the house to us. The officers 
 had started a vegetable garden in the back-yard and this they 
 relinquished with deep regret, one young lieutenant fairly having 
 tears in his eyes as he took a last survey of his rows of tiny lettuce 
 and young cabbages. 
 
 Today is to be given over to house-cleaning, and getting settled. 
 Tomorrow the troops are due to begin detraining at the two points 
 Landrecourt and Dugny and we are to be there to serve them 
 hot chocolate. 
 
 Last night we took our supper at the dingy little house next 
 
go RATTENTOUT 
 
 door, a surprisingly delicious meal, bread and butter, omelette, 
 salad and cocoa. The house next door is one of the half-dozen or 
 so in town still inhabited by civilians. The family consists of 
 grandmother, mother and little girl of five; the husband is in 
 the trenches. The child Pauline is half sick with a feverish cold. 
 They could get no medicine, the mother fretted; we promised some 
 from Bar-le-Duc. The house itself is painfully unkempt and dirty, 
 yet Pauline is always fresh in a spotless white pinafore, her glossy 
 hair immaculately brushed. This morning we went to the house 
 next door again for bread and coffee. 
 
 "Did you sleep last night?" asked Madame. 
 
 " But yes, — and you? " 
 
 She shook her head. "I was afraid of the Boche aeroplanes. I 
 could hear them overhead.' ' 
 
 "But I should think you would be used to them by now." 
 
 "Ah! But that makes no difference!" 
 
 What consideration keeps her here, clinging to the very door- 
 step of the war, as it were, hounded as she is, by terrors? Just 
 the one reason, I suppose, — that she has nowhere else to go. 
 
 Rattentout, March 15. 
 
 Lafayette, nous voild! The first battalions of the division have 
 arrived. 
 
 The car called for us early this morning to take us to Dugny- 
 Est where half the men are to detrain. We followed along the east 
 bank of the Meuse running parallel to the Canal de UEst. The 
 canal was a dismal sight, filled with an endless fine of empty aban- 
 doned barges, many of them settling slowly down as if water-logged, 
 a few, already sunk, leaving nothing but a bit of prow protruding 
 above the water's surface. We ran along the bank for about three 
 miles, then swung across the Meuse to Dugny. Dugny-Est is a 
 half mile north of Dugny proper, — the terminus of a strip of rail- 
 way taken over and run by American engineers. Viewed from the 
 detraining tracks the landscape was bleak enough; the morasses 
 of the Meuse, strung with barbed-wire beyond, an austere deserted- 
 
THE FRONT 91 
 
 looking church in the foreground, and, dreariest of all, right under 
 the boys' feet as they detrained, almost, a large military grave-yard. 
 
 Arriving at the little stone station-house made over to us for 
 the occasion, we found the chocolate already made. Four of the Y. 
 men had spent the night there and by dint of stoking the fires all 
 night long, as they declared, they had gotten the five huge con- 
 tainers hot. The equipment assembled in haste at Bar-le-Duc was 
 evidently proving none too satisfactory. 
 
 I had just time to suspend a small American flag from the front 
 of the station-house before the first train puffed up the track. 
 Nothing I think has ever looked quite so good to me as that old 
 American locomotive. It was the first one I had seen in France. 
 I wanted to throw my arms around it and hug it. As one of the 
 boys said afterwards: "Why, you'd be happy just to lie down on 
 the track and let the darned thing run over you." 
 
 I stood under the flag and waved frantically, first to the Ameri- 
 can train crew and then, oh joy! to my Company A! There they 
 all were, crowded in the open doors of their box cars, " Side-door 
 Pullmans" as they call them, Magulligan the prize fighter, comi- 
 cally conspicuous with his head done up in a sort of night-cap made 
 from a large white handkerchief. The train pulled by, slowed 
 down, came to a standstill up the track. We hustled the chocolate 
 cans out by the road-side. Company A, the first off the train, 
 came marching down the road; each man held out his mess-cup 
 and got a dipperf ul of cocoa. 
 
 "Where are we?" they demanded. 
 
 "Four miles south of Verdun. How do you like the scenery?" 
 
 "All right except the grave-yard. That's too handy." 
 
 " Say " spoke up one of the boys, "I heard the mud out here in 
 the trenches was pretty deep." 
 
 "Is that so?" 
 
 "Yes they said a feller went in over his ankles there the other 
 day." 
 
 "I wouldn't call that very deep!" I bit. 
 
 "Mm, but he went in head-first!" 
 
92 RATTENTOUT 
 
 I asked one of the corporals how things were going. 
 
 "We were feelin' kind o' lost," he confessed. "Then we looked 
 out and saw the old flag and you. After that it seemed just like 
 home somehow.' ' 
 
 They marched off down the road looking very business-like and 
 military. Next came the other companies belonging to the first 
 battalion, and the regimental machine-gun company. These were 
 not permitted to stop by the station-house on account of the danger 
 of being observed by enemy aircraft, but were halted at a distance 
 down the road. We picked up the chocolate cans and chased after 
 them. 
 
 When every man in the First Battalion had had a drink, we 
 hurried back to the stone-house to get ready for the next train- 
 load. As I stirred the chocolate on one of the little stoves set up 
 outside, several of the train crew came to talk to me. I was the 
 first "real honest- to-God American girl" they had seen in months 
 they told me; and they were just as excited over me as I had been 
 over their engine. 
 
 If the history of America in the Great War should ever be written 
 down in detail, surely one chapter should be given over to a Little 
 Iliad of the "Six Bit Railway" that runs from Sommeil to Dugny- 
 Est, five kilometers south of Verdun; how, as I had it from the 
 lips of one of those engineers, the English took it over from the 
 French and tried to run it and failed, how the Canadians took it 
 
 after them and failed too, how then the Engineers fell heir to 
 
 it. How they lived with the French, eating French rations which 
 were gall and wormwood to them. How they struggled with an alien 
 tongue and finally reduced it to a wierd unholy gibberish which 
 was yet somehow intelligible both to the French and to themselves. 
 How they came through shell-fire and gas and bombing raids, 
 seemingly bearing charmed lives. And how they worked forty-eight 
 hours at a stretch whenever the big drives and shifts were on. 
 
 Tonight one of the secretaries told us that, as he was standing 
 by the road-side watching while we ladled out the chocolate, one 
 of the boys said to him: 
 
THE FRONT 93 
 
 "I'm thinking of a toast." 
 
 "And what might that be?" 
 
 "God bless American women," the boy answered him. 
 
 Rattentout, March 16. 
 
 When we reached the station-house this morning we found every- 
 one agog over the night's events. The detraining had gone on all 
 night; at first without incident. All precautions had been taken, 
 no one was allowed to so much as light a match. About midnight 
 one of the marine soup-kitchens had been unloaded and rolled down 
 the road puffing sparks and scattering coals. Some enterprising 
 mess sergeant had evidently planned that his men should have a 
 hot meal. The French spectators in consternation had followed 
 the soup-kitchen down the road, extinguishing the trailing embers, 
 but the mischief was already done. There were German planes 
 scouting overhead, they noted, evidently, the sparks, and signaled 
 the range to the German gunners. Fifteen minutes later a six 
 inch shell exploded a few hundred yards from the little stone-house, 
 then another and another. One shell had fallen in the very center 
 of the grass-plot where Company D had lined up to eat their 
 luncheon of cold corn-willy sandwiches and hot chocolate. The 
 gas-alarm had been sounded. A mule team had become frantic and 
 bolted, encountering the marine band's big base drum, had made 
 toothpicks of it. Meanwhile confusion, it seemed, had reigned in 
 the little stone-house. One secretary, seizing an article of under- 
 wear and putting it on his head in mistake for a helmet, had dashed 
 madly up and down the road as the shells fell, and ended by burst- 
 ing, in his deshabille, into the private dugout of a French colonel. 
 
 No Americans were hurt, but one poilu had been injured and 
 another killed. 
 
 "They have our range now," said everybody. "And look at 
 those Boche ballloons, will you?" 
 
 We looked to the northeast; three German observation balloons 
 were hanging just above the hills. 
 
94 RATTENTOUT 
 
 We stirred the chocolate and served it to whatever boys happened 
 to be about, boys on detail, drivers of mule-teams. One can, 
 having been kept warm all night, had turned. Some bright soul 
 suggested that it was the concussion of the shelling that had 
 soured the milk, just as thunderstorms sometimes do. Two 
 poilus leaned in at the window. 
 
 "What are you doing?" they asked curiously. We explained; 
 they shook their heads. "You spoil your soldiers." Then, "Was 
 anyone killed last night?" 
 
 "Yes, one Frenchman." 
 
 "Oh that's nothing!" (Ca ne fait rien.) They strolled away. 
 
 The friendly interpreter came in and told us that they were 
 about to hold the poilu's funeral. 
 
 A troop-train pulled in. It was loaded with soldiers from my 
 own regiment, the Second Battalion. The chocolate was ready, 
 smelt delicious. • 
 
 "You can't serve it," they told us. "On account of last night's 
 shelling, the troops won't be allowed to stop until they're well 
 beyond the town." 
 
 "Isn't there some way we can manage?" we teased. 
 
 "No, they've got our range." 
 
 "Well at least we can say hello to them!" 
 
 We went down to the tracks where the men were spilling out 
 of the box cars. They were gathering up their equipment and 
 forming in companies in double time. One red-in-the-face ser- 
 geant was furiously demanding who in blazes had stolen his 
 revolver on him; it was evident that he found the presence of 
 ladies sadly hampering to his flow of language. Three companies 
 marched off. The last to go was H Company, the company that 
 had been billeted on the same street with us at Goncourt. We 
 waved and they smiled back at us. They marched down the road, 
 disappeared over the brow of the hill. 
 
 We stood chatting with two boys who were on a billeting de- 
 tail. 
 
 There was a dull heavy detonation beyond the hills. A moment 
 
THE FRONT 95 
 
 later a strange whistling screech shrilled over our heads. I stared 
 into the air, trying to see — I knew of course it was a shell, but I had 
 never thought one would travel so slowly or be quite so noisy about 
 it. The whistling shriek passed over us, changed to a dropping 
 whine. Down the street there was a thunderous explosion followed 
 instantly by a shattering crash. Timbers, tiles, stones, a mass of 
 debris splashed for a moment up against the sky. The shell had 
 fallen at the cross-roads. I stared at M. I was cold all over. 
 
 "It must have got them," I heard myself whispering. "My 
 God! it must have got them!" 
 
 We stared down the road. Everywhere figures in poilu blue and 
 some in khaki, were running like rabbits towards the dugouts. 
 It seemed to me the uncertainty was more than I could bear. 
 
 "I'm going to go and see." 
 
 "I'll go with you," said M. 
 
 We stopped at the station-house and put on our helmets; then 
 we started down the road. Just beyond the 'station-house we 
 passed a little cortege of poilus carrying the body of their comrade 
 on a stretcher-bier. They were on their way to the church. When 
 the first shell came over I had seen the funeral procession waver, 
 hesitate, seem uncertain for a few moments whether to proceed 
 or to seek shelter, now, their indecision conquered; they were 
 continuing their march with what seemed an added dignity. A 
 limousine drew up behind us, stopped. In the back seat sat an 
 American major. 
 
 "Give you a lift?" 
 
 We climbed in. Half way down the hill another shell shrieked 
 over our heads, burst in front of us. We reached the cross-roads. 
 
 "Let us out, please." 
 
 The major stared, them stopped the car. We scrambled out. 
 The car whirled off. Two houses lay, crushed heaps of stone. 
 In the road were three dead horses and an automobile with a 
 crumpled radiator. That was all. Another shell struck, sending 
 us cowering against the nearest house-wall. As far as we could 
 see the place was utterly deserted, There was nothing to do but 
 
96 RATTENTOUT 
 
 go back. Half-way up the hill we met a poilu, he was carrying 
 an O. D. blouse. He asked us where the wounded American was; 
 he had been carried into some house nearby; this was his coat. 
 We could of course tell him nothing. The wind which had been 
 strong all morning, was filling the air withj)linding clouds of yellow 
 dust. The shells were coming over at regular intervals, so many 
 minutes between them; they were all falling, it seemed, in the 
 vicinity of the cross-roads. A little further up the hill and we began 
 to meet mule teams from the supply train driving down. The 
 mule-skinners on their high seats looked calm enough, but a num- 
 ber of the mules were becoming quite unmanageable. I recognized 
 the slim lad of seventeen with whom I had driven into Bourmont 
 from Goncourt once after a load of canteen supplies. As each 
 team passed, we waved our hands and wished them luck; but all 
 the time I kept repeating to myself : 
 
 " They're going right down into it. God help them! Why does 
 ithave to be?" 
 
 A French officer encountered us, asked us politely if we wouldn't 
 like to step down into a dugout. I was amused at his manner 
 which was as casual as if he were offering us an umbrella in a^hower. 
 There were some excellent dug-outs up on the hill-side he assured 
 us. "But I don't want to go into a dugout!" "Mademoiselle a 
 beaucoup oV esprit" he observed, " mais ce n'est pas prudent." Obedi- 
 ently we climbed the hill, to come upon a little group of Americans 
 gathered about the entrance to a dugout, watching the shells as 
 they came over. Taking a peep into the dugout I found it had 
 already been patronized by several poilus. We sat on the ground 
 and watched the shelling. On the other side of the town we could 
 see Company H flung out in skirmish line, marching over the open 
 fields. 
 
 Presently a boy in olive drab came panting and laughing up 
 the hill. The group welcomed him with a shout. He was one of 
 the billeting detail. They had been staying in a house at the cross- 
 roads. When the others had gone out this morning he had been 
 left to clean up and get dinner. He had washed all the dishes, he 
 
THE FRONT 97 
 
 told us, and had just gone out and bought a basketful of eggs to 
 make an omelette for dinner, when crash! the first shell had fallen 
 demolishing the house next to theirs. He had stepped out to look 
 at the ruins and returned, when bang! went the house on the other 
 side of him! He began to think it might be time for him to move, 
 when, oh boy! zowie! a shell had wrecked the upper story of the 
 billet over him. Then he had left. But he was feeling very badly 
 about those eggs. Corporal G. also of the billeting detail looked 
 at him with widened eyes. "And I was half a mind to stay up- 
 stairs in bed and not get up this morning!" he remarked. The 
 boys found solace for the loss of the omelette in the thought that 
 all the effects of the very unpopular captain billeted next door 
 must surely have been annihilated. 
 
 After an hour or so the shelling stopped. One by one blue forms 
 emerged from the dugouts. The Chief had ordered the flivver to 
 report at eleven. It was noon and it hadn't appeared. 
 
 "We must walk to Rattentout," said the Chief. "No use our 
 staying here." 
 
 It was hot and dusty and my helmet weighed like a mountain 
 on my head, but at last we made it. Some two miles or so from 
 Dugny we passed two marines sitting in discouraged postures by 
 the roadside. 
 
 "What's the matter?" 
 
 "He's had a fit," growled one of the warriors, jerking his thumb 
 in the direction of his comrade's back. 
 
 "He has 'em. They never ought ter let him come." 
 
 There was nothing we could offer them but sympathy. 
 
 Rattentout, March 17. 
 Here I am sitting on a bench in the little garden back of our 
 billet, soaked in spring sunshine. Over my head the lilacs are 
 leafing out against a sky of Italian blue, at my feet are golden 
 crocuses and the first pale primroses. But the sky, as one gazes 
 at it, has an odd trick of breaking out in little puffy dots of white 
 like nothing so much as kernels of corn in a corn-popper. These 
 
9 8 RATTENTOUT 
 
 are of course the bursting shells fired by French anti-aircraft bat- 
 teries at the enemy aviators overhead; sometimes you can see the 
 plane itself, skimming like a gnat among the smoke puffs. "They 
 don't seem to get 'em often," as a boy remarked to me. " But golly 
 they do make 'em move!" 
 
 Ever since the Americans began to arrive the German planes 
 have been constantly overhead. They are taking photographs; 
 they say. Where, oh where are our American aviators? 
 
 In my ears as I sit here is a curious sound, a sound like the pound- 
 ing of tremendous breakers on a stormy shore: it is the guns of 
 Verdun, Les Eparges and St. Mihiel. At rhythmic intervals this 
 sound is punctuated by heavy crashing thuds nearer atJiand. They 
 are shelling Dugny again. All the civilians fled yesterday. A 
 driver, coming in last night, told us how they went, empty-handed, 
 creeping along the edges of the roads under the cover of trees or 
 brush, fearing to step out in the open lest they be spied and bombed 
 by the German aeroplanes overhead. The church where they held 
 the poilu's funeral has already been struck by a shell and the steeple 
 demolished. 
 
 In front of the house the street is quiet. All through the day 
 the town seems a sleepy deserted place, but at night it is a different 
 matter; then the real business of the day begins. Carts and camions 
 may straggle past at odd intervals during the daylight hours, but 
 with darkness, the traffic starts to pour by in a perfectly unbroken 
 stream. One lies awake and listens, it seems for hours, to the 
 absolutely incessant rattle of carts, trucks, caissons and gun car- 
 riages passing along the road, until it seems as if the whole French 
 Army must be on the move. 
 
 Little Pauline is better today. She has just come running into 
 the garden through the back gate, in company with a big curly 
 dog. Rattentout they tell us is the "Dog Town" for this sector; 
 every dog picked up near the front, lost mascots, faithful beasts 
 looking for their masters, strays of every sort, are sent back here 
 for keeping. 
 
 Presently I must go in and help M. get the supper. Our food, 
 
THE FRONT 99 
 
 over and beyond what we brought from Bar-le-Duc in tins and sacks, 
 is furnished us by the French Army. Every morning a dapper 
 little corporal calls to take our orders. When the official inter- 
 preter is out it falls to me to do the parleying. The corporal is 
 patient and very military and oh so polite! He brings us fresh 
 butter, fresh eggs, even so much as a quart of fresh milk, and the 
 most delicious fresh French bread I have ever tasted. The first 
 day he came he was dreadfully distressed; he had no fresh meat 
 to offer us. This morning he shone with smiles. There was plenty 
 of fresh beef now, plenty! We ordered some and ate it stewed for 
 dinner. It was dark and tough and stringy. I could dare swear 
 that I saw that "beef" freshly slaughtered yesterday at Dugny 
 cross-roads. 
 
 A French liaison officer called here this afternoon. He told me 
 that it was quite true that a certain regiment of French infantry 
 had gone into battle, each man carrying with him the wooden 
 cross which was to mark his grave if he fell. To earn le croix de 
 bois is the current slang phrase among the French to designate 
 dying a soldier's death. 
 
 Yesterday noon a detachment of marines arrived in Rattentout. 
 During the day they must keep under cover, but last night after 
 sundown they came out and played baseball in the street. When I 
 looked out my window and saw those lads in olive drab nonchal- 
 antly throwing and catching a baseball under my window, I felt 
 as if something safe and sane had somehow appeared in the midst 
 of a strange night-mare world. 
 
 Rattentout, March 18. 
 
 I have said; "Good-bye, Good luck!" to my boys. 
 
 Today we received word that the first battalion of my regiment 
 was to take its place in the trenches by Les Eparges at twelve 
 o'clock tonight, leaving Genicourt where they have been billeted, 
 at eight. I breathed a piteous appeal to the Chief. At five o'clock 
 the car called for us. 
 
 Earlier in the afternoon there had been an air battle over Geni- 
 
ioo RATTENTOUT 
 
 court. I heard the soft whut, whut of the anti-aircraft guns, and 
 later the staccato rattle of machine-guns in the air. Looking out 
 I could see the planes, one German and two French darting among 
 the shrapnel puffs, the German escaping, sad to say, unharmed. 
 Now a French observation balloon was floating over Genicourt, a 
 curious-looking thing shaped like a huge ram's head, and a dull 
 green in color. As we neared the town they started to haul the 
 balloon in: it came down with astonishing rapidity. 
 
 We rolled into Genicourt, a sodden desolate village clinging under 
 the lea of a low hill, just now alive with suppressed vitality. The 
 boys had been ordered to keep their billets until the last moment, 
 as any unusual number of men about might be observed by an 
 enemy aeroplane. Nevertheless there were plenty of stragglers in 
 the streets, while out of the windows were leaning several hundred 
 more, craning their necks in order to get a glimpse of the des- 
 cending balloon. 
 
 We went to the Foyer du Soldat, a bright clean barracks, the 
 walls covered with posters in vivid hues. It was full of our boys. 
 They laughed, joked, played checkers and pounded the piano, some 
 were dancing together. Yet through all the gaiety one had a sense 
 of tension, of nervous strain. Some of the boys asked us to sing, 
 one lad evidently in a more solemn mood repeatedly requested 
 "My Country 'Tis of Thee." We sang the "Long, Long TraiT 
 and "Keep the Home Fires Burning." Then we went out in the 
 street again. The French, we gathered, were quite astonished at 
 the high spirits of the Americans. "Ah, but it's their first time," 
 they said. "After four years it will be different." 
 
 In the public square they had been holding some sort of cere- 
 mony, an interchange of formal greetings between the French and 
 American officers. A French military band had just finished its 
 programme. As we passed they played the Marseillaise and the 
 Star Spangled Banner; we all stood at attention. 
 
 We came to the street where Company A was billeted. The 
 boys leaned out of the windows and waved and called to me. Every- 
 where it was the same question: 
 
THE FRONT 101 
 
 "What shall I bring you from the trenches? " 
 
 "Do you want a live Boche for a souvenir? I'll get you one!" 
 
 They thought my gas-mask was a lovely joke. "What's that 
 strap across your shoulder for?" they teased. 
 
 "That? Oh that's my new Sam Browne belt!" 
 
 " Say! Bet you don't know how to put it on! " Then they would 
 yell "Gas!" just to frighten me. 
 
 In the street a little crowd of boys were tossing coppers. Every- 
 body was anxious to get rid of his "clackers," in order not to have 
 to carry all that useless weight into the trenches with him. They 
 invited me to join. I tried one penny while the boys all cheered, 
 only to miss by a good yard. Lieut. B. came by: "Will you take 
 tea with me in my dugout?" he asked. 
 
 The order was given for the companies to form. The streets 
 filled up; dusk was gathering. The Chief said that it was time to 
 go. We found the car in the public square. Slowly we moved out 
 of town. I shall never forget those long brown files drawn up 
 against the dim grey houses. Five hours hence and those very boys 
 would be in the front fine trenches, face to face with the enemy. 
 We passed Company A. I called out to them to be sure not to 
 stick their heads up over the top, and not to dare to take off their 
 gas-masks before they were ordered to. Never before did I realize 
 how much those boys meant to me. Each face I saw flashed some 
 vivid unforgettable association to my mind. "When you come 
 back," I called, "I'll be waiting for you with the hot chocolate 
 ready." They smiled and waved Good-bye to me. Some of them 
 held up their fingers to show how many Germans they were going 
 to account for. A turn in the road shut it all from sight. On 
 the way back to Rattentout we passed the Third Battalion, 
 who were marching in on their very heels to take over their 
 billets. 
 
 It's eleven o'clock now. They must be almost in. They are 
 marching, I know, in darkness and silence; not a cigarette is to 
 be lighted, not a word spoken above a whisper. One hour more 
 and the relief will be completed. 
 
102 RATTENTOUT 
 
 Rattentout, March 19. 
 
 I am to be sent to Paris for reassignment. I have, it seems, 
 been guilty of conduct unbecoming a lady under shell-fire. This 
 sentence has been hanging over me ever since that day at Dugny. 
 I knew of course that I was in disgrace but never dreamed that it 
 would come to this. 
 
 It seems, what no one had troubled to hint to me, that we have 
 been allowed to go farther front than any women of any of the 
 Allied Nations in France have been permitted to go to work before. 
 Moreover that the French, whose guests we are in this sector, were 
 very much opposed to the presence of women here, and only finally, 
 after much persuasion, allowed us to come here on trial. Now 
 the Chief says that he is afraid that my indiscreet action at Dugny 
 in going down to the cross-roads instead of into a dugout may have 
 shocked the French. In order to forestall any possible protest by 
 our Allies I am to be made an example of the discipline of the 
 organization. 
 
 Etretat, Normandy. March 28. 
 
 I have been here a week on leave. To-morrow I start back for 
 Paris once more. Where I am to go after that is uncertain. 
 
 It seems strange to be in France and not be wading through seas 
 of mud, but to have firm turf and dry roads beneath one's feet. The 
 hamlets here, while picturesque, are quite spruce and tidy, amaz- 
 ingly different from the quaint but indescribably dirty little mud- 
 pie muck-heap villages to which I have been used. 
 
 This pretty little coast town, once a fishing village, then a sum- 
 mer resort, is now chiefly a hospital. All the large hotels have 
 been taken over for wards and nurses' quarters, the big casino 
 filled with row on row of iron cots. It is an American hospital with 
 American doctors, nurses and orderlies, but attached to the B. E. F. 
 and filled of course with British patients. As in all the English 
 hospitals, as soon as a patient is able to get out of bed he is dressed 
 in a "suit of blues;" trousers and jumper blouse of bright blue 
 cotton, white shirt, scarlet tie and handkerchief to match, making 
 him look exactly like a grown-up. Greenaway boy. The men hate 
 
THE FRONT 103 
 
 them, they tell me, but I for one am grateful to the designer as the 
 bright blue and scarlet makes wonderful splotches of color in the 
 landscape. 
 
 There may be a more disgusted set of boys in France than these 
 here in the hospital corps at Base No. 2, but if so I have yet to meet 
 them. One of the first units to come across, landing in May of 19 17, 
 every man enlisted, so they tell me, because he thought it was the 
 quickest means of getting to the front in field hospital service 
 and most of them enlisted to do some form of specialized work; 
 but, medical students, college professors, and motor experts, they 
 each and all were given the job of hospital orderly which means 
 scrubbing floors, washing windows, shovelling coal, doing the hard 
 and dirty work of a hospital, and, most galling I fancy of all, — 
 taking orders from girls with whom you are not allowed to associate 
 or even speak except in the line of business. The X-ray expert 
 has been delegated to the job of keeping the hospital pigs. I saw 
 him in a pair of grimy overalls trundling a well-worn wheelbarrow 
 down the street. The man who speaks eight languages, and en- 
 listed as interpreter, spends his days checking up clothes in the 
 laundry. And here as hospital orderlies in spite of their frantic 
 efforts to get transferred, it seems likely that they will stay. 
 
 But these are dark days for us all just now, with the news that 
 comes in every day of the German drive. ''What do the officers in 
 the hospital think? What do they say about it?" I tease the 
 nurses. 
 
 "They think that we will hold them," they reply, but none too 
 hopefully. 
 
 At the hotel where I am staying there is a French officer en per- 
 mission, with his wife and apparently unlimited offspring. With 
 them is an English governess. She is a little nervous thing all 
 a-twitter these days with excitement and apprehension. Will the 
 Germans get through to Paris? Monsieur's aged mother is there. 
 He is thinking of going back to get her, together with a few essen- 
 tial household treasures. She herself had fled with the family 
 from Paris in 1914. It was a dreadful experience; fourteen people 
 
104 RATTENTOUT 
 
 crowded in a coach for six, and nothing to eat. Oh dear! wasn't 
 it all just too terrible! 
 
 There is also an old French lady here who frankly fled from Paris 
 to escape the air-raids; now someone has taken all the joy out of 
 life for her by suggesting that Etretat might be shelled from the 
 sea by a German submarine. 
 
 The Tommies in the hospitals, they say, flatly refuse to believe 
 that Paris is being shelled. It isn't possible, they declare, for a gun 
 to shoot as far as that, and to them that is the end of it. But to- 
 night a little crowd of the hospital boys who had gone on pass to 
 Paris came back as eye-witnesses. One of the first shells had fallen 
 very close to them, killing a number of people who were sitting drink- 
 ing in a sidewalk cafe. The boys had gone up to the Church of 
 Sacre Cceur on Montmartre and from the tower there had watched 
 the shelling of the city. It had been a beautiful clear day: they 
 could see where each shell struck. One of the boys brought back 
 with him for a souvenir a piece of a French lieutenant's skull, 
 picked up, after the shell had wrecked the cafe, from the sidewalk. 
 
 Tonight there was a concert at the Y hut here. The hall was 
 crowded; the concert party, a group of pretty girls, had just com- 
 pleted, to much applause, the first number, when a horn sounded 
 in the distance. Everybody started up. The Y man stepped for- 
 ward and announced the programme over. In a few minutes the 
 hut was deserted. "The convoy is in," they said, which meant 
 that a train load of wounded had arrived at the station. 
 
 Paris, Easter Sunday. 
 On the way here from Etretat I saw a sight which brought the 
 war closer to me somehow than anything before; at the junction 
 station connecting the line to Le Havre with the line to Amiens, 
 a string of box cars full of women, little children and decrepit 
 old men, packed in like cattle, fleeing before the German drive, 
 many of them empty-handed, others with a few pathetic futile 
 treasures, a hen or two, a copper cooking-pot, snatched up evidently 
 in a moment of half-witless panic haste. 
 
THE FRONT 105 
 
 Nor is Paris itself without its refugees. The German advance, 
 the air-raids, the shelling, culminating in the Good Friday horror, 
 have combined to render the city half deserted. 
 
 "Paris? We call Paris 'the front' nowadays," one Frenchman 
 on the journey had remarked to me. 
 
 Yesterday I went shopping. Everywhere it was the same reply. 
 Nothing could be made to order for an indefinite period, the work- 
 rooms were all deserted, the workers fled. As for those who re- 
 main, they seem to take life calmly enough; what else can they 
 do? When, as yesterday, every sixteen minutes a tremendous 
 jarring crash tells you that a shell has fallen somewhere in the 
 city, — and the concussion is so great that it always sounds as 
 if it had fallen in the next block! — you see people turn their 
 heads as they walk, staring in the direction of the explosion; 
 others come out on the balconies to see what they can see and 
 that is all. 
 
 Of course the danger of all this lies in its effect on the civilian 
 morale. In connection with this I learned an interesting thing 
 today. While the hospitals outside are over-crowded, the hospitals 
 in Paris with their splendid equipment and staffs are left half empty, 
 because they dare not show the people of Paris too many wounded. 
 And when convoys are brought into the city, they are often 
 detained outside, sometimes for hours, in order that the wounded 
 may be transferred to the hospitals at night. 
 
 Yesterday at Brentano's I got talking with a boy who belonged to 
 the American Ambulance Section which is attached to the French. 
 He told me an incident which struck my fancy: 
 
 One night, at the front, after a hard day's work, he had just 
 dropped off to sleep when he was awakened. There was a bless e 
 to be taken back to the hospital, he was in bad shape, they had 
 placed him in an ambulance. The boy rolled out of his blankets, 
 started up the car. It was a bitter night. Once he was on his way 
 everything went wrong; the water had frozen in the radiator, he 
 had to get out and crawl along the ditches on his hands and knees, 
 trying, in the dark to find a pool that was still unfrozen. And all 
 
106 RATTENTOUT 
 
 the while he was tortured by the thought that the life of the wounded 
 man in the car depended probably on his speed in reaching the 
 hospital, and this urged him to an agony of haste. Finally, as the 
 dawn was breaking, he reached his goal. They came to carry the 
 blesse in. The wounded man was dead; he had been dead, it was 
 evident, some while before the boy started. At the front, he ex- 
 plained, they hate to take the time and trouble to bury bodies. So 
 whenever it is possible they work this method of passing on the 
 task to someone else. You have to be constantly on the look-out 
 for such tricks. This time they had fooled him. 
 
 Last night there was an air-raid. It was a mild affair. I was 
 awakened by the sirens. They make what is to me quite the most 
 fascinatingly horrible sound I have ever heard. That long agon- 
 ized wail, now sinking to a shuddering whimper, now rising to a 
 banshee screech, flashes vividly to my mind's eye a myriad little 
 demons sitting on the roofs of Paris, cowering, shivering, crying 
 out their abject terror. I went to the window and looked out, but 
 although my room is on the top floor of the hotel, I could see noth- 
 ing and so went back to bed again. The anti-aircraft guns put 
 up a tremendous barrage; they have them mounted on trucks now 
 so they can quickly be shifted from point to point about the city. 
 I am sure there was a whole battery just in front of the hotel. 
 Today the papers inform us that the Gothas were driven back after 
 reaching the suburbs. 
 
 This morning I went to service at Notre Dame, entering through 
 piles of sand bags heaped so as to hide the carvings about the door- 
 ways. In that vast cathedral only a few were present, a fair share 
 of the congregation being comprised of Americans. 
 
 Tonight an ambulance driver attached to one of the Paris hospi- 
 tals came to the hotel for dinner. He spread a startling tale. 
 Every ambulance in the city has been ordered to be in readiness; 
 for tomorrow, it has been learned, twenty-seven long-range guns 
 are to be turned at once on Paris! 
 
THE FRONT 107 
 
 Aix-les-Bains, April 6. 
 
 When they said "Leave Area" to me my heart sank. The Lady 
 in the Office explained to me how very important she considered 
 the work, and the assignment, she added, need not be permanent. 
 "Very well" I said, "I'm willing to go there temporarily." 
 
 I left Paris Tuesday, taking the night train. Getting off was 
 something of an ordeal. The lighting at the stations, as on the 
 streets, has been reduced almost to the vanishing point. The 
 great Gare de Lyon was filled with a mass of distraught humanity 
 over whom the few violet-blue bulbs cast a ghostly glimmer. There 
 were no porters to take one's luggage; a number of women had 
 possessed themselves of the baggage trucks and were pushing them, 
 heaped high with bags and household stuff, recklessly through the 
 crowds. I could find no officials anywhere about. All the French 
 orderliness and red tape seemed to have been swept clean away 
 and the result was chaos. Somehow, I don't know quite how, I 
 found my train and reached my seat. 
 
 Three very fat old gentlemen and one old lady occupied the 
 compartment with me. The fat gentlemen had one little spoiled 
 dog between them which they kept passing from one to the other, 
 in order that each in turn might kiss him. The old lady had a 
 bird in a cage; presently she opened her hand-bag and brought out 
 her supper, a loaf of bread, junwrapped, together with a good- 
 sized turtle. For a moment, such were her raptures over her pet, 
 I thought that she was going to kiss the turtle. The first minute 
 that one of my companions entered the compartment, each in- 
 formed all the rest that he or she was not running away from the 
 air-raids or the long range guns. "I? / am not afraid of the 
 Kaiser's Gothas! I laugh at them! " A few minutes later however 
 they began: Ah, what a fearful night, last night had been! Five 
 hours in the Caves! No sleep at all! One might as well be a mole 
 and take up one's dwelling underground. What a life! Oh it was 
 terrible, terrible! Then one old gentleman turned proudly to the 
 little fat canine. "But of a verity, my little Toto is possessed of 
 a sagacity extraordinary. The moment that he hears the sirens, 
 
108 RATTENTOUT 
 
 he will run down into the cellar, and nothing can induce him to 
 come up again until the 'all clear' has sounded!" 
 
 We pulled into Aix soon after dawn as the rising sun was touch- 
 ing the tops of the mountains and the morning mists were hover- 
 ing over the lake. Whatever the work may prove to be like here, 
 the place is surpassingly lovely. It is too early for the summer 
 resort pleasure seekers. The French don't care for it here until 
 it grows really hot, they tell us. But to me the season is at its 
 most appealing rnoment. One glimpses pink peach blossoms against 
 the blue lake over which stand purple mountains with snow still 
 lying on their summits. Several of the large hotels and casinos 
 have been requisitioned for French convalescent hospitals, but 
 the largest of all has been taken over by the Y. JFrom this canteen 
 excursions are constantly setting out, motor-boats on the lake, 
 motor cars to Chambery, the cog-wheel railway up Mt. Revard, 
 picnics, hikes and fishing parties, yet many of the boys seem to 
 find it pleasantest to do nothing, — just to sit around in lazy com- 
 fort all day long, watching the others playing billiards, listening 
 to the orchestra in the afternoon beneath the gold mosaic casino 
 dome, sitting luxuriously in a box at the vaudeville in the evening, 
 gaining a maximum of pleasure with a minimum of exertion. Many 
 of the boys came here with their heads full of pessimistic expecta- 
 tions. 
 
 "They told us it would be Reveille and Retreat and one day's 
 K. P. for each of us," confided one lad to me. 
 
 Some brought their mess-kits and some even their blankets. 
 When they find themselves guests in hotels that are among the 
 finest in Europe, lodged in comfortable rooms, eating real food off 
 tables furnished with china-ware and linen, at first they are fairly 
 dazed. 
 
 "I'm feared somebody'll pinch me an' I'll wake up," declared 
 one lad today. 
 
 More than one has told me, that the first night he got here, he 
 could not go to sleep in bed at all and only finally achieved slumber 
 by rolling himself in blankets on the floor. 
 
THE FRONT 109 
 
 There are no troops from the line here at present; only boys 
 from forestry regiments, motor mechanics and a few lads from 
 medical detachments. They are holding up the leaves of all com- 
 batant troops on account of the drive. It may be that presently 
 they will hold up all leaves altogether. Then we will have to shut 
 up shop here temporarily. 
 
 It is the pleasant custom here for the Y ladies to go down to the 
 train every night to see the boys off. 
 
 "It's a shame you can't stay longer," we say tothem. 
 
 "I'll say it is!" 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry you have to go." 
 
 "You ain't half so sorry as I am, Lady." 
 
 "Maybe some day you'll be coming back again." 
 
 "I'll tell the world one thing; I'm going to be good as gold when 
 I get back to camp, so they'll let me." 
 
 One of the Y women tonight repeated what one boy on leaving 
 had confided to her: 
 
 "If I said to you that this had been my happiest week since I 
 joined the army it wouldn't mean much," he told her, "but that's 
 not what I'm going to say. What I'm going to say is that this 
 has been the happiest week of all my life." 
 
 So far I have found just one man who wasn't enjoying himself 
 here. He had been stationed for six months at Paris. Aix, he 
 declared, "Weren't no town at all, nothin' but a one-horse place." 
 He evidently had no soul for the beauties of nature. 
 
 Paris, April 22. 
 
 They held the leaves up. The boys kept leaving; fewer and 
 fewer came, then finally none. Last week they disbanded the 
 force of workers at Aix; a few stayed to look after things until 
 such time as the crowds should start to pour in again; the rest v/ere 
 sent back to Paris to be reassigned. 
 
 If I thought the trip down was a chore, it wasn't a patch on the 
 trip back. We waited half the night for the train at the Aix rail- 
 way station. When it finally pulled in, I found my seat was in a 
 
no RATTENTOUT 
 
 compartment which was full, and had evidently been so for hours, 
 of French people. Now life in France tends to cure you of belief 
 in several popular superstitions; one is the idea that it is dangerous 
 to have wet feet, and another that there is anything in the germ 
 theory; but there is one notion to which I still cling, an obstinate 
 belief in the desirability of fresh air. I putmy head in the compart- 
 ment, then withdrew, shutting the door. For the twelve hours it 
 took to reach Paris I stood up outside in the corridor. 
 
 Arrived in Paris, they assigned me temporarily to the Avenue 
 Montaigne Club House. This is a beautiful building, the home 
 of one of Napoleon's generals; but the best thing about it is the 
 tea-room restaurant, for here they serve apple-pie, chocolate cake 
 and ice-cream. Since the latest food restrictions were issued, 
 forbidding the French to make desserts employing milk, cream, 
 sugar, eggs or flour, such dainties have been unobtainable any- 
 where else in Paris; but the Americans drawing supplies from their 
 own commissary, are of course untouched by such regulations. 
 Indeed the saddest sign in France these days I often think is that 
 over the deserted shops which reads Patisserie. To be sure some 
 of these stores still make a show at doing business, filling their 
 windows with raisins, dried prunes and other prosaic edibles, to- 
 gether with heaps of pseudo-chocolates wrapped gayly in tin-foil, 
 but which when purchased proved to be nothing but what one boy 
 termed "the same old camouflage," — an unappetizing paste of 
 dried fruits and ground nuts. Yesterday a curly-headed lad, who 
 looked about sixteen, came into the canteen carrying a big bunch 
 of pink carnations. These were for the waitresses, he said, because 
 they were the first American ladies that he had seen in France. 
 We each pinned a spray to the front of our pink aprons, and then, 
 since he pretended famine, let him have "seconds", — quite against 
 the rules — on everything, with all the ice-cream and cake that he 
 could swallow. 
 
 Yesterday I saw Mr. T. who was with us for a while at Goncourt. 
 He told me that French troops en repos were occupying that area 
 at present. They had asked for the use of our hut and of course 
 
THE FRONT in 
 
 it had been granted them. A Y man, happening by the other day, 
 had stopped in. They had converted our beautiful hut into a regu- 
 lar French Cantine with three men to hand the bottles over the 
 counter "and a smell enough to knock you down." Who shall say 
 that this is the least of life's little ironies? 
 
 This morning I met N. who had reached Rattentout the day I 
 left. She tells me that all the villages occupied by our troops in 
 the sector have, one by one, been shelled. Rattentout was shelled 
 and two Frenchwomen killed. Because of the constant shelling all 
 the Y women workers had been withdrawn from the canteens and 
 sent back to safety at Souilly where they have nothing to do but sit 
 and possess their souls in patience. 
 
 Tonight they gave me my new assignment. It is at Gondrecourt. 
 I leave tomorrow. I am glad, so glad over the prospect of being 
 back on a real job once more! Here at the Avenue Montaigne 
 as in the gilded casino at Aix I have been desperately homesick, 
 to be back in a real hut again! 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 GONDRECOURT 
 
 THE ARTILLERY 
 
 Gondrecourt, April 28. 
 
 Gondrecourt is quite a place. It boasts a brewery, a hotel, a 
 mediaeval tower and a number of little stores. Each one of these 
 stores contains at least one pretty girl on its selling force and the 
 ratio between the sales of goods and the charms of the ladies is, 
 I fancy, quite exact. From the military point of view Gondre- 
 court is important as being the site of the First Army Corps Train- 
 ing Schools. But to me the really distinguishing feature of Gondre- 
 court is the fact that it boasts a bath-tub. If anybody had said 
 bath-tub to me the day before I arrived here, I would have said 
 with the doughboy that, — short of Paris — "there ain't no such 
 animal." But now I have beheld it with my own eyes, a white- 
 enamelled bath-tub, a Y. M. C. A. bath-tub, in the basement at 
 Headquarters. The tub is supposed to be a strictly family affair, — 
 on the door are posted hours for the Lady Secretaries and hours 
 for the Men Secretaries, — but in spite of the plain English before 
 their eyes, it seems that army officers occasionally slip in and steal 
 a bath off us, yes, even impinging on the sacred bath hours of the 
 ladies! 
 
 My first day here they sent me to "The Cafe." This was once 
 a very wild place indeed. When the Y. first came to Gondrecourt 
 it tried to buy the proprietor out, but the proprietor refused; he 
 was doing too profitable a business. Then one night Providence 
 sent some Boche planes wandering in this direction. There was a 
 panic among the populace; the proprietor, with visions of his place 
 wrecked by a bomb, sold out in a hurry and left town. Since then 
 the Cafe has led a reformed and decorous existence but the old 
 
THE ARTILLERY 113 
 
 name still clings. My second day I spent at the " Double Hut," 
 the big hut built up on the hill close by the Infantry School. The 
 third day I was introduced to my own canteen. 
 
 According to directions, I climbed the hill by my billet, went 
 past the athletic field, past the warehouse and out along the edge 
 of the rolling open upland. About half a mile out of town I came 
 to a group of seven French barracks, covered with black tar paper, 
 built at the edge of the railway cut. This was the Artillery School. 
 I crossed the field, entered the nearest barracks which bore a Y. 
 sign at one end, and found myself in a Greenwich Village Tea 
 House. I stood and stared. Some modern-school interior decorator 
 had been at work. The place was a riot of red, yellow, salmon- 
 color and black, worked out from a nasturtium motif. In the 
 wall panels were paintings, some conventionalized fruits and flow- 
 ers, evidently done by the decorator; others, landscapes, Japanese 
 scenes and some rather awful Indians just as evidently executed 
 by the boys. The whole effect to be sure was a bit sketchy and in 
 spots frankly unfinished, and yet to one used to such simplicity 
 in the huts as I, the ensemble was startling. Back of the black and 
 orange partition which screens the canteen and the kitchen from 
 the hut proper, I found the staff, secretary and canteen worker. 
 The lady whom I am to replace, it appears, belongs in reality to 
 the Motor Transport Section. She turned canteen worker to help 
 out in a pinch, and now is anxious to return again. 
 
 When dinner-time came the Motor Transport girl told me that 
 we had been invited to dine at the camp. We went over to the 
 mess-hall. "Let's help feed the chow-line for a lark!" said the 
 M. T. girl. So we stood behind the serving-bench and ladled out 
 big spoonfuls of mashed potato and gravy. This amused the boys 
 immensely; and as they passed they would sing out: 
 
 "When did they put you on K. P?" 
 
 "What have you done to deserve this?" 
 
 The kitchen was white-washed and specklessly clean, the earth 
 floor was covered with cinders. These cinders which are in use 
 for floors and walks in all the camps about, come, I am told, from 
 
ii 4 GONDRECOURT 
 
 a great heap down by the river which marks the site of one of 
 Napoleon's cannon foundries. 
 
 "Why are the boxers in a company always found on the kitchen 
 force? " I asked one of the cooks. 
 
 "That's so they can handle the boys when they come back for 
 seconds." 
 
 As soon as the chow-line had been fed, the M. T. girl and I had 
 ours with the Top Sergeant. After dinner the Top Sergeant, who 
 had formerly been mess sergeant, was moved to unburden his soul 
 as to the sorrows of a mess sergeant. 
 
 "When I was mess sergeant," he reminisced, "I sure got to 
 know the way to a man's heart all right. Why, the days when I 
 gave them a good dinner there wasn't a man in camp who wouldn't 
 positively beam at me; but if something had gone wrong and the 
 chow wasn't up to scratch, half the fellers in the company wouldn't 
 speak to me the rest of the day." 
 
 Then he grinned. "I wouldn't want Mother to know the way I 
 used to get stuff for the boys last winter." 
 
 He went on to tell us. French freight trains have no brakemen 
 and the conductor rides in a caboose directly behind the coal car. 
 Trains pulling into town from the north hit a grade curve close to 
 the camp, up which they must pull very slowly. The camp guard 
 kept a lookout; when a freight train with flat cars was sighted, 
 word was immediately passed to the mess sergeant who with a 
 number of K. P.s hurried to the tracks and boarded the slow-mov- 
 ing train; if the cars proved to holdjmy thing of value for the mess, — 
 be it coal or cabbages, — all the way up the grade the sergeant and 
 his assistants were busy, hastily throwing or shoveling what they 
 could over the sides of the cars. At thejtop of the grade they would 
 jump off and returning along the tracks, gather up the spoils. 
 
 Tomorrow the Motor Transport girl departs and I "take over" 
 the canteen. 
 
 GONDRECOURT, MAY 4. 
 
 The Artillery School consists of some few hundred officers and 
 non-coms enrolled for each four-weeks' course, in addition to the 
 
THE ARTILLERY 115 
 
 two batteries who are here, for demonstration work; .Battery D from 
 a regiment of "75s" and Battery A from a regiment of the big 
 "155s." Selected for this exhibition jvork on account of their ex- 
 ceptional ability, they are, I suppose, the equal of any batteries in 
 the world. When the boys enlisted these batteries were declared 
 to be about to be "motorized," but at present the motor power is 
 being supplied by a particularly unresponsive set of French cart 
 horses, whose daily care is the greatest trial of the boys' lives. Last 
 night we had a movie-show; one reel gave the story of a discontented 
 boy on the farm — showing him at one moment disgustedly groom- 
 ing Dobbin. For a full minute it seemed as if the roof of the hut 
 was going to be hf ted right off. 
 
 The officers' quarters and the class-rooms lie across the railroad 
 track from the camp, in the grounds of the Chateau. Here they 
 have a canteen of their own, a cool little place in cream color and 
 blue presided over by a most refreshing and delightful English 
 lady. The Chateau itself was partially destroyed by fire a few 
 years ago and though the lower story is available for offices, the 
 upper story stands roofless, with empty windows staring against 
 the sky. Every now and then a rumour goes the rounds: — Per- 
 shing is going to move his headquarters to Gondrecourt, — the 
 Chateau is to be repaired for Jiis use! The Chateau and the school 
 buildings stand on high ground. To the south the ground falls 
 away suddenly; below is "off limits" and is Fairyland. Here are 
 meadows warm with the color of spring flowers, here are groves 
 such as one sees in the pictures of Eighteenth Century shepherds 
 and shepherdesses, and here is the river flowing so placidly that 
 its waters seem to form still lagoons, white-flecked with swans and 
 arched with rustic bridges. Here while the boys are at their mess, 
 I have been stealing to eat my picnic supper; an orange, a sand- 
 wich and a piece of chocolate. The guard walking post at the 
 foot of the embankment shuts one eye as I go past, — and usually 
 gets half of my supper! For that matter I gather he is there largely 
 for the sake of appearance, for there's not a boy in camp I'm sure 
 who hasn't explored those groves, fed the swans, and angled for 
 
u6 GONDRECOURT 
 
 fish in the river. And the only reason, I'm certain, that they don't 
 surreptitiously go in swimming there is that the water, fed by 
 springs, is cold as ice! Nor is the touch of romance that should go 
 with such a setting absent. One of the cooks in the officers' mess 
 kitchen is deep in an affair with Lucile, the caretaker's daughter, 
 a girl like a wild rose, shy, slender, freshly-tinted. Every other 
 night when he is off duty he carries her chocolate from the canteen 
 and she " gives him a French lesson." 
 
 " Serious?" I asked inquisitively. 
 
 "Fat chance!" he glowered at me frankly. "She tells me that 
 she's engaged to twelve fellows now already and that twelve's 
 enough." 
 
 The proprietor of the Chateau, Monsieur S., has the distinction 
 of being the father of ten girls. I like to fancy that the spirits of 
 the ten lovely daughters, — for lovely they must be, as no French- 
 man, I am sure, would have the courage to father ten homely ones! 
 — haunt the Chateau gardens. 
 
 The boys, however, don't have to rely on phantoms for thrills 
 of this sort. Yesterday, they tell me, that during the progress of an 
 exciting ball-game on the Y. athletic field a beautiful lady dressed 
 a la Parisienne strolled by. The batter dropped his bat, the pitcher 
 forgot his ball; the game came to a dead halt until the beautiful 
 lady had passed out of sight. 
 
 GONDRECOURT, MAY 13. 
 
 The Secretary is sick. He lies in his little bed-room office and 
 reads the latest magazines and gossips with his visitors while I 
 attempt to run the hut single-handed. At times during this last 
 week I have been strongly tempted to get sick myself. Indeed I 
 think I probably would have done so if it hadn't been for Snow. 
 Snow, Snowball or Ivory as he is variously called, is Battery D's 
 albino cook. "Say, ain't I the whitest-haired beggar you ever did 
 see?" he asked me the other day in a sort of naive wonder at him- 
 self. "Anyway, nobody ever had a cleaner-looking cook," re- 
 marked the Top Sergeant, ex-Mess Sergeant. Snow has the sweet- 
 
THE ARTILLERY 117 
 
 est disposition in the world. "If Snow was starving to death," 
 declared one of the boys to me today, " and somebody gave him a 
 sandwich, and he thought you were the least bit hungry, he'd give 
 you that sandwich." Ever since the Secretary has been sick, Snow 
 has been bringing him toast and eggs and things while he has 
 brought me lemon pies, the most wonderful lemon pies that ever 
 I tasted. Already Snow has come to be looked upon by the boys 
 as an authority on all things pertaining to the canteen and has to 
 stand a battery of searching questions, such as, whether he thinks 
 that my hair is really all my own? 
 
 Just to add to all our other troubles this week we have run 
 amuck of the Major. This I suspect was all my fault. I was fu- 
 rious because when he came into the hut he made the boys stand 
 at attention. This was something I had never seen done before 
 and is, I am sure, contrary to all the rules. J was so angry that 
 when the Major came up to the counter I stood and glared at him. 
 
 "You will find the Secretary in his office," I said and turned 
 and walked out the back door. It was the Major's turn to be 
 angry then. He stalked out behind the counter, looking for trouble, 
 and began to hold an inspection in the kitchen. The Secretary 
 appeared, the Major let loose. That kitchen, he declared, was not 
 up to army standards in cleanliness. This was a matter of utmost 
 importance. Hereafter the medical officer would inspect the 
 kitchen daily. Then he proceeded to prescribe a schedule of 
 canteen hours outside of which nothing at all must be sold. 
 
 Now I admit that kitchen hasn't been quite all it might be. It 
 is a small, overcrowded place, built of rough dirty boards and there 
 are no shelves, nor of course running water, nor conveniences of 
 any kind. Moreover, the Major, I learn, has the reputation of 
 being a tartar in this respect; "Major Mess Kit" they call him 
 because of the rigour of his inspections. 
 
 The next morning the medical officer arrived at the crack of 
 dawn. He found the chocolate cups from the night before unwashed. 
 He was shocked. He too read the Secretary a lecture. Then he 
 departed to do the sensible, the saving thing, which was to rec- 
 
n8 GONDRECOURT 
 
 ommend to the Major that we be allowed a detail. So it all worked 
 out for the best in the end. " Neddy" as we have christened the 
 detail is now a part of the family. A shy, dreamy lad, he is ;at 
 hand to help from early morning until closing time at nine at night, 
 and I actually have to shoo him out to his meals. The only trou- 
 ble with Neddy is that he is so good I am sure that he is going to 
 die young. And besides Neddy I now have a pet bugaboo. This 
 has proved so useful these last few days that I don't know how 
 I ever kept a canteen without one. Now any time that officers 
 come to my kitchen door to tease for cigarettes out of selling hours 
 I can gleefully tell them: 
 
 "Oh, but I wouldn't dare! The Major, you know! He's ex- 
 pressly forbidden it! If I did and he learned about it, he would 
 surely have me court-martialed!" 
 
 Of course when the boys come out of hours that is quite a dif- 
 ferent matter. 
 
 Then, too, as the Major is detested by the men, this furnishes 
 a common bond of sympathy. This morning a boy came to my 
 back door to borrow our axe in order to chop up the Major's wood. 
 
 "You can have it on one condition," I told him. 
 
 "What's that?" 
 
 "That you chop off the Major's head with it too." 
 
 GONDRECOURT, MAY 24. 
 
 I have always cherished a secret longing to have pets in my can- 
 teen: I have heard of huts that kept kittens and canaries, and once 
 I visited in one where an ant-eater, if not an habitue, was at least 
 a frequent and honoured guest and sat in the ladies' laps at the 
 movie-shows. At various times I have considered and regretfully 
 abandoned the project <of rabbits, a puppy, goldfish and a goat. 
 But till recently the nearest I have come to realizing my dreams 
 was when I found two large snails with black and yellow shells 
 by the roadside. I carried them into the canteen and set them 
 on a flowering branch in a vase. For two days the boys took a 
 casual interest. They nicknamed them Bill and Daisy. 
 
THE ARTILLERY u 9 
 
 "The* French eat snails you know," I told them. 
 
 "You don't say!" 
 
 "Yes and I had some myself the other day." 
 
 "Aw shucks! You didn't really, did you? Why, before I'd eat 
 them things! Say, what did they taste like anyway?" 
 
 "They would have tasted pretty good," I answered, "if only 
 while you were eating them you could have stopped thinking what 
 they were!" 
 
 One boy staring at my pets asked innocently; 
 
 "Will butterflies come but of those?" 
 
 After the snails our only livestock for a while was the canteen 
 rat, whom I have never met myself, but of whom I have heard 
 large rumours. The other day however I received a present of 
 two real pets. One of the Y. drivers had been out to a wood-cut- 
 ting camp in the forest. There an Italian lad had given him two 
 young birds in a beautiful cage he had made himself with nothing 
 but a pen-knife and a hot wire, and the driver brought the birds 
 to me. I don't know what sort they were but they were tame and 
 most amusing. To feed them was the immediate question. I 
 asked the boys to dig me some earth worms, but this they seemed 
 to consider beneath their dignity. Finally Neddy went out with 
 a can, only to return wormless. He couldn't find any, he declared. 
 I considered the advisability of asking the Top Sergeant for a 
 worm-digging detail, but decided against it. Then I confided my 
 troubles to my friend, the Warehouse Man. 
 
 "I know," he said, "HI ask Pierre." 
 
 Now Pierre is a little orphan refugee from the devastated dis- 
 trict. He fives with one of the families on the edge of the town 
 and I am afraid is none too well treated. When he isn't herding 
 the cows over the meadows, he is usually hanging about the ware- 
 house. A handsome, rather wild looking lad, dressed in a brown 
 cap and an old brown suit, I always think of him as Peter Pan. 
 The next morning Pierre appeared at my kitchen door with a can 
 full of long fat wriggly angleworms and had his pockets filled with 
 chocolate by way of recompense. Later I learned that the Ware- 
 
120 GONDRECOURT 
 
 house Man, not being able to pronounce the French word for birds, 
 had told Pierre that I wanted the worms for fishing, and Pierre 
 after taking one look at the bird-cage had gone straight back and 
 told the Ware-house Man that he was a liar. But cunning as my 
 pets were, I couldn't quite reconcile myself to the idea of keeping 
 wild birds in a cage. This morning I looked at Neddy: 
 
 "Let's let them out." 
 
 "Let's, " he answered. 
 
 Now the only pet I have in prospect is the baby wild boar which 
 a boy from one of the aviation camps nearby has promised me. 
 
 GONDRECOURT, JUNE 2. 
 
 Night before last, at half-past ten, as I was sitting here in my 
 billet trying to write a letter, I heard a voice calling me from the 
 street below. 
 
 "What is it?" 
 
 "It's Sergeant B . I've brought you a gas-mask." 
 
 "What!" 
 
 "There's a bunch of German planes headed in this direction. 
 They're afraid of gas bombs. We got the alarm out at the school." 
 
 I went down to the door. The sergeant gave me two gas-masks. 
 I gave one to the English lady who has the room across the hall 
 from me. Then I sat up waiting for the fun to begin. Nothing 
 happened. I went to sleep with the gas-mask lying on the pillow 
 beside me. 
 
 The next morning the Chief declared that all the Y. personnel 
 here must go to gas drill and have masks issued to them. Last 
 night they rounded us up for a lesson. We stood in a big circle at 
 the Gas School over on the hill while the gas instructors instructed 
 us and the boys looked on and grinned. Gas drill consists of 
 learning how to put on and take off your mask in the prescribed 
 and formal manner. It is all done by count. If you can't do it in 
 six seconds you are a casualty. As we popped our masks on and 
 pulled them off again the hair of all the ladies present proceeded 
 to slowly but relentlessly fall down their backs. The English Lady 
 
THE ARTILLERY 121 
 
 stood next to me. "It's all stuff and nonsense," I could hear her 
 muttering; " stuff and nonsense!" 
 
 The noncom instructors walked around and informed each and 
 all of us that if we didn't change the style of our coiffures we 
 certainly would get gassed. 
 
 "And now," said the instructor cheerfully, "I am going to send 
 you through the gas-house." 
 
 I looked desperately for a chance to sneak away, but there 
 wasn't any; besides, several boys from my batteries were watching. 
 
 "Oh this is nothing, nothing at all," declared the instructor. 
 "We've only got the tear gas on tonight. You will go through 
 once with your masks on, and then a second time without them." 
 
 We put our masks on and marched in a long line into the gas- 
 house. There was a table in the middle with candles burning on 
 it, which gleamed golden through the thick yellowish clouds of 
 gas. We marched around the table and out again. There was 
 nothing to it; the masks were a perfect protection. 
 
 "Now," said the instructor," you will go through without 
 your masks. This is to give you confidence in them." The idea 
 being that discovering how very nasty it was without one, you 
 would be taught to appreciate the blessing of a mask. I had an 
 inspiration. I would shut my eyes and hang on to the man in 
 front of me! But alas, for my pretty plan, the line was too long; 
 as I was about to enter: "Break the line here!" shouted the in- 
 structor. I had to lead the second line into the gas house. I made 
 double-quick time around that table. Just as I was about to dart 
 out the door an English noncom instructor seized my arm and, 
 halting me, started to explain something. 
 
 "Yes, yes," I choked. "It's all very interesting, but I don't 
 feel like stopping now!" I pulled away and made a break out the 
 door. I was weeping horribly. My eyes felt as if someone had 
 rubbed onion juice on them. They stung and burned for hours 
 afterward. 
 
 "The next time," said the instructor genially, "we'll put you 
 through the mustard gas." 
 
122 GONDRECOURT 
 
 Now in the mustard gas lesson a fellow must walk into the gas- 
 house without his mask, and put it on after he has entered. If he 
 fails to hold his breath long enough, or is nervous and clumsy and 
 so doesn't get his mask on quickly enough, why it means a trip to 
 the hospital for him. The mustard gas test is an ordeal which 
 causes the boys considerable apprehension. 
 
 "Oh thank you! You're very kind," I said. 
 
 As we took our departure down the lull I noticed a darky dough- 
 boy in a group who were drilling. He was in an awful fix; every 
 time he tried to fasten the nose-clip on his nostrils, it would slip 
 right off again! 
 
 When the next lesson is held I have decided to be among the 
 missing. 
 
 GONDRECOURT JUNE 9. 
 
 We have a new detail. His name is Jones. About six weeks 
 ago he was kicked by a mule and had three of his ribs broken. He 
 was sent to the hospital at Neufchateau. Learning that there was 
 a chance that his battery might be sent to the front shortly, he 
 pestered the docters until they let him go, his besetting fear 
 being that he might become separated from his outfit. He re- 
 turned three days ago. The next day he went out on the range as 
 one of a gun crew. Yesterday he came into the hut and collapsed. 
 The Secretary put him on his bed where he spent the rest of the 
 day. Moved by purely altruistic motives, the Secretary then 
 went to his captain and asked that Jones be assigned to the Y. as 
 a supplementary detail. Now this is very nice for Jones, but I am 
 not so sure whether it is nice for the Y. Jones, it seems, goes by 
 the nick-name of "Mildred." At one period of his past life he was 
 engaged in selling soap, a fact which inspires the boys to shout at 
 frequent intervals: "Three cheers for Jones! Soap! Soap! Soap!" 
 He brings echoes of his commercial training to the canteen counter. 
 No east-side shopkeeper was ever more anxious to make sales than 
 he. If a boy asks for tooth-paste when we happen to be out of it, 
 he is sure to answer: 
 
THE ARTILLERY 123 
 
 "No, but we have some very fine shoe polish." 
 
 Or if somebody wants talcum powder when talcum there is none: 
 
 "I'm sorry we're out of it today, but can't I interest you in 
 some tomato ketchup?" 
 
 Some day I think I shall write on essay on the psychology 
 of suggestion as demonstrated in canteen sales. Nothing, it 
 seems, ever really wins the boys' approval unless it bears the 
 label; "Made in the U. S. A." — nothing that is, with the possible 
 exception of eggs. Anything originating in Europe, from mustard 
 to matches, is looked upon with a certain amount of suspicion, 
 while goods coming from America are hailed with an enthusiasm 
 often quite inconsistent with their quality. The other day we put 
 a case of "Fig Newtons" on sale. The news flashed all over town. 
 As one of the boys said; "Why it was just as if General Pershing 
 or somebody's mother had come to camp." 
 
 Lately we have had for sale quantities of fat French cookies. 
 Some of the boys are mean enough to suggest that these were baked 
 before the war. 
 
 "Those cookies ought to wear service stripes," one boy declared. 
 
 So "Service Stripe Cookies" they have been ever since. 
 
 "They're all right for eating," observed another customer 
 solemnly, "but the Lord help you if you drop one on your toe!" 
 
 This morning when I reached the hut I found Jones languidly 
 washing dishes. 
 
 "Where's Neddy?" 
 
 "Neddy? Why he's in the guard-house." 
 
 For a moment I was goose enough to believe it, then I learned 
 that Neddy, with a lieutenant and some twenty other boys, had 
 all gone off, the day being Sunday, on single mounts to Domremy 
 to visit the birthplace of Jeanne D'Arc. Late in the afternoon the 
 little cavalcade returned. 
 
 "Neddy," I teased, "I hear you've been in the guard-house." 
 
 To my astonishment Neddy's mouth twitched, rnVeyes filled. 
 "I wish I'd never gone!" he blurted out. 
 
 "Why, what's the matter?" 
 
i2 4 GONDRECOURT 
 
 Then the whole pitiful tale was unfolded. Neddy hadn't any 
 money, not a clacker, and being too shy to ask for a loan, he had 
 gone on the trip with empty pockets. 'He hadn't been able to buy 
 himself a bite of dinner. But that wasn't what hurt. What hurt 
 was that he couldn't purchase any souvenirs for his girl, and there 
 had been so many enticing ones! 
 
 "Gee," he moaned, "but that's an awful place for a feller to go 
 who hasn't any money." 
 
 Then, just as the last straw of misery, his horse had been taken 
 sick on the way home! 
 
 We are going through one of those painful periods of pecuniary 
 depletion which are periodic in the army, the inevitable prelude 
 to pay-day. In Battery A there are two lads whom I have privately 
 dubbed Tweedledum and Tweedledee. They are both short, roly- 
 poly and always smiling and they are absolutely inseparable. When 
 either of them buys anything at the canteen he always buys double; 
 two packets of cigarettes, two "bunches" of gum, two cups of hot 
 chocolate "one for me and one for my friend" as the stock phrase 
 goes. This morning I received a shock. Tweedledum asked for 
 one bar of chocolate and one package of cigarettes. 
 
 "What's the matter?" I asked, thinking alarmedly of how in 
 the immortal poem "Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have 
 a battle," — "You and your buddy haven't quarrelled, have you?" 
 
 "No ma'am, oh no indeed ma'am! It's just that it's an awful 
 long ways from pay-day! " 
 
 Later I saw them carefully dividing the purchases between them. 
 I leaned over the counter, beckoned to Tweedledee. 
 
 "You boys go around to the back door, but don't let anybody 
 see you!" 
 
 At the back door I gave them each a slice of Snow's latest lemon 
 pie. 
 
 Tonight the Major suddenly made his appearance in the kitchen 
 to find Snow, Neddy and myself all sitting on the floor sorting out 
 rotten oranges. Snow and Neddy faded away out the back door, 
 but I stood my ground. For once his Majorship was pleased to be 
 
THE ARTILLERY 125 
 
 gracious. He complimented me on the improvement in the appear- 
 ance of my kitchen. Indeed we did look pretty fine, Neddy 
 having just covered the shelves with newspapers whose edges 
 he had cut into beautiful fancy scalloping. 
 
 " What do you do with those over-ripe oranges?" 
 
 "Put them in a box outside the back door." 
 
 "Well? What then?" 
 
 "The French children do the rest, sir." 
 
 But the boys are more incensed than ever against the Powers 
 That Be. They have been writing too many letters of late for the 
 censor's comfort. So yesterday at Retreat the order was read out 
 that no boy might write more than two letters and one postal card 
 per week! 
 
 GONDRECOURT, JUNE 13. 
 
 The School has closed. It is common knowledge that the two 
 batteries will soon join their respective regiments at the front. 
 Curiously enough, here with the artillery I have never had that 
 same feeling of closeness to the war which I had when I was with 
 the doughboys. The attitude of the men here is so much more 
 detached, impersonal. I fancy this is because, however dangerous 
 their work may be, they do not look forward to any actual physical 
 conflict. It is the imaginative image of "Heinie" with a bayonet 
 thrusting at his breast which makes the front so vivid in antici- 
 pation to the doughboy. 
 
 But now with the news from Chateau Thierry there is a certain 
 tenseness everywhere. One feels that the hour is close at hand 
 when every man that Uncle Sam has in France may be needed. 
 The barking of the guns at practice has taken on a new significance. 
 Yesterday indeed it just missed implying tragedy. Shortly after 
 the jarring thunder of the "75s" had started our dishes in the 
 kitchen to rattling, came a frantic message by telephone. A party 
 of engineers were surveying for the narrow-gauge railway just 
 beyond the hill over which the battery was shooting. One shell 
 had narrowly missed them. 
 
126 GONDRECOURT 
 
 Today an aviator in a little Spad machine came down at our 
 back door. He had lost his way, exausted his gas, and was forced 
 to descend. He had thought he was over Germany so his relief 
 on finding himself among friendly faces may be imagined. But 
 aviation doesn't mean what it used to any more to us. We have 
 lost our aviator. Shortly after I came to Gondrecourt we began 
 to have an aerial visitor. Every few days about sundown he would 
 appear; flashing up over the eastern hill horizon, to circle the big 
 open drill ground, dipping, soaring, playing all manner of madcap 
 tricks just for the sheer joy of it, now he would sweep so low as 
 almost to touch the ridgepole of the hut, then up, up again with a 
 rush, waving his hand to us below as we waved and shouted with 
 all our might up at him. The whole camp would turn out to see; 
 it was one of the events of the day. "It's Lufberry," some one told 
 me. Not long ago we read in the paper that Major Lufberry had 
 been killed. We waited in suspense. Had it really been he? Would 
 our aviator never come again? Night after night we watched for 
 him; he never came. 
 
 The fields about, which have been golden with buttercups and 
 primroses, white with daisies, and purple with flowers whose names 
 I do not know, are now crimsoning with poppies. "Artillery 
 flowers," the boys call them. They pick them and stick them 
 jauntily in their overseas caps, or in great bunches, bring them 
 to me to brighten the canteen. 
 
 Since the boys are going soon I have been trying desperately 
 to make them extra special goodies; candy, stuffed dates, frosted 
 cookies, and — what pleases them as much as anything — hard- 
 boiled eggs. It has been a revelation to me here in France, the 
 American appetite for eggs. The boys will walk miles to get them; 
 they will cheerfully pay as high as two dollars a dozen for them. I 
 buy twelve dozen at a time, carry them out to the canteen and boil 
 them in the dish-pan. Placed on sale they disappear in the wink- 
 ing of an eye, and then the cry is always, "Ain't you got no more?" 
 Sometimes I take Neddy with me on my shopping expeditions; 
 Neddy carries my market basket, smokes his pipe and looks as 
 
THE ARTILLERY 127 
 
 pleased as Punch. Today in our Quest we stopped in at a store 
 kept by two extremely pretty Mademoiselles. As we entered we 
 were greeted by peals of girlish laughter. In a chair in the corner 
 sat a tired M. P. fast asleep, his mouth wide-open; between his 
 lips one of the pretty girls had just at that moment popped a 
 round ripe strawberry. 
 
 GONDRECOURT, JUNE l8. 
 
 Besides the American Camp Hospital there is a French Hospital 
 at Gondrecourt, a place with a hint of old-world flavour to it, the 
 nursing being done by Sisters of Charity. Here through some 
 freak of chance a week ago arrived sixteen Tommies from the Eng- 
 lish front, after having travelled half over the map of France. 
 They were none too pleased to find themselves in a French Hospi- 
 tal and several, being walking cases, straightway deserted and 
 sneaked over to the American Hospital only to be regretfully re- 
 turned again. They have a little Algerian in a red fez with them 
 whom they have nicknamed "Charlie Chaplin." Although inter- 
 course between them is restricted entirely to sign language, the 
 Tommies have adopted Charlie as their mascot and Charlie follows 
 them about just like a dog. 
 
 My friend the English Lady, having little to do in her canteen 
 since the School closed, has appointed herself as a sort of foster- 
 mother to the whole cockney brood. She acts as interpreter and 
 sometimes as intercessor, for the Tommies are impatient of the 
 hospital discipline and cause the authorities frequent anxiety, 
 helps the Sisters out in nursing them and, best of all, makes them 
 tea at four o'clock or thereabouts, accompanying it with bread 
 and butter sandwiches. Frankly, the Tommies think that they 
 are little short of starved on the French Hospital rations, and the 
 tea helps. When they can they sneak over to the American Hos- 
 pital and beg a meal there, but such excursions are frowned upon 
 by those in authority. 
 
 Yesterday the English Lady gave a tea party for the Tommies 
 in her canteen. She arranged to have a truck go fetch them. To 
 her astonishment, instead of one, two trucks appeared and instead 
 
128 GONDRECOURT 
 
 of just the Englishmen, the whole hospital that was able to stand 
 on two legs or one arrived with them; big black Algerians and Mo- 
 roccans in every shade of duskiness and poilus by the half score. 
 The hut was crowded, there weren't enough chairs to go around. 
 The English Lady sent out a hurry call to bring up the reserves 
 in refreshments. Neddy and I came over from our hut with our 
 arms full of cups; more water was put on to boil for the tea, new 
 packages of biscuits opened. Then while the water heated the 
 English Lady took all the liveliest ones out for a walk through the 
 Chateau grounds, while " Skipper", her detail, who is a clever 
 pianist, entertained the rest with music. During the playing one 
 enormous Algerian, as black as night, stared fascinated at the piano, 
 then edged slowly nearer and nearer to finally lay one incredulous 
 finger, with infinite caution on one of the end keys. He had evi- 
 dently never seen such a thing before, and more than half suspected 
 it was all magic. 
 
 Then the water boiled and we made the tea and carried cups 
 and bowls of it around with canned milk and commissary sugar. 
 The Frenchmen, true to type, with the scarcity of sugar in mind 
 would only take one lump, until you invited them to have another, 
 when each, with evident pleasure, took a second. As we could 
 only muster six teaspoons between our two canteens to supply the 
 whole company, we had to pass the spoons from guest to guest 
 allowing each man just long enough for a good stir and then on to 
 the next. The men with wounded arms got their neighbors to 
 stir for them. With the tea we served sandwiches; these were a 
 special treat to the poilus because they were made with American 
 army bread. Now to my mind our white army bread is very poor 
 and tasteless stuff in comparison with the grey well-flavored French 
 war-bread, but the French, probably on account of the novelty, 
 prize highly any scraps of the pain Americain that they can obtain. 
 "Why, they eat it just like cake!" one boy said to me. Besides 
 the sandwiches, there were little cookies and candies and cigarettes 
 and finally, the gift of an American officer who happened in, an 
 orange for each man to take home with him. 
 
THE ARTILLERY 129 
 
 When the tea was finished it was time for the guests to go. 
 Crowded into the trucks they rolled out through the Chateau 
 gates, the poilus smiling and waving their good hands, while the 
 Tommies raised a ragged cheer. 
 
 As Neddy and I returned to our canteen we paused at the 
 door of one of the barracks to listen to the band producing pan- 
 demonium within. This band is the pet project of Battery D, 
 the dearest hope of Corporal R. who is theatrical producer, 
 impresario, librettist, base soloist, and band leader for the bat- 
 tery. The instruments were finally assembled some ten days ago. 
 The one thing required of a member seemed to be that he had 
 never played that particular sort of an instrument before. For 
 the last ten days the band has been practicing, mostly in the Y. 
 They have always played the same tune, yet I have never been 
 able to decide what that tune was. Now that the battery is going 
 to the front, the instruments must be put in store and our bud- 
 ding band disbanded almost before it had begun. The instruments 
 are to be interned at Abainville, the town next door. When the 
 day comes to relinquish them the band is going to march all the 
 way from Gondrecourt to Abainville in state, playing their one 
 tune over and over. 
 
 Tonight Corporal R. sat on a barrel in the kitchen polishing 
 his French horn with the Secretary's pink tooth-paste. It made 
 excellent brass-polish he had discovered. 
 
 "It's too bad you can't take that band of yours up front/' 
 remarked Snow. 
 
 "What for?" 
 
 "'Cause it sure would make the boys feel like fighting." 
 
 Gondrecourt June 22. 
 The boys have gone! We saw the last battery off on the train 
 tonight. The guns were loaded on flat cars, horses and men 
 lodged together in the box cars, the boys sleeping under the 
 horses' very noses and in danger of being nipped, it seemed to me, 
 by an ill-tempered beast. The boys who were to sleep with the 
 
ISO 
 
 GONDRECOURT 
 
 guns on the flat cars would be much better off I thought; they had 
 made themselves cozy little nests of straw underneath the gun- 
 carriages. Some of the boys in the box cars, I was pained to ob- 
 serve, had smuggled in bottles with them. 
 
 The English Lady and I had arrived at the station none too 
 soon. We had no more than walked the length of the train, in- 
 specting each car and wishing every boy Good-bye and Good- 
 luck when the engine whistled and was off. We stood on the 
 platform and waved to the boys who leaned from their cars and 
 waved back until a curve in the track cut off our sight. 
 
 These last few days have been hectic. Wednesday was my 
 birthday. Neddy found it out and told the boys. They had 
 observed that I didn't have any raincoat; indeed rainy nights 
 I was always embarrassed by the offer of half a dozen different 
 rubber coats and ponchos to go home in; so they decided, — bless 
 them! — to supply this lack. A crowd of noncoms went downtown; 
 they took along one boy with them as a cloak model because he 
 was about my height and " looked like a girl"; and they made him 
 try on every raincoat in Gondrecourt. Finally they selected one, 
 brought it back and made a ceremonious presentation. The 
 raincoat is a beauty, and ever since I have worn it every day, 
 rain or shine, just to show them how much I thought of it. 
 
 It was hard to part with little Neddy. The Secretary presented 
 him with a farewell pipe. I clasped around his neck a chain 
 bearing a little silver cross; it was to keep him safe, body and soul 
 from harm. He was almost moved to tears. The Secretary and 
 I, he told me, had been "like a little papa and a daddy to him," 
 and then, flushing, joined in my laughter. 
 
 At the last moment one of the D Battery cooks came stealthily 
 to the back door. 
 
 "Me an the other fellers in the kitchen," he confided sotto 
 voce, " we wanted to do something to show you folks how much 
 we thought of you. So we just made up our minds to send yer 
 this." 
 
 This was a ten pound can of issue bacon. 
 
THE ARTILLERY 131 
 
 The Secretary leaves tomorrow for Paris. He is going in order 
 to buy himself some new clothes. It seems that all his belongings 
 entrusted to the local laundresses disappeared one by one until 
 he found himself reduced to a single set. Last night he washed 
 these out himself and put them in the oven to dry. When he 
 remembered them this morning it was to find nothing left but a 
 little cinder heap. 
 
 The camp, for the present at least, is to be abandoned; the hut, 
 for the army wishes to use the barracks elsewhere, torn down. 
 In a few days the little Artillery School Canteen will be nothing 
 but a memory. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ABAINVILLE 
 
 THE ENGINEERS 
 
 Abainville July i. 
 
 "Abainville is going to be bombed off the face of the map." 
 Every time anyone has mentioned Abainville in my hearing during 
 the last six weeks they have wound up with some such prophecy 
 as this. Abainville is an engineering camp, Abainville is the start- 
 ing-point for the narrow-gauge system that is to supply a certain 
 sector of the American front. Already the great car shops have 
 been built and stand gaunt and staring with more glass in their 
 glittering sides than I have seen on this side of the Atlantic. It 
 is these shops in particular that are held to be such shining marks 
 for enemy aircraft. Anyway we have this comfort that if the Boche 
 gets us we will all go together, for the town is so tiny that if a bomb 
 hit it anywhere, it would wreck the major part of the village and 
 there isn't a single cellar in the whole vicinity! 
 
 Just at present Abainville is in a state of suspense. There is 
 some question among those in high places as to whether after all 
 the site, for such extensive operations as have been planned, is 
 well selected. Work on the narrow-gauge goes on, but the work 
 on the shops has been suspended. Everyone is anxiously awaiting 
 the decision. 
 
 The hut, which is on the far edge of the camp, is a huge empty 
 shell, for work on this too has been stopped pending developments. 
 Up till the day I arrived the Y. was doing business in a tent near 
 the highway, but being notified that the engineers were going to 
 run a railway through that spot the next day, they had moved 
 out and over to the unfinished hut in a hurry. 
 
 My billet has a fine central location,— at the corner of La Grande 
 
THE ENGINEERS 133 
 
 Rue and the national highway that runs through the town. My 
 window overlooks what approximates the town square, an open 
 dusty space, bounded on the south by the principal cafe, on the 
 east by the butcher's shop, on the west by manure-heaps and on 
 the north by my billet. In this square, it appears, all the village 
 pig-killings take place. It is incredible and painful how many pigs 
 of a marketable maturity a town no larger than Abainville can 
 produce. Arguing from the frequency of the pig-killings I am con- 
 vinced that if a census were taken Abainville would be found to 
 contain more pigs than people. 
 
 Further down la Grande Rue one comes to the church and the 
 town-hall. Upstairs in the Mairie my co-worker, Miss S., has her 
 billet. Downstairs is the village school and the living apartments 
 of the schoolmaster's family, refugees from the invaded territory. 
 I peeped in at the empty schoolroom yesterday: on the wall was 
 a large pictorial chart designed to impress upon the infant mind 
 the advantages of drinking beer, cider and wine, rather than the 
 more potent alcohols; a lesson vividly demonstrated by a series 
 of cuts portraying a pair of guinea pigs. The guinea pig who in- 
 dulged in cognac and kindred beverages was depicted in successive 
 stages of inebriation until at the end he is shown expiring in all 
 the horrors of delirium, while the prudent guinea pig who took 
 nothing stronger than vin, Mere et cidre is pictured first in a state 
 of mild and genial intoxication, and then the "morning after" 
 with all the zest of a good digestion and a clear conscience, break- 
 fasting on a sober cabbage leaf. 
 
 The church next door to the Mairie is remarkable for nothing 
 except the peculiar sound like a wheezing snore which may be 
 heard every evening issuing from the belfry. At first this sound 
 was a mystery to us. I inquired of Madame; she was blank. 
 
 "Perhaps," I suggested remembering how in medieval lore evil 
 spirits were reputed to haunt church towers, "perhaps it is the 
 devil in the belfry." 
 
 "But no!" cried Madame scandalized. "The devil doesn't live 
 in Abainville!" 
 
i 3 4 ABAINVILLE 
 
 "To be sure," I amended hastily, "the devil is a Boche! He 
 lives at Berlin." 
 
 11 Mais, out, out, ouil " 
 
 But now the riddle has been read. The devil in the belfry is 
 in reality an ancient owl, une chouette, who has inhabited the church 
 tower time out of mind. 
 
 There is a Salvation Army hut here, the first one I have seen. 
 It is down by the main road; the canteen occupies one end of a 
 barracks, which is used as a store-house, then there is an ell con- 
 taining the kitchen. The staff comprises one man and two women; 
 they are pleasant people, "real home folks." Two or three times 
 a week, for supplies are hard to obtain, they make pie or cake or 
 doughnuts. On these nights, passing the hut on our way back from 
 mess, one sees a long Une stretching down the road, waiting pa- 
 tiently for the chance to get a piece of pie "like Mother used to 
 make." Our relationships are cordial. We help each other out 
 in the matter of change. They come to our hut for sweet chocolate 
 and movies; we go to them, when our consciences will permit, for 
 doughnuts. I only wish that one of their huts could be in every 
 camp in France. 
 
 Abainville, July 8. 
 By courtesy of a group of officers we are messing at a house 
 with a particularly noisome front-door gutter and the Most Beauti- 
 ful Girl in France to wait on us. La Belle Marguerite, as I always 
 think of her, is tall and stately with a lovely gracious bearing and 
 a sensitive, responsive face; what's more, she only paints a little. 
 She affects to speak no English but I suspect she understands a 
 good deal. At meal times when we are present the officers never 
 look twice at her, but any evening that one happens past the house 
 one can see two cigarette ends gleaming from the darkness just 
 inside the mess-room window: the officers are making up for lost 
 time. Yesterday La Belle looked so pale and distraite at dinner- 
 time that I was quite distressed, fancying heart-break. "Mademoi- 
 selle Marguerite is sad," I told Madame my hostess. Madame 
 
THE ENGINEERS 135 
 
 immediately went forth on a visit of investigation. "Mademoi- 
 selle has the tooth-ache!" she announced on her return. Today 
 at dinner, having finished our salade, we waited in vain for dessert. 
 La Belle Marguerite, usually so prompt and so efficient, simply 
 did not appear. After waiting until I grew tired I gave it up and 
 left. Passing by the kitchen door I glanced inside. In front of 
 the hearth stood Marguerite and a handsome Russian officer, and 
 oh! the coquetry of her eyes, the seduction of her smiling, scarlet 
 lips! It was evident that the mess in the next room was wiped as 
 clean from her mind as if it never had been! Whether my mess- 
 mates ever got their dessert or not I haven't heard. 
 
 Besides La Belle Marguerite, the one unique feature of our mess 
 is a certain set of plates. These are French picture plates with 
 jokes on them. The jokes are all of a gustatory nature and pertain 
 to things which most people would prefer not to think about while 
 they are eating. One rather striking design represents the pro- 
 prietor of a Swiss resort hotel delicately sniffing a platter of fish 
 as he says to the waitress: 
 
 "These trout are passe. Keep them for the customers who 
 have colds in their heads." 
 
 On another an irate diner is exclaiming over an item on his 
 bill: 
 
 "Three francs for a chicken! What's that?" 
 
 "Why that was the little chicken that Monsieur found in his 
 
 egg!" " 
 
 There is always an anxious moment of suspense whenever a 
 guest comes to dinner, a moment in which one peeps furtively out 
 of the corners of one's eyes to see whether the newcomer has 
 noticed the picture on his plate, and if so, whether he has got the 
 point. Sometimes the guest will ask to have the text translated 
 for him and then there is an awkward pause. 
 
 The question of what to serve at the canteen is a vexed one 
 these days as it is quite too hot for chocolate. By scouring the 
 country we managed to procure several cases of lemons, and then 
 found our work for the day laid out, — just squeezing them. A few 
 
136 ABAINVILLE 
 
 days ago, however, a shipment of bottled fruit juices arrived at 
 the warehouse; by mixing this syrup with water and a small 
 amount of lemon a delicious drink can be obtained. The boys 
 have dubbed it a dozen different names, " Camouflage vin rouge" 
 being one of them, but "pink lemonade" is the title it commonly 
 passes under. Already it has become famous and every drunk in 
 camp if questioned as to how he came to be in that condition will 
 unblushingly assert that it was through drinking "that Y. M. C. A. 
 pink lemonade." 
 
 If we could only get ice! Yesterday I investigated the pos- 
 sibilities, to find that if one were very ill and in desperate need of 
 it, could produce a certificate to that effect signed by half a dozen 
 doctors, approved by the Sanitary Inspector, passed upon by the 
 local Board of Health and sealed by the Mayor with the sanction 
 of the Town Council, one could, by means of this document, 
 procure at the brewery at Gondrecourt a piece of ice about as 
 large as a small-sized egg. Somehow it doesn't seem quite worth 
 the trouble. 
 
 Lacking ice, we do our best with freshly ' drawn water which 
 comes pleasantly cool from the deep wells drilled by American 
 engineers to supply the camp, — when it does come. But often 
 just when the thirsty ones are crowding thickest you make a 
 frantic dash to the faucet only to find that the supply has been cut 
 off: there is not enough water in the wells, it seems, to supply all 
 the engines and pink lemonade besides for the whole camp. Then 
 there is nothing to do but to take a pail and set out. After climb- 
 ing over a couple of freight trains and ploughing through a dozen 
 cinder heaps one comes at last to the pump-house, where one may, 
 by assuming an ingratiating manner, beg a pailful, — strictly 
 against the regulations, — from the man at the pump. And then, 
 after all, what use is a mere pailful of lemonade in a thirsty camp? 
 
 Abainville, July io. 
 We have stopped fighting the war and have gone into the movie 
 business. For two days all work has been suspended while the 
 
THE ENGINEERS 137 
 
 camp has posed before the camera. They are making a big prop- 
 aganda film for use in the States, entitled " America's Answer to 
 the Hun" and Abainville and the Abainville-Sorcy narrow-gauge 
 is to be part of that answer. "Camouflage pictures" sneer the 
 boys, and camouflage pictures I blush to say they frankly are. 
 For on the screen the peaceful valley through which the narrow- 
 gauge is being built is to masquerade as a field of battle. Cam- 
 ouflaged engineers, armed and equipped as infantry will march 
 valiantly across the landscape, while other engineers in helmets, 
 with their gas-masks at the alert, are plying their picks and shovels 
 amid the smoke of camouflage shrapnel; the climax being attained 
 when the helmeted engineers effect a lightning repair feat by 
 bridging over a carefully dug camouflage shell-hole. 
 
 Yesterday I saw a photograph cut from the Sunday Supplement 
 of one of America's best known and most respected newspapers. 
 Underneath the picture ran the text, "American boys playing 
 base-ball on a field in France where shells fall daily." To my 
 certain knowledge the only shells that have ever fallen on that 
 field or within many miles of it are peanut shells. For the field in 
 the picture is most plainly and indisputably the Y. athletic field 
 at Gondrecourt. Will I ever, I wonder, recover my pre-war faith 
 in newspapers and photographs and movies and such things? 
 
 But now we have done our turn before the camera, it's back to 
 work again and very hard work at that, for the officers are de- 
 termined to set a record for all the world in laying track. Already 
 the little railway has shot ahead at an amazing rate; though 
 whether track laid in such a hurry is really going to make for speed 
 in the long run is a question on which the trainmen, sipping their 
 pink lemonade at the canteen counter^ have their own opinions. 
 For no train, it seems, can make the run at present without leav- 
 ing the track at least once during the journey. " Sun- trouble " 
 say 'the officers, which means, being interpreted, that the heat of 
 the sun's rays has warped the rails. "Sun trouble nothin,'" 
 grunt the men. "It's just not takin' the time to do the job decent." 
 When the " sun trouble " doesn 't serve to throw a train off the track, 
 
i 3 S ABAINVILLE 
 
 the French children see to it that the same effect is produced by 
 the simple expedient of dropping spikes in between the ends of 
 adjoining rails. 
 
 Yesterday I was talking with an engineer from Tours. He and 
 his fireman had just brought a Belgian engine up from that city 
 for use in the Abainville yards. The attitude of the train crew 
 who received it was plainly "thank-you-for-nothing-sirs!", Bel- 
 gian engines being none too popular with A. E. F. railroad men. 
 The two crews sat in the hut for a long while holding a symposium 
 over the Belgian engine's oddities; at last the home crew departed, 
 looking very glum. In the course of my subsequent conversation 
 with the visiting engineer I happened to ask: 
 
 "Would you vote for Pershing for president?" 
 
 "No sir!" he answered emphatically. "All the railroad men 
 over here have got it in for him." He went on to explain. 
 
 French railroad engineers are allowed a certain amount of 
 coal and oil with which to make their runs; for anything that they 
 can save out of this, they are reimbursed. This idea appealed to 
 the American train crews who were attached to the French. They 
 set to work and saved, — far more than the French were able to! 
 The French proceeded to depreciate the quality of coal allowed 
 them, instead of giving them half dust and half briquets, they 
 gave them three-quarters dust and finally all dust yet still the 
 Americans were able to beat the French at saving. And each man 
 in fancy was rolling up a tidy little sum for himself. 
 
 "And then," continued my informant, "Pershing came out and 
 said that we weren't here to make money off the French, but to 
 help them, so we weren't to get the money for all the coal and 
 oil we had saved after all. And that's why there isn't a railroad 
 man in France who has any use for him." 
 
 How much of politics could be reduced, I wonder, to a mere 
 question of pocket-book? 
 
 He went on to tell me among other things that although a 
 French conductor would be furious if you stopped a train in the 
 middle of a run for any other reason, if you just said; "Come 
 
THE ENGINEERS 139 
 
 on, oF top, and have a bottle of vin rouge on me," he was all beam- 
 ing acquiescence. "Just imagine," he concluded disgustedly, 
 "stopping a main-line train in America so the crew could go into 
 a saloon and get a drink!" 
 
 Abainville, July 14. 
 
 The Bastille has fallen! We celebrated its fall today with much 
 enthusiasm. Ostensibly in order to signalize the Franco- American 
 Alliance, the festivities in reality were planned as propaganda of 
 a different sort. Surreptitiously but quite definitely the end and 
 aim of them was to flatter the Major. 
 
 Now the Major in command of the camp at Abainville is what — 
 if he weren't a major — one would be tempted to term a "hard- 
 boiled guy." Being of the old school he looks with a jaundiced 
 eye at all welfare organizations, particularly, I gather, at the femi- 
 nine element in them. He calls the college men in the regiment 
 "sissy boys" and believes in treating them to an extra dose of pick 
 and shovel. What's more, it is an open secret 'that he would like 
 to swap the whole outfit of them for a regiment of Mexican des- 
 peradoes, with whom he has had considerable experience. As the 
 boys say, he speaks three languages, English, Mexican and Pro- 
 fane, and of the three he is the most proficient in the last. 
 
 So in view of all this, the Fourteenth of July celebration was 
 gotten up chiefly in order to give the Major a chance to appear in all 
 his glory and make a speech, this being, it is claimed, one of the 
 surest ways to tickle the vanity and so win the heart of a man. 
 
 We decorated the half-finished hut with flags and bunting, 
 screening the yawning cavern back of the stage with broad strips 
 of red, white and blue cheesecloth. Then we officially invited the 
 whole town to attend. The whole town, from grandmother to 
 baby, came dressed in their Sunday best. The programme started 
 with an informal concert by an impromtu jazz orchestra varied 
 by some Harry Lauder impersonations delivered by an unexpected 
 youth who somehow strayed on to the stage. For a few moments 
 we were painfully uncertain as to whether the effect produced was 
 due just to Harry Lauder or to vin rouge, finally deciding that a 
 
i 4 o ABAINVILLE 
 
 share at least of the credit should be allowed the latter. Fortu- 
 nately Harry's appearance on the stage was short; he left us fondly 
 hoping that the French hadn't realized anything was amiss. 
 
 The Major of course opened the formal programme. He read 
 his speech. It wasn't a bad speech, representing, as it did, the 
 combined efforts of one captain, two lieutenants and the clerk in 
 the Headquarters office, and was sufficiently fiery in its reference 
 to the Germans to be quite in keeping with the Major's character. 
 The Major sat down amid thunderous applause. The Secretary 
 had vainly tried to arrange to have a little girl present him with a 
 bouquet at the end of his speech : perhaps it was just as well the way 
 it was, — a bouquet might have proved embarrassing to the Major. 
 When the applause had died down the Major's interpreter stepped 
 out and gave a brief summary of the address in French for the bene- 
 fit of the villagers. Then we had the Mayor of Abainville and after 
 him the Cure, looking very handsome in his beautiful French 
 officer's uniform. They both delivered flowery speeches, enlarging 
 upon the mutual affections of the two nations, which were trans- 
 lated briefly into English by the interpreter for the benefit of the 
 Americans. 
 
 After the speeches the school children, who had been fidgeting 
 about like so many little crickets in their front-row seats, swarmed 
 up on the stage and, standing in a long line with flag-bearers at 
 each end, sang the Marseillaise in their funny shrill little voices. 
 Then we all sang the Star Spangled Banner, and after that there 
 was a movie. As luck would have it, instead of an adventure of 
 the western plains, fate had sent us a romance of high finance. 
 We had asked the interpreter to announce the titles of the pictures 
 in French for the benefit of the villagers but when he discovered 
 that this meant making clear the intricacies of the New York Stock 
 Exchange to the mind of the French peasant, he baulked and bolted. 
 It must have been just about as intelligible to them as Coptic, 
 yet they sat tight and at least looked interested. 
 
 Everybody considers the affair a success. The Secretary was 
 in high spirits over the evening. 
 
THE ENGINEERS 141 
 
 "The Major was pleased, I'm sure," he declared. "As for the 
 French, it was an occasion which they will always remember. Why 
 it was just like transplanting the whole village there. The grand- 
 mother and the babies, the mayor, the priest, the school-teacher 
 and his scholars; every village institution was represented!" 
 
 "Everything," I said — I was tired, "but the pig-killings." 
 
 Abainville, July 20. 
 
 I have just established what I think must be the smallest "hut" 
 in France, and such fun as it was doing it! 
 
 There is a detachment of about a hundred engineers stationed, 
 while they build the narrow-gauge railway, at a little village about 
 ten miles to the north, called Sauvoy. The other day I went with 
 the Athletic Director in a side-car to take them some base-ball 
 equipment. The boys I found were billeted in dark dingy 'lofts 
 and had to eat their meals, rain or shine, sitting just anywhere in 
 the streets of the village. The thought came to me; why shouldn't 
 they too have a Y? I approached the French Town Major, 
 taking the barber-interpreter with me to lend me both moral and 
 lingual support. After some uncertainty he admitted that there 
 was a room which might be made to serve, a room over a stable to 
 be sure, but a good room for all that; the rent would be thirteen 
 sous a day, — I snapped it up. 
 
 Yesterday with all my materials assembled I started out for 
 Sauvoy again. We began work a little before noon, myself and 
 four engineers. Before the afternoon was over we had changed a 
 filthy loft, its grimy walls covered with obscene scrawls, into as 
 cunning a little pocket-edition Y. as one could find I think in France. 
 Sweeping the dust and cobwebs from the rafters, we calcimined 
 the ceiling and walls a pretty creamy yellow; filled in the missing 
 panes with vitex'/hung curtains of beautiful blue and green chintz 
 at the windows; laid runners of the same across the tables lent with 
 the benches by the Major du Cantontnejit; jiecomted the walls, 
 half-dry as they were, with stunning French posters; built shelves 
 in the alcove corner where the built-in bed had been, filled them 
 
i 4 2 ABAINVILLE 
 
 with books, games and writing materials; hung two big green Jap- 
 anese lanterns from the beam in the center; and last of all put bowls 
 of the loveliest flowers, larkspurs and snapdragons, begged by the 
 boys from the village gardens, on the shelves and tables, together 
 with heaps of fresh magazines and the company victrola. In the 
 midst of all the scurry and hurry a red-faced frowsy Frenchwoman 
 marched in upon us. She stalked across the room and tried the 
 door which led into the hay-loft: we had nailed it fast. We must 
 open that 'door immediately, she declared, otherwise she could 
 not get the hay to feed the horse downstairs. I saw my pretty 
 room used as a passageway by a beery old termagant and my 
 heart sank. After some discussion, however, our visitor proposed 
 an alternative. If we would supply her with a ladder, she could 
 climb up into the loft from below. But how, I asked helplessly, 
 was I to get a ladder? One of the boys winked at me and disap- 
 peared; ten minutes later he was back dragging a ladder after him. 
 Our French friend was satisfied. 
 
 "But how did you get it?" I asked wonderingly. 
 
 He looked at me reprovingly. "In this Man's Army," he re- 
 marked, "you should learn not to ask such questions." 
 
 When the last touch had been bestowed there was still an hour 
 before the truck which was to take me home was slated for depar- 
 ture. Someone suggested a visit to the Chateau. So the Top 
 Sergeant, the barber-interpreter, the Town Major and I all set 
 out together. 
 
 The Chateau at Sauvoy is & fifteenth century Chateau, cut 
 out of an old picture-book, surrounded by a high wall and just 
 about big enough for two. One enters, oddly enough, through 
 the kitchen which is enormous and like a Dutch genre painter's 
 "Interior," with a cobble-stone floor, an eight-foot fireplace, 
 dried herbs and vegetables hanging from the rafters and every- 
 where on the long shelves, the soft gleam of pewter and the mellow 
 tones of old china-ware. From the kitchen one steps into a tiny 
 dining-room panelled in dark carved wood with a bird-cage, empty 
 now, built into the wall. Beyond this is the salon with a wonder- 
 
THE ENGINEERS 143 
 
 ful old tapestry stretched across one of its walls and some ex- 
 quisite Louis Quinze chairs in which kings and queens might have 
 sat. 
 
 But the best thing about the Chateau is the Chatelain, an old 
 French gentleman, eighty-nine years of age, the last of his family, 
 who lives all alone, except for one antique serving-woman, in this 
 beautiful dim old mansion, wears sabots, keeps bees for a living, 
 and every day of his life cuts from the journal the little daily 
 English lesson, pastes it in a tiny note-book, and then his poor 
 old eyes an inch from the paper, cons the words over and over, 
 reading them aloud with such a pronunciation! 
 
 "In three months," he told us proudly, "I am going to be an 
 American." 
 
 He related to us how in 1870 the town was invaded by the 
 Germans and he taken prisoner. But the Germans were gentlemen 
 then and treated him humanely; he couldn't understand what had 
 changed them to such savage beasts. He took us out and showed 
 us his precious bees. We went through the garden, a charming 
 place with little box hedges and rose bushes and currant bushes 
 and gooseberries all growing together in the true French style. 
 Beyond we came to an open oblong of greensward edged by trees 
 with fifty hives ranged around it, the hives, — of all quaint con- 
 ceits — being made like little Chinese houses, each one different 
 from the rest, each painted red and ( blue, a 1 bit shabby and worn 
 by time, but still gay and jaunty nevertheless. Monsieur guar- 
 anteed us that the bees wouldn't sting, they weren't bad bees he 
 said, so we consented to be led about to each hive in turn and 
 peered in through the little glass windows at the bees ^making 
 honey. Sad to say, this is a bad year for sweets and instead of 
 hundreds of pounds of honey, there will be scarcely one to sell. 
 
 We went back through the garden 'and here Monsieur must 
 gather a bouquet for 'me. Around and about the garden he hur- 
 ried, going to every bush in turn, putting his poor dim eyes down 
 into the very leaves of each, searching for just what he wanted; 
 and finally it was done, pink and white roses, red geraniums, 
 
144 ABAINVILLE 
 
 camomile and white pinks, made up in a little stiff bunch and tied 
 with a bit of scarlet string. Then he must present it with a deep 
 bow and a gallant speech "from an old Frenchman to line jolie 
 Americaine", while all the rest, including the ancient maid-servant 
 who had just returned from the fields with an apron full of clover 
 for the rabbits, stood about and applauded and cried "Vive la 
 France!" and then "Vive V Amerique!" in a quite truly stage 
 manner. 
 
 We left the little Y. in charge of a boy from the Medical Corps. 
 He has little to do except dispense pills to the French people, so 
 he was willing to look after it. 
 
 This morning word came in from Sauvoy that the Germans 
 bombed it last night. Luckily the bombs, evidently aimed at the 
 railroad, fell just outside the village and did no harm; but poor old 
 Monsieur must have gotten a bad fright. 
 
 Abainville, August i. 
 
 Abainville's future is at last assured. Work upon the hut 
 has been resumed. The buzz of barracks-building fills all the 
 place, the 'railroad yards gradually but relentlessly 'encroach; 
 little by little they are ruining the most beautiful poppy field in all 
 the world. 
 
 Meanwhile our family too has grown. A few days ago three new 
 companies of engineers arrived in town. These are draft troops 
 from Texas and Oklahoma, in camp for only a few weeks in the 
 States, shipped here directly from the base port, and so green to 
 France that they don 't even know what oui oui means. On the trip 
 here one of these boys, they tell, after gazing out the door of his 
 "side-door pullman" in silence half the morning, remarked dis- 
 gustedly; 
 
 "This is a hell of a country! " 
 
 "What's the matter?" 
 
 "Why all the stations have got the same name!" 
 
 "The hell they have! What's the name?" 
 
 "Sortie!" 
 
THE ENGINEERS 145 
 
 The Major in command of the new arrivals proves to be an old 
 and none too amicable acquaintance of our Major's, their mutual 
 esteem having been obscured by a law-suit some time in the past 
 which resulted in our Major's being forced to part with a consider- 
 able sum of money. To make himself more welcome the new 
 Major has introduced innovations. Up till now, in accordance 
 with our Major's theories, we have been a strictly business com- 
 munity, our energies concentrated chiefly upon what the boys 
 call P. and S. — pick and shovel. But now with the coming of the 
 new detachment we have blossomed out with all sorts of military 
 frills. Armed sentinels marching their beats in a military manner 
 fairly encumber the camp. One is halted and challenged a half- 
 dozen times on one's way home from the canteen at ten o'clock in 
 the evening. I am startled out of my dreams in the middle of the 
 night by shouts of, "Corporal of the Guard, Post Number Four!'' 
 under my very window. And the best part of it is that these 
 "Long Boys," never having had so much as the A-B-C of 
 military training, make the drollest imitations of real soldiers 
 that ever were. The atmosphere at Headquarters has of late, I 
 gather, been slightly tinged with electricity. But the boys belong- 
 ing to the older organizations in camp have been enjoying them- 
 selves to an unholy degree "stuffing" the new arrivals with ghastly 
 tales of air-raids, gas bombs, and aerial machine-gun barrages. 
 
 As in all huts, we have a big map of France tacked to the wall 
 where the boys can have easy access to it. After one of these maps 
 has been up a short while, it is always a simple matter when glanc- 
 ing at it, to locate one's self — one has only to look for a dirty 
 spot; a little later, countless more grimy fingers having in the 
 meantime been applied, one looks for the hole. Yesterday one 
 of our new friends came to me and asked: 
 
 "Please, 'Ma'am, could you tell me where that there place, 
 'No Man's Land' that they talk about in the papers is? I've 
 been a-lookin' an' a-lookin' an' I can't find it on the map nowhere." 
 
 Along with the new engineers Nanny arrived in town. Nanny 
 is an Alabama goat, smuggled on board the transport wrapped up 
 
i 4 6 ABAINVILLE 
 
 in one of the boys' overcoats. Her fleece is pure white and she is 
 fat as a little butter-ball. Already she is one of our most dis- 
 tinguished citizens. Possessed of an adventurous spirit, she 
 makes herself free of every house in town, being particularly fond 
 of climbing stairs and appearing at unsuspected moments in odd 
 corners of one's billet. Madame explains the attraction here: 
 "She smells an American, you see!" which is a quaint thought. 
 Nanny is the pet detestation of the Adjutant, for she has a pen- 
 chant for straying into his office and nibbling at every paper with- 
 in reach. Already several valuable documents have disappeared 
 down her greedy little throat. Last night, in revenge, one of the 
 boys in the Adjutant's office, armed with a pot of bright red paint, 
 painted Nanny in "dazzle" designs. Today she is a sight. 
 
 This morning I was puzzled to observe that a considerable 
 number of the newcomers were wearing pink tickets in their hats. 
 
 "What's that?" I asked. 
 
 " Them? Them's meal tickets! " They explained ; the report had 
 gone around that the chow of one of the companies was of super- 
 ior quality; immediately the chow line of that same company had 
 assumed an inordinate length. The mess sergeant, unable, since 
 the company was so new, to distinguish his own men from the 
 self-invited guests, had found it necessary to attach tags to the 
 company. 
 
 With the coming of the new engineers, the sale of one article 
 in stock has swelled to unprecedented quantities. One member of 
 the force is fairly kept busy from morning until night cutting off 
 chunks of chewing tobacco. Texas and Oklahoma, it seems, have 
 unlimited capacities for this commodity. Now with all due re- 
 spect to the honourable American tribe of chewers, this indulgence 
 raises a very delicate question for the canteen lady in whose 
 charge rests the appearance of the hut. The scrap-boxes are 
 already in a bad way, I frankly advocate spittoons, but our 
 detail, who is a very superior lad, known among his cronies as 
 "The Infant" because of his pink cheeks and innocently solemn 
 air, flatly refuses. There are some things, he declares, to which 
 
THE ENGINEERS 147 
 
 he will not stoop, and he grows very stiff and red in the face if I 
 hint at it. 
 
 "I have discussed the matter," he told me yesterday, "with 
 several very eminent chewers, and they all agree that there isn't 
 the slightest necessity for their behaviour!" 
 
 There may not be any necessity, — how am I to judge? But 
 there is a very actual and urgent state of affairs. And what is one 
 to do about it? 
 
 Abainville, August 13. 
 
 The hut is finished. Now if at any time Marshal Foch or Gen- 
 eral Pershing or President Poincare should happen this way, we 
 could say: Come in, gentlemen, and behold us; don't we look nice? 
 
 The main part of the hut, the big auditorium, is done in creamy 
 yellow and brown with rafters of bright blue, the windows hung 
 with curtains of sumptuous orange chintz. The writing-room is 
 blue and yellow too, with green and yellow curtains on which, 
 in a bower of branches, black-birds perch; runners of the same 
 material He across the writing tables, the practical advantage of 
 this pattern being that whenever anyone spills a bottle of ink on a 
 runner, it merely gives the effect of one more black-bird. In each 
 window of the writing-room is a little pot with a scarlet geranium, 
 while the walls of both writing-room and auditorium are bright 
 with beautiful French posters. 
 
 But the best of all the hut, to my mind at least, is the Tea Room, 
 — so-called until we think of something better to name it, — for the 
 Tea Room was my own particular pet scheme. According to the 
 plans, the ell behind the canteen counter was cut up into half a 
 dozen little rooms. By eliminating part of the central hall, the 
 "mess-room" and the "ladies' room" and moving the office out 
 to an unused corner by the movie machine booth, we got space 
 for a fair-sized room connected by a serving-window with the 
 kitchen. Our matched lumber having run short we used rough 
 lumber and covered it with burlap; each strip was a different weave 
 and texture, to be sure, but all the same it was burlap! The wood- 
 
148 ABAINVILLE 
 
 work and little tables we painted a bright green, hung vivid 
 green curtains at the windows, then, taking the covers of chewing 
 tobacco boxes, stained these green too, pasted in the centre of each 
 a bright little water-color reproduction cut from an English art 
 magazine, tacked them up on the walls, and voild! as pretty a 
 little room as could be found short of Paris! 
 
 In the Tea Room we serve pink lemonade, hot chocolate, jam 
 sandwiches, cookies and canned fruit. The boys are living on a 
 diet of what they call " goat's meat" at present; — whenever it is 
 time for a chow line to form you can hear a chorus of bleats and 
 baas hah across the camp, — and so sick of this have they become 
 that many will sup off chocolate and sandwiches in the Tea Room 
 by preference. Yesterday I took a chance and tried making a ten 
 gallon boiler full of raspberry tapioca pudding, using the bottled 
 fruit juice. At first the boys were inclined to be cautious. 
 
 "What do you call that?" 
 
 "How would raspberry slum do?" 
 
 "Well, I'll try anything once!" 
 
 But after the first taste it went all too fast. 
 
 "Say, are there any seconds on this?" 
 
 "Lady," said one lad solemnly to me, "with pudding like that 
 I could stay four years more in the army." 
 
 One of the divisions from the lines arrived in this area, a few 
 days ago, for a short period of rest. A number of the men are 
 encamped up on the hill near the old Artillery School and they 
 come straying down to our hut. Poor lads, it is pitiful to see how 
 wonderful it seems to them to be in a place that is clean and pretty. 
 
 "This looks like a bit of heaven to me," declared one boy. 
 
 Another, sitting in the Tea Room stirring his chocolate, com- 
 mented, 
 
 " Gee, this is a swell place in here. You ought ter get some fancy 
 name for it." 
 
 "What would you suggest?" 
 
 "Well I should think," he looked around, "you might call it 
 Canary Cottage." 
 
THE ENGINEERS 149 
 
 Yet occasionally I wonder if it really all pays, as when I pick 
 out the cigar butts which, in spite of the trash boxes beneath the 
 tables, the boys will persist in sticking in the vases of flowers and 
 planting in the geranium pots, or when, as last night, I catch a 
 fellow using one of the beautiful chintz runners from the tables 
 with which to wipe the mud off his boots. 
 
 Abainville, August 21. 
 Talk kills men. 
 
 Don't talk. The walls have ears. 
 
 Keep mum, let the guns talk for you. 
 
 Thus are we placarded. Every hut, every cafe, every garage, 
 every place of any sort where the A. E. F. may meet together and 
 indulge in conversation, now bears a board with some such legend 
 printed on it and after each terse warning is the terser admonition; 
 Read G. O. 39. A campaign of silence is on foot. These catchy 
 phrases, American variations on the classic French line: Taisez 
 vous, tnefiez vous, les oreilles ennemies vous ecoutent! — Be still, be- 
 ware, the ears of the enemy are listening! — are to be perpetual re- 
 minders to us that we are all too prone to gossip indiscreetly. 
 
 As to just what one may say and mustn't say, I for one confess, 
 not having read G. O. 39, that I am in a quandary. I find myself 
 hesitating before mentioning the fact that we had baked beans for 
 dinner. As for talking about the weather, why that leads naturally 
 to the subject of moonlight nights, and moonlight nights, as every 
 one knows, now imply not romance but air-raids and air-raids are 
 of course a tabooed topic. Indeed I am beginning to have a sneak- 
 ing conviction that perhaps it would be better to discard speech 
 entirely and take to conversing in dumb show. 
 
 Sometimes some small thing that comes to one's attention will 
 crystallize a difference between two races so sharply as to be start- 
 ling. This 'was impressed on me the other day by two posters. 
 Both the French land American authorities have recently issued 
 warnings to their soldiers concerning the practice of riding on the 
 
150 ABAINVILLE 
 
 tops of railroad cars, since this habit has led to a number of casual- 
 ties. The French poster reads something like this: 
 
 Whereas it has been brought to the attention of the Commissioner 
 of Railroads, that various accidents have occurred resulting from 
 the practice indulged in by soldiers of obtruding a portion or the 
 whole of their bodies beyond the limits of the car; it is urgently 
 requested that the soldiers in transit upon the railroad should 
 henceforth restrict themselves to the interior of the cars. 
 
 The American sign runs thus: 
 
 "If you want to see the next block, keep yours inside! Your 
 head may be hard but it's not as hard as concrete!" Pithily it 
 states the number of casualties resulting from this trick, explains 
 that the French bridges and tunnels only allow six inches clearance 
 above the top of the cars, and ends; 
 
 "Your life may not be worth anything to you, but it may cost 
 your country $10,000." 
 
 But the triumph of American sign art, a specimen of which hangs 
 in the Adjutant's office, is the gas-defense poster. It starts off 
 with the Gas School slogan: 
 
 "There are two classes of men in a gas attack, the quick and the 
 dead," proceeds to poetry: 
 
 "The hard-boiled guy said gas was bunk, 
 
 It couldn't hurt you, only stunk 
 
 The hard-boiled guy went up the line, 
 Fritz spilled the mustard good and fine; 
 And now some people wonder why 
 It's flowers for the hard-boiled guy," 
 
 and ends with the admonition that seems a little ironical to one 
 who must struggle to make green wood burn in a broken-down 
 French range; "Cook with it, don't croak with it." 
 
 To-day we put up a sign all of our own over the counter. For 
 some reason, transportation probably, there has been a most dis- 
 tressing lack of supplies in this area recently. Not only are we 
 suffering, but the Salvation Army and even the sales commis- 
 
THE ENGINEERS 151 
 
 saries have all been stricken with the same famine. Indeed I was 
 told of one commissary which bore the warning; "We have salt, 
 mustard and baking powder. That's all." Tired of replying several 
 hundred times a day; "I'm awfully sorry but we haven't any 
 so-and-so," I made a sign which was a list of all the "haven't gots" 
 and tacked it up over the counter. Thinking to be funny I in- 
 cluded strawberry ice-cream among the rest, to be promptly pun- 
 ished by an innocent-eyed youth who inquired hopefully; "What 
 kind of ice-cream have you got? " 
 
 Another boy read through the list once, twice, then looked up 
 at the Infant disgustedly. 
 
 "Why don't you put 'Hell!' at the bottom of it?" he queried. 
 " 'Pears to me it would be easier to make a list of the things 
 you have got," suggested another. 
 
 A little while longer and if no help comes, we shall be doing this. 
 I can see that sign in my mind's eye now. It 'will read something 
 like this: 
 
 We have 
 chewing tobacco 
 indelible pencils 
 
 and 
 shaving brushes 
 
 Abainville, September 2. 
 Once a month, according to schedule, the whole personnel of 
 the division is summoned to Y. Headquarters at Gondrecourt for 
 a conference. Formerly these conferences were largely religious in 
 significance, consisting of much righteousness with a slight leaven 
 of business. Each one in turn was looked forward to as a pious but 
 unprofitable duty and evaded when possible, — which wasn't often. 
 Now with a change in the directorship the conferences have taken 
 on an almost entirely practical tone. Incidentally they have 
 gained amazingly in popularity. For now one can attend a con- 
 ference with confidence that during its progress one will surely 
 glean more than one quaint bit of human comedy. 
 
152 ABAINVILLE 
 
 Today it was the Aviation Camp Secretary who supplied most 
 of the spice. This is an odd but very earnest little man whom I 
 shall always remember as I saw him at the Gondrecourt railway 
 station last May, starting for Paris dressed up in a "tin hat" and 
 a gas mask. Whether this was in order to bluff Paris into thinking 
 that he had come straight from the front, or whether this was to 
 protect himself against the assaults of Big Bertha while in the city, 
 I could not determine, but never since have I been able to take the 
 gentleman quite seriously. 
 
 The Aviation Secretary created the first sensation by rising 
 suddenly to his feet and reading a motion to the effect that the 
 Gondrecourt Division of the Y. M. C. A. should go on record as 
 registering a protest against " the wicked state of the Paris streets," 
 citing Mr. Edward Bok and his action in the case of the streets 
 of Liverpool. For a moment no one said a word, then a secretary 
 arose and requested that the motion be amended to read more 
 clearly, as in its present form it might be taken to refer to the 
 condition of the paving, or the criminal recklessness of the taxi 
 drivers. The Warehouse Man then solemnly proposed that in view 
 of Mr. Bok a ruling should be passed that while in Paris all sec- 
 retaries should be required to travel by the subway or in a cab. I 
 wanted to ask if it wouldn't do just as well if special prayers 
 should be offered for each secretary on his departure for the wicked 
 city, but refrained. 
 
 No sooner had the excitement over the Paris streets subsided, 
 than the Aviation Secretary was on his feet again with a second 
 resolution. This was in effect a petition to the Paris office that 
 they send us proportionately less tobacco and more sweets for sale 
 in the canteens. This precipitated a fiery argument, the smokers 
 lined up against the non-smokers. Listening to the non-smokers 
 you became convinced that the manhood of America was on its 
 way to ruin through excessive cigarettes; listening to the smokers 
 you became equally certain that the war would be won by tobacco 
 smoke. The situation became so tense one could almost see the 
 sparks in the air. In the end the smokers had it. 
 
THE ENGINEERS 153' 
 
 The next thrill was caused by one of the women workers who in 
 the course of a speech took occasion to deprecate the house- 
 keeping abilities of the men secretaries. On Fourth of July, she 
 declared, when the chocolate cups from all over the area had been 
 sent into Gondrecourt for the celebration there, some of them had 
 been discovered to be in a shocking state. These had later been 
 traced to a hut where there was no woman worker. Instantly the 
 Aviation Secretary Was up again. This charge 'was a personal 
 matter, he declared, as the cups in question had been his. How- 
 ever he denied the implication. The cups had been perfectly clean 
 when they left the hut, they must have become soiled en route. 
 And so the conference comedy is played out. 
 
 At the town of X. there is a secretary who declares he is de- 
 voting his life to the service of the Lord. Some years ago he 
 found himself becoming deaf. So he told the Lord that if He 
 would restore his hearing he would spend the rest of his days in 
 performing good works. He was cured. Last week he created a 
 corner on eggs in this vicinity by buying one hundred and twenty- 
 five dozen at five francs per. Now he is reselling them for six. 
 Wanting eggs badly to make custard for some sick boys here, and 
 not being able to obtain them any other way, I walked over to X. 
 and bought two dozen. When I got home I counted them, there 
 were just twenty-three. Surely the Lord got the worst of that 
 bargain! 
 
 Abainville, September 9. 
 
 Something is going to happen. 
 
 We have been used to seeing the French Army go by; intermin- 
 able fines of camions, so many feet apart, rolling through the town 
 for hours on end. Sometimes we have seen a section pass through 
 on its way to the front, only to return again some ten days later. 
 Once seen, a French camion train is never forgotten, for each 
 automobile section bears painted on its sides the distinctive 
 insignia of the unit. These are sometimes droll, sometimes senti- 
 mental, but always cleverly designed and usually striking,— 
 
iS4 ABAINVILLE 
 
 a poilu drinking pinard from his canteen, a pelican, a polar bear, 
 a dancing monkey, a soldier embracing a peasant girl, a grinning 
 Algerian's head in ear rings and a red fez, a gendarme holding up 
 a threatening club. 
 
 But now by day, by night, it is the Americans who are passing 
 through, their faces set toward the front, on troop-trains, in 
 camions, on foot. Coming home from the canteen in the evening 
 one hears the heavy rattle that means artillery on the move, and 
 standing by the road-side peering through the darkness one can 
 just discern horses and caissons, slat-wagons, supply- wagons and, 
 looming ominously in the dim light, the formidable bulk of the 
 great guns. 
 
 Night before last I was awakened by the sound of troops pas- 
 sing, a regiment of infantry on the march. I lay and listened; 
 the tramp, tramp, tramp of the rhythmic feet was unvarying, 
 incessant, then came a break. The order had been given to halt 
 for a rest. The ,boys were evidently sitting down by the edge of the 
 road. But though they rested they were by no means still. 
 
 "Oh Mademoiselle!''' they entreated the dark and 'unrespon- 
 sive houses, "Oh, Mademoiselle! Deux vin rouge toot sweet s'il 
 wus plait, Mademoiselle!" 
 
 They swore genially. They sang snatches of Rail, hail the 
 gangs all here and Tipperary. One boy had a mouth organ which 
 he played with vim. Someone introduced a barnyard motif and 
 they were off, crowing and cackling, mooing and bleating, imitat- 
 ing every animal known to domestic life. They sounded like 
 schoolboys off for a holiday and my God! they were soldiers on 
 the march to the front, their faces set to the battle! 
 
 Tonight as we came home from the hut, we were startled by 
 a strange sight. The sky was clear, except for one dark mass 
 shaped like a cloud of smoke which hung above the horizon to 
 the north. As we looked, suddenly the under side of the cloud 
 turned an angry crimson, then in a moment grew dark again. A 
 minute later the red glow showed again only to fade out and be 
 repeated. We knew that the angry light must be the glare re- 
 
THE ENGINEERS 155 
 
 fleeted from the flashes of the guns which were belching red death 
 across the lines. All at once the battle-field seemed very near. 
 
 Abainville, September 14. 
 
 We have taken the Saint Mihiel salient! The news came in 
 yesterday over the wires. At first we couldn't believe it. We 
 have heard so many wonderful but alas! too hopeful things over 
 those wires! But now the newspapers have proved it, with their 
 maps showing the salient cut off as clean as by a knife. And 
 if we wanted concrete proof, why we have that too. They 
 have sent for a detail of engineers from Abainville to build hurry- 
 up prison pens. They simply haven't any place to put the thou- 
 sands of captive Germans. The detail set out in high spirits look- 
 ing forward to doing a brisk business in souvenirs; already reports 
 have come in to the effect that buttons and shoulder-straps may 
 be had in exchange for a cigarette, and a ring for a sack of five- 
 cent "smoking." 
 
 The inhabitants of Saint Mihiel, they say, were terror-stricken 
 at the sight of the Americans. When our troops first entered the 
 town they believed the city had been retaken. The Americans, 
 they thought, were Austrians. No one in Saint Mihiel had ever 
 seen an American; they hadn't even known America was in the 
 war! 
 
 But even in Saint Mihiel I don't believe that there was any 
 greater joy than the joy that was here in our own kitchen. Mad- 
 ame who helps us with the dishes at the hut is the daughter of the 
 refugee schoolmaster, a shy, sensitive, appealing little woman, 
 girl-like in spite of her half -grown daughter. When we told her 
 that the salient had been taken she went white and trembled. 
 And what of Vieville? she begged; Vieville, her own little village? 
 We got the map and showed it to her. Sure enough, there was 
 Vieville and the new fine stretching the other side of it! It was 
 true past doubting. Madame shivered. "I don't know whether 
 to laugh or to cry," she told us and there were sobs in her voice 
 while she smiled at us. She tried to go on with scrubbing the floor, 
 
156 ABAINVILLE 
 
 but she couldn't. Would we mind if she ran home for a minute? 
 She must tell the news to Papa and Maman. But certainly, stay as 
 long as you like! we told her. In an hour she was back again, to 
 go about her work in a dazed uncertain fashion, smiling tremu- 
 lously while the tears stood in her eyes. We must get someone to 
 take her place at the canteen, she told us, — they would be going 
 back to Vieville right away. It was plain to see that she would 
 have liked to start that very moment. We said nothing. Of 
 course it was impossible. Vieville though liberated was close to 
 the lines. When I looked at Madame so happy, so confidently 
 eager to return to her home, I sickened to think of the ruin that 
 probably awaited her. How do they have the courage to face it, 
 these French people? I thought of the words of the old school- 
 master: "We are living under tension now, it is the strain that 
 keeps us up. When the war is over there will be a terrible reac- 
 tion." They have been brave, so brave, these peasant villagers, 
 but how will they bear the future? Where will they be swept when 
 they are caught in the fearful ebb of that reaction? 
 
 Already odd-looking little German narrow-gauge engines and 
 freight cars have begun to appear in the yards, part of the Saint 
 Mihiel booty. It does the eyes good to look at them. 
 
 One doesn't want to hope too greatly, but is it possible that 
 this may be the beginning of the end? 
 
 Abainville, September 18. 
 
 Last night they bombed Gondrecourt. We were startled out of 
 our sleep by the explosions. Lying in bed I could hear the angry 
 growling gr gr gr which distinguishes the German plane, as it 
 flew over Abainville headed back towards the lines. Would it 
 drop another bomb? It seemed to take an interminable time to 
 pass over us. Finally the growling hum grew faint, died away. 
 Then the real excitement of the night began. Swarming into the 
 streets, men, women and children, they proceeded to turn the 
 occasion into a social event. Standing in the square in the moon- 
 light, all talking at once and all talking at the top of their voices, 
 they discussed, narrated, compared, commented, sympathized, 
 
THE ENGINEERS 157 
 
 while high above all the din I could hear Madame 's voice in semi- 
 hysterical outbursts of emotion. How they could find so much to 
 say about it I can't imagine. If Hindenburg's whole army had 
 suddenly appeared in Gondrecourt they couldn't have been more 
 excited. I went to sleep and left them still busy analyzing, as I 
 took it, their psychological reactions. 
 
 This morning we learned that the bombs, falling at the edge 
 of the town, had injured nothing except a few trees. 
 
 "What would you do if they should start to bomb Abainville? " 
 I asked Madame when she brought me my morning toast and 
 chocolate. 
 
 "I? I would go to the church." 
 
 "What you, the infidel! You who never go to mass!'' 
 
 "I know." Madame smiled a little sheepishly. "And yet all 
 the same, one would feel safer there." 
 
 At the canteen a lieutenant who was just finishing his course 
 at Gondrecourt came in. 
 
 "Nobody can imagine who should have wanted to bomb the 
 school," he declared, "unless it was some former pupil." 
 
 "Why I was told that the Gondrecourt School was the ranking 
 school of France!" I exclaimed. 
 
 "Made a mistake in the last syllable," he responded sourly, 
 "it should have been spelled e-s-t." 
 
 But if the inhabitants of Abainville have experienced no losses 
 through air-raids yet, they have nevertheless, suffered a minor 
 casualty. Victor, the town simpleton, the genial, harmless Victor, 
 was knocked down by a passing automobile yesterday and became 
 separated from his left ear in the ensuing confusion. Poor wretch! 
 I saw him this morning hobbling down the street with a cane, his 
 head swathed in bandages, but the same old cheerful smile on his 
 half-wit face, as he cocked one eye warily on the look-out for 
 approaching autos. Meanwhile a heated controversy is being 
 waged between the medical officers of Abainville as to whether or 
 not that ear might after all have been saved. 
 
1 58 ABAINVILLE 
 
 Saint Malo, Brittany, September 23 
 Today I took tea with a Baroness, not only I, but about eighty 
 odd members of the A. E. F. here en permission like myself. Our 
 hostess was an American lady, the widow of a French Baron; the 
 tea a weekly party held at her Chateau out in the country, to which 
 all boys on leave in this Brittany area are invited. 
 
 We took the funny little narrow-gauge train from Saint Malo, 
 a "mixed" train and so crowded by the tea party that the boys 
 must ride in the baggage car and on the flat freight cars, and started 
 our journey out to Chateauneuf. The feature of the train trip 
 was the blackberries. Here in Brittany these grow all along the 
 roadsides, the bushes topping the narrow earth-covered walls like 
 dykes that serve for fences. Strangely enough in this land of 
 thrift, the blackberries go untouched, untasted. A Frenchman 
 who lectured to us last spring declared that as a child he was warned 
 not to eat them: they would give him lice, he was told. This, he 
 explained, was the method which French parents took to dissuade 
 their children from eating berries which, growing along the road- 
 sides, would be full of dust — a quaint scruple to find among people 
 ordinarily so superior to sanitary considerations! But the Ameri- 
 cans had no such superstitions; at every crossroads stop we made, 
 the boys swarmed off the cars and fell upon the wayside bushes. 
 I tasted some that one of the boys brought back for me. Compared 
 to our blackberries at home they were flat and flavorless, but any- 
 way they were fruit and they were free and that was all the A. E. F. 
 demanded. 
 
 Arrived at Chateauneuf, we must first file through the reception 
 room where each and all of us shook hands with the Baroness, a 
 gracious, stately old lady dressed in black, and then out upon the 
 lawn beyond the long ivy-covered, many-gabled house, to sit upon 
 the grass and drink our tea. But tea was a misnomer unless it 
 might have been the sort which the English call "high tea," it was 
 a supper; salad, sandwiches, buttermilk and fruit punch served on 
 real china plates and in dainty goblets. Many a covetous eye I 
 
THE ENGINEERS 159 
 
 saw fixed on the silver forks with the coronets engraved on them, 
 while the whispered word "souvenir" caught my ear, but to the 
 boys' credit I am glad to say that, as far as I know, they one and 
 all resisted this temptation. 
 
 After supper the boys sang and then we were invited to go 
 through the house and wander about the grounds and garden. 
 Coming back to the house after having made the rounds, the boy 
 who was with me suddenly stopped stock-still. 
 
 "Well I'll be darned!" 
 
 Before us wound a tiny stream and perched on its bank an old, 
 old peasant woman was busy scrubbing what was evidently the 
 Chateau wash. The boy turned and looked at me despairingly, 
 "And for all that's such a fine house," he groaned, "I suppose there 
 ain't so much as a speck of plumbing in the whole blamed build- 
 ing!" 
 
 On the lawn we found games were in progress. All the young- 
 sters from the neighborhood had assembled to watch the Americans 
 at the tea party. At first they had hung shyly on the outskirts, 
 but now a lad from, the air service had started them to romping. 
 Taking hold of hands a long line of these little gamin would pursue 
 a soldier victim, encircle him, bring him to earth, then pile on him, 
 holding him a helpless prisoner until he bought his liberty with a 
 ransom of cigarettes, gum or coppers. It was a wonderful game 
 for the children but I could not help but watch with apprehension, 
 every time there was a pig-pile, to see where all those wooden 
 shoes would land. 
 
 Coming home, we walked to the little fishing village next door 
 and took the train there. As this visit to the village is also a weekly 
 affair, all the inhabitants were on their door-steps to greet us, the 
 women with their red cheeks, dressed invariably in black dresses 
 and little stiffly starched net caps. We went into the church with 
 its array of votive offerings in the shape of tiny models of fishing 
 boats and then, on our way to the station, stopped to view, over 
 the hedge, the picture-book garden of one old fisherman in which 
 the trees and shrubs were all clipped and trained into the quaintest 
 
i6o ABAINVILLE 
 
 shapes — peacocks and animals and little ships. As the crowd 
 moved on I lingered. An old man leaning on a cane, who had been 
 watching from the road-side, stepped forward and spoke to me. 
 He was the owner of the garden. He wanted to express to me his 
 gratitude to America, America who had saved France! "Ah! 
 Vive VAmcriquel" The old fellow's tribute, unsolicited and un- 
 premeditated evidently, touched me deeply. 
 
 Abainville, October 4. 
 
 While I was away it seems several things occurred. For one, 
 we lost Nanny. Whether some enterprising mess sergeant thought 
 the day's menu would be improved by the addition of kid pie, 
 whether some French family lured her away to be interned in their 
 back yard, or whether, as one might more darkly suspect, the Ad- 
 jutant had something to do with the matter; nobody knows. The 
 bare fact confronts us: Nanny has disappeared. 
 
 We have also lost one of our most picturesque customers. This 
 was a handsome young Greek with a beautiful curled mustache, 
 named Niccolo. He used to hold up the chocolate line, while, his 
 eyes fairly shooting fire, he rolled up his sleeves and showed me 
 the scars of the bayonet wounds which he received fighting the 
 Turks. "The German, he just the same the Turk! I tella the 
 Captain he letta me go front, killa ten, twenty, hundred Germans!" 
 Why such a bloodthirsty soul as his should be cribbed, cabined and 
 confined in an engineer regiment, he never explained. Just before 
 I went away on leave a detail of prisoners from the guard-house 
 arrived at the hut one morning to scrub the floor. To my regret 
 I noticed Noccolo was among them. Niccolo, however, did not 
 seem to mind, he was quite happily occupied with telling the others 
 how the work should be done. 
 
 "That feller's nuts," complained a fellow-prisoner to me, "he 
 spends all his time when he's in the brig, tryin' to read the Bible 
 to us." 
 
 While I was away they sent him to the Gondrecourt hospital 
 on suspicion of insanity. The other night he escaped and made his 
 
THE ENGINEERS 161 
 
 way back to Abainville clad in his hospital pajamas, only to be 
 caught and taken back again. Poor Niccolo with his beautiful 
 mustache and his fiery spirit! I am sorry he never had the chance 
 to get those Germans. 
 
 Worst of all, the Y. is in disgrace with the officers. It came about 
 through the matter of seats at the movies. The officers wanted 
 to come to the shows and they also wanted seats reserved for them; 
 naturally they wanted the best seats. Now this is always a vexed 
 and delicate problem ir a hut, for if the officers ask for reserved 
 seats one can't very well refuse them, and yet to grant them is to 
 raise resentment among the men. When I left the matter was hang- 
 ing at loose ends. Shortly afterwards our Secretary, who is more 
 distinguished for sentimentality than tact, had an inspiration; he 
 would put it up to the men. Undoubtedly when the case was laid 
 before them, their nobler natures would be touched and they would 
 discern that it was their patrotic duty to voluntarily relinquish 
 the best seats in the house to their military superiors. So one night 
 just as the show was due to start the Secretary walked out onto 
 the stage and made his little speech, ending with the appeal: 
 
 "And now boys, where shall we put the officers?" 
 
 A perfect roar answered him. "Put 'em on the roof! Put 'em 
 on the roof!" 
 
 It was frightfully embarrassing. The officers were furious. They 
 withdrew and called a mass-meeting to consider the matter. What 
 the exact statute that covered the case was I don't know. I sup- 
 pose the crime was one of a sort of military Use Majeste. Anyway 
 the Secretary had indisputably laid himself liable to a court-martial. 
 In the end, however, the officers decided that as long as the case was 
 one of stupidity rather than malice, they would let the Secretary 
 go with a warning. 
 
 And now they have stationed spotters among us! The hut, it 
 seems, has proved to possess an all too potent charm for boys who 
 should by rights be engaged at "pick and shovel" and other uninvit- 
 ing but necessary occupations. In view of this the authorities have 
 taken drastic action; passes must now be issued to the boys to 
 
162 ABAINVILLE 
 
 allow them to enter the hut during work hours, and alas for the 
 unhappy lad who ventures in without a permit, the lynx-like eye 
 of the amateur detective detail is sure to light upon him! 
 
 Abainville, October ii. 
 
 Nanny has returned! She was found tethered in a backyard 
 in a nearby village. Since the French household which claimed 
 her as their lawful property refused to relinquish her peacefully, 
 she was taken by storm. There was a scrimmage, the neighbors 
 rallied to their friends' assistance. But the two lads who had been 
 the discoverers managed to break away bearing the struggling 
 Nanny with them and, followed by the whole village shouting 
 "Stop thief!" gained their truck and rolled triumphantly away. 
 No longer, however, does Nanny wander at large, innocently 
 trimming the villagers' cabbage rows, or slipping slyly into the 
 Adjutant's office to sample his latest orders. Nanny is under 
 guard. The engineers are taking no chances. 
 
 Yesterday we acquired a kitten, — a 'wild-eyed yellow scrap 
 brought in last night by a lad as an offering. The boys immed- 
 iately christened her "The O. D. Cat." Every time I give her a 
 caress some one of the boys leaning over the counter is sure to 
 remark: "Gee, wish I was a cat!" 
 
 "But what shall I feed her?" I questioned, thinking of the 
 difficulty of fresh milk. 
 
 "Corn willy and cognac! What else would you give an O. D. 
 cat?" they chorused. 
 
 "And where shall she spend the night?" 
 
 "I'll keep her for you ma'am," volunteered a brawny Texan. 
 "She'll sleep right in the bunk longside o' me." 
 
 This morning the canteen was full of tales of the night. "Yes 
 sir! he tied her up to a post with a rope as big around as your 
 arm! An' the pore cat nearly hanged herself. She hollered all 
 night long!" 
 
 This the Texan emphatically denied; he had a tale all of his own 
 to tell however. 
 
THE ENGINEERS 163 
 
 "There was a mouse last night in the barracks. It was the 
 littlest mouse you ever seen, but it chased that cat all around 
 them barracks. Yes ma'am, it sure did run that cat ragged!" 
 
 "Did you give her any breakfast?" I asked, disdaining any 
 comment on his story. 
 
 " Sure ma'am! I gave her a saucerful of cognac." 
 
 "You never did!" 
 
 "Yes, an' it did that cat good, it did. Soon's she'd lapped 
 up that saucer; ' Bring on your mouse!' she says." He shook his 
 head reflectively. "My, but that cat sure was feelin' its strength 
 this mornin'!" 
 
 "Waste cognac on a cat! That's a likely story for that guy to 
 be telling!" was the single comment of the bystanders. 
 
 Right here I wish to record a formal apology to the Secretary 
 at X who sold me the six-franc eggs a month ago. Today I was 
 talking to the Top Sergeant whom I encountered on my way home 
 and who carried my basket for me. From something he let fall 
 I now more than suspect it was he who accounted for that twenty- 
 fourth egg! 
 
 Abainville, October 16. 
 
 His real name, of course, is Horace but since Madame refers to 
 him as 'Greece, as 'Oreece he must go, — 'Greece is our new detail. 
 He is cautious, conscientious and slow. If 'Oreece ever showed 
 signs of having spunk enough to do something that was really bad, 
 I would feel that there was hope for him. Madame, who adores 
 the Infant, is very cold to 'Oreece. The other day she requested 
 him to save her all the cigar stubs he found while sweeping. She 
 wanted them for an old derelict of a Frenchman who is a sort of 
 scavenger around camp. Poor old papa could smoke the butts 
 nicely in his pipe she declared. But 'Oreece was so disobliging as 
 to turn his nose up at her proposal. Anyway 'Oreece cuts the 
 bread for the jam-sandwiches very, very nicely. 
 
 Three nights ago we had an air-raid alarm. The evening's 
 programme was over but the hut was still full of boys. Suddenly 
 without any warning, all the lights went out. We looked out the 
 
i6 4 ABAINVILLE 
 
 door, the camp was in total darkness. In the machine-gun pit 
 nearby we could hear quick excited orders interspersed with curses, 
 — the gunners were getting ready to stand off the aeroplanes. 
 The boys left the hut. We waited for a while and then, getting 
 tired of the dark, went home. The planes didn't show up; I went 
 to bed feeling that it had been a case of Hamlet without Hamlet. 
 
 Last night we were in the middle of a movie show when a shat- 
 tering explosion sounded outside. Back in the kitchen where I 
 was serving hot chocolate to the Tea Room line, everyone started 
 and stared. Was it a raid? Surely that was a bomb ! There was 
 another explosion. Then the lights went out. So it was the real 
 thing! I seized the cash-box and stood pat. Another crash; 
 instantly outside there was a stampede. In the dark it was im- 
 possible to see just what was happening, but from the sounds 
 it appeared that about seven hundred pairs of hob-nailed shoes 
 were doing double-quick time out the doors. In less time than 
 one could believe the auditorium was empty. I heard Madame 's 
 voice behind me in staccato exclamations. Somebody scratched a 
 match and lit a candle, a little group of boys were still standing at 
 the window waiting for their chocolate, their faces looked a bit 
 white I thought. Then the Infant put his head out the kitchen 
 door: 
 
 "Why, the lights in camp are all on!" he exclaimed. 
 
 A boy came up to the window. "They're practising at the 
 school," he told us. "I heard the other day that they were going 
 to pull some stunts in the trenches tonight." 
 
 "So that was it!" 
 
 The lights flashed on. 
 
 "But why did they go out?" I asked confused. Nobody could 
 explain it. 
 
 At that moment 'Oreece drifted into the kitchen, he wore a 
 very pale and apologetic grin. 
 
 "'Oreece!" I gasped, "Did you— " 
 
 "I turned the lights off," he admitted. "I knew where the 
 switch was. I thought it was a raid." 
 
THE ENGINEERS 165 
 
 I glared disgusted: "And a nice night's work you've done!" 
 
 My friend the Texan strolled up to the deserted counter. 
 
 "I met 'em all coming down the road," he remarked. " Gee, but 
 it was like the retreat of a whole division!" 
 
 Today the boys have been asking to tease me: " Where were 
 you in the Great Air-Raid?" 
 
 "I? Oh, I was under the kitchen- table," I reply. 
 
 Abainville, October 23. 
 
 The Chief has just brought me great news. I am to have a hut 
 all of my own. I am to be head cook, bottle-washer, and grand 
 high secretary all in one. And I am to go out into the wilds of 
 France and start a new hut alone. 
 
 It seems there is an ordnance depot at a village called Mauvages 
 about six miles north of here. The camp itself is small, some two 
 hundred men, but the town has a large billeting capacity and 
 additional bodies of troops will be stationed there from time to 
 time. The C. O. of the Ammunition Reclamation Camp, — that 
 is its official title, — has requested that a hut be established there. 
 With the personnel in its present state no man secretary, says the 
 Chief, can be spared, but if I care to undertake the job on my own 
 I am welcome to it. And if after two months or so of solitary 
 confinement "out in the sticks," as the boys say, I get to hanker- 
 ing too badly for the flesh-pots of civilization, why they will arrange 
 to have me relieved. Need I say that I snapped up the offer on the 
 spot? I had asked to be transfered from Abainville some while ago, 
 as the conditions here have been none too congenial, but to have 
 a hut all of my own is beyond any luck that I had dared dream. 
 
 I would like to sling my old kit bag over my shoulder, tuck a 
 chocolate container under one arm and a case of cigarettes under 
 the other, and catch the first truck that passes bound northward 
 for Mauvages. But it seems they won't let me go until a New Lady 
 comes here to take my place. They have telegraphed to the office 
 at Nancy. If the New Lady doesn't come quick, I have a good 
 mind to go A. W. O. L. and start my canteen willy-nilly. 
 
166 ABAINVILLE 
 
 Meanwhile I am planning plans. Because of the grey chill days 
 of winter I am going to paint my hut inside the brightest sunshiny 
 yellow I can find, hang it with orange curtains, and then in honor 
 of the ordnance, christen it the Pumpkin Shell! 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 MAUVAGES 
 
 THE ORDNANCE 
 
 Abainville, October 26. 
 
 I have been to Mauvages; a reconnoitering expedition. As re- 
 gards the town the most striking feature about it is the Egyptian 
 Fountain. A somewhat startling structure to come upon in a little 
 French mud-pie village, it stands in the centre of the town and 
 consists of the facade of a temple in front of which towers an an- 
 cient God of the Nile — or so I take him — in dull green bronze, 
 pouring from pitchers held in either hand clear streams of water 
 into a broad semi-circular basin. Behind the columns is another 
 pool, this one for the village washerwomen: a cleverly conceived 
 arrangement, for every passing stranger must stop to stare at the 
 fountain and this in turn affords the washerwomen the opportunity 
 to stare at him. 
 
 Around two sides of the town curves the canal along whose 
 placid surface the slow barges occasionally pass. They tell me 
 that some very beautiful women go by on these canal boats, but 
 I suspect that the reason that they seem so beautiful is just that 
 they do go by — the lure of the unobtainable. At the south end 
 of the town the canal disappears into a hill-side, four miles to the 
 southwest it appears again; a rather remarkable, and in view of 
 the fact that in the most piping times of peace the traffic on the 
 canal never exceeded four barges each way a day, inexplicably ex- 
 travagant feat of engineering. Every now and then a little crowd 
 of ordnance boys will take a notion to walk through the tunnel 
 which has a path cut at one side, an excursion which must be un- 
 speakably dreary as the whole length is quite unlighted and the air 
 damp and close beyond anything. More than once on these excur- 
 sions a boy has fallen into the canal and had to be fished out again. 
 
i88 MAUVAGES 
 
 4 
 
 preached by a black-face comedian. As luck would have it, two 
 real darkies from a labor camp up the line slipped in at the back 
 of the hut just as the preacher began. They took it all in deadly 
 earnest, and warmed, I suspect, by a glass at the corner cafe, they 
 presently began to respond to the preacher's exhortations with 
 genuine religious fervor. 
 
 "Dat'sso! You tell 'embruder! Hallelujah! Bless de Lord!" 
 
 The audience up front, hearing a commotion and unluckily not 
 catching the comedy, hissed indignantly and the darkies, abashed, 
 slunk out. 
 
 Of course at the last moment some of our headliners failed to 
 come across. The mumps claimed our dramatic reader and our 
 buck-and-wing dancer sent word, just as the curtain was going up, 
 that in all the camp, no shoes outside of hob-nails, large enough 
 for him could be found. But we made up for these defections by 
 our impromptu acts. The most surprising of these was the Little 
 Fat Poilu. He popped up suddenly from Heaven knows where, a 
 round rosy dumpling of a man with a shiny nose and a fat black 
 beard, and offered his services. On his first appearance he played 
 the violin with vim and spirit. Then in answer to the applause he 
 dropped his violin, seized the tall hat from the head of the darky 
 preacher, clapped it on his own, and bounced back onto the stage. 
 The transformation was amazing. In an instant, instead of a 
 poilu he had become a jolly little bourgeois shopkeeper out for 
 a stroll on the boulevard. He proceeded to sing a comic song, a 
 song with an interminable number of verses, unquestionably very 
 funny and in all probability quite scandalous. The French portion 
 of the audience was charmed, they joined vociferously in the jiggy 
 choruses, and when he had done they insisted on another and an- 
 other. For a while it looked as if France was going to run away 
 with the programme, but finally the little poilu came to the end 
 of his repertoire, — or of his breath maybe, and America once more 
 took the stage. 
 
 Today we are living in an atmosphere of theatrical enterprise. 
 Already there are three or four "bigger and better" rival shows in 
 
THE ORDNANCE 189 
 
 process of incubation. What's more, Barney is writing a play. He 
 sits at one of the canteen tables surrounded by a group of admiring 
 would-be actors and each sheet, as he finishes it, is gravely handed 
 around the crowd. So far it seems to contain just three characters; 
 Rose the beautiful stenographer, the villain landlord and the office 
 boy. I am waiting in suspense to see whether Barney's master- 
 piece is going to turn out a melodrama, a problem play or a 
 dramatic treatise on the social and political wrongs of Ireland. 
 
 The French troops are moving tomorrow. Tonight the Little 
 Fat Poilu came to bid us good-bye. When no one was looking I 
 filled his pockets up with cigarettes. 
 
 Mauvages, December 9. 
 
 A very regrettable incident occured last night. The day being 
 Sunday we were due for a religious service at seven-fifteen. At 
 seven-ten the Reverend Gentleman, who was to instruct my flock 
 in the way wherein they should go, arrived in company with the 
 Business Manager from Gondrecourt. Now it happened that the 
 Reverend Gentleman on this occasion was none other than my 
 friend the Sentimental Secretary. He surveyed the congregation; 
 there were nine boys in the hut. He sat down and waited for the 
 audience to arrive. But the audience didn't. Instead one wretch 
 surreptitiously sneaked out the door. At last I felt it necessary 
 to come forward with apologies and explanations; my flock at 
 present was small to start with, the sheep had all gone to Domremy 
 on an excursion, the goats were deep in an after-pay-day poker game. 
 
 "Do you wish me to hold the meeting?" the R. G. questioned 
 grimly. 
 
 "If you will." 
 
 The Reverend Gentleman, a bit tight about the lips, laid on. 
 It was a cold night; we gathered by the fire. I tried to make myself 
 look as large as possible, but stretch the congregation as you might, 
 we only reached two-thirds of the way around the stove. 
 
 "Well," said the Business Manager when it was all over with, 
 "how soon will you be ready to close out this hut?" 
 
170 MAUVAGES 
 
 camouflage curtains are let down. In each space between the win- 
 dows we have tacked one of that gorgeous series of French railway- 
 posters, so my hut is brave with color, tawny orange, sharp blues, 
 and shadowy purples. 
 
 Meanwhile the whole French populace has called, singly or in 
 crowds, in order to see just what is going on. As for the children, 
 I am sure they must have declared a school holiday in honor of us. 
 The whole concern is evidently a bit puzzling to the French mind; 
 but they have solved the riddle by terming the hut a " cooperatif," 
 and so I let it rest. 
 
 But you will be wondering how le diable is contriving to live 
 with le bon Dieu. 
 
 Monsieur le Cure* is quite old. There is something stern and 
 something tragic in his face, with all his urbane graciousness. He 
 is a refugee from the devastated area and like myself a lodger in 
 the house, whose owners have fled this zone of armies. Monsieur 
 le Cure* was a captive for six months with the Germans and the 
 desolate confinement wrought a little on his mind; "At times he 
 is absent,' , says Madame the Care-taker. This morning I stopped 
 and chatted with him at his door downstairs, he called me in to 
 show me "a souvenir of his captivity," a little dirty-white tin 
 basin out of which as prisoner he ate. "I learned to smoke then,'*" 
 he told me. "There was nothing to do the whole day long but sit 
 and smoke and wait for the clock to strike." Tonight I am going 
 to take him a little gift of American tobacco. 
 
 I am planning a house-warming with which to formally open 
 the hut. 
 
 Mauvages, November 6. 
 We didn't have that house-warming. Even as we were finishing 
 the hut all hands came down with the flu. Curiously enough it hit 
 the camp all in a heap after dinner. Thirty per cent of the boys, 
 the two officers, the building detail and myself were all laid low 
 between one and six o'clock. Fortunately it was the lightest sort 
 of an epidemic, a mere soupqon as it were, in every case. I merely 
 
THE ORDNANCE 171 
 
 retired to my bed for a day and a half and refused to eat. On 
 the third day, which was yesterday, I crawled back to the canteen. 
 It was a case of pipe all hands on deck and stand to the counter. 
 Two companies of engineers had arrived in the night. They were 
 back from an advanced station just behind the lines and they were 
 starved for chocolate and cigarettes. Two months ago they left 
 Abainville, green troops, just over, now they are seasoned veterans, 
 in proof of which they carry souvenirs salvaged from German dug- 
 outs. I heard all about these souvenirs, as I was taking break- 
 fast, from the lips of an excited Neighbor Woman. From the list 
 of unwarlike trophies which she rattled off I gleaned umbrellas 
 and a wall-clock; but the best was reserved for me when I reached 
 the canteen. One of the boys had met one of these same engineers 
 toiling up the hill from the railroad with a large upholstered arm- 
 chair on his back. 
 
 "You can't imagine," he complacently replied to his gaping 
 questioners, "how nice it is, at the end of a hard day's work, to 
 be able to sit down and smoke one's pipe in real comfort." 
 
 Up and down the street are heaps of pale-green cabbages. 
 The field kitchens by the fountain are busy cooking them. The 
 town is fairly steeped in the odor of boiling cabbages. These are 
 the famous German cabbages captured in the Saint Mihiel drive, 
 and for the past two months, the engineers, they tell me, have had 
 them boiled for dinner, for supper and for breakfast, until it seems 
 that they hate the Germans for those cabbages as much as they 
 hate them for the rape of Belgium and the sinking of the Lusi- 
 tania. 
 
 At the corner by the fountain this noon a lady stopped to 
 speak to me. She was tall and white-haired and bore herself with 
 gracious dignity. She had heard, she told me, that these men had 
 just returned from Hattonchatel. She was very anxious to learn 
 something of the fate of a nearby town, Haumont by the lakes, 
 where her aged sister had lived. Since the German invasion four 
 years ago she had heard absolutely no word of her. Was the town 
 in such a state that it was possible her sister might still be there, or 
 
1 72 MAUVAGES 
 
 had the inhabitants been herded off to Germany? I questioned 
 several boys, finally I found a lad who spoke French. Yes he 
 knew the town to which she referred. He had often observed it 
 from the height of a nearby hill, — it had been daily under shell- 
 fire. Very sadly, but with her gracious sweetness undisturbed, 
 the lady turned away. 
 
 Mauvages, November 9. 
 
 Life is just one breathless bustle now-a-days. Hardly had 
 we got our minds adjusted to the engineers when a whole bat- 
 talion of machine-gunners marched into town. From the moment 
 they arrived it has been one interminable line from morning 
 until night, demanding the Three C.s, — chocolate, cookies, and 
 cigarettes. Luckily my closet was well stocked and so has stood 
 the strain. 
 
 And speaking of closets, I have acquired a skeleton in mine. 
 It came about through a sick soldier, an accomodating captain 
 and an egg-nogg. The sick boy I discovered in Madame the Care- 
 taker's stable while breakfasting this morning. He was very 
 miserable, Madame told me, and had been quite unable to eat a 
 thing for days. I stopped in at the stable and verified her words. 
 The boy looked wretched. 
 
 1 ' Come to the canteen at ten o'clock and I'll have something 
 for you to eat," I told him. Then I begged a cup of fresh milk 
 from Madame. 
 
 The Captain I discovered in front of my canteen counter, and 
 knowing him to be a southerner and a gentleman, I summoned my 
 courage and whispered a petition for a few drops of something, 
 from the flask he carried in his pocket, to put in the egg-nogg for 
 the sick boy. The Captain, who was corpulent and dignified, in 
 some embarrassment replied that he was unfortunately without 
 anything at present, but that the lack would be immediately 
 supplied. He disappeared, returning to produce before my startled 
 eyes, from beneath his coat, a life-sized bottle labeled cognac. 
 Then he invited himself into the kitchen to help make the egg- 
 
THE ORDNANCE 173 
 
 nogg. He proved expert. I quaked fearing the customers would 
 sniff the cognac through the lattice-work. The sick boy came, 
 turned out to be one of the Captain's own men. The Captain 
 cocked an unsympathetic eye. 
 
 "What's the matter with you, Smith?" he questioned, "been 
 drunk again?" 
 
 "Captain," I scolded horrified, "I won't have any rough talk 
 like that in my kitchen!" 
 
 Smith indignantly denied the charge. He drank his egg-nogg 
 and left looking three shades happier. 
 
 "Captain," said I, "did you ever make an egg-nogg for one of 
 your men before?" 
 
 "Never," replied the Captain with decision. He drained his 
 own bowl and took his departure. "I will leave the bottle be- 
 hind," he told me. 
 
 "But I don't want it!" 
 
 "You might need it again," he declared. And nothing could 
 induce him to change his mind. 
 
 That bottle weighs on my conscience like a crime. I have hid- 
 den the guilty thing in a corner of the store-room shelf behind 
 some perfectly innocent-looking bundles of stationery and a pile 
 of safety razor blades. But out of sight it continues to haunt my 
 mind. I feel as if I were giving sanctuary to the devil. And, worst 
 of all, I have a vision of coming into the hut some day to find 
 that the bottle has been discovered and the whole Y. M. C. A. is 
 on a jag. 
 
 Mauvages, November ii. 
 
 It isn't true. It isn't real. It can't be that the war is really 
 ended. 
 
 This morning I awoke to the sound of the most tremendous 
 barrage I have ever heard. At this distance however it was al- 
 most more like a sensation than a sound, a sort of incessant thrill- 
 ing, throbbing vibration. 
 
 The question was on everybody's lips: "Do you suppose they 
 really will sign the armistice?" "It don't sound much like peace 
 
i 74 MAUVAGES 
 
 this morning!" would come the dubious reply. We have heard 
 rumours just since yesterday, but in rumours we have so long 
 ceased to put any faith! As the morning wore on our skepticism 
 grew. The almost unbroken reverberation frayed the nerves. 
 As eleven o'clock drew near the tension became torture. Would 
 the guns cease? Could they? It seemed as if they must go on 
 forever. The clock in the old grey church tower began to strike the 
 hour. I flung open the kitchen door. We all stood breathless, 
 frozen, listening. Ding-dong, ding-dong; through the notes of the 
 bell we could still hear the throbbing of the great guns. Eleven 
 times the slow bell chimed, there was a heavy boom, one more, 
 and then absolute silence. We stared at each other blankly 
 incredulous. "They've signed," said a boy. 
 
 I walked down the little lane that leads to the ammunition 
 dump and picked a bunch of orange-scarlet berries. I wanted to 
 be alone, to listen. It was a day all pearl and lavender, a violet 
 mist hung over the brown hill-sides. No one passed on the road, 
 there was not a sound of any sort that reached me, the world 
 seemed to be asleep. The stillness was terrifying. I waited, tense, 
 not able to believe, expecting every moment to have the silence 
 broken by the resumption of the cannonade. Then as the minutes 
 passed and still my strained ears could not catch so much as a 
 whisper, I turned back and entered the little roadside Chapel in 
 the Bush. There in its dim blue and silver solitude I knelt down 
 before the little statue of Jeanne d'Arc and prayed. 
 
 At noon someone started the old church bell to ringing, it 
 jangled frantically for hours. 
 
 I think we are all a little dazed. I for one have a curious feeling 
 as if I had come up suddenly against a blank wall. 
 
 Mauvages, November 12. 
 
 Last night we celebrated. The whole ordnance camp got out 
 
 and set off flares and signal rockets from the dump, while two of 
 
 the boys put over a barrage with the machine-gun on the hill. 
 
 And there was much champagne. This morning the street is hung 
 
THE ORDNANCE 175 
 
 with flags, — I never knew before how thrilling the tricolor could 
 be until I saw it like this, against the stone-grey of the old houses. 
 
 A company of French cavalry is just passing through town. 
 They are very beautiful to look at, with their bright blue uniforms, 
 their bright bay horses, and the long slim lances which they carry 
 in one hand, each with a tiny pennant at the end. As each one 
 comes into view down the street I think; "Thank God, for one 
 more Frenchman left alive." 
 
 The boys have already begun to argue about the date on which 
 they will reach home. But though the fighting may be over, there 
 are long months still ahead of us here I am sure. And now with 
 the strain and the excitement gone, France is bound to look greyer 
 and muddier and more whats-the-use to the boys than ever before. 
 May Heaven help us all! 
 
 Mauvages, November 17. 
 
 I want to make you acquainted with Bill and Nick, my two 
 invaluable assistants. Bill is my official detail formally assigned. 
 Nick is a volunteer, his services a free-will offering proferred at 
 such times as he is not required in his regular capacity as guardian 
 of the bath-house. 
 
 Bill is a lame tame giant six feet two and up. He slipped a cog 
 in his knee one time while shuffling shells last summer and never 
 got quite straightened out again. Bill is my salvation. He redeems 
 what would otherwise be a desperate situation. For Bill has a 
 Business Brain. If it weren't for that, I believe I should be driven 
 to the mad-house trying to balance the francs and centimes at the 
 end of each week. Besides having a head for figures, Bill is an all 
 round handy man with a turn for inventions. When I come back 
 to the hut after a morning expedition to Gondrecourt in quest of 
 suppplies, I may or I may not find last night's dishes washed but 
 I am pretty sure to find some wonderful new contrivance added to 
 my hut equipment. 7 Bill has made me a stove-pipe out of a German 
 powder can. v Bill has installed an automatic closing attachment 
 for the main door, which consists of a rope, a pulley, a stove grate 
 
176 MAUVAGES 
 
 and an excruciating squeak; the chief advantage of this invention 
 being the squeak which always betrays the sneak who tries to 
 escape undetected in the middle of a prayer. Sometimes I think 
 it hurts Bill's pride to have to take orders from a lady, especially 
 one with such an unmathematical brain as I. Occasionally he lapses 
 into a you're-only-a-little-girl-after-all sort of attitude and then I 
 have to put on all my dignity and read the riot act to him. But 
 when I hand in my weekly cash sheets at Headquarters and the 
 cashier there tells me that my accounts are the best in the whole 
 area, why Bill could have the whole hut and everything in it. 
 
 As for Nick, if Bill is right hand man, why Nick makes a quite 
 indispensable left, and this in spite of the fact that the poor fellow 
 is almost blind. He got a crack in the back of his head from the 
 corner of a case of * 75s," while unloading ammunition some two 
 months ago, which affected the optic nerve. And though the doc- 
 tor promises a partial restoration of his sight, at present he must 
 grope about in dark glasses and semi-darkness. Nick has a history. 
 An orphan, educated for the priesthood, he ran away at the age 
 of sixteen and started on the career of a cowboy. After having 
 broken every bone in his body in the course of his broncho-busting 
 he rose to the heights of his profession and joined Buffalo Bill's 
 Wild West Show. Here he met his wife, a lasso and pistol expert. 
 While riding an "outlaw" in Madison Square Garden, he was 
 thrown and had one of his legs badly smashed, which forced him 
 to retire from public life. After this he spent a couple of years as a 
 bar-tender in New York. In his spare moments, aided by his 
 ecclesiastical Latin, he learned practical chemistry from an old 
 German druggist who kept shop next door. Now in his civilian 
 capacity Nick is consulting chemist for a Brooklyn laundry con- 
 cern, while his wife conducts successfully a French millinery store 
 in Flatbush. So much for romance! 
 
 Nick is, I am quite sure, the politest Irishman in France. More- 
 over he is the darling of the feminine portion of the town. Partly 
 by reason of his blindness, which appeals to the quick sympathies 
 of the Frenchwomen, and partly because of his unvarying courtesy, 
 
THE ORDNANCE 177 
 
 his kindliness and his quaint humour, he is the most sought-after 
 man in Mauvages. He knows, I should judge, some six words of 
 French, but with these he manages to "get by." And he is forever 
 being invited out to supper. 
 
 Every morning between sweeping up and washing the dishes 
 and waiting on the counter we hold a coffee party in the kitchen; 
 Bill and Nick and myself and whoever else happens to be around. 
 The party consists of coffee with plenty of sugar and canned milk, — ■ 
 always a treat in the army as in the messes you must drink it plain; — « 
 and K. P. cookies. Now K. P. cookies, you must understand, are 
 cookies from the end of the package that the mouse didn 't eat. As ' 
 there is considerable activity on the part of the mice these days 
 there are any number of K. P. cookies. And yet I have done 
 my best. Pricked on by conscience I said to Nick day before yester- 
 day, "Nick do you suppose you could get me a trap?" 
 
 "Certainly Ma'am, I'll buy one at the store." 
 
 "But wait a minute, do you know the word for mouse-trap?" 
 
 "Don't worry. That's not in the least necessary." And he set 
 out for the General Store Articles Militaire down the street. 
 
 But for once his sign language failed him. He was offered every- 
 thing in the store from a screw-driver to an egg-beater and only 
 achieved the trap finally by stumbling over one on the floor. It 
 was a French trap to be baited with flour and sewed up with thread; 
 I looked at it skeptically, but. the next morning we had caught a 
 mouse. However today it was K. P. cookies as usual. 
 
 "Bill," I said, "you'll have to borrow Iodine." Iodine is the 
 Medical Sergeant's cat. 
 
 "Aw shucks," says Bill, "Iodine is a frog cat. She wouldn't 
 look at a mouse unless you served it to her on a platter dressed with 
 garlic." 
 
 Bill says no home is complete without a dog. I quite agree with 
 him. Only, I say, we must catch him young so we can bring him 
 up in the way he should go. These French dogs for the most part 
 seem to have neither manners nor morals. So Bill is keeping an 
 eye out for a likely puppy. 
 
178 MAUVAGES 
 
 "But," he said, "when we close up here, the only way we'll be 
 able to settle it between us will be to make him into sausages." 
 
 If we ever do get a dog I think I shall call him "Tin Hat" just 
 because every other dog in the A. E. F. is named "Cognac." 
 
 Mauvages, November 20. 
 
 Our relations to the French populace are enough to try a dip- 
 lomat. Hardly a day passes in the hut but what some delicate 
 social or ethical problem arises. 
 
 First, there is Louis, a most disreputable old scamp if there 
 ever was one. He keeps the cafe across the street and so is my 
 deadly rival. The other day the old rascal appeared at my counter 
 grinning from ear to ear, and demanded "bonbons pour le rheum," 
 producing, in witness of his urgent need, a feeble and patently 
 artificial cough. When I answered that unfortunately we had 
 none, he instantly substituted chocolate in his request. Unable to 
 resist the rapscallion's grin I gave him a handful, whereat in beam- 
 ing gratitude he immediately invited me over to the cafe to have 
 a glass of wine at his expense. And when I hastily informed 
 him that I didn't care for wine he genially amended the invitation 
 so that it stood, "glass of beer." And now I am told by the boys 
 that he has announced that I, forsooth, am his "fiancee!" 
 
 But chiefly there is Rebecca. We call her Rebecca because 
 when Bill goes to the well to get a pail of water he usually happens 
 to meet her there. Rebecca is thin and dark and lively. Her 
 English vocabulary includes such phrases as "beeg steef" and 
 "Mek eet snappee!" She is, as the boys put it, "full of pep." 
 Rebecca has a little black and villainous-looking husband who 
 occasionally appears in town from the trenches, but for the most 
 part she is free to follow where her fancy leads. If it should 
 ever lead her to confession I am afraid she would make the old 
 Cure's eyebrows curl. 
 
 Bill's acquaintance with Rebecca is entirely on business lines 
 he wants me to understand. She does his laundry for him. "It's 
 all very well," I say, " to take her your washing, but why must you 
 
THE ORDNANCE 179 
 
 take her chocolates?" He knows I disapprove. When he lingers 
 too long on the water detail I eye him severely on his return. 
 
 "Bill, have you been hobnobbing with Rebecca?" 
 
 Bill grins admission. 
 
 Rebecca lives in a white little one story door-and-window 
 house just around the corner on the Rue d'Eglise which I must pass 
 going to my canteen. And Rebecca keeps tab on the precise hour 
 and minute at which I return to my billet under Bill's escort every 
 night. Going home one stormy night I took Bill's arm. The 
 next day Bill informed me that Rebecca had advised him that such 
 conduct, according to French notions, was not quite comme il faut. 
 
 Bill, I find, is able to make an astonishing amount of conver- 
 sation with his "nigger French" that takes absolutely no account 
 of moods, tenses, conjugations, declinations or any of the other 
 stuff in grammar books. And I am afraid he understands a great 
 deal that it would be just as well he didn't. 
 
 "How did you learn it all?" I asked him. 
 
 He looked at me side-wise. "Rebecca gave me lessons," he 
 answered grinning. 
 
 Last night, as we passed Rebecca's house, I noticed that her 
 door was the least bit ajar. 
 
 As Bill left me at my gate I admonished him; "Now don't you 
 stop to say good-night to Rebecca." 
 
 "Gosh, no!" said Bill, "if I did I'm afraid I might have to 
 hurry or I'd be late for breakfast." 
 
 Whenever I meet Rebecca on the street she always bows to 
 me most urbanely. 
 
 Nor is Rebecca all my concern in relation to Big Bill. There 
 is also the pretty girl who lives down the street who undoubt- 
 edly would not be averse to accompanying him to America. Bill 
 stops at her house every night in order to get a quart of fresh milk 
 for the C. O.'s breakfast. I bid him be wary of these Franco- 
 American alliances, citing horrible examples I have known, such 
 as the machine-gunner, for instance, who, in order to be in harmony 
 with his future family-in-law, felt it incumbent on him to appear 
 
180 MAUVAGES 
 
 at his wedding wearing a pair of wooden shoes; and of the dough- 
 boy who married a widow with two children, and, since he knew no 
 French and she no English, persuaded his company commander to 
 detail an interpreter to live in the house with them for the first 
 three days after their marriage. 
 
 Not many days ago a girl came to my kitchen door in company 
 with a soldier. She had a United States paymaster's cheque which 
 she wished to have cashed. Afterwards I questioned Bill. It 
 seems a lieutenant had married and afterwards divorced her. She 
 was still drawing his allotment. She looked so thoroughly the 
 peasant, bare-headed, in a shawl and shoddy skirt, with nothing 
 to particularly distinguish her pretty but inexpressive face, that 
 I voiced my wonder to the boys. 
 
 "Oh but you ought to see her when she gets dressed up!" they 
 said. 
 
 "Fine feathers don't make fine birds," I remind severely. "Bill, 
 be warned!" 
 
 "Yes, but there's Gaby," Bill suggests. "What about her?" 
 Now Gaby is the little chauffeuse who has been driver for a 
 French general three years and who turns up periodically in town. 
 She is quaint as a wood-cut and solemn as an owl, with her shock 
 of bobbed hair and her great staring child-like eyes. She sits 
 at the mess table and never says a word but draws your glance 
 irresistibly. Always she wears an odd little straight-cut dress 
 hanging just below her knees and a croix de guerre pinned to her 
 breast. Gaby killed a man with her car not long since and was 
 held a prisoner at Ligny-en-Barrois for ten days in consequence. 
 Gaby and one of the sergeants at the A. R. are undergoing all 
 the woe and wonder of love's young dream. 
 
 "Oh well," I say, "Gaby is different." 
 
 This afternoon Rebecca appeared at the canteen and asked 
 for Bill. She was so elegantly attired that at first I didn't know 
 her. After a parley at the door, Bill, with an odd expression 
 on his face, takes his second-best raincoat from the peg and hands 
 it to her. I looked my inquiries. An old doughboy sweetheart of 
 
THE ORDNANCE 181 
 
 the lady's, it appears, had returned on leave and they were going 
 travelling together. 
 
 " Going off on a honey-moon with another feller, in my rain- 
 coat! Gosh, it's a cruel war!" grinned Bill. 
 
 Mauvages, November 24. 
 Now that the time is drawing on toward Christmas the boys, — 
 bless them! — are all wanting to send some remembrance to mothers, 
 sisters, wives and sweethearts at home. But what to send has been 
 the desperate question. One sort of goods and one only is offered 
 for such purposes by the French stores in this locality, a line of 
 flimsy silk stuff, handkerchiefs, scarfs and little aprons, machine- 
 embroidered with gay flowers and each bearing the legend "Sou- 
 venir de France." They are fragile slazy things, absurdly high- 
 priced, inappropriate and often hideous. But to the boys they are 
 altogether beautiful. After many requests and inquiries I gave in. 
 I went to Gondrecourt and purchased what I could find that was 
 the least tawdry, the least exorbitant. I brought them to the can- 
 teen; they proved so popular that three days afterward I had to 
 make another trip to town to buy some more. Now we carry a 
 regular stock of fancy silk handkerchiefs and aprons in addition 
 to the chewing tobacco and cigarettes. But here one is faced with 
 a delicate problem. Each handkerchief is embroidered with some 
 such specific legend as To my Sweetheart, To My Dear Wife, To 
 my Darling Daughter, — I refused to consider the bit of lacy frippery 
 marked To my Dear Son! — and this complicates matters immensely 
 I find. Somehow we always manage to have a supply of Sweet- 
 hearts on hand when a man is in quest of a Dear Wife and vice 
 versa. In vain I artfully suggest that it would be a pretty compli- 
 ment to call one's wife "Dear Sweetheart," to their minds there 
 seems to be something essentially compromising in such a notion. 
 Occasionally the reverse will work however, and a boy, grinning 
 and abashed, will select a handkerchief marked "Dear Wife" to 
 send to his sweetheart. Sometimes during these sales one's faith 
 in the single heartedness of Young America receives a shock, as 
 
i82 MAUVAGES 
 
 when an innocent-looking lad will blandly select half a dozen "Dear 
 Sweethearts" and put each in a separate envelope to send to a dif- 
 ferent girl! 
 
 Speaking of souvenirs, there is a boy who acts as fireman on the 
 dinky little engine that pulls the work-train on the narrow-gauge 
 between Mauvages and Sauvoy. He belongs to a regiment of 
 engineers who served with the British in Flanders for some eight 
 months. While there he dug up enough dead Germans, — "You 
 could always tell where they were buried because the grass grew so 
 much greener there," he explained, — and picked enough gold fillings 
 out of their teeth, to make a whole match box full. He was going 
 to take it home and have a dentist put the gold in his teeth "for 
 a souvenir," but unluckily in the spring drive he lost all his possess- 
 ions and the match box with them. Now this, as Kipling would 
 say, is a true story. 
 
 Mauvages, November 30. 
 
 Let me recount to you the gentle tale of the German prisoners 
 and the Thanksgiving movies, an incident which I consider a sort 
 of sermon in a nutshell and a Warning to the Nations. 
 
 Unluckily there is in this division a secretary who is a senti- 
 mentalist. He has an idea that an important part of his object 
 in France is "to enliven the long evenings of the French villagers," 
 and particularly does he consider it his Christian duty to do some- 
 thing to demonstrate how much we love the poor German prisoners, 
 those gentlemen who wear the big P. G. for Prisonnier de Guerre on 
 their backs and "ought," as the boys say, "to have an I in the 
 middle." There are several hundred of them in a camp at Gondre- 
 court and they are, it is said, just as well housed and fed as our 
 boys, and not made to work nearly as hard. 
 
 Now, as there was no other sort of entertainment available, I 
 had set my heart on having movies in my hut on Thanksgiving. 
 I had presented my request at the Headquarters office and under- 
 stood the matter settled. But the Sentimental Secretary it seems 
 had made up his mind that the poor dear German prisoners must 
 have a treat and, other schemes falling through, he also put in a 
 
THE ORDNANCE 183 
 
 request for the movies. There was only one portable machine 
 in working order. Through some misunderstanding or something 
 in the office, the P. G.s got the movies. To enlarge upon my senti- 
 ments when the news was broken to me Thursday morning or to 
 record the opinions expressed by the boys in regard to the matter, 
 is not to the purpose of this tale. 
 
 Failing our show, all that I could manage in the way of celebra- 
 tion was a little box of nuts and raisins tied up with a bit of red, 
 white and blue ribbon for every man in camp. The mess sergeant, 
 however, outdid himself. Our Thanksgiving dinner was nothing 
 less than a feast. For days the A. R. jitney had been scouring 
 the country for poultry. At last the sergeant had succeeded in 
 getting enough for all. He did this by assembling specimens of the 
 whole feathered tribe; turkey, duck, chicken and goose. And I 
 had a slice of each. But for all that I didn't enjoy that dinner 
 worth six-pence. Those movies were on my mind. I tried to think 
 of the touching gratitude of the German prisoners. Perhaps after 
 all if one should pursue them with delicate attentions it might lead 
 them to see the error of their ways. Perhaps giving them a movie 
 show would inculcate, by example, a beautiful lesson of Christian 
 charity and forgiveness. Who could tell what uplifting moral 
 influence Charlie Chaplin or Mutt and Jeff might exert? 
 
 Last night was our regular movie-night. In the midst of pre- 
 paring for the show, Georges, the French operator, who was getting 
 the machine ready, Georges the little dandy, always nonchalant 
 and blase, came charging back to the counter, his eyes as big as 
 arc-lights. He thrust his hands, which were full of cartridges, 
 beneath my nose, fairly dancing on tip-toe in his excitement. He 
 had found them in the carbide; when the carbide had gotten hot, 
 "Poof!" he dramatized the wrecking of the hut with explosive 
 gestures. "Cestles Boches! Les cochons!" Never again would he 
 take his machine there, never, never! 
 
 As the machine had been left at the German Prison Camp after 
 the Thanksgiving show and then brought directly from there to 
 Mauvages there seems little room for doubt that the prisoners 
 
i8 4 MAUVAGES 
 
 had placed the shells there. Of course, if there were any poetic 
 justice in things, the Sentimental Secretary himself would have 
 been blown up by the Germans' cartridges, but unfortunately in 
 real life things don't happen that way. 
 
 Mauvages, December 3. 
 The French Army is in possession of Mauvages. A regiment 
 of artillery moved in on us yesterday afternoon. There seemed 
 a never-ending line of them as they crawled into town, the horses 
 just barely able to drag the heavy pieces. There must have been 
 a shocking shortage of fodder in the French Army; the poor 
 beasts look wretched beyond words. The big guns are lined up 
 all along the street. They look like great spotted lizards in their 
 green and brown and yellow coats of camouflage. Each piece 
 has a girl's name carved on the muzzle. The one in front of my 
 canteen is Marthe, further up the street stand Lucile and Marie. 
 We watched them as they brought the guns into place, unhitched 
 the teams and made their preparations to settle down and stay. 
 Once settled, our perplexities began. Immediately they started to 
 trickle into the canteen in search of cigarettes. To the first comers 
 in a weak moment I slipped a few packages. That was enough. 
 Thereafter it was just like flies to the molasses jar, and then of 
 course I had to harden my heart and say no. But they wouldn't 
 take no for an answer. They begged, pleaded and cajoled. I 
 posted a polite sign at the end of the counter explaining how the 
 canteen supplies had been brought into France without payment of 
 any duty, under the strict agreement with the French Govern- 
 ment that they would be sold only to Americans. But they re- 
 fused to read the sign. One handsome brigadier stopped me on 
 the street in order to present his petition. And at the canteen 
 a little poilu with a round cherubic face, after being refused 
 some nine or ten times over at the counter, followed me out into 
 the kitchen to urge his piteous plea. It was dreadful, it was 
 harrowing. I have never felt quite so mean about anything in all 
 my life. 
 
THE ORDNANCE 185 
 
 In the evening we had billed a stereoptican lecture on London. 
 Forseeing that the poilus would form a large proportion of the 
 audience, I tried to get an interpreter to explain the pictures in 
 French to them but at the last minute the interpreter failed me. 
 Notwithstanding, the Frenchmen remained courteously quiet while 
 the lecture lasted. But once it was finished the atmosphere of the 
 hut underwent a change. The bluecoated figures who were swarm- 
 ing into the canteen now had evidently spent the earlier part of the 
 evening in the cafes. I went out into the centre of the hut to see 
 what was going on; all about me stretched a swarm of poilus in a 
 genial mood. The door squeaked open, a little soldier came skip- 
 ping into the hut. To my horror I saw he carried in one hand a tall 
 tumbler and in the other a large bottle of Benedictine. The victrola 
 was jigging out a rag on the counter. Posing for a minute in an atti- 
 tude reminiscent of the great Isadora, the little poilu proceeded to 
 dance in time to the music, pirouetting on one toe as he waved the 
 bottle and the tumbler above his head with Bacchanalian gestures. 
 Then suddenly he sat down at one of the tables and started to pour 
 himself a glass. I swooped down upon him. It was defendu I ex- 
 plained, strictly and absolutely defendu to drink in this hut. He 
 stared incredulous. I reiterated with emphasis. Finally he nodded 
 sulkily and, slipping the bottle underneath his arm, turned away. 
 Two minutes later I caught him offering a red-nosed friend a drink 
 square in front of my counter. I flew to the attack again. I told 
 him it was against the rules to so much as bring wine into the hut. 
 He held his ground defiantly. I wanted to take the little wretch 
 by his coat collar and march him out the door; I felt I could have 
 done it. Instead I plead, expostulated and commanded. A score 
 of grinning poilus crowded about us: it was evidently as good as a 
 show to them. I entreated the little poilu please, please to carry 
 the bottle out of the hut! "Dehors! Dehors! Outside!" they 
 chorused gleefully. I exhausted my vocabulary, apparently with- 
 out effect. The fit tie poilu wasn't used to taking orders from a 
 girl, especially one who spoke French so badly, but finally I won. 
 "Bon!" he snapped exDlosively, turned on his heel and marched 
 
186 MAUVAGES 
 
 out. I fled precipitately to the kitchen and stayed there until clos- 
 ing time. I didn't feel equal to coping with any more tipsy poilus. 
 
 It's curious how the whole character of a dwelling-place can 
 change. When the priest and the cat and I are keeping house 
 together, the old mansion is the dimmest, most decorous place 
 imaginable. At night I let myself in the dark front door, locking 
 it carefully behind me, — Monsieur scolded me for leaving it un- 
 locked once; I had left him, he said, at the mercy of the passersby! 
 — then grope my way down the cold unlighted hall and up the 
 steep stairs to my chilly room and to bed by one flickering candle's 
 light. The place is as silent and lifeless as a tomb. Then new 
 troops come into town and suddenly everything is changed. The 
 lower floor is taken over for an officers' mess and often too, for 
 Headquarters. Savory odors of cooking, warm smells mount up 
 the dim stairway, candles gutter in niches in the pasage-ways, 
 smart-looking officers in khaki or horizon-blue as the case may be, 
 meet and salute one in the hall. The tramp of booted feet, the 
 ring of spurs, the clink of glasses, laughter, song, the piano played 
 tumultously sometimes late into the night, — everything from 
 Madelon to Mozart — and most startling, and incredible of all, 
 the jangle of a telephone bell, installed for the occasion; for a 
 few days we live in a strange bustling vivid world, then on they 
 move and we are left again to our silence and solitude. 
 
 Tonight as I was washing up for supper I was startled by a 
 rap on my door. There stood Monsieur le Cure* and a French 
 officer. I had a bad moment wondering what the cause of such a 
 visitation might be. Was he going to turn me out of my billet 
 perhaps? Or was he going to complain about the treatment his 
 men had received in the Y.? Monsieur le Cure was ambling through 
 a long and elaborate peroration. At first I could make no sense 
 out of it, then suddenly I caught on. Monsieur le Capitaine was a 
 stamp collector. He wanted to know if I perhaps had some stamps 
 des Etats-Unis which I could spare him! 
 
 Reports have come in tonight of friction between the French 
 and American soldiers in town, resulting in a number of scrim- 
 
THE ORDNANCE 187 
 
 mages. The whole trouble springs, I gather, from the eternal 
 feminine and the native jealousy of the male; the Fair Sex of 
 Mauvages having made quite evident to the poilus their decided 
 preference for the doughboys. 
 
 Mauvages, December 6. 
 
 The theatrical season at Mauvages has been inaugurated. The 
 carpenters were busy in the hut all day yesterday, hammering and 
 sawing, making us a roll curtain out of roofing paper, manufactur- 
 ing foot-lights from commissary candles and tin reflectors cut from 
 the lining of tobacco cases. When the stage was done it was very 
 gay. We had a red curtain across the back, bright yellow wings, 
 red and yellow draperies around the proscenium arch, festoons of 
 little flags strung across the top, and a large American flag draped 
 centre back. It wasn't what we wanted, it was just what, by hook 
 or crook we could get, and the effect really wasn't half as bad as it 
 sounds. 
 
 The programme might be classed in two parts, rehearsed and 
 impromptu. For a starter we dropped a tear over Baby's Prayer, 
 that bit of ninety-nine one-hundredths pure sentimentality, with- 
 out which no programme in the A. E. F. is complete these days; 
 after which we were adjured to "Pray for sunshine, But always 
 be prepared for rain," — a quite superfluous admonition in this part 
 of France at this season of the year! 
 
 "Put all your pennies on the shelf, 
 The almighty dollar will take care of itself." 
 "Humph!" grunted the boy next me, "I'll bet it was a Jew wrote 
 that." 
 
 Following the songs we heard Barney, the Poet Laureate of the 
 Camp, celebrate the deeds of the ordnance detachment in verse. 
 At least we supposed that was what it was, for Barney has a brogue 
 all his own and if you get one word in ten you're lucky. As the C. O. 
 says, it is much easier to "compree" a Frenchman than it is to 
 understand Barney. 
 
 After Barney we had a sermon, a burlesque darky sermon 
 
i88 MAUVAGES 
 
 preached by a black-face comedian. As luck would have it, two 
 real darkies from a labor camp up the line slipped in at the back 
 of the hut just as the preacher began. They took it all in deadly 
 earnest, and warmed, I suspect, by a glass at the corner cafe, they 
 presently began to respond to the preacher's exhortations with 
 genuine religious fervor. 
 
 "Dat'sso! You tell 'em bruder! Hallelujah! Bless de Lord!" 
 
 The audience up front, hearing a commotion and unluckily not 
 catching the comedy, hissed indignantly and the darkies, abashed, 
 slunk out. 
 
 Of course at the last moment some of our headliners failed to 
 come across. The mumps claimed our dramatic reader and our 
 buck-and-wing dancer sent word, just as the curtain was going up, 
 that in all the camp, no shoes outside of hob-nails, large enough 
 for him could be found. But we made up for these defections by 
 our impromptu acts. The most surprising of these was the Little 
 Fat Poilu. He popped up suddenly from Heaven knows where, a 
 round rosy dumpling of a man with a shiny nose and a fat black 
 beard, and offered his services. On his first appearance he played 
 the violin with vim and spirit. Then in answer to the applause he 
 dropped his violin, seized the tall hat from the head of the darky 
 preacher, clapped it on his own, and bounced back onto the stage. 
 The transformation was amazing. In an instant, instead of a 
 poilu he had become a jolly little bourgeois shopkeeper out for 
 a stroll on the boulevard. He proceeded to sing a comic song, a 
 song with an interminable number of verses, unquestionably very 
 funny and in all probability quite scandalous. The French portion 
 of the audience was charmed, they joined vociferously in the jiggy 
 choruses, and when he had done they insisted on another and an- 
 other. For a while it looked as if France was going to run away 
 with the programme, but finally the little poilu came to the end 
 of his repertoire, — or of his breath maybe, and America once more 
 took the stage. 
 
 Today we are living in an atmosphere of theatrical enterprise. 
 Already there are three or four " bigger and better" rival shows in 
 
THE ORDNANCE 189 
 
 process of incubation. What's more, Barney is writing a play. He 
 sits at one of the canteen tables surrounded by a group of admiring 
 would-be actors and each sheet, as he finishes it, is gravely handed 
 around the crowd. So far it seems to contain just three characters; 
 Rose the beautiful stenographer, the villain landlord and the office 
 boy. I am waiting in suspense to see whether Barney's master- 
 piece is going to turn out a melodrama, a problem play or a 
 dramatic treatise on the social and political wrongs of Ireland. 
 
 The French troops are moving tomorrow. Tonight the Little 
 Fat Poilu came to bid us good-bye. When no one was looking I 
 filled his pockets up with cigarettes. 
 
 Mauvages, December 9. 
 
 A very regrettable incident occured last night. The day being 
 Sunday we were due for a religious service at seven-fifteen. At 
 seven-ten the Reverend Gentleman, who was to instruct my flock 
 in the way wherein they should go, arrived in company with the 
 Business Manager from Gondrecourt. Now it happened that the 
 Reverend Gentleman on this occasion was none other than my 
 friend the Sentimental Secretary. He surveyed the congregation; 
 there were nine boys in the hut. He sat down and waited for the 
 audience to arrive. But the audience didn't. Instead one wretch 
 surreptitiously sneaked out the door. At last I felt it necessary 
 to come forward with apologies and explanations; my flock at 
 present was small to start with, the sheep had all gone to Domremy 
 on an excursion, the goats were deep in an after-pay-day poker game. 
 
 "Do you wish me to hold the meeting?" the R. G. questioned 
 grimly. 
 
 "If you will." 
 
 The Reverend Gentleman, a bit tight about the lips, laid on. 
 It was a cold night; we gathered by the fire. I tried to make myself 
 look as large as possible, but stretch the congregation as you might, 
 we only reached two-thirds of the way around the stove. 
 
 "Well," said the Business Manager when it was all over with, 
 "how soon will you be ready to close out this hut?" 
 
i 9 o MAUVAGES 
 
 I reminded him that after all it would have only taken ten right- 
 eous to save Sodom, so might not eight save Mauvages? 
 
 Of course just as soon as the Reverend Gentleman and the Busi- 
 ness Manager had shaken our dust off their feet and disappeared, 
 a whole crowd of boys came streaming into the hut. I accused 
 them of having waited just around the corner until they had seen 
 the Religious Service depart. As for Big Bill I consider him noth- 
 ing short of a slacker, he sat in the kitchen all evening and wrote a 
 letter to his girl. I tell him that as hut detail it is obviously his 
 duty to attend all services but he explains that "it makes him 
 homesick. " 
 
 In a town on the road between Mauvages and Gondrecourt 
 there is a labor camp of Chinese coolies. These are the laziest folk 
 in Europe I am sure. They are supposed to be working on the 
 road, which needs it badly enough, resembling, as one boy declared, 
 "the top of a stove when all the lids are taken off." All day long 
 they squat by the roadside, or stand idle watching the traffic go 
 by. "They'd rather be caught dead than caught working," as 
 one boy said. The story goes that if one of them dies the French 
 Government must pay the Chinese Government thirty francs. 
 They come dear at that. Moreover, they are unconscionable 
 thieves. Up on the hill back of the town where they are billeted 
 there is an American aviation field. The camp was abandoned 
 after the armistice, but twelve boys from the air service were 
 detailed to stay and guard the property. These boys find that 
 the chief end of their life is to chase the Chinks out of the 
 stores; they are quite persistent and perfectly unabashed. More 
 than that, if the Chinks catch one of the guards by himself, they 
 are likely to attack in force armed with sticks and as our boys 
 are not allowed to carry weapons, such an attack is no laughing 
 matter. The trouble began, the boys tell me, in the days when 
 the camp was populated; two mechanics had once thought it 
 a good joke to give one of the Chinks a bath by ducking him in 
 the horse-trough. 
 
 One of these heathen, I am told, came to church here at Mau- 
 
THE ORDNANCE ior 
 
 vages yesterday and almost broke up the meeting. It pleased 
 him to sing all the way through the service, a wierd sing-song 
 chant all his own, and as if that were not bad enough, in the 
 middle of a prayer he had turned square about and started to play 
 with the rosary of the scandalized Madame behind him! The 
 most pious-minded could scarcely keep their thoughts on the 
 priest's dissertation. There was "beaucoup distraction" as one 
 Mademoiselle phrased it. 
 
 This morning I went down to Gondrecourt. 
 
 "Well, and how are your eight men?" asked the Business 
 Manager. 
 
 "One of them has gone to the hospital with the mumps," I 
 answered. "So now I have seven." 
 
 Mauvages, December 12. 
 
 I have been A. W. O. L. I have been on a joy ride. For the 
 first time since I came to France I have taken a real day off. I 
 got a chance to go up to the old battle front on a "speeder." I 
 didn't mention the matter to the office, but I took the chance. 
 I knew I could safely trust the hut to the management of Bill 
 and Nick for one day. 
 
 We started out shortly after six A. M., on the narrow-gauge 
 bound for Mont Sec. There were five of us on the speeder which 
 is, you must know, a little flat car something like a hand-car, 
 only that instead of being propelled by hand power, it is run by a 
 gasolene motor. Speeders are the jolliest possible way of travel- 
 ling and they can go like the wind: they possess just two dis- 
 advantages, their propensity for having engine trouble, and 
 the ease with which they jump the track at the slightest prov- 
 ocation. It is told how in Abainville the other day a speeder 
 jumped the rails, the engineer, after turning a half a dozen somer- 
 saults, picked himself up, squared off, demanded; "Who in hell 
 put the pebble on the track?" 
 
 From Mauvages we followed the A. and S. to Sorcy. There 
 we switched onto the line which the boys at Abainville used to 
 
i 92 MAUVAGES 
 
 declare "ran through the trenches." They would tell me wonder- 
 ful tales of the trips they had taken on this line; the smoke-stack 
 of the engine protruded over the top, they explained, and " Gosh, 
 you could hear the bullets just splatterin' against it!" 
 
 A short ways out from Sorcy we passed the last inhabited 
 village. Ahead of us we could see the barren sinister outline 
 of Mont Sec, that little Gibraltar of the land which the Germans 
 had captured and fortified early in the war, which the French 
 had endeavored to retake in 19 15 with the most fearful losses, but 
 which had remained impregnable, commanding, looking down in 
 contempt on our men in their muddy lowland trenches of the Toul 
 Sector, until, on September twelfth, the American Army had 
 taken it along with the rest of the Saint Mihiel salient. 
 
 As we neared Mont Sec we began to pass devastated villages, 
 some of them mere formless ruins, others from a distance holding 
 the shape and outline of habitable dwelling-places but on ap- 
 proach revealing themselves as mere groups of riddled house- 
 shells. Across the open places stretched interminable grey 
 swathes of rusting tangled wire, " barbed-wire enough to fence 
 Texas," as one boy put it. On sidings we passed long lines of 
 cars full of salvage, all the junk of war tossed carelessly together. 
 Along the tracks were scattered empty shells and here and there 
 piles of unexploded ammunition. In a shell-hole by the road- 
 side, half filled with water, lay a hob-nailed shoe, — prosaic but 
 pitiful witness of some tragedy. It was the loneliest land, the 
 most forsaken I have ever seen. Far and wide as one looked over 
 the empty plain there was no living, moving creature anywhere. 
 
 At the foot of Mont Sec we stopped. There in the woods were 
 the remains of a German camp; it had been a jolly little place 
 fixed up like a beer garden underneath the trees, with fancy 
 " rustic" work and chairs and tables. We left the speeder there, 
 and tramping across the fields, climbed Mont Sec. Near the top 
 we found the entrances to the dugouts. The hill was tunneled 
 through from side to side, all the corridors and rooms walled, 
 roofed and floored with the heaviest oak lumber. Everywhere 
 
THE ORDNANCE 193 
 
 through the passage-ways ran a perfect network of electric wires. 
 Long stairs led to the different levels. No furnishings were left 
 except the bunks and some rough tables. We ate our luncheon 
 of bread, jam and corn willy in what had evidently been the 
 officers' quarters; the room was nicely finished with cement, 
 there was a fancy moulded pattern in bas relief over the door- 
 way, a pipe-hole showed where a stove had been. 
 
 After lunch we inspected the concrete machine-gun pill-boxes 
 which dotted the hill-top. Then we went down the steep eastern 
 slope to the village of Mont Sec. About the town, to judge 
 from the ploughed and pitted vineyards, the fighting must 
 have been the fiercest. The village was a village of the dead. 
 We went inside the church; part of the tower, some of the walls, 
 a little of the roof was left, beyond that nothing. Near the door 
 a French officer had scrawled "Maudite soil le boche qui detruit 
 les eglises"— cursed be the Hun who destroys the churches. In 
 this church, Madame the Caretaker tells me, the Germans com- 
 manded all the male inhabitants of Mont Sec to assemble. Here 
 they were kept prisoners for three days and nights. On the 
 fourth day they were marched off at the bayonet's point into 
 Germany, and no one has ever heard a word from them since. 
 
 Just outside the village in the little cemetery, ploughed with 
 shell-holes, we found French, American and German graves. The 
 German inscriptions all commemorated "heroes dead for the 
 Fatherland;" one of them vowed, with the help of God, vengeance 
 on the enemy. 
 
 We went back to the speeder. As it was early in the afternoon 
 we decided to go on. Rounding Mont Sec, we passed into German 
 occupied territory. We saw the famous cabbage patches which 
 fed our soldiers after the Saint Mihiel drive, and, on a hillock be- 
 side the road, one memorable scarecrow dressed from head to foot 
 as a German soldier, "feldgrau" uniform, cartridge belt, helmet 
 and all. At Hattonchatel we looked down on the German barracks 
 from the hill-side but didn't have time to stop. It was growing 
 late, so we must turn about-face. Once headed for home our trou- 
 
i 9 4 MAUVAGES 
 
 bles began. The rain which had been teasing us all day as a faint 
 drizzle, settled down to business. A few hundred yards down the 
 hill-side the speeder jumped the track. Fortunately we weren't 
 running fast and the speeder jumped on the right side, if it had 
 jumped on the left we might have gone over the edge of the moun- 
 tainous hill-side. As it was no real harm resulted beyond a violent 
 bumping and shaking up; I jumped and got a lame wrist. "The 
 chances are, that whatever happens, she won't turn over," the 
 boys told me, "so hang on after this." So I hung tight. The 
 engine, which had worked like a charm all the way up, began to 
 sulk and balk by fits. Presently it grew dark. We had one lantern, 
 we lighted it and the boy who sat at the front end held it so the 
 light would fall on the rails. Every now and then the wind would 
 blow it out. At each station along the track we would stop and 
 ask the engineer operators whether the block ahead was clear. 
 When we came to the last station before the long forest stretches 
 about Mont Sec the operator who came out to speak to us was quite 
 angry; there were three trains, he said, somewhere on the track 
 ahead; we were doing a very dangerous thing, running after dark. 
 We went on, straining our eyes as we entered the woods in order to 
 discern the dark mass on the track ahead which would mean a 
 train, for the trains, in memory of war days, I suppose, carry ab- 
 solutely no lights. A week ago a speeder ran head-on into a 
 train at night just above Sauvoy; of its three passengers, two were 
 killed, the other fearfully injured. We held ourselves tense, ready 
 the moment we had made out a train, and the speeder slowed 
 down, to jump, and, lifting the car, push it to one side off the tracks 
 until the train had passed. Once we were lucky enough to make 
 a siding just at the critical moment. Sometimes we ran at the edge 
 of high embankments, sometimes we would cross, on a trestle, a 
 wide marshy stream; then the thought would come to me, What 
 if the speeder should jump here? And she did jump twice more on 
 the way back, but luckily both times in well-selected places. The 
 worst feature of these acrobatics was that the jar had an unhealthy 
 effect upon the engine and after each occasion the mechanics in 
 
THE ORDNANCE 195 
 
 the crowd had to delve and tinker before the speeder could be 
 coaxed to speed again. Also it was wet. The rain soaked through 
 my raincoat, through my sweater, into my leather jacket; my skirt 
 was a dripping rag, the water oozed from my gloves, raindrops 
 dripped from my nose, my "waterproof" shoes were like sponges. 
 You felt, as one of the boys put it, exactly like a figure in a foun- 
 tain. 
 
 Between Mont Sec and Sorcy we got a tow. In the dark we 
 came upon the rear end of a salvage train, tied ourselves up to 
 it, and bumped merrily along behind until the train turned off 
 on a branch line and we had to cut loose and make our own way 
 with the increasingly contrary engine. Fortunately, from that 
 point most of the way was down hill; on the up-grades we got off 
 and walked; the last part of the way the boys simply had to push 
 the car. We reached home at half-past ten, tired, soaked to the 
 skin, but happy. 
 
 Mauvages, December 16. 
 
 After this, Mauvages is going to be on the map! Mauvages is 
 
 to be headquarters for the Artillery Brigade, with seventeen 
 
 hundred men in town and thousands more in the villages about. 
 Wonderful to say, this is the very brigade to which my two bat- 
 teries from the Artillery School belong and though neither of these 
 will be here in town, still they will be near enough so I can get a 
 glimpse of my old boys, I am sure. 
 
 Already we have an ammunition train and a crowd of "casuals" 
 waiting here for their outfits. The hut, which has of late been 
 rather empty mornings, is now filled all day. These casuals are 
 for the most part replacements, shipped here directly from the 
 ports, after a ten days' residence in France. They have nothing 
 to do at present but sit in the hut and think how miserable they 
 are. It is funny to hear them talk. Their opinion of Mauvages 
 is inexpressible in polite terms. They are quite convinced that 
 they have come to the Very Last Hole on Earth. In vain I assure 
 them that Mauvages is quite a fine town, as French towns go, in 
 
i 9 6 MAUVAGES 
 
 vain I draw their attention to its beauties and advantages. They 
 are absolutely certain that nothing could be worse ! 
 
 Meanwhile I have been busy making frantic trips into Gondre- 
 court to demand, in view of the coming crowds, a new hut, an 
 electric lighting system, an addition to the old hut, anything or 
 every thing, except a man secretary! But Gondrecourt takes the 
 situation very calmly. 
 
 Just to pass the time away, one of the new arrivals went fishing 
 in the canal yesterday. He bestowed his catch on me; it measured 
 about six inches by one and a quarter. As it was still wriggling 
 faintly I put the poor thing in the water-pail, only to find later 
 that Big Bill in disgust had thrown water and fish out into the back 
 yard. Whereupon I raised such an outcry that Bill must go out 
 in the dark and feel through the wet grass for that fish until he 
 found it. I carried it down to camp, inviting the K. P.s to prepare 
 it for the C. O.'s dinner. At dinner it appeared elegantly garnished 
 with parsley in the center of a huge platter. Just to pay me back 
 they made me eat it, while the rest dined on steak. 
 
 "How do you suppose he caught it?" asked the C. O. I said 
 nothing. Fishing with hand-grenades is strictly against the law. 
 
 Mauvages, December 18. 
 
 Mauvages is in disgrace. Mauvages is the black sheep in the 
 Y. fold. Mauvages is in wrong all the way around. And it's all 
 because of one Old Gentleman and his ill-timed opinions. 
 
 The Old Gentleman came out to talk to us yesterday evening. 
 We weren't expecting him. We were expecting a lecture on the 
 Man Without a Country, — whoever that may be, Jack Johnson or 
 the Kaiser! as the boys say, — by the Educational Department. 
 But then we have almost given up expecting to get what we expect. 
 This is only the third time we have been fooled on the Man 
 Without a Country who appears to be our Old Man of the Sea. 
 
 The Old Gentleman was brought out in state in the best Y. car 
 by the Big Chief, the Entertainment Department and a driver. 
 The Entertainment Department immediately ensconced himself 
 
THE ORDNANCE 197 
 
 by the cook-stove with a Sunday Picture Supplement; the driver 
 retired to a secluded corner to play a game of checkers with one 
 of the boys; while the Big Chief took his stand out front. I for 
 once back-slid scandalously, and, instead of occupying a front 
 seat with a deeply interested expression spread upon my counten- 
 ance, sat in the kitchen and ate jam and waffles, the waffles 
 which were heart-shaped and crisp and heavenly, having been 
 brought by Nick from his latest supper party. 
 
 The Old Gentleman stood out by the stove, the stage proving 
 too chilly. There was a crowd in the hut. He put his foot in it 
 at the start. He announced himself as an intimate friend of ex- 
 President Roosevelt. The boys, sniffing politics, grew suspicious, 
 even hostile. He began on the scandal of America's unprepared- 
 ness, from that passed by degrees to the view that Germany was 
 not yet defeated and as a climax called upon the boys to rise and 
 put themselves on record as being willing to stay in France until 
 Kingdom come, if necessary, in order to do the job up brown. 
 The boys did not rise. Instead they heckled the Old Gentleman 
 until he grew as red as a turkey-cock and so indignant as to fairly 
 wax speechless. One of the ammunition train boys, a husky lad 
 who, they tell me, is an old guard house standby, led the opposi- 
 tion. Out in the kitchen you could have heard a pin drop. The 
 Entertainment Department and I sat and stared at each other. 
 
 The whole trouble as I saw it, was that the Old Gentleman had 
 slipped up on his dates. He was giving them a Bef ore-Novem- 
 ber-Eleventh speech when it was after the eleventh. It was as if 
 he had quite failed to comprehend that at eleven o'clock on 
 that date the whole psychological outlook of the American dough- 
 boy underwent an instantaneous change. His entire mental 
 horizon became forthwith concentrated to one burning point, — 
 the desire which he expresses simply but adequately in the words; 
 "I want to go home!" And not ex-President Roosevelt, nor 
 President Wilson, nor General Pershing, nor anybody else could 
 make him interested in anything that was not remotely, at least, 
 related to that issue. 
 
198 MAUVAGES 
 
 At last the agony was over. The Old Gentleman came back to 
 the kitchen mopping his brow. When he had finished expressing 
 his opinion of Mauvages, the driver went out to crank the car. 
 The car was gone. Of course then, everyone remembered having 
 heard a car drive off in the middle of the lecture, — every one 
 that is, but I, I had been too interested in the waffles, — but of 
 course no one had really thought that it could be, etc. A search 
 party was recruited which scoured highway and byway. The 
 M. P.s at Gondrecourt were notified by 'phone. Meanwhile it 
 was ten o'clock, a bleak night and four indignant gentlemen were 
 stranded six miles from home. An ambassador was elected to go 
 and lay the case before the A. R. C. O. The C. O. on his way to 
 bed, instructed the emissary where billets for the night might 
 possibly be had. But the Old Gentleman, upon receiving the 
 information, flatly and finally refused to stay in any billet in 
 town; he would sleep in his own bed or no other. After a nervous 
 interval the ambassador again approached the C. 0., this time 
 suggesting the loan of his car and chauffeur. The C. O., aroused 
 a second time from bed, acceeded shortly, the ambassador returned 
 to despatch the unfortunate Bill to camp to break the news to the 
 chauffeur. The chauffeur, who was in the midst of an after- 
 hours poker game, when he recovered from his astonishment, 
 replied (expurgated) that he'd come when he got good and ready, 
 and settled back to his game. 
 
 In the meantime my four guests by the kitchen-stove discussed 
 in part the peculiarities of the Japanese language, but chiefly the 
 short-comings of Mauvages. The Chief, however, showed himself 
 a gentleman. He washed the dishes up! And considering that 
 he was a man and a minister and that the light was dim and the 
 water cold, he washed them pretty well. 
 
 At a quarter to eleven the A. R. chauffeur having presumably 
 forced all the others into bankruptcy, or gone bankrupt himself, 
 drove up to the door and I said farewell to my friends. 
 
 This morning a rescue expedition was sent out from Gondre- 
 court. It finally discovered the lost car, none the worse for its 
 
THE ORDNANCE 199 
 
 joy-ride, in a ditch half-way to Sauvoy. Information has reached 
 me on the side that it was a little group of "hard-boiled guys" 
 from the ammunition train who stole the auto. They were dis- 
 pleased with the Old Gentleman's opinions, and they made up 
 their minds that he should walk home. 
 
 So this is how matters stand: I and my hut are in discredit at 
 Headquarters, because my boys stole their car. The Old Gentle- 
 man has openly declared that Mauvages is the most unpatriotic 
 spot in France. The A. R. C. O. is disgusted because he was routed 
 twice out of bed in one night. The chauffeur is so incensed at 
 me and mine at having to drive into town at eleven P. M. that he 
 persistently forgets to stop for my daily papers. And the boys 
 are all sore and touchy on account of the opinions expressed by 
 the Old Gentleman in and after his lecture. Such is the happy 
 lot of a hut secretary, 
 
 Mauvages, December 23. 
 The Big Push is here. Our lawn has turned into a gun park with 
 limbers and caissons elbowing each other under our very eaves. All 
 day the little hut is crowded to its capacity and at night it becomes 
 so full that I am literally afraid it will burst out at the seams. 
 Colonels and captains are forever bobbing up like so many Jack- 
 in-the-Boxes in my kitchen which I was used to consider as a ref- 
 uge and a sanctum. They have the best intentions in the world; 
 they offer me advice on every subject under the sun from the 
 building of new shelves in the canteen to the frequency with which 
 I should require Big Bill to shave. And quite unsolicited they have 
 given me a detail, — a detail of such proportions that I am swamped. 
 I don't know how many there are. They never stand still long 
 enough for me to count them. Sometimes there appear to be ten 
 and sometimes twenty. Like the Old Woman who lived in the 
 shoe, I have so many details I don't know what to do. They are 
 the nicest boys that ever were, if only they didn't take up quite so 
 much room! Now when I am minded to sit down for a moment to 
 think, my only course is to go into the store-room and sit on a 
 
2oo MAUVAGES 
 
 packing-box, and the store-room is very cold. And the worst of it 
 is that they all, from colonel to K. P., have the beautiful idea in 
 their heads that I am not to do any work, but just to be a sort of 
 parlor ornament, and a sweet influence; that I will, in short, like 
 the old man who was afraid of the cow, "sit on the stile and con- 
 tinue to smile," while the army runs my hut. Which is not at all 
 my notion of things. 
 
 In the meantime we have been busy making such preparations for 
 Christmas as we could. Chiefly we have decorated the hut. I 
 begged two boxes full of lanterns, flags, tinsel and festoons, from 
 the office, then I merely mentioned the fact that I wanted a tree 
 and lots of branches to trim with and the boys did the rest. I 
 don't know where those greens came from, I don't want to know. 
 But there is one spectre that keeps haunting me; the apparition of 
 an indignant Frenchman at my canteen door, with a bill half a 
 metre long for damages. 
 
 This new outfit has brought a heathen custom to town with 
 them. The band plays for Reveille! We had been so peaceful, so 
 unmilitary here in town with not so much as a bugle note to make 
 a ripple in our slumbers! But now at some unimagined hour be- 
 fore daylight a brazen clangour bursts suddenly forth. Down the 
 street and past under my window in the dark they go, making the 
 grand tour of the three streets in town, thumping and tooting as if 
 their lives depended on it. I never knew a band could make such 
 an amazing racket, nor could sound quite so joyously impudent. A 
 bucketful of cold water couldn't dispel sleep any more effectively. 
 I feel like jumping out of bed. But I don't, for it is pitch dark and 
 cold and very damp. There is a fire-place to be sure in my room 
 but after one or two fruitless attempts at making it produce a little 
 heat I abandoned the idea and decided to spend all my time be- 
 tween my bed and the canteen. But when I desire to view my 
 countenance in the mirror, I have to take a towel and wipe off the 
 moisture that collects on it to trickle down in little streams. 
 
 I have received my first Christmas present. Bill and Nick — 
 the dears! — have presented me a beautiful silk umbrella. I think 
 
THE ORDNANCE 201 
 
 they did it largely for the honor of the family. As long as my old 
 faithful only had its handle gone, they could overlook it, but when 
 the ribs took to parting company with the covering, they evidently 
 thought that something should be done about it. Nick went to 
 Gondrecourt to buy it; coming back, he managed to fall off the 
 truck, was picked up and given first aid by a kindly Frenchwoman, 
 and reached home in slightly damaged shape but with the precious 
 umbrella safe. I have been suggesting to Bill that he set a two 
 franc piece in the handle and then I will have his and Nick's ini- 
 tials carved on it, but he doesn't wax enthusiastic. 
 
 Mauvages, December 25. 
 
 We sat up half the night packing Christmas boxes, — seventeen 
 hundred of them, one for every man in Mauvages. Two packages 
 of cigarettes, a cigar, two bars of chocolate and a can of "smoking" 
 went into each little cardboard box labelled in red " A Merry Xmas 
 from the folks at home through the Y;" that is, theoretically they 
 went in, practically it was discovered that no human ingenuity 
 could so arrange the pesky things as to make them fit the box. 
 So finally we decided to treat the "smoking " as a separate affair. I 
 wanted badly to have Santa Claus hand the boxes to the boys 
 underneath the Christmas tree, but the boys finally convinced me 
 that the difficulties, including the danger of "repeaters" ad lib, 
 were too great, so we fitted the boxes into packing-cases and shipped 
 a case to each company and let each of the top sergeants play 
 that he was Santa Claus. 
 
 It was half past twelve by the time I passed the church on my 
 way back to the billet. They were celebrating midnight mass. 
 The fight of the altar-candles illumined the old windows with a 
 soft radiance. They were Y. M. C. A. candles. Monsieur le Cure 
 had begged them from me in the afternoon; he could get no others, 
 he said, and was in great distress. 
 
 Chez nous there was much activity. I stopped inside the door 
 to chat with the cooks. They were up plucking the Colonel's 
 goose and expected to make a night of it. 
 
202 MAUVAGES 
 
 Sounds of gaiety were ringing from the dining-room. A young 
 lieutenant, slightly touseled, thrust his head out of the door. I 
 wished him a Merry Christmas; in return he asked me in to par- 
 take of an anchovy sandwich. I took one look inside the door at 
 the array of empty bottles, declined with thanks, and climbed the 
 stairs to bed. For a long while afterwards someone downstairs 
 kept mewing like a cat. It might have been the slightly touseled 
 lieutenant. 
 
 To-day it has been raw and damp and chill and grey and drizzly. 
 I had a notion that I might ask the French kiddies in this after- 
 noon to see the tree and receive some little gifts of cookies and 
 chocolate but when I reached the hut this morning and saw how 
 packed it was I quickly gave up the project. Not for all the chil- 
 dren in ten villages would I turn the boys out into the rain. 
 
 Tonight there is to be some sort of show, arranged by the enter- 
 tainment officer. 
 
 Just before dinner time the Second Lieutenant from the A. R. 
 came in, looking full of mysterious importance. "The C. O. leaves 
 this noon," he said. "He's ordered to report at Souilly by twelve 
 tonight. I'll tell you all about it later." Later I learned. In- 
 spectors had been visiting the dump. They had found it in a very 
 dangerous state indeed. The wet weather has affected the ex- 
 plosives so that should the sun come out for a day or two the chemi- 
 cal change ensuing would in all probability cause an explosion 
 which would set off the whole dump with its millions of dollars 
 worth of high explosives. In which case little Mauvages would of 
 course go higher than Halifax. The C. O. has been removed and 
 the Second Lieutenant left in charge. The work of destroying the 
 dangerous explosives is to be pursued at top speed. In the mean- 
 while we will pray for continued rain. 
 
 I received two gifts today that touched me deeply. One was a 
 pretty pink embroidered scarf from the boys at the aviation field. 
 The lad who brought it to me had walked twelve miles, into Gondre- 
 court and back again in the sleety rain, to buy it ! The other was 
 a package labeled; "Wishing you a Mary Xmas from the Opera- 
 
THE ORDNANCE 203 
 
 tors at A. S. No. 9, and may the next one be in the States." Inside 
 were two boxes of chocolates, their Christmas candy issue! 
 
 As for me, I am ashamed — I have been so busy and so bothered 
 that I just couldn't seem to manage a gift for anyone, not for Bill 
 nor Nick nor even Monsieur le Cure. 
 
 Mauvages, December 28. 
 
 Neddy has come back! His battery has just arrived at Ros- 
 ieres and last night he got off and walked over here to see me. 
 
 We sat and talked by the kitchen-stove and I found him just 
 the same shy, slow-spoken dreamy lad. The long months at the 
 front have seemingly instilled nothing bitter in him, nor left 
 any scars on his spirit, no matter if he is wearing a wonderful 
 belt quite covered with German buttons all "cut off of dead ones. " 
 He dug out of his pockets for me two odd little picture frames 
 made cleverly out of rings from German fuses, with pieces of 
 celluloid cut from the eye-holes of German gas-masks for glass, 
 and held together with surgeon's plaster. Then of course there 
 were the latest pictures of his girl to show me. 
 
 He told me about the battery. On the whole their casualties 
 have been light. Jones was gassed, and is in hospital somewhere; 
 it seems just like Jones, somehow, to get gassed! The boys, he 
 told me, had been fairly homesick for the little old Artillery 
 School Hut, — most of all, he said, they had missed my hot 
 chocolate. 
 
 Then just to make the occasion perfect, who should walk in 
 but Snow! Snow's battery is at Delouze, two towns away; but 
 Snow has been on leave down on the Riviera, having the time of 
 his young life. 
 
 "I never could see what there was in this country worth fighting 
 for," he told me, "until I went down there. But now I know." 
 
 He had just returned from his furlough this very afternoon. 
 He hadn't a thing to eat all day, being of course, "dead broke." 
 I got the best impromptu supper I could and we all three sat in 
 the kitchen and ate it. The menu was: crackers and canned milk; 
 
204 MAUVAGES 
 
 sardines and crackers; cracker-pudding and cocoa; crackers and 
 jam. The boys gossiped and swapped yarns like two old vet- 
 erans. Neddy related how the gunners at the front when loading 
 would pat and even kiss a shell as they adjured it not to be a dud! 
 
 Snow told me how , the talented, the brilliant, had gone to 
 
 pieces at the front and had been sent back to the S. O. S. This 
 must have been hard on Snow for the two were close friends. "I 
 
 said to him one day," recounted Snow, " , you must have done 
 
 something awfully wicked in your life to make you so afraid to 
 die." Undoubtedly the poor fellow's failure was due, not so much 
 to lack of courage, as to over-sensitiveness and too much imagin- 
 ation. The pity of it is that this will surely prove a bad blow to 
 his self-respect. 
 
 When it was time for Neddy to go I saw there was something 
 he wanted to say to me. At last it came out. Around his neck, it 
 seems, he is still wearing the chain with the little cross which I 
 gave him when he went to the front. And he has the unshak- 
 able notion in his quaint head that it was the cross which kept 
 him safe! 
 
 Mauvages, December 29. 
 Tonight we gave a party: hot chocolate and cookies for the 
 whole camp. Every Sunday before the Big Push came I had been 
 serving hot chocolate free but I had been staggered by the thought 
 of trying to make chocolate for seventeen hundred men on my 
 little stove that is just big enough to sit on, over a fire which has 
 to be coaxed with German powder sticks and candle ends before it 
 will burn, and serving it in our sixty odd cocoa bowls. This morn- 
 ing, however, I had an inspiration. I consulted the detail, they ap- 
 proved. Accordingly we sent requests to three of the battery mess- 
 kitchens, asking that they should each furnish us, at five-thirty, the 
 largest container they possessed full of hot water. Then we asked 
 the mess sergeants to annouce the party at supper and tell the 
 boys to bring their mess-cups. The sentry at the street corner was 
 also instructed to let no one pass without his mess-cup. Then we 
 
THE ORDNANCE 205 
 
 started in, heating all the water we could manage, making choco- 
 late paste, opening whole cases full of canned milk. 
 
 At six o'clock the fun, per schedule, began. The boys lined 
 up from the counter to the stage. But instead of a single line, 
 it soon became evident we had two, one coming and one going, 
 which together formed an endless chain like a giant wheel which 
 kept slowly but surely revolving. After the second or third time 
 around a boy would begin to acquire a slightly sheepish look and 
 endeavor to avoid my eye, but when they found that all they got 
 was a grin and "I'm glad you like it!" they grinned back un- 
 ashamed. 
 
 "I can't stop," joyfully explained one lad to me, "I'm in the line 
 and I can't get out; I just gotter keep on coming round." 
 
 "Oh boy! but that's the best thing I've had in France!" de- 
 clared another. 
 
 While a third announced; "Gee, but I'm full all the way up! 
 If I drink another drop I sure will bust " — a confession which 
 may have contained more fact than fancy, for some of the boys 
 did drink so much that they got sick right then and there. It was 
 an orgy. And when the last of the four huge containers had been 
 drained to a drop, why everyone, I believe, for once had had 
 enough. 
 
 "You've got all the business in town right here tonight," one of 
 the boys informed me. "I just took a look in at the cafes. Every 
 one of them is empty." 
 
 Personally I feel that the party was a Great Success. We 
 shall have to have one just like it every Sunday. 
 
 Mauvages, January i, 1919. 
 Mes meilleurs voeux de Bonne Annee! or, as the boys say; "Bun 
 Annie! " We welcomed the new Year in con molto giubilo. Down- 
 stairs at my billet there was music until late and after that sounds 
 as of a repetition of the Christmas party. At twelve o'clock by 
 the old church bell, the band, which I had imagined long since 
 safe and sound in bed, burst forth into music and straggled down 
 
so6 MAUVAGES 
 
 the street playing "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight" 
 and all the rest of the most rakish airs in its repertoire. I stepped 
 out on my Juliet balcony. The boys were setting off pyrotech- 
 nics of all sorts "salvaged" from the dump; flares, colored lights, 
 and rockets. The street burned out of the darkness in rose- 
 colored mist against which showed black silhouettes of soldiers 
 who waved their arms and shouted and sang; while from the edge 
 of the village sounded a sharp tattoo of rifle shots. Just as the 
 light was beginning to fade out I heard an emphatic bang of the 
 front door below me and looking down saw two figures; a little 
 brisk bustling one and a tall, lean one go hurrying down the path 
 and out the gate. It was our Colonel and an attendant officer. 
 Retribution, I knew, was bearing down upon the revellers. Sure 
 enough, this morning I learned that the Colonel, sallying forth, 
 had struck right and left, leaving a trail of arrests all over town. 
 
 But even with the Colonel's sortie, quiet did not descend on 
 Mauvages for some time. The party below-stairs was not confined 
 to the mess-hall this time but was also being celebrated in the 
 kitchen. At about one o'clock a K. P. stumbled up the stairs 
 and knocked on the door of the Cure's chamber just across from 
 me. He had some champagne for the Cure, he explained in thick 
 and execrable French. The Cure must drink it in honor of the 
 New Year. It was good champagne. I could hear the Cure 
 replying from his bed in rapid deprecating sentences, but the 
 K. P. held to his point; he had set his heart on the old man's 
 joining the celebration. "Champagne bun" he kept repeating, 
 " Vous camarade. Bun annie. " For a long time they carried on 
 the argument, but finally, as the priest implacably refused to 
 open his door, the genial K. P. gave up in disgust, confiding to 
 his friends as he reached the floor that the Cure was, after all, 
 nothing but a dried up old fish. 
 
 This morning I went down to Headquarters to turn in my 
 accounts. Alas, for the vanity of human intentions! At Christ- 
 mas I had sent little boxes of fudge to several of the men at the 
 office, hoping thereby to curry favour for my canteen and coun- 
 
THE ORDNANCE 207 
 
 teract any bad impressions which our delinquencies in the matter 
 of attending Sunday Services and appropriating other people's 
 autos might have caused. Now I find I have made more enemies 
 among the ones that I left out, than I made friends of the ones I 
 favoured. 
 
 In spite of this sad condition of affairs I managed to tease one 
 driver into agreeing to take me to Vaucouleurs. At Vaucouleurs 
 I had been told that there was a commissary where one could 
 purchase candles, and the boys are desperately anxious for candles. 
 At first I did not quite understand so burning a desire as 
 they exhibited, but now I am wise. They want them — poor 
 wretches! — so they can "read their shirts," before they go to bed! 
 I stayed down in Gondrecourt, missing dinner, and then set out 
 for Vaucouleurs with my heart full of hope and my pockets 
 crammed with currency. It was a long, cold trip in the driving, 
 drizzly rain. Arrived at Vaucouleurs we found that, being the 
 first of the month, the commissary was closed for inventory. 
 
 Mauvages, January 3. 
 
 Everybody has a little pet trouble of his own these days. The 
 A. R. has its share and more of them. Lieutenant C. recounted 
 some of his tonight. He had been carrying the dangerous explo- 
 sives over beyond the woods to the west of the town where they 
 were being blown off. Then the French Town Major had called. 
 
 It wouldn't do, he said, to blow off the ammunition there any 
 more; there were sick people in the town and the explosions fairly 
 made them jump right up out of their beds. And really one couldn't 
 blame them. So then the Lieutenant had switched to the north, 
 over beyond the narrow-gauge, only to be promptly visited by a 
 furious delegation of engineers. Whether it was because proper 
 precautions hadn't been taken or what I don't know, whatever the 
 case, in the course of the explosions a large rock had made a gaping 
 hole in the roof of A. S. No. 9 and narrowly missed one of my good 
 friends the operators. The complaint of the engineers was shortly 
 followed by an indignant ultimatum from the Captain at Abain- 
 
2 o8 MAUVAGES 
 
 ville who is in charge of the railway. Unless the explosions were 
 forthwith stopped, he threatened, no more trains would be run 
 on the road. On top of all this the Colonel of artillery must call 
 the Lieutenant to account. The boys whom he arrested New Year's 
 night had been shooting off their rifles. The shells must have 
 come from the dump. Since it was Lieutenant C's dump, it was 
 his business to keep his shells in their proper places. Therefore 
 Lieutenant C. was responsible for the shooting. 
 
 I don't know just how the matter has been arranged with the 
 Captain at Abainville, but the explosions beyond the tracks have 
 been going on all day. Latest reports testify that that roof of A. S. 
 No. 9 is riddled like a sieve with stone-holes and that the cook, 
 who never was known to be a religious man, spends all his time 
 beneath the table praying. 
 
 Two of the ordnance boys have been badly burned while setting 
 off the explosions, and the whole detachment is sore and disheart- 
 ened because they are being worked so hard in the mud and rain 
 and their Sunday holiday denied them. Special details from the 
 artillery are being sent to work at the dump every day in order 
 to hasten the work of destruction, but these boys, too, are sullen 
 and rebellious. They have been used to handling shells at the front, 
 they say, and they consider it an indignity to have to handle them 
 here in the dump as if they, forsooth, belonged to the ordnance! 
 And so the work goes none too quickly. Everyone has been in- 
 structed to keep a particular lookout for German delay fuses, those 
 deadly little infernal machines, which can be set, according to the 
 strength of the acid which eats through the spring, to explode 
 any time between a week and six months. They are disguised 
 cleverly to look exactly like ordinary percussion fuses, the only 
 betraying mark being a tiny six pointed star on the nose. Several 
 have already been found planted in dumps which contained cap- 
 tured German ammunition, and the tale runs through camp that 
 some have been discovered here, although this I rather suspect is 
 just another army rumor. 
 
 Tonight one of the ordnance boys hobbled into the hut, his left 
 
THE ORDNANCE 209 
 
 foot swathed in bandages; a shell had fallen on a toe and crushed it. 
 I attempted to sympathize. 
 
 "Don't waste any of your sympathy on me," he retorted, "I'm 
 the luckiest feller you know. There ain't a man in camp who don't 
 envy me." 
 
 As for me, I am having a few pet troubles too. One of these 
 is concerned with the army dentist at Gondrecourt. And this is 
 all in consequence of the kind operators at A. S. No. 9 and their 
 Christmas chocolates, for among those chocolates was a caramel 
 and, — well that candy was made in Switzerland and so was prob- 
 ably pro-German anyway. 
 
 Yesterday I had to witness the harrowing spectacle of a stal- 
 wart doughboy being separated from a tooth. When the ghastly 
 business was over he shook himself. 
 
 "I've been over the top," he declared, "and got filled up with 
 machine-gun bullets," — he was wearing two wound stripes, — "but 
 I'll tell the world them bullets weren't nothin' to that tooth!" 
 
 But the chief of my troubles is the hut lighting problem. So 
 far, I have not been able to get any response to my petition for an 
 electric lighting system. Our fine carbide lamps are a frank fizzle, 
 our candles are all gone, we have nothing but a few lanterns and 
 small oil lamps. Every day someone breaks my heart by breaking 
 another lamp chimney, and new ones, alas! are not to be had for 
 love or money in this part of France. Moreover the boys have 
 developed a most inconvenient habit of walking off with the lamps. 
 At first I said in exasperation; "Well, let them take them! As 
 soon as the oil burns out they'll find the lamps aren't any use to 
 them," But I didn't reckon on their Yankee ingenuity. They are 
 smart enough, it seems, to bring back the empty ones, and ex- 
 change them for filled ones, every evening! 
 
 Mauvages, January 5. 
 Mauvages is in a state of mind for mutiny, and it's all over a 
 little piece of cloth about two inches square. The case is this; 
 the Artillery Brigade, having served six months contin- 
 
2io MAUVAGES 
 
 uously at the front, having participated in all the big offensives, 
 and having won an enviable reputation, was attached, on coming 
 
 to this area, for the sake of military convenience, to the 
 
 Division already stationed here, a draft organization which had 
 never been to the front at all. The artillery were far from pleased 
 over the arrangement, but they managed to swallow their pride 
 and put a good face on the matter. A few days ago, however, the 
 order came out that they were to abandon the insignia of their old 
 division and appear — every last man of them, — with the insignia 
 of the new division on his arm. The men were furious. The bat- 
 teries stationed at Rosieres made a bonfire and burned the detes- 
 table insignia publicly, for which they got two weeks restriction 
 to camp and a new set of little red patches. One boy sewed his 
 "clover-leaf," as they call them, to the seat of his breeches. Rain- 
 coats have become all the wear, even in the best of weather, for 
 under these the hated symbol is hidden. Indeed the feeling was 
 so intense that in some places both officers and men tore off their 
 service-stripes before putting on the new insignia. 
 
 I alone in the town am wearing the insignia of the old division 
 and this is a wonderful and weird affair cut out of turkey red bunt- 
 ing and pinned to my sweater sleeve in a moment of reminiscent 
 loyalty by my indignant detail. But the band keeps on lustily 
 proclaiming the brigade's undying allegiance, for every morning 
 for Reveille, as it makes the grand tour of the town it brays forth 
 defiantly the war march of the old division. 
 
 "We haven't got orders to stop that!" says the leader. 
 
 Since the spirit of rebellion is abroad I have been managing a 
 little mutiny of my own. It came about in the matter of Sunday 
 movies. Up till the present we had been accustomed to having a 
 sendee every Sunday night, but since the artillery moved in we 
 have been furnished with a full-fledged morning service by the regi- 
 mental chaplain, in view of which I had set my heart on having 
 movies in the evening rather than a second service. I based my 
 position on the grounds that, since to my notion at least, the main 
 end of the work over here is simply to keep the boys away from the 
 
THE ORDNANCE 211 
 
 things that would hurt them, on Sunday night, the most dangerous 
 night of all the week, this could best be done by drawing them to 
 the hut with a movie show; always provided that their "religious 
 needs" had been supplied earlier in the day. 
 
 The movie machine was at the hut, I had found an operator in 
 one of the batteries, a little Jewish boy who bragged of long 
 experience in the states; all I wanted was a film. I went with my 
 request to the office. My logic it seemed to me was unassailable. 
 But the office couldn't see it that way. After much debate we 
 agreed to disagree in theory. In practice I carried off my film. 
 But I did it with a sinking of the heart. My relations with the 
 office have always been quite cordial, this was the first incident 
 to cast a gloom over them. Anyway, I thought, we're going to 
 have those movies! I advertised the show extensively. 
 
 Sunday night came. The hut was thronged. I was feeling 
 rather particularly pleased with things. We had ministered to 
 the boys' souls in the morning, fortified the inner man with free 
 hot chocolate at six o'clock, now we were going to finish out the 
 day by satisfying their romantic cravings with a film drama of 
 love and adventure. 
 
 But oh! for the pride that goes before the stumbling-block! 
 When it came to the test it seemed that the little operator, for 
 all his bragging, couldn't make the movie machine go. Perhaps it 
 was because the lad didn't understand the foreign make, perhaps 
 it was because the machine needed to be talked to in French, or 
 perhaps it was just because the project had been unblessed from 
 the beginning: I don't know. We had half the camp ganged 
 around the machine, offering to take a hand. Everybody was 
 criticizing and advising, which, I suppose, added the last touch to 
 the little operator's confusion. After waiting an interminable tune 
 in the dark we witnessed a few feeble nickers on the screen and 
 then darkness once more. The audience dribbled disgustedly away. 
 They probably made up for their disappointment in the cafes. 
 
 This morning the driver stopped at the hut to take the machine 
 away. "Have a good show., last night?" he asked. 
 
212 MAUVAGES 
 
 "Umm hm," said I, grinning cheerfully. 
 
 I am praying that the truth about that show never reaches 
 the office! 
 
 Mauvages, January io. 
 
 Tonight I leave Mauvages. Two weeks more and I shall be 
 " homeward bound." I am so tired that it has seemed to me for 
 some time that the only thing I can do is to go home. There 
 isn't any room in France these days for anyone who isn't per- 
 fectly strong, perfectly rested. A week ago I went to Nancy and 
 persuaded the lady in charge of the women workers of this divi- 
 sion, after some argument, to let me go. I have already over- 
 stayed my contract by eight months. Now they have telegraphed 
 from Paris that they have a sailing for me. The man secretary 
 is here to take over this hut. 
 
 Because I hate leave-takings I tried to keep the fact that I 
 was going dark until the very last minute but at the end word got 
 around. The boys came flocking into my kitchen with messages and 
 missives for the states. Boys whom I had never to my knowledge 
 seen before pledged me to call up their wives on the long distance 
 telephone as soon as I should land. One boy gave me two German 
 fuses weighing a number of pounds apiece to carry home. If I 
 would take one for him, I might keep the other one, he said. 
 
 "Say hello to the Statue of Liberty for me!" 
 
 "Give my regards to Broadway." 
 
 "Say Lady, can't you take me in your trunk?" they chorused. 
 
 As for Nick, he has instructed me to go to Brooklyn, pick out 
 the best hat in his wife's millinery store, "And tell the missus 
 it's on me." 
 
 I have taken my last agonized inventory, turned in my last 
 accounts, — balanced by Big Bill. This afternoon I went to take 
 my last look at the little hut. It is all torn to pieces, they have 
 begun to build that addition which I started begging for a month 
 ago; I slipped one of my canteen tea-cups into my bag just for old 
 times sake. 
 
 Neddy came in to say Good-bye. At the last moment he shyly 
 
THE ORDNANCE 213 
 
 placed a little box in my hand. In it was a pretty gilt Lorraine 
 cross. He had walked all the way into Gondrecourt to get it. He 
 would have bought me a chain too, he explained with a flush, 
 only he was "pecuniarily embarrassed." Dear little Neddy! If 
 he only knew how much better I liked it without the chain. 
 
 My luggage is all packed and Bill has strapped it up for me. 
 I have said adieu to the Cur£ and the Colonel. Madame the Care- 
 taker has kissed me on both cheeks and dropped a tear over me. 
 Now I am waiting for the A. R. jitney to come and take me to the 
 station. 
 
 A horrid thought has just occurred to me. The captain's 
 cognac must be still in the corner of the store-room shelf. What 
 will the secretary think? 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 VERDUN 
 THE FRENCH 
 
 Paris, January 12 
 
 It is fortunate that the world looks tolerantly on a certain 
 instability in the feminine mind. When I left Mauvages there was 
 just one thought in my head, — to go straight home. I have been 
 twenty-four hours in Paris; already my resolution is wavering. 
 It's all on account of what they said to me at the Headquarters 
 office. 
 
 Paris is truly a different city from the one I last saw in Sep- 
 tember on my way back from Saint Malo; the streets thronged 
 with people, and brightly lighted at night, the shop windows 
 gay and inviting, freed from their patterned lattices of paper 
 strips which formerly protected the glass from the concussions 
 caused by shells and bombs. In the Place de la Concorde the 
 statue representing the City of Strasbourg, divested of the mourn- 
 ing wreaths which it has worn ever since 1870, now smiles trium- 
 phantly above a mass of flags and flowers; and, most thrilling of 
 all, the crouched grey guns of Germany, like so many dumb im- 
 potent monsters, throng the Place de la Concorde, stretch in a 
 double line along the Champs Elysees all the way to the Arc de 
 Triomphe. 
 
 Everywhere the shop windows display a picture; a woman's 
 form, heroic, bearing a great sword, with wide spread wings which 
 are at the same time wings and American flags; before her the 
 bent and cowering form of the Emperor; while beyond, a sea of 
 khaki, illimitable hosts of warriors melting away in waves against 
 the horizon; and underneath the words: 
 
 "But what tremendous fleet could have brought hither such 
 an army?" 
 
THE FRENCH 215 
 
 "The Lusilania" 
 
 The Patisserie shops are full of enticing little cakes once 
 more; but, sad to say, the quality one finds has depreciated while 
 the prices have gone sky-rocketing. I thought I would economise 
 this noon and, instead of eating a five franc luncheon at the hotel, 
 substitute a cup of cocoa and some little cakes at a tea-shop. 
 When I came to pay my bill it was seven francs fifty! While I 
 was partaking of my frugal repast a French Red Cross nurse came 
 into the shop leading two blind poilus. She bought them each 
 some cakes as if they had been two little boys and they stood 
 there eating them. The poilu nearest me, a tall fine-looking 
 fellow, tasted his, "Ah!" he exclaimed, "c'est une vrai Madeleine!" 
 He lied. It was no more like a pre-war Madeleine than chalk is 
 like cheese, but if it had been made of India-rubber I suppose he 
 would have said the same thing, and said it with just the same 
 grave and gracious courtesy. 
 
 Now that the war is over, one feels sorrier than ever for the 
 French officers who haven't medals. 
 
 "The Frenchies are issuing the croix de guerre with their rations 
 now," the boys used to say. And indeed when one sees a French 
 officer without some sort of decoration one feels instinctively 
 that something must be the matter with him. 
 
 To go or not to go? I am thinking of a compromise. I will 
 postpone my sailing, take the furlough that is due to me. At the 
 end of two weeks I can calmly make up my mind. 
 
 Cauterets, January 20. 
 "There's only one poor feature about this place;" declared 
 a boy today, " they won't let you stay long enough." 
 
 This is a representative but not a universal sentiment. Some 
 of the boys don't like the snow, for Cauterets being high in the 
 Pyrenees, is deep in snow at present. A few complain that they 
 don't get enough to eat. It is the breakfasts chiefly that fail to 
 satisfy. The French having been used, time out of mind, to a 
 petit dejeuner of rolls and coffee, utterly fail to comprehend the 
 
216 VERDUN 
 
 American need for heartier sustenance. When the contracts with 
 the hotels were made it was carefully stipulated that eggs, meat 
 or fish should be served at breakfast in addition to the continental 
 menu, but the quantities were not stated and to a hearty doughboy 
 on a cold morning one egg is a mere tantalization, if not an insult. 
 Every morning you may see them flocking in swarms to the Y. in 
 order to round out their unsatisfactory breakfasts with hot choco- 
 late and bread and jam. Yesterday I overheard some indignant 
 splutterings from a little crowd at one of the canteen tables. 
 
 " What's the matter, boys?" 
 
 "They gave us fish this morning for breakfast!" 
 
 "They did?" 
 
 " Yep ! One sardine to each man ! " 
 
 Yet in spite of a few such inharmonious notes, Cauterets, like 
 Saint Malo and Aix-les-Bains, is instinct with the spirit of the Amer- 
 ican soldier on leave. And the American soldier on leave is the 
 Playboy of the Western World. When the last doughboy has 
 walked up the gang-plank of the last west-bound transport, I 
 think the railway officials, gate-keepers, station agents, and train 
 conductors all over France will settle back in their chairs and draw 
 a deep breath of relief . 
 
 The French poilu and the English Tommy have both questioned 
 often and bitterly why it was that while they must ride third class, 
 the American soldier habitually traveled second and first; the an- 
 swer being that you simply can't keep the doughboys out! It is 
 the idea of the social distinction implied by the classes I fancy that 
 makes half the trouble. However that may be, it is absolutely 
 against the rules of the game for any doughboy to ride third class 
 if there are any second class coaches, and equally disgraceful to ride 
 second class if there is a first. I myself have seen an American 
 buck private with third class transportation in his pocket stretch- 
 ing his legs in a luxurious first class compartment seat, while a 
 French general stood up outside in the corridor! At another time 
 I took a journey in a first class compartment built for six, in which 
 three English officers, an English titled Lady, her companion, two 
 
THE FRENCH 217 
 
 muddy doughboys and myself were all crowded. This was an 
 anxious trip for me, for not only was I worried lest an indignant 
 conductor should eject the doughboys, but I was also guiltily con- 
 scious of having paid only a second class fare myself! 
 
 One joyous company of eight lads on leave whom I encountered 
 on the way down here counted in their number one sergeant with a 
 well-worn second class pass. Things arranged themselves very sim- 
 ply. In the line-up at the gate or in the car, the sergeant, heading 
 the file, presented his pass first, then, as it was handed back to 
 him, slipped it behind his back to the next man and so on down the 
 line. Once in a second class compartment it was usually an easy 
 matter to transfer to first. This same crowd related to me how, 
 when locked out of an empty first class compartment by an irate 
 conductor they merely waited until the next stop, then getting 
 out climbed through the window on the off side of the train into 
 the forbidden seats. 
 
 " Golly, but that old frog got a shock when he looked in through 
 the glass door and saw us sitting there!" 
 
 They were overcome with chagrin because at the last change one 
 member of the party allowed himself to be bullied by a hard-boiled 
 M. P. into leaving the first class car. 
 
 "He's broken our record," they mourned; "he's disgraced the 
 family!" And half their pleasure in the remainder of the trip was 
 spoiled it was evident. 
 
 Irrepressible, curious of all things, awed by nothing, the dough- 
 boy cares not a snap of his fingers for the whole of French Official- 
 dom. An officer told me how, when standing on a station plat- 
 form the other day, an irate and husky doughboy sailed by him, 
 headed for the baggage-room in search of somebody's luggage. 
 
 "If you hear a noise, Major," he remarked in transit, "you'll 
 know that I'm stepping on a frog." 
 
 The French railway system affords him a never-failing topic 
 for amusement. And truly it has its quaint points. On the trip 
 down we passed over one line where the heating system for the 
 cars consisted entirely of long flat metal cans filled with hot water 
 
2i8 VERDUN 
 
 which were shoved in under our feet, so that, no matter how chilly 
 the rest of us might be, our toes at least could travel in comfort; 
 while on the walls of each coach, we observed with glee, was an 
 official notice requesting the passengers to refrain from throwing 
 objects such as empty bottles out the windows as numerous casual- 
 ties among the employees had resulted from this practice! 
 
 The doughboy passes everywhere by virtue of the magic words, 
 "no compree" Traveling he develops a stupidity that is absolute 
 and unshakable. 
 
 "I never understand anything they say," chuckled one young- 
 ster joyously, "until they begin to talk about something to eat". 
 
 Wonderful tales are told of escapades and adventures; such as 
 the story of the boy who started out to spend his leave at Aix-les- 
 Bains and traveled half over Italy before he came back, all on the 
 the strength of the pass- word " onion-stew" and an unidentified 
 document that happened to have a red seal attached. Common 
 rumour has it that the official report records sixty thousand 
 A. W. O. L.s at the present date in the A. E. F. in France. I don't 
 know whether this is correct, but I rather hope it is. Now that the 
 war is won I am glad that in spite of Provost Marshals and M. P.s 
 some of the boys at least are on the way to discovering that there 
 is something more to France than just "mud and kilometers." 
 
 Paris, February 7. 
 
 I'm going to stay. If I went home now I would feel like a quit- 
 ter all the rest of my life. I don't know where I'm going. They 
 asked me if I would like to go to Germany but I said no, I didn't 
 want to look at Germans. I shall have to stay here in Paris for 
 a week or so anyway in order to get that wretched business of a 
 broken tooth, which the Christmas caramel at Mauvages began, 
 straightened out. In the meantime, I am doing what I can in a 
 perfectly amateur and impromptu way to help young America see 
 Paris. 
 
 Paris is the lodestar of France for the A. E. F. From every part 
 of the country it draws them like a magnet. When on leave, no 
 
THE FRENCH 219 
 
 matter from what portion of France they may have come or what 
 corner they may be bound for, they always contrive to get there by 
 way of Paris. If the R. T. O. instructs them to change to another 
 line before they reach the city, they arrive there just the same, to 
 explain blandly to the M. P. that they went to sleep on the train: 
 "and when I woke up, why here I was in Paris!" What dodges 
 the doughboys haven't worked in order to circumvent the M. P.s 
 and get into Paris without official permission, or once in Paris to 
 stay longer than the short time allotted them, would be beyond 
 human imagination. There is one story current, for whose truth 
 though, I cannot vouch, of an American private who passed 
 a week in the forbidden city in the uniform of his cousin, a lieu- 
 tenant in the French Army. At the time of the signing of the 
 armistice, for several days the M. P.s' vigilance was relaxed and 
 boys from all over France swarmed to the city to participate in 
 the festivities, but since then the penalties for the unlucky ones 
 who are caught have grown more and more severe. 
 
 Yesterday by request I took two boys to the Louvre. We 
 wandered through the galleries of Greek and Roman sculptures. 
 One boy, looking at the yellowed and discolored surfaces, de- 
 clared himself bitterly disappointed. He had heard that the 
 statues were all real marble here, but it was perfectly plain that 
 they were nothing but plaster imitations! The other boy asked 
 naively if the mutilated statues were "meant to represent people 
 who had had their heads chopped off. " After about half an hour 
 they consulted their watches, announced that we had just time to 
 get to a movie show, and wouldn't I go with them? 
 
 But if the finer points of Greek art are lost on many, there 
 are plenty of other things which they do appreciate. 
 
 " Can you climb to the top of the Eiffel tower? " 
 
 "Where is the church that the shell struck on Good Friday?" 
 
 "What would you advise me to buy to send home to Mother?" 
 
 "How often does the Ferris Wheel go?" 
 
 "Is there any place in Paris where one can get ice-cream soda?" 
 These are some of the questions that they ask you. Some go 
 
220 VERDUN 
 
 to the Opera, sitting invariably in the best seats to the amazement 
 of the French people. Yesterday I stopped at the box-office to 
 buy some tickets. A boy standing just inside the door spoke to me. 
 
 "I beg your pardon, were you going to buy a seat for this 
 afternoon?" 
 
 "No," I said; "for Saturday." 
 
 "I have an extra ticket. I'd be glad to have you use it." 
 
 He went on to tell me that he was taking the six o'clock train, 
 that he had bought tickets for himself and a friend for the matinee 
 as a last pleasure, but that his friend had failed him. I hesitated, 
 uncertain. "What's the opera?" I asked, just because it was 
 something to say. 
 
 "It's La Boheme, " he said. I fell. 
 
 "I'm mighty glad," he told me, "I was just about to go out and 
 pick up a chicken on the street, when you came in." 
 
 The opera was a dream of loveliness. I felt as if I must have 
 done something very good indeed in some previous existence to be 
 thus rewarded. 
 
 Today I encountered two boys who told me how they had 
 "done" Paris. 
 
 "We stopped at a store and bought a bunch of post cards, all 
 the famous buildings and everything. Then we got a taxi. After 
 that all we'd do was to show the chauffeur a post card and he'd 
 drive us to it, — then we'd show him another one, and so we kept 
 a-goin' until we'd seen most all of Paris. But gee! That taxi bill 
 was a fright!" 
 
 This afternoon, coming down the "Boulevard de Wop," as the 
 boys call the Boulevard des Italiens, I paused beside a fiacre, 
 attached to a particularly wretched looking old nag, which was 
 drawn up by the side-walk. Into it were piling merrily some 
 eight or nine doughboys, the cabman fairly dancing on his seat as 
 he uttered frantic but perfectly unheeded expostulations. Finally 
 as the cabby appeared to be developing apoplexy, I spoke up. 
 
 "Boys, you know that really that broken-down old beast never 
 could pull all of you!" 
 
THE FRENCH 221 
 
 Whereupon half of them immediately piled out again. One of 
 the remaining ones leaned out of the fiacre. 
 
 "Say Lady, can you talk French?" he demanded earnestly. 
 
 "Why a little." 
 
 "Well tell that old guy for me, will you," he indicated the 
 still disgruntled cocker who, like the rest of his tribe, was crowned 
 with an ornamental "stove-pipe," "that I want him to lend me 
 his hat." 
 
 Tonight I met a girl I know who is in the Hut Equipment 
 Department. She has just returned from an extended tour of 
 inspection. I told her I didn't know where my next assignment 
 was to be. 
 
 "Why don't you go to Verdun?" she asked. "The conditions 
 about there are worse than any other place in France. Men are 
 commiting suicide there every day." 
 
 So I wrote a note to the Office asking that I be sent to Verdun. 
 
 Bar-le-Duc, February 16. 
 
 Somewhere here in Bar-le-Duc there is an extraordinary thing. 
 It is the Mausoleum of Rene* of Chalons, prince of Orange, and 
 designed in accordance with his wishes. Against an ermine mantle, 
 under a rich armorial crest, stands a skeleton or rather the rotting 
 carcass of a man, half bone and half disintegrating tissue, holding 
 aloft in one ghastly hand, his heart, an offering, so the story goes, 
 to his lady wife. 
 
 Every time I am in Bar-le-Duc, even it if is only an hour between 
 trains, I go hunting for that skeleton; but the nearest I have come 
 so far, is to find it on a picture post card. Once I thought I had 
 surely run it to earth when I came upon a strange old church 
 built so as to bridge a narrow moat-like canal, and so low that it 
 seemed as if the water must ooze up through the stone slabs of the 
 floor, but no. 
 
 I am here at Bar-le-Duc for a few days because it seems that 
 after all it isn't quite certain whether I had better go to Verdun 
 or to Souilly. While my fate is being decided, I am acting as a 
 
222 VERDUN 
 
 sort of errand-girl, special messenger and Jack-of-all-jobs here at 
 Headquarters. 
 
 This morning I went out in a flivver to do an errand. The 
 driver told me how, a few days ago, he had carried a young French 
 girl all over the country-side looking for her aviator-lover's grave. 
 Finally with the help of a French officer they had found it. The 
 girl had placed a wreath on the grave, said a little prayer and 
 turned away. He showed me the place, three grey wooden crosses, 
 one with a china wreath on it, marking the field where a large 
 aviation camp had once been and now quite the loneliest and most 
 deserted spot in the world. 
 
 Coming back, I was sent to the Provost Marshal's office to 
 telephone. While I waited for my connection two M. P.s brought 
 
 in a prisoner. He belonged to the Division which reached 
 
 France in September. Two days after he landed he went A. W. 
 O. L. and had been missing ever since. By some unknown means 
 he had managed to acquire a typewriter and all winter, it appeared, 
 he had been living in the woods supporting himself by typing 
 faked travel orders and selling them to the soldiers. He was a 
 heavy-set fellow, sullen and taciturn under their questioning. 
 They went through his pockets and turned out the collection on 
 the table; chewing gum, tobacco, a shaving-set, old newspapers, 
 screws and nails, buttons and string and matches and pins, pen- 
 cils, and post cards, a knife and three toothbrushes. 
 
 Bar-le-Duc I understand does a thriving business in A. W. O. L.s. 
 One of the M. P.s told me of a lad who, when asked for his papers, 
 took to his heels and was promptly pursued. 
 
 "I chased him all over town, and finally I ran him into the 
 canal," he narrated joyfully. "He stood out there with the water 
 up to his waist while I stood on the bank and shied stones at him. 
 And he had on a serge uniform too." 
 
 "How did it end?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh I let him go; I figured if he wanted to get away that bad 
 he had a right to." 
 
 Up this same canal a few weeks ago came a flotilla of French 
 
THE FRENCH 223 
 
 submarines bound for the Rhine, the sailors startling the inhabit- 
 ants by their sudden appearance in the streets in their naval 
 uniforms and their casual references to their ships close at hand. 
 Somebody was unkind enough to declare that the subs had started 
 their journey from the coast on Armistice Day, but I am sure this 
 must be a libel. 
 
 This afternoon I asked if I might work in the canteen. This is 
 in a French house, a few doors beyond the beautiful Officers' 
 Club, the home of one of the wealthy manufacturers of the Con- 
 fiture de Bar-le-Duc, lent by him, rent-free for the use of the Amer- 
 icans during the war. In the course of the afternoon I became the 
 possessor of a puppy-dog presented me by a motor-truck driver, 
 who, following some careless remark of mine about wishing I had 
 a puppy, dropped the scared little black thing in my arms and fled. 
 As soon as I could collect my senses I flew around the counter and 
 out the door after him, calling on him to take his dog back. But 
 when I reached the street, motor-truck and driver both had 
 vanished. I would have loved to keep the little beggar, but here 
 I am, a transient traveller bound for nobody knows where; what 
 could I do? I explained my dilemma to the grinning crowd in the 
 canteen. One of the boys spoke up. 
 
 "I'll take him and give him to my French girl," he said. I 
 relinquished the little fellow regretfully. I hope Mademoiselle 
 makes him a good foster-mother. 
 
 A little while later I noticed a boy at the counter who wore 
 three service stripes and two wound stripes. "What's your divi- 
 sion?" I asked. He told me. He belonged to my old regiment! 
 He had been in the Milk Battalion at Goncourt, and he remem- 
 bered me. He was a Class B man now and in the post office at 
 Bar-le-Duc. 
 
 "What of the rest?" I asked. 
 
 "They're mostly dead," he answered, and he told me how, 
 after one charge, out of the whole Company M six men and the 
 captain had come back. 
 
 I broke down and cried; I couldn't help it. The boy, embar- 
 
224 VERDUN 
 
 rassed, drew away. He is the only man I have seen out of my 
 regiment since last March, and all he could say was, "They're 
 mostly dead!" Dead at Chateau-Thierry, dead on the Marne, 
 dead by Soissons, dead in honor, dead with glory. America, will 
 you ever forget? 
 
 Bar-le-Duc, February 18. 
 
 Everyone here is incensed this morning over the action of the 
 French troops in the matter of the theatre. It seems that the 
 Americans had arranged a schedule of movies and shows to be 
 given at the local theatre a month in advance. A soldier show was 
 billed for tonight, the company had reached town, the audience was 
 beginning to gather from the nearby villages, when the French 
 troops who began to arrive in town yesterday announced that they 
 had their own exclusive and immediate uses for the building. All 
 efforts to arbitrate the matter have so far failed. And now word 
 comes that a French lieutenant in order to be ready to repel any 
 possible move on the part of the Americans to take possession of 
 the theatre for the night has had his bed made up in one of the 
 boxes! 
 
 It is the greatest of pities that there should be this wretched 
 element of friction between the two allies. If every American could 
 have been miraculously whisked out of France the day after the 
 armistice was signed the doughboy would likely have been to this 
 day a bit of a popular French idol. It is this hanging about with 
 no ostensible end in view that frays nerves on both sides and leads 
 to a mutual stepping on each other's toes. No two nationalities 
 I am convinced could be thrown into such an intimate and trying 
 relationship and produce perfect harmony. There must inevitably 
 be a clash of temperaments. The case in this instance, as I see it, 
 is complicated to an extraordinary degree, with human foibles and 
 failings a-plenty on both sides. 
 
 We Americans have undoubtedly been guilty of bad manners. 
 Quite openly and persistently the doughboy has called the French- 
 man "frog" to his face and this the French have by no means en- 
 
THE FRENCH 225 
 
 joyed. The odd part of the thing is that the doughboy can give 
 no explanation of the nickname. 
 
 "But why do you call them frogs? " I ask the boys. Usually 
 they look quite blank. 
 
 "It's 'cause they sound like frogs when they talk," explained 
 one lad. 
 
 " 'Cause they jump around like frogs when they get excited," 
 offered another. 
 
 Not one of them suspects that this nickname is a curious sur- 
 vival of the old term of contempt "Frog-eaters" applied to the 
 French by the English in the days when they were enemies instead 
 of allies! 
 
 Undoubtedly too the feminine factor, leading as it has to jealousy, 
 has played its share in arousing antagonism. 
 
 "The chief victories of the Americans in France," declared a 
 French officer bitterly the other day, "are his conquests over the 
 feminine heart!" 
 
 Indeed from the start it has been an open secret that the "Mad- 
 emoiselles" have taken a prodigious fancy to the American soldier. 
 This is partly because he possesses the charm of novelty, partly 
 because he has money and can procure chocolate and cigarettes and 
 partly just because he is himself. 
 
 "There are three thousand men in this town and three girls," 
 ran a postal addressed by a joyous youngster on leave to his lieu- 
 tenant; "I'm going with one of them and Abe has the other two." 
 
 And who can blame the poilu for a certain amount of resentment, 
 when, coming back from the trenches he has discovered that a dash- 
 ing American stationed at an engineering camp in his home town 
 has supplanted him in the affections of his sweetheart? 
 
 On the American side there is of course the old grievance of the 
 overcharging, 
 
 "D 'you know why you don't see any Jews in France?" asked a 
 lad of me the other day, "It's because they couldn't make a living." 
 
 In part, this sense of grievance, as I see it, is justifiable. An 
 officer told me not long ago that he had recently been left behind 
 
226 VERDUN 
 
 when his outfit moved out from a village, as "Mop Up Officer" 
 to settle the claims of the townspeople for damage done by the 
 soldiers during their stay, — a pane of glass, a truss of straw, the 
 tine of a pitchfork. Hearing a commotion in the town square he 
 looked out; the town crier was announcing to the populace that 
 now the Americans had gone the price of wine would be cut from 
 five francs a bottle to two. But in part this sense of grievance is 
 unjustifiable, for the American has in no small measure brought 
 this state of affairs upon himself. From the start the doughboy's 
 disgust with the flimsy paper bills and the puzzling tricky scheme 
 of the francs, sous and centimes engendered a carelessness toward 
 French money which the tradespeople took as a delightful indi- 
 cation of unlimited wealth. "But everyone is rich in America! " 
 I have heard them declare with childish conviction. So prices be- 
 gan to rise and presently, with the prices, the doughboy's resent- 
 ment, and then the poilu's; for the rise automatically put all lux- 
 uries out of the French soldier's reach and this of course he in turn 
 blamed bitterly on the "rich" American. Indeed the sending of a 
 large body of men paid at the rate of a dollar a day into a country 
 where the native troops were paid at the rate of five cents a day 
 was a social-economic error which somehow, say by some system 
 of reserve pay such as the Australians have, should have been 
 avoided. 
 
 Then too, the American won't haggle. The Frenchman, as a rule, 
 won't buy unless he can. Prices are fixed with the expectation of a 
 compromise after bargaining. Not easily shall I forget a dramatic 
 scene witnessed at the "Rag Fair" at the Porte Maillot in Paris be- 
 tween a prosperous householder and a "rag" seller over a second- 
 hand padlock. The seller remained firm in demanding six cents 
 for the padlock. The householder was equally determined not to 
 pay more than five. Finally the householder with great dignity 
 withdrew, only to be called back by a despairing yelp from the 
 seller. He had capitulated. To the American such a performance 
 seems both tedious and undignified; he either takes the article at 
 the first price asked or leaves it. 
 
THE FRENCH 227 
 
 Nor can it be denied that the doughboy tends to be a bit of a 
 prodigal. Chief of his spendthrift weaknesses are two; he will pay 
 almost any price for sweets, sink almost any sum in a present for 
 his girl. Then too the universal custom of gambling in the army, 
 leading to swollen fortunes for the favoured ones, has helped to 
 establish standards of extravagance. An officer in charge of a 
 company belonging to a negro labor regiment told me of seeing two 
 of his boys in a cafe sit down to a twenty-five franc bottle of cham- 
 pagne and then, the taste for some reason not quite suiting their 
 fancies, walk out leaving the bottle practically untouched behind ! 
 
 In the light of such incidents as this, who can blame the French 
 people for regarding the American as a sort of gift from God benefi- 
 cently allowed them at the time of their greatest national im- 
 poverishment, for the replenishing of their depleted pocket-books? 
 
 Verdun, February 20. 
 
 The little narrow-gauge train pulled us in here from Bar-le- 
 Duc at ten o'clock last night, a thirty mile run and six hours 
 to make it! When I asked for a first class fare at the station 
 I noticed an odd expression on the ticket-seller's face. "They're 
 all the same," he said; "all second class." Arrived at the train 
 I understood. The coaches were filthy and furnished with 
 straight-backed wooden benches; a heap of rubbish surrounded 
 the rickety stove in the centre. Shortly after we crawled out of 
 Bar-le-Duc it began to rain. Half the windows were innocent of 
 glass. The rain beat in through the empty sashes. Presently it 
 grew dark. Several of the passengers, American, reached in 
 their pockets and brought out a few grimy candle-ends. We 
 made little grease-spots on the benches and stuck the candles 
 there, but the gusts of wind from the empty windows kept blow- 
 ing them out, so half the time we jogged along in darkness. 
 
 Among the passengers was a little old Frenchman with one 
 arm. He was returning to his native village in the devastated 
 area the other side of Verdun, after an absence of four years. 
 With him was his young son, an immature lad of seventeen. 
 
228 VERDUN 
 
 " 'J'ai une passion," declared the old man with startling fervour; 
 "j'ai une passion veritable de revoir le village de ma naissance!" 
 
 In all probability he was returning to nothing but a crumbled 
 heap of stones. 
 
 "You are very brave," I told him. 
 
 Ah but it was for them, the old, to set an example for the young! 
 It was they who should lead the way! It was they who should 
 rebuild France! His frail old body fairly shook with the strength 
 of his emotion. What a strange, thrilling, tragic pilgrimage! 
 
 Verdun resembled nothing but a ruin mercifully wrapped in 
 darkness as we passed through the gate and made our way up the 
 hill. We had found, luckily, a guide who had a lantern; nowhere 
 else in all the city was so much as a gleam of light to be seen. 
 In places, as we passed, the shells of houses still stood, staring 
 down with empty eyes at us, in other places there were nothing 
 but rubble mounds with here and there a narrow jagged bit of wall 
 or a naked chimney standing out like a lonely monolith. 
 
 Headquarters offices are at the Chateau on the summit of the 
 hill close to the Cathedral, one of the few buildings left undamaged 
 in this part of town, a rambling, ungainly, rather gloomy struc- 
 ture. The second story consists almost entirely of a series of 
 great empty barren loft-like store-rooms. In one of these, known 
 as the Ladies' Cold Storage, I have my habitation. Supposed 
 to be a sort of one-night-stand dormitory for female tourists, — 
 nurses chiefly, — who are touring the battle-fields, the Ladies' 
 Cold Storage is a large dusty garret with grimy rough-plastered 
 walls, without a window or as much as a crack to let in any light 
 or air except for a few small slits in the roof where the rain leaks 
 in. A stove, a long row of cots and a tin basin on a shelf sur- 
 mounted by a broken piece of looking-glass are its only furnish- 
 ings. However, the L. C. S. boasts one luxury, it is equipped with 
 electric lights. This helps — when the current is turned on! — 
 when it isn't, we light a candle stub and stick it in an old milk can. 
 The electricity is generated underground in the Citadel. When 
 the Americans first came to Verdun some enterprising elec- 
 
THE FRENCH 229 
 
 tricians tapped the wires and had forty lights working before the 
 French knew anything about it. Upon discovery the French cut off 
 the Americans, only to find shortly afterwards that another connec- 
 tion had been made. This absurd performance was repeated no 
 less than seven times. After the seventh time the French gave up. 
 
 We were fairly frightened out of bed this morning by a most 
 horrible hubbub, — a Klaxon gas-alarm which is used to call the 
 guests to breakfast. Having heard it I am quite convinced that 
 if Gabriel wishes to do the job efficiently on the last day, he will 
 scrap his trumpet and take a Klaxon. 
 
 After breakfast we newcomers hurried out to get a glimpse of 
 the town. There were plenty of others likewise occupied as 
 Verdun is a veritable magnet for A. E. F. tourists. The Cathedral 
 is closed to visitors but we happened upon two French officers 
 who kindly took us through. The roof is badly damaged and the 
 stained glass of the windows shattered to bits, but beyond that the 
 Cathedral is comparatively unharmed. I was much embarrassed 
 when the officers informed me that the sacres pierres, the sacred 
 stones from the altar, had been stolen and presumably sent as 
 souvenirs to America. At first I pretended not to understand, 
 but they took such pains to explain, finally taking me to the 
 altar and showing me where the little marble slabs had been dug 
 out, that I finally had to admit I understood. The two nurses who 
 were with us were anxious to climb the clock-tower, but this, 
 we found, was strictly defendu. All through the war, we learned 
 afterwards, the clock in the tower had been kept going by the 
 faithful verger who refused to leave his post, and what's more, 
 it had kept time. But a short while ago the clock had started 
 "skipping." A party of American boys had just visited the tower. 
 Upon investigation it proved that one of the wheels was missing! 
 Sometimes I think the French are very patient with us. 
 
 Everywhere we went we came upon German prisoners engaged 
 in the most leisurely fashion in cleaning up. There are several 
 thousands of them here and more to come. Verdun is to rise from 
 her ruins and live once more. Yet she can never be in any sense 
 
230 VERDUN 
 
 the stately city that once she was; for while the business and 
 poorer portions of the city below the hill are not irreparably 
 damaged, the finer part with its stately mansions and exquisite 
 specimens of mediaeval architecture is wrecked beyond repair. 
 The most serious obstacle in the way of making at least some small 
 portions of the city habitable at present lies in the great difficulty 
 of obtaining window-glass. 
 
 From the Cathedral we went to the Canteen-in-the-Convent. 
 How the nuns would stare, I thought, if they could see their 
 virgin precincts in possession of a mob of boys in khaki, white and 
 black, interspersed with the blue-coated poilus! Across the back 
 of the building runs a wide terrace, once worn by pious feet of 
 patient sisters engaged in holy meditations. Here among the 
 lounging boys stand life-sized carved and colored images of saints 
 and angels. Their size of course prevents them from travel- 
 ing to America as souvenirs, but even so they must stand witness 
 to the irreverence of young America, for the Angel Gabriel is 
 hideous in a German gas-mask! 
 
 After dinner we went on a trip through the Citadel, that vast 
 underground soldier-city with its miles of corridors and rooms enough 
 to harbor a whole army, a little world deep underneath the earth. 
 We saw the bakery which bakes bread not only for the whole gar- 
 rison but for all the troops in the vicinity; the Foyer, a writing and 
 recreation hall, named in honor of President Wilson; the movie 
 theatre; and the hospital with its wards and operating room, — 
 what a nightmare horror I thought to be sick in those damp and 
 dimly-lighted subterranean caverns! But we were not allowed to 
 see more than the outer door of the chapel which they say is sump- 
 tuous, since it is enriched by all the costly furnishings and precious 
 images moved there for safety's sake from the Cathedral. Nor 
 were we shown the underground caf e* where, I have been told, an 
 unusually good brand of beer is sold. 
 
 From the Citadel, rumour has it, tunnels lead out to the circle 
 of forts that form the defences of Verdun, but if you ask a French- 
 man if this is so, he only looks wise and keeps mum. 
 
THE FRENCH 231 
 
 Verdun, February 25. 
 
 I don't believe there is another canteen quite like my canteen 
 in the whole of France. It is a canteen for French civilians. The 
 one-time inhabitants of Verdun and the devastated area beyond 
 are allowed by the government, it seems, just twenty-four hours 
 in which to visit their former homes, after which they must re- 
 turn as there is no food for them here and very little shelter. In 
 return for many favours the French authorities asked the Y. to 
 co-operate with them in running a sort of rest-room for these 
 refugees; they supplying a detail, and we supplying the materials 
 to make hot chocolate which is given away, and a secretary to 
 take charge. The canteen is in the College Buvignier at the foot 
 of the hill. There is a dortoir in the building also, in charge of 
 the man who was once manager of the principal hotel in the city; 
 two long halls full of cots with straw mattresses where the ref- 
 ugees may pass the night. My assignment to this canteen is only 
 to be temporary. 
 
 The room where my canteen is must have once been quite beau- 
 tiful, high-ceilinged with wainscot panelling below and embossed 
 leather covering the walls above. Even now in its state of dingy 
 disrepair, with half the panes in the tall arched windows replaced 
 by dirty cloth, it keeps something of its old dignity and charm. 
 Beyond the main room is another smaller one, connected by two 
 doors, in which the detail lives and in which we make our chocolate. 
 
 When I took over the canteen from the man who had been in 
 charge of it, it was absolutely bare except for four tables and 
 some backless wooden benches. My first act on assuming charge 
 was to clean house, my second was to persuade the detail to make 
 the very watery chocolate richer. After that we proceeded to 
 refurnish and adorn. We ran a frieze of war-pictures in color, 
 taken from a child's pictorial Eistoire de la Guerre around the 
 top of the wainscoting, hung French and American flags from 
 the chandeliers, teased the French authorities into bringing us 
 some nice upholstered armchairs for the old ladies to sit in, and, 
 finally, put a little pot of primroses or snowdrops, dug with a 
 
232 VERDUN 
 
 broken tile from a ruined garden, in the centre of each table. 
 Then a kind secretary bound for Bar-le-Duc was persuaded to go 
 shopping for us and brought back an array of French magazines, 
 hand-picked, and an assortment of toys to amuse the kiddies who 
 must often wait here with their families between trains, though 
 so far, it must be confessed, it is chiefly the detail who have been 
 amused by them. And now I am wondering what there is to do 
 next. 
 
 Besides the hot chocolate, we carry on a trade in bread, a huge 
 sackfull of which is brought us fresh every day from the under- 
 ground bakery on the back of a little round-faced poilu; and we 
 do a brisk business in checking parcels, without checks. Yes- 
 terday a rabbit was left all day in our care. I was sorry for the 
 poor beast cooped up in the little box and wanted to give it a 
 drink of water, but the poilus insisted that this would be fatal. 
 Whether this might possibly be a zoological fact, or is just part 
 of the national prejudice against water, I can't determine. 
 
 At first, remembering my difficulties with the French Army 
 at Mauvages, I was a little apprehensive as to how my two poilus, 
 Emil and Guillaume and I might get along. But though I am 
 sure they think me the oddest creature in the world, and my pres- 
 ence here unconventional beyond words, yet their behaviour 
 could not possibly be more courteous, considerate and deferential. 
 They won't even allow me to wash the chocolate cups. 
 
 "Mademoiselle will soil her hands!" 
 
 And they are forever telling me that I am working too hard. 
 "But Mademoiselle will be fatigued!" Which is so absurd as to 
 fairly exasperate me. 
 
 Besides Emil and Guillaume we have four soldier friends-of- 
 the-family, as it were, who also frequent the back room. The 
 canteen is supposed to be a strictly civilian affair, but we make an 
 exception in favour of the four camarades, and they repay us by 
 helping chop the stove-wood which is stacked in a great pile 
 outside the door and is nothing more or less than the stakes to 
 which were once fastened barbed-wire entanglements. Each 
 
THE FRENCH 233 
 
 stake still bears two little rings of wire around it and every few 
 days one has to clear out the accumulation of barbed-wire en- 
 tanglements from the chocolate-stove. Les defences de Verdun 
 the poilus call the wood-pile. The poilus are all artillerymen 
 from a regiment of "75s." Guillaume has brought down three 
 Boche planes, he tells me, and Emil five. One of the poilus is a 
 handsome brigadier, or corporal, who wears wooden shoes. I 
 said something about sabots the other day. But don't they wear 
 sabots in America? The poilus were astonished to learn that 
 wooden shoes were unknown among us! There is also a sergeant 
 who is the aristocrat of our little circle, a dreamy looking lad, a 
 student of architecture at the Beaux Arts. Yesterday he shyly 
 proffered me an envelope; in it was a pretty pen-and-ink sketch 
 of two little girls, one in the costume of Alsace, the other of Lor- 
 raine, proffering bouquets, and underneath was written, " Souvenir 
 of a Frenchman who thanks America for having given the victory 
 more quickly," Our poilu friends are constantly straying into 
 the back room in order to read the newspapers here and to get 
 a cup of hot chocolate. Every now and then they all get together 
 and hold a vin rouge tea party. On these occasions it is evidently 
 a mystery to them why, though I join them in eating bread and 
 cheese, I always refuse the vin rouge I 
 
 The politeness of the poilus is equalled by that of the clientele. 
 They are extraordinarily grateful for what little we do for them. 
 Today an old lady, in spite of anything I could say, insisted on 
 tipping me with a two franc piece! I spent it buying chocolates 
 and cigarettes for the poilus at the Canteen-in-the-Convent. 
 Every class of society flows into my little canteen from gently 
 bred ladies under the escort of immaculate officers to old men who 
 resemble nothing but the forlornest vagabonds. The cheerfulness 
 and courage of the refugees in general is astonishing. One would 
 think that a room full of people engaged in such a mournful 
 mission would be a gloomy place, but on the contrary, although 
 occasionally you see a woman quietly sobbing, at most times we 
 fairly buzz with pleasant sociability. The women come in with 
 
234 VERDUN 
 
 faces bright with excitement. "Oh the poor Cathedral!" they 
 cry. 
 
 "Did you find anything of your home? " I ask. For a moment 
 the tears swim in their brave eyes. "Rien" they answer shaking 
 their heads. "Nothing!" 
 
 Today an old man in a long white apron smock was the centre 
 of attention here. He was busy searching the ruins of his house 
 for buried treasure. Every little while he would come back to 
 the canteen w T ith the fruits of his pathetic salvaging, — a few silver 
 spoons, some paint brushes, a bolt of black velvet ribbon, — place 
 them in a basket and then return to look for more. Two German 
 prisoners were digging for him. Finally he came back with six 
 unbroken champagne glasses and a face scored with tragedy. 
 He had been hoping against hope to recover the treasures in his 
 wine cellar but he was too late, not a bottle was there left! 
 
 Verdun, February 28. 
 
 This morning I went out on a truck to Fort Douaumont. This 
 is the fort which was captured by the Germans, held by them 
 for five months, and then retaken by the French and marks the 
 enemy's nearest approach to the city. Oddly enough the French 
 were the gainers through this occupation to the extent of a splen- 
 did electric lighting system introduced by the Germans into the 
 fort! 
 
 A modern fort does not resemble in the least the idea that one 
 has of a "fort." Viewed from outside it is nothing more or less 
 than a hole in the ground. Once inside we had the sense of being 
 in a monster ant-hill as we followed our guide through a net-work 
 of tunnelled corridors. We saw the room of the Commandant 
 with its wonderful relief maps both French and German of the 
 Verdun hills, we saw the war-museum, the Foyer, the store-rooms 
 and engine-rooms, the magazine rooms where the big shells were 
 stacked like cord wood, and we climbed up into the turrets of 
 the disappearing guns. In this strange fort w T hich has been both 
 friend and enemy we looked through one empty doorway into a 
 
THE FRENCH 235 
 
 pit of ruins open to the sky, under the wreckage sixteen Germans 
 lay, they said; it was here that a French shell had broken through. 
 We passed by another door which bore a sign on it announcing 
 that this was the tomb of five French mitrailleurs who had been 
 killed by a German shell in the room within; instead of burying 
 the bodies they had simply sealed up the door and left them. 
 Then we ducked through a little low door and climbed up over 
 the hillock which forms the roof of the fort as it were. All about 
 us stretched the abomination of desolation of the battle-fields, 
 wracked tortured earth, seared and scarred into a yellow-grey 
 desert waste. Here and there lay bones, human bones, some- 
 times scattered loose, sometimes gathered in a little heap with 
 a rusty helmet and a broken rifle lying close beside them. Only 
 a few hundred feet from the road, the man who guided the party 
 told us, he came yesterday upon two unburied bodies. 
 
 To the north-east we could just discern a large wooden cross. 
 A French officer who was stationed at the fort pointed it out to 
 us. Here, he said, lay buried no less than twelve hundred French 
 soldiers. They had been given a fine of trench to hold, the officers 
 were taken from them, they were to expect no reinforcements 
 or relief. They were left there knowing it was only a question of 
 days or hours. When the French finally reached the line again 
 every man was dead. So they left them where they lay and filled 
 the trench in over them, but each man's rifle they took and 
 planted upright in the earth beside him. There is a heroic theme 
 for a poet! 
 
 When I reached the canteen again I found a ragged disconsolate 
 old soul occupying one of the benches. On seeing me he began a 
 sad recital of sore feet, ending with the petition that I procure 
 him a pair of rubber boots and emphasizing the point by taking 
 off his shoes then and there and exhibiting his troubles, — which 
 weren't pretty, — to me. I was perplexed, not knowing what to do, 
 when the friendly M. P. on the beat happened in; so I put the case 
 up to him. He told me that there was a salvage dump at the 
 station. We set out together and succeeded in finding an enormous 
 
236 VERDUN 
 
 pair of rubber overshoes, and, what's more, in getting away with 
 them. The old man was pleased as Punch, put them on and hob- 
 bled off in them. Tonight someone told me a melancholy tale. An 
 M. P. stationed upon the hill had spied an old Frenchman going by 
 in a pair of American overshoes and had straightway held him up 
 and ordered him to relinquish what was Government property. 
 And the old man perforce had to sit down in the street and take off 
 his shoes. 
 
 Speaking of boots reminds me of the tale told me by a doughboy 
 the other day; a tale of a pair of tan shoes, handsome, shiny, new 
 tan shoes which was sold to every man in turn in his whole com- 
 pany only to be finally purchased as a bargain at thirty-five francs 
 by an unsuspecting Frenchman. They were beautiful shoes, the 
 boy assured me, the only trouble was that they both happened to 
 be for the left foot. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CONFLANS 
 
 PIONEERS, M. P.S AND OTHERS 
 
 Jarny, March 2. 
 I am living in a hospital. Being in the occupied territory, 
 the hospital has been for the last four years, of course, a German 
 hospital. Over the doorways are painted such pious mottoes as 
 "Gruss Gottl" and the theatre, for there is an amusement hall in 
 the building, is adorned with a back-drop on which a Siegfried- 
 esque hero overlooks an ideal German landscape wherein a picture- 
 book castle perches on the top of an impossible mountain. At the 
 other end of the hall is painted an enormous iron cross. The 
 masterpiece of the collection, though, is on the wall of the basket- 
 ball court and is, naturally, a portrait of His Late Imperial Maj- 
 esty, although one indentifies him rather by inference than rec- 
 ognition, for the countenance having recently served for a pistol 
 target is battered almost out of human semblance. The main 
 part of the hospital is occupied by the Y. ; in the wings some two 
 hundred ordnance boys are quartered; we ladies find comfortable 
 lodging in the operating room. There are five of us here at present, 
 two American girls, besides myself, and two Englishwomen. 
 These latter are ladies of high degree, I gather, being related to 
 bishops and other such personages. They go under the unvary- 
 ing title of the " British Army, First and Second Battalions.' , 
 According to report they were sent over here from England to do 
 propaganda work, that is, to create a pleasant impression on young 
 America and thus help to forge another link between the two 
 nations etc., but this they indignantly deny. However that may 
 be, the boys derive a rather wicked joy from teasing and arguing 
 with the good ladies, and particularly from filling them full of 
 
23S CONFLANS 
 
 amazing tales about "The States." Even the Secretary can't 
 resist the temptation to "rag" them, and though they are usually 
 very patient under his plaguing, today at dinner we received a 
 shock. In response to one of his more daring sallies, the Bishop's 
 sister, fixing the Secretary with an icy eye^ lifted one patrician hand 
 to her august nose, and thumbed it! Which only goes to show 
 that even an English Lady of Quality has human moments. And 
 if we on our side must laugh a bit at them, it is plain to see that 
 they, in their turn, find us infinitely amusing. In fact I half sus- 
 pect, since they spend hours every day covering sheets of paper 
 with close, fine handwriting, that the good ladies are engaged upon 
 writing a book concerning the peculiarities of their American 
 cousins when seen at close range. And in view of all the wonder- 
 ful material the boys have furnished them, that book should make 
 rich reading. 
 
 There are three Y.s here in a little triangle each a mile apart, 
 all under the same management; Jarny, Conflans and Labry. 
 Within this triangle, besides the ordnance detachment, there is a 
 regiment of engineers, two companies of pioneer infantry, a tele- 
 graph battalion and a detachment of negro labor troops. 
 
 When the Americans came here last November, the town, they 
 tell us, was an indescribable mess, the roads choked with aban- 
 doned military material and fitter of all sorts. To the Americans 
 as usual fell the pleasant task of cleaning up. Sometimes I think 
 that if France doesn't come out of this war as clean as the classic 
 Spotless Town it will only be because the Americans weren't here 
 long enough. And yet, funnily enough, France being cleaned up 
 by America has often provided a spectacle analogous to a little boy 
 having his face washed against his will. At Bourmont, when the 
 Americans sought to make the town sanitary by a liberal use of 
 disinfectants, a frantic protest went up from the inhabitants: their 
 wells, they claimed, had all been ruined! At Gondrecourt the 
 Mayor presented a formal complaint; the Americans were wearing 
 away the streets, he said, by too much cleaning! And on the other 
 hand this sort of work proves none too pleasant a pill for American 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 239 
 
 pride to swallow. Today a young New York Jew came into the 
 canteen. He was a handsome fellow and in civilian life evidently 
 something of a dandy. He belonged to the pioneers and he had 
 been engaged all day, I gathered, in following about at the tail of a 
 dump cart, picking up tin cans and rubbish. 
 
 "My God!" he suddenly burst out. "If my wife could see me 
 now! My God! if she could see me!" 
 
 One day last fall going down a street I passed a boy who was 
 engaged in a particularly dirty sort of cleaning. He looked up, 
 caught my eye, stood grinning sheepishly at me a moment. Then 
 he drawled, half humourously, half -bitterly: 
 
 "And my mother thinks I'm in the trenches!" 
 
 Conflans, March 10. 
 
 After so many weeks of wandering, I have settled down to a 
 job again. The last six "huts" in which I have been were in a bar- 
 racks, a casino, a private house, a convent, a college and a hospital. 
 This "hut" is in a hotel. The hotel is situated directly back of 
 the Conflans- Jarny railroad station. Before the war the hotel 
 was a prosperous and pleasant place, judging from the photograph 
 which Madame showed us; its windows filled with real lace cur- 
 tains all matching! as she pointed out; the broad terrace in front on 
 sunny days filled with little tables and crowded with well-dressed 
 people. Now, after four years of German occupation, it is a melan- 
 choly spectacle; ragged, dingy, half the panes gone from the win- 
 dows, its front painted over with staring German signs. There are 
 two entrances, one into the hall leading to the rooms given over to 
 the Y. the other into what we call the "Annex," a little cafe" kept by 
 Madame and Monsieur, the proprietors of the place. Next to our 
 red triangle sign stares a board announcing brazenly in red and 
 yellow Vin et Biere; but the irony of the juxtaposition is quite lost 
 on the French; indeed yesterday Madame asked me if I couldn't 
 get her the loan of a truck to go to Nancy for a load of beer! 
 
 Madame and Monsieur have been here all through the German 
 occupation. The Germans weren't bad, Madame told me, if one 
 
2 4 o CONFLANS 
 
 were very meek and never said a word, but did just exactly as they 
 said, — she had had some difficulty to be sure, reducing her more 
 temperish spouse to the proper attitude of meek submission! — but 
 they had made a clean sweep of everything of value; all her linen 
 that she had carefully hidden, her copper utensils, everything. 
 
 The Y. consists of a canteen room, a reading and writing room, 
 store-room, kitchen and office. When I first saw the place it was 
 as uninviting as anything could well be; dark, dirty, ill-smelling, 
 the walls covered with soiled ragged paper. But now it is very 
 nice; the dirty cloth in the window frames has been replaced by 
 vitex, the windows hung with pretty curtains, new electric lights 
 have been added, and best of all, the walls entirely covered with 
 German camouflage cloth and decorated with bright posters. This 
 camouflage cloth is a Godsend; woven of finely twisted strands of 
 paper, it comes in three colors, a soft brown, a yellowish green and 
 a dark blue, resembling, when on the walls, a loosely woven burlap. 
 It was used by the Germans to conceal and disguise military ob- 
 jects and was left here in large quantities when they evacuated. 
 The Americans hereabouts use it for every imaginable purpose; for 
 covering unsightly walls, for curtains, for officers' mess table-cloths. 
 Then there are the ammunition bags made of paper cloth which the 
 boys use for laundry bags. "When in doubt, camouflage," is the 
 motto. I chose brown for my canteen and now it is on the walls 
 I feel that no millionaire could ask for anything prettier. Only 
 I wonder; will they ask me to join the paper-hangers' union when 
 I get home? 
 
 Besides running the dry canteen, we serve hot chocolate free every 
 night for all comers here, filling up their canteens so the boys can 
 take it away with them, and run a free lodging-house. Every day we 
 have boys coming into the canteen asking for a bed. So after nine- 
 fifteen we stack all the chairs and tables at one end of the writing- 
 room, and bring out canvas-cots and blankets from the store-room 
 for our lodgers. There is only one unfortunate feature of this 
 scheme; the lodgers become so attached to their blankets that they 
 are all too apt to carry them away with them the next morning! 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS > 4 i 
 
 A man secretary and I are to run the hut together; a minister 
 in the states, here he answers to the unvarying title of " Chief. " 
 The " Chief" I find at present chiefly remarkable for his trousers. 
 These are garments with a past apparently and a present of such 
 a sort that in the company of ladies he is only rendered at ease 
 by assuming a sitting posture. If compelled to rise he backs out of 
 your presence as if you were royalty or goes with the gesture of the 
 little boy who has been chastised. Outside the house, no matter 
 how fine the day may be, he goes discreetly clad in a raincoat. 
 
 " I must," declares the Chief at least six times a day, "go to Toul 
 and get a new uniform." 
 
 "Amen," say I under my breath. 
 
 Besides the outfits stationed in town there are some twenty more 
 in the neighborhood which draw their rations here at the railhead 
 and then there are the leave trains on their way to or from Ger- 
 many, whose passing, like a visitation of locusts, leaves the can- 
 teen stripped and bare. The negro labor troops in the vicinity 
 supply quite a new element. Sometimes this takes the form of a 
 bit of humour. Last night I had drawn several cups of cocoa 
 ahead of the demand when a darky lad came shyly up to the counter 
 and pointed to one. 
 
 "Please ma'am," he asked, "am dat cup occupied?" 
 
 There is one fat and genial little darky who is a constant cus- 
 tomer, always he comes in munching a sandwich or an orange or 
 some other edible bought from a street-vendor. 
 
 "Eating again, Jo?" asked the Chief today. 
 
 "Why Boss," expostulated Jo, "I only eats one meal a day! But 
 dat," he grinned, "am all de time!" 
 
 "Shines" the boys invariably call them. 
 
 Tonight we were amused to see a negro corporal, who, not con- 
 tent with the chevrons on his sleeve, had sewed an additional pair 
 on his overseas cap! 
 
 Conflans, March 14. 
 
 My family at the hut consists of the Chief, Harry, Jerry and 
 Slim. Harry and Jerry are as nice lads as one could find anywhere, 
 
242 CONFLANS 
 
 but Slim is the bird that hatched out of the cuckoo's egg. Lean, 
 uncouth, according to his own claim, "the tallest man that Uncle 
 Sam's got in his army," with an inordinately long neck and an 
 Adam's apple so prominent as to give him the appearance of an 
 ostrich in the act of swallowing a perpetual orange, "Slim Old 
 Horse" as the boys call him, seems to me at times more like an ani- 
 mated caricature of the middle west "Long Boy" than a being of 
 flesh and blood and bone. How he ever became attached to the Y. 
 is a point on which nobody seems certain, but here he is and here he 
 sticks in spite of every effort to dislodge him. I fancy his "Top 
 Kick" was only too glad to get rid of him and when he discovered 
 Slim's inclination toward the Y. simply let him go and washed his 
 hands of him. Slim's health is uncertain. Most of the time he 
 only feels well enough to sit in the office and eat or "chaw." 
 
 "I started in ter chaw terbaccer," — he talks with a nasal twang 
 which is impossible to reproduce, — "when I was a kid four years 
 old; when my daddy an' my mammy found it out, they sure did 
 start ter raise hell with me, but I says to 'em; 'All right, have it 
 your way, but then it will be whisky and rum fer mine, when I'm 
 twenty-one!' So my mammy says 'Let 'im chaw.' An' I've 
 chawed ever sence." 
 
 "I've only got one lung," he remarked the other day, "and that's 
 a little one." 
 
 "Slim," I urged, "I'm worried about you. You oughtn't to be 
 here. You ought to be in the hospital where you could be properly 
 cared for. Go to your medical officer and tell him from me that 
 he must send you to the hospital." 
 
 Slim reluctantly departed. I dared to hope we had seen the last 
 of him. But before the afternoon was over he was back on his 
 old perch. He had brought some little pills back with him. Just 
 wait, I thought, until I meet that medical officer! 
 
 Slim seldom feels attracted to the meals at the mess-hall. So 
 he sits in the office and lives chiefly upon cheese ; Y. M. C. A. cheese 
 purchased to make sandwiches for the canteen at a cost of a dol- 
 lar and a quarter a pound. Sometimes he fries himself eggs, tak- 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 243 
 
 ing whatever mess-kit, Harry's or Jerry's or mine, happens to be 
 handy and never, in spite of anything I can say, will he wash it up 
 after him ! Sometimes Harry and Jerry and I decide that instead 
 of going to mess we would like to have a supper-party at the can- 
 teen ourselves, and then the question is, how to get rid of Slim? 
 
 "Slim, it's getting near chow-time," we say, "I'll bet they're 
 going to have mashed potatoes and brown gravy tonight. Isn't 
 that 'Soupy' I hear going now?" 
 
 But Slim refuses to budge any more than a bump on a log, so 
 we usually have to end by inviting him. But if I find Slim a bur- 
 den, how must the Chief feel toward him? For Slim has appro- 
 priated the extra cot in the office, which also serves as the Chief's 
 bed-room, and so has fairly camped down on him. And the Chief 
 is a gentleman of nerves and delicate perceptions. 
 
 "He gets up in the middle of the night," confided the Chief 
 to me today in an almost awe-struck voice, "and he goes for the 
 water-bucket and drinks a half a pail without stopping. He 
 makes a noise just like a horse swallowing it." 
 
 I have given up trying to do anything with Slim. Nothing 
 that I can say seems to make the least impression on him. Slim 
 is a married man, yet yesterday I caught him embracing Louise, 
 Madame's cross-eyed maid of all work, in the passage-way. I 
 undertook to reprove him. 
 
 'Why that ain't nawthin !" he turned a blameless and unabashed 
 eye upon me. "That's jest a man's nature." 
 
 This is the first time that I have eaten regularly from a mess- 
 kit and I am learning things. I have learned that the aluminum 
 mess-cup draws the heat from the hot coffee so that it is impossible 
 to drink out of one until the liquid has become half-way cold, 
 and that it is most unappetizing to have to wash one's mess-kit 
 afterwards in a pail of greasy soap suds in which a hundred odd 
 other mess-kits have already been bathed. I used to tease the 
 boys with their mess-cups in the chocolate line by telling them 
 that I could tell just how recently they had had inspection by 
 the shine on their mess-cups, but now whenever I look at the 
 
244 CONFLANS 
 
 state of my own cup I think I won't have the face to ever tease 
 them that way again! I have also learned that cold "gold fish" 
 or "sewer carp," as the boys call their canned salmon, is just as 
 bad as they say it is, and that slum made of hunks of bacon, 
 potatoes, onions and unlimited water is no easy thing to swallow. 
 But this sounds ungrateful and I don't mean to be, for the cooks are 
 nice as can be and never say a word no matter how late I may be. 
 While as for the boys, they put on all their company manners for me. 
 
 Here at the hut we are busy building an addition in order to 
 enlarge our restaurant business. This is in the shape of a room 
 on the terrace. The Germans had kindly built a roof over one 
 end, a detail from the ordnance detachment at Jarny is enclosing 
 the sides; we are to have three real glass windows looking out onto 
 the street and a door connecting the terrace-room with the present 
 canteen. This afternoon the detail ran out of lumber; the Chief 
 managed to get the loan of a truck to fetch some more. He asked 
 Slim to go with the truck. The afternoon wore away, neither 
 Slim nor the truck appeared, the detail, disgusted, sat and twiddled 
 their thumbs. Nobody could understand what had happened 
 as the lumber yard was just around the corner! Jerry went out 
 to search. There was no trace of Slim or the truck to be found. 
 About five o'clock he turned up. He had gone to Mars-la-Tour 
 he told us coolly. We had been talking of going to the commissary 
 at Mars-la-Tour for canteen supplies, and that great goose had 
 gotten into his head that the lumber was to be obtained there! 
 At least that is his explanation. But Harry and Jerry insinuate 
 darker things: 
 
 'We didn't know you had a girl in Mars-la-Tour before," they 
 tease. "Oh Slim, you old devil, you!" 
 
 I wonder now, just what was he up to in Mars-la-Tour all after- 
 noon? 
 
 Conflans, March 19. 
 
 Why is it that all the world loves a rascal? What is the secret 
 of the fascination that outlaw and free-booter have exercised 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 245 
 
 from Robin Hood down to Captain Kidd? Is it because each 
 one of us, in our secret hearts, would like to go and do likewise, 
 if we only dared? Of all the minor piracies committed by the 
 A. E. F. in France, none, I think, are so picturesque as those of 
 the ■ — Engineers. 
 
 The — Engineers are a railroad regiment. My first acquaint- 
 ance with them was last summer. A company of these engineers 
 was located at a station on the Paris line just north of us. It 
 was a point at which supplies for the American front were trans- 
 ferred from the standard gauge to the American narrow gauge; 
 in order to effect these transfers the — Engineers had a switch 
 of their own. Now freight trains in France are quite unguarded 
 and so at the mercy of marauders. Indeed the losses in transit 
 have been so serious that since the armistice it has been the custom 
 to have cars containing American goods " convoyed " to their 
 destination by soldier guards. Last summer of course the 
 men could not be spared for convoy duty. So it was the eas- 
 iest thing in the world for the — Engineers to "cut out" a Y. 
 or a Red Cross car, side-track it, and lighten the load at their lei- 
 sure. 
 
 "I went through their company store-house while I was there," 
 a Q. M. sergeant told me, "and it was as well stocked with deli- 
 cacies as the store-rooms of a big hotel back in the States." 
 
 No wonder there was such a dearth of supplies at Abainville 
 last summer! 
 
 But it was after the — Engineers moved into the occupied 
 area here following the armistice that they performed their most 
 notorious exploits. Assigned to run a stretch of railway in co- 
 operation with the French, a certain amount of friction was 
 inevitable from the start, the red tape in the French railway 
 system exasperating the Americans as much as our more direct 
 methods scandalized the French. Finally the French protests 
 at the Americans* disregard for the formalities of railroading 
 moved the engineer officers to stricter discipline. "I'll hang the 
 next man of you who runs a train out of the yards without a pilot!" 
 
246 CONFLANS 
 
 declared one captain. After that things went more smoothly, — 
 on the surface. Then came the Dance. 
 
 Now unfortunately for the — Engineers there is an extra 
 large M. P. force here at Conflans under a Major whose greatest 
 delight in life is the detection and punishment of both major and 
 minor infractions of the law. 
 
 The Dance was quite an affair over which the — Engineers 
 had spread themselves and to which the French fair sex was 
 generally invited. When the party was about to begin, however, 
 it became evident that the feminine partners afforded locally were 
 all too few. Some bold soul had a bright idea; a train-crew forth- 
 with hurried down to the yards, commandeered an engine and a 
 couple of cars, and, in spite of the horrified protests of the French 
 railroad men, ran it to a nearby town. Here they filled up the 
 train with girls from the village and were about to start back 
 again when a detachment of M. P.s, rushed up in autos from 
 Conflans, broke in upon the scene. A sanguine scrimmage en- 
 sued, resulting in a victory for law and order. 
 
 In the meanwhile, back at the dance hall the engineers were 
 waiting in impatient expectation for partners. Among the in- 
 vited guests were two friendly M. P.s, old soldiers, with genial dis- 
 positions and several wound stripes to their credit. When word 
 reached the party that the M. P.s had prevented the arrival of the 
 " Mademoiselles' ' the engineers were furious. "Kill the M. P.s!" 
 went up the cry. Catching sight of the red-arm bands on their 
 two innocent guests the crowd started for them with the evident 
 intention of making a beginning then and there. Heaven only 
 knows what would have happened if the two M. P.s, by affecting 
 an exit at the double-quick, hadn't immediately made their escape, 
 unharmed but badly scared. 
 
 The most notable exploit of the — Engineers occurred not 
 long afterwards. It is referred to as the Affair of the Serge Uni- 
 forms. One fine day, not very long ago, it was noised abroad that 
 a car full of tailored serge uniforms, consigned to and paid for by 
 officers of the Army of Occupation in Luxembourg, was standing 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 247 
 
 down in the yards. The idea of going home in an officer's serge 
 uniform from which, of course, the braid on the cuffs had been 
 discreetly ripped, made a strong appeal to the boys' imaginations. 
 When the time came for that car to be sent to Luxembourg 
 it was found to be quite empty. But for once the Engineers 
 had gone too far. The M. P. Major took the war-path. Word 
 flew around the camp that a strict search was being conducted. 
 The possessors of the incriminating uniforms must get rid of 
 them and get rid of them quick. Some hid them in out-of-the-way 
 places, between the floors and ceilings in the half-ruined houses; 
 others frantically ripped the uniforms to pieces and burned them 
 in the barracks stoves. The camp, they tell me, was full of the 
 stench of scorching woolen. Still others got rid of them by plant- 
 ing them among the possessions of their innocent neighbors. One 
 company postal clerk, a most upright and blameless lad, to his 
 horror discovered one of the fatal uniforms stuffed in a mail-bag 
 lying at his feet. Before the search party had made its rounds 
 most of those serge uniforms had been safely disposed of; a few, a 
 very few were found. 
 
 But now, having been baulked in his attempt to bring the 
 culprits to justice, it is common rumour, that the M. P. Major 
 is lying low, waiting to "fix" the — Engineers. 
 
 Conflans, March 23. 
 The — Engineers have left. They are on their way to Le 
 Mans, presumably the first stage of their journey home. Their 
 departure was not unmarked by incident.* At the last moment, 
 when they had all entrained and were ready to pull out of the sta- 
 tion, the M. P. Major sallied forth, court-martials in his eye, to 
 search the trains for contraband. But he had reckoned without 
 the Colonel of the engineers who flatly refused to allow any such 
 procedure. Being outranked by the Colonel, the M. P. Major 
 was seemingly helpless. Then, however, the Colonel made a bad 
 mistake. There were two train loads. The Colonel left with the 
 first. The second, being left without any protector of sufficiently 
 
248 CONFLANS 
 
 high rank, fell an easy prey to the Major. He searched to his 
 heart's content, discovering several articles of unlawful loot and, 
 one unfortunate clad in one of the notorious serge uniforms! The 
 train was held in the yards while the M. P. Major indulged in an 
 orgy of court-martials. 
 
 On the morning of the departure the captain of the motor 
 unit where we had messed stopped in to speak to me. He came by 
 request of the boys to bring an apology for any careless language 
 which might have been uttered unwittingly in my hearing! Then 
 the captain of another unit called to tell us, sub rosa, that, forced 
 by shortage of transportation, he was leaving behind an over 
 supply of rations which would be ours for the fetching. We 
 fetched accordingly and found that we had fallen heir to dozens of 
 loaves of bread, sugar, coffee, canned meat, canned tomatoes, 
 hard bread, soap and unlimited beans. What to do with these 
 surreptitious stores is now the embarrassing question. One simply 
 can't offer the boys hard bread, tomatoes plain or scalloped, in the 
 canteen, no matter if one should dress them with all the sauces of 
 Epicurus and serve them on gold-plate. Yet they mustn't be 
 wasted. What's more, the fact that they are in our possession 
 must be kept absolutely dark, lest we get the kind captain into 
 trouble. I feel something like the man who was presented with a 
 million dollar check and then found he couldn't cash it. 
 
 With the — Engineers went Harry, Jerry, and Slim. I couldn't 
 believe until the last moment that Slim was actually going. His 
 departure almost compensated for the loss of Harry and Jerry. 
 But though gone, he is not forgotten. This morning a lad came 
 into the canteen. He would like his watch please, he said. I 
 looked blankly at him. He explained; several days ago, just as he 
 was leaving on a long truck-trip, he had broken the strap of his 
 wrist watch. Happening to be in front of the Y. just then, he had 
 brought it in and left it for safe-keeping "with the Y. man in the 
 office." The Chief knew nothing of it. 
 
 "What did the Y. man look like?" I questioned. 
 
 He described him. It was Slim. We have searched every nook 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 249 
 
 and cranny of that office, hoping to come upon the missing watch, 
 in vain. 
 
 "I'll come in again," said the boy. "Perhaps by that time you 
 will have found it." 
 
 But personally I am sure that that watch is now on its way 
 to Le Mans, en route for the States. Was there ever anything 
 more wretchedly embarrassing? 
 
 Conflans, March 27. 
 
 This is a curious world. Six "Relief Trains" pass through 
 here every day bound east, loaded with food for Germany. Mean- 
 while in the little half-ruined hamlets within a stone's throw of 
 the tracks the French villagers, for whom no provision has been 
 made, are famine-stricken. 
 
 Lieutenant A. came in from the little town of Pierrefond which 
 lies between Conflans and Verdun yesterday. 
 
 "They have nothing to eat there," he told me, "but the weeds 
 they dig up in the fields for salade and the frogs they catch in 
 the marshes. When the days are cold the frogs bury themselves so 
 deep in the mud that they can't be caught. There is one old 
 gentleman who told me today that he had existed for weeks en- 
 tirely on a diet of turnips. They come to me and beg pitifully 
 for a bite of something from the mess-kitchen, but I don't dare 
 let them have it, as that would be, of course, strictly against regu- 
 lations." 
 
 I thought of those bushels of beans in the store-house. It 
 was taking a chance of course, because after all it was government 
 property and nothing else, but I told the Lieutenant that if he 
 was willing to run the risk, I was; then I put it up to the Chief. 
 
 This morning the Lieutenant came in with a flivver. We drove 
 over to the store-house and loaded it up with army beans, issue 
 coffee, sugar, rice, onions, potatoes and soap. Then we filled a 
 special sack with canned soup, "gold fish," corn meal, canned 
 tomatoes and corn syrup for the old gentleman who had lived on 
 turnips. I felt he had a special claim on our sympathy. 
 
250 CONFLANS 
 
 We reached Pierrefond after a long drive in a stinging rain. 
 It was a quaint pathetic village with a pretty little church whose 
 tower had been sliced off as neatly as by a knife. Was it a German 
 or a French shell which had done it, I wondered. We drew up 
 in front of the Mayor's house. He came out to greet us, showed me 
 a list of the seventy- three inhabitants of the town; men, women 
 and infants in arms. All the supplies were to be duly weighed and 
 measured and distributed, so much per capita. While they were 
 unloading the flivver we stopped in at Madame C.'s for coffee and 
 compliments, and to dry out by her hospitable fire. Everyone 
 made pretty speeches, of course, and Madame bestowed on me a 
 delectable bouquet of wall-flowers and daffodils. Poor things! 
 It's little enough one can do for them. This will keep the wolf 
 from the door for a short while perhaps, but after that, what then? 
 
 Pierrefond, like Conflans, was occupied by the Germans for 
 four years. Now there is a young half-German population grow- 
 ing up, even as many as three to one family. The villagers accept 
 the situation with tolerant humour; "Souvenirs Bodies," they call 
 the children. 
 
 As for the rest of the rations, I made jam sandwiches with the 
 bread and bestowed them together with hot chocolate on a hungry 
 leave train. What to do with the "Charlie Horse," as the boys 
 call the canned roast beef, was a puzzle. Finally I made a paste 
 of it mixed with bread crumbs, tomato soup, a few weenies and 
 some ham scraps, pickles, parsley, onion and an egg, — we had six 
 assistants in the kitchen and each added an ingredient, — put it 
 between slices of bread and christened the result "Liberty Sand- 
 wiches. Guaranteed to contain neither Gold Fish nor Corn Willy." 
 The boys ate and wondered and came back for more. 
 
 Conflans, March 30. 
 
 In our back yard a detail of German prisoners is busy cleaning 
 
 up; already they have made quite a transformation. Madame 
 
 must have a garden. I wonder, as I watch them, what their state 
 
 of mind may be; their phlegmatic faces give no hint. Did some of 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 251 
 
 these very ones, perhaps, make merry in this self same caf£, only 
 six months ago, when they were conquerors? 
 
 Madame tells me how, when the German officers were living here 
 at the hotel, they ate off priceless old French plates, which, appar- 
 ently quite ignorant of their value, they had carried off as loot. 
 Madame, coveting these treasures, tried to arrange an exchange with 
 the mess orderly, offering a number of modern dishes in return for 
 one antique; but the mess orderly, fearing that some officer might 
 notice the substitution, hesitated and before they could come to 
 an agreement the precious plates, with the rough handling ac- 
 corded them, had all been broken to bits. 
 
 Some of the boys seem to think that the French don't give their 
 prisoners enough to eat. The Germans, they say, when they get 
 the chance, will wait outside the mess-hall door and seize eagerly 
 the leavings in the mess-kits that the boys are about to throw away. 
 
 " Maybe it's just because they're greedy," I say. " Surely they 
 look fat enough!" And then a picture comes back to my mind, 
 the picture of a Red Cross train seen while waiting at Pagny on my 
 way to Paris last January, a train full of French prisoners who were 
 being brought back from Germany, so weak from starvation that 
 they lay on stretchers or sat pressing against the windows faces as 
 wan and white as spectres. 
 
 The German prisoners, according to the boys' repeated stories, 
 are by no means a humble or repentant lot. They're not beaten 
 for good, the prisoners invariably declare. Just as soon as the 
 Americans have gone and things have calmed down a bit, they are 
 coming back to France again, they say, and this time they will 
 settle matters with the French for good and all! 
 
 Last night a train load of German prisoners in box cars pulled into 
 town. When the doors of the cars were opened it was found that one 
 of the prisoners had died on the way. The dead man was wrapped in 
 a blanket and left lying on the freight station platform. A "shine" 
 from the labor battalion happened along in the dark, tripped and 
 fell flat over the body. He came into the canteen in a state of 
 nerves, quite prepared, evidently, to see a ghost in every corner. 
 
252 CONFLANS 
 
 Conflans, April 2, 
 
 The latest member of our household is something quite new in 
 the way of details. He is a Salvation Army man and a very nice 
 fellow indeed. A year or so ago he was beating a big drum in front 
 of GimbePs Store; then he was drafted to come to France with the 
 pioneers; now he has applied for a discharge in order to join his 
 organization over here; and while waiting for his release he is prov- 
 ing himself an invaluable aid in the canteen. Now more than ever, 
 since The Salvation Army, as everybody calls him, has joined our 
 force, I have been longing to realize a dream which I have cherished 
 ever since I came to France, — to make doughnuts for the A. E. F. 
 I have the recipe, I can get the materials, the stove is the sticking- 
 point. At present our cooking equipment consists of a hot water 
 boiler and a wretched German range which is really fit for nothing 
 but the scrap-heap. As the boys say, I have lost more religion than 
 I ever thought I had over that stove! So while we hope and hunt 
 for a doughnut-stove we are specializing in sandwiches and pud- 
 dings. The puddings are my special pride as I worked out the 
 ideas for them myself and, as far as I know, they are served in no 
 other canteen. There are four of them; Coffee Jelly, Raspberry 
 Jelly (made with the " pink-lemonade" fruit juice) Chocolate Bread 
 Pudding, and Blackberry Bread Pudding. The bread-puddings are 
 baked for us, by kindness of the cooks, at a nearby mess-kitchen. 
 The only trouble with the puddings is, that there never is enough! 
 But lest anyone should think that I take this as a compliment to my 
 culinary skill, I must explain that the boys would eat anything you 
 offered them, I believe, just as long as it was sweet and was a change. 
 And then there is perhaps a quaint psychological factor too. 
 
 "A man don't like to eat food that's cooked by a man," a lad 
 confided to me the other day. "Anything that's cooked by a 
 woman tastes better." 
 
 So if a boy does leave any scraps of pudding on his plate it bothers 
 me unreasonably. 
 
 " Somebody didn't like his pudding," I remark mournfully to 
 the S. A. as I pick up the dishes. This amuses him. Last night 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 253 
 
 as we were clearing up before we closed he marched up to the 
 counter, deposited a tiny wad found on one of the tables in front 
 of me. 
 
 " Somebody," he declared in a tragic tone, "didn't like his chew- 
 ing-gum!" 
 
 Nor can I boast, as a cook, of a record of unvarying success. On 
 more than one occasion I must admit to having scorched the cocoa, 
 and once, not many days ago — to my shame be it said! — I ruined 
 a ten gallon can by putting in salt instead of sugar! 
 
 Here at Conrlans we have an unusual amount of competition in 
 the light lunch line. The other day a French fried potato booth, 
 like a hot-dog booth at a country fair at home, established itself 
 on the terrace just outside our door. Now a hungry doughboy can 
 take the edge off his appetite with a paper full of hot French fries 
 in return for a franc at any hour of the day. 
 
 Also in the street below the terrace are many little stands where 
 oranges and sandwiches made of rolls and slices of sausage are on 
 sale. The rivalry between these stands, it appears, is acute. Yes- 
 terday, hearing a hubbub, I looked out to see a comic battle in 
 progress, the proprietors of two neighboring stands, a fat frowsy 
 old woman and a little ragged man like a weasel, pelting each other 
 for all they were worth with rotten oranges while half the A. E. F., 
 it seemed, stood around and cheered. Nor did matters settle down 
 to calm until a gendarme and intervention appeared on the scene. 
 
 This morning I stopped in at the little French store around the 
 corner to buy half a dozen eggs to make a custard sauce for my 
 chocolate bread pudding. When the man gave me my change I 
 noticed he had overcharged me by twenty-five centimes. 
 
 "Why's that?" I asked. 
 
 "That," returned the shop-keeper, "is because you picked them 
 out by hand." 
 
 Some canteen ladies can cook and wait on the counter and open 
 milk-cans and wash the chocolate cups and yet keep spotlessly and 
 specklessly clean. But I have come to the conclusion that as long 
 as I live in Conflans, with its air full of smoke and soot from the 
 
254 CONFLANS 
 
 train yards, and its water so hard that it curdles the soap, — and 
 sometimes the milk in the cocoa too, that I will have to content 
 myself with being godly and leave the cleanliness till a happier day. 
 We have been having a regular plague of inspectors and investi- 
 gators of late. Last night just as I had my final bout with the last 
 chocolate container, a major and a lieutenant colonel wandered 
 in, evidently in search of scandal. The lieutenant colonel fixed 
 a piercing eye on me. 
 
 "So you are the only 'white woman' in this part of the world 
 at present? " 
 
 "Well," I said looking at my fingers smudged with cocoa, "to- 
 night I should say that I was a pale chocolate-colored woman." 
 
 "I noticed that your face was dirty," coolly returned the gentle- 
 man. I hurriedly excused myself in order to consult a looking- 
 glass. Sure enough, there on my nose was a large smudge of soot! 
 I must have got it the last time I stoked the chocolate-stove. 
 
 Conflans, April 7. 
 
 The M. P.s live in the hotel next door. Naturally we see a 
 good deal of them. I try to treat them extra nicely because I 
 feel sorry for them. They can't help being M. P.s any more than 
 they can help being unpopular. And though many of them go 
 about with a chip on their shoulders and an attitude of I-don't- 
 give-a-tinker's-damn, still to know that you are anathema to 
 the major portion of the A. E. F., to be publicly referred to as 
 Misery Providers, Mademoiselle Promenades, and Military 
 Pests, besides being made the subject of songs such as; Mother 
 take down your service flag, Your son is only an M. P., must be 
 galling to the most insensitive. 
 
 Just as soon as the armistice was signed the doughboys started 
 in to pester the M. P.s with the classic taunt: 
 
 "Who won the war?— The M. P.s!" 
 
 For a long while the M. P.s could think of no more crushing 
 rejoinder than the time-honored; 
 
 "Aw, go to hell!" 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 255 
 
 But lately some bright soul has hit upon a bit of repartee that 
 goes far to salve the M. P.s' self-respect. Now if a soldier is so 
 rash as to jeer; "Who won the war? The M. P.s!" the response 
 comes instantly: 
 
 " Yep ! They chased the doughboys up front!" 
 
 There are two M. P.s from the detachment next door who have 
 lately joined themselves to our family. Like Slim, they came 
 unsolicited, and like Slim, they stick. They are known respect- 
 ively as the Littlest M. P. and the Fattest M. P. 
 
 The Littlest M. P. is a pest. I feel sorry for him because he 
 is so young and has no mother; otherwise there would be no tolerat- 
 ing him. He hangs about the canteen from morning until late 
 at night under pretence of assisting us, and eats and eats and 
 eats and eats. The other day I heard him proudly averring that 
 he hadn't taken a meal in the mess-hall for two weeks, and I 
 believed him. Yet when you ask him to do any particular piece 
 of work, like filling up the wood box or fetching a pail of water, 
 in return for his board, he always has some perfectly good reason 
 for not doing it. Besides which, he has no morals. The other 
 day he confided to me triumphantly that the reason that they 
 didn't put him on guard work was that they knew he would take 
 money to let men into caf£s at prohibited hours. He went on to 
 tell me about the town of S. 
 
 "That was a good place, you could get twenty-five francs for 
 lettin' a feller into a cafe* out of hours there.'* 
 
 I have tried to find out what he does in return for Uncle Sam's 
 dollar a day and have discovered that his job is sweeping out 
 the halls in the M. P. Hotel. 
 
 "But I skip about twenty feet at each end every time, so it 
 don't take me more'n ten minutes." 
 
 Yesterday morning he came in with an air of righteousness 
 rewarded. 
 
 "I told 'em I'd got to have help on that job," he announced, 
 "so they put another feller on too." 
 
 This morning I got so exasperated with him that I told him 
 
256 CONFLANS 
 
 in unmistakable terms that we could dispense with his company. 
 He disappeared, and I congratulated myself that we were rid of 
 him. But at supper-time he bobbed serenely up again. 
 
 "Some fellers would have got sore if you'd spoke like that to 
 them," he told me with a magnanimous air, "but I just took it 
 as a joke." 
 
 Now what is one to do with anybody like that? 
 
 The Fattest M. P. is the most unleavened lump of good-nature 
 I have ever known. He is, I understand, a notorious poker-player 
 and his breath, to my embarrassment, betrays the fact that he 
 has a weakness for Conflans beer. Besides which, he really takes 
 up quite too much room behind the counter. Yet in spite of all 
 this, he is such a simple soul and is. so anxious to help that one 
 hasn't the heart to send him away. 
 
 Yesterday I thought I was going to be arrested by an M. P. 
 I had gone over to Verdun in an army flivver to get some stock. 
 Turning the corner into Conflans on our way home we were halted 
 by the upraised billy of the M. P. on duty. 
 
 "Sorry, Buddy!" he called to the driver, "but you can't do that!" 
 
 Then, approaching, he got a closer view, turned red as fire and 
 stammered; 
 
 "Beg your pardon, Miss. Made a mistake. That's all right, 
 driver, you can go on." 
 
 Later he sent apologies to me at the canteen. It is, of course, 
 against regulations to allow civilian women to use army trans- 
 portation. The M. P., catching sight of a skirt, had taken me 
 for a Mademoiselle on a joy-ride. 
 
 Conflans April 7. 
 We must start an Orphans' Annex here, the boys tell me. 
 Three nights ago as it was drawing on toward closing time the 
 Chief called me into the office. By the table stood two young 
 boys, about fourteen and sixteen I judged them; each carried 
 on his shoulder a little sack which evidently contained all his 
 worldly possessions. They were German boys from Metz; they 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 257 
 
 had just come in on the train. Why had they come? we asked 
 them. They had come to join the American army. But they 
 were too young! He was eighteen, declared the elder. He dug 
 into his pockets and produced documents. I looked at two of 
 the papers, they appeared to be the birth certificates of his father 
 and mother. Had his parents given their consent? He nodded. 
 "And you really are eighteen?" "Ja! J a wohll" It was hard 
 to believe, — he was so small. We stared at them a bit helplessly. 
 Then, finding our German not quite adequate to the occasion, 
 we called an interpreter. But to all the interpreter's questioning 
 the boy returned the same unvarying answer. He had come to 
 join the American army! As for the younger one, he merely stood 
 and smiled and looked as guileless as a young angel. Whatever 
 the elder one's intention might be, I was sure I could divine the 
 younger's. He, I am certain, had set his heart on being an Amer- 
 ican "mascot." And he, for all his innocent and engaging air, 
 had most patently run away from home! 
 
 We told the boys that we would put them up for the night. 
 I busied myself in getting them some supper and then — another 
 waif appeared! A little French lad of thirteen, with a peg-leg 
 and a crutch, he came shyly hobbling into the office, and the 
 face he lifted to us was one of the sweetest, the most sensitive 
 and appealing that I have ever seen. Silently he tendered us a 
 letter. It had been written by an American lieutenant; the 
 bearer, it stated, was an orphan of the war; he had been shot by 
 German machine-gunners near Verdun; his right leg had been 
 amputated at the thigh. I looked at the crippled child in appre- 
 hension. How would he take the presence of the Germans? But 
 my question was already answered. The little German lad and 
 the French mutile had drawn close together, seemingly drawn 
 instantly to each other by a bond of childish understanding. 
 Although neither could speak the other's speech they appeared 
 to be communicating in some shy wordless way. Later, as we 
 were getting the cots ready for the lodgers, passing the empty 
 canteen room, I glanced inside. Somebody had started the vie- 
 
258 CONFLANS 
 
 trola on the counter to playing a waltz, and to its music the 
 German boys were dancing while the little French lad gaily kept 
 time with his crutch! 
 
 We fed the three of them and put them up for the night. The 
 next morning the French lad took his leave. Later he came back 
 to see us dressed in a little American uniform; he had been adopted 
 by one of the companies here. The German lads stayed with 
 us, or rather, they slept and ate with the M. P.s next door and 
 spent the rest of the day with us in the canteen. They loved to 
 help about the counter; they were quick and deft and willing. 
 The only trouble with the arrangement was that I fairly went 
 distracted trying to talk three languages at once ! 
 
 Two days afterwards, the M. P.s having taken the matter in 
 hand, the German boys were sent back to Metz. But the French 
 lad comes in often to visit us. We see him playing ball with the 
 soldiers in the street in front of the hotel. This morning the S. A. 
 and I stood watching him. 
 
 "I wouldn't mind it so much somehow," the S. A. remarked, 
 "if he didn't have that wrap-legging wound so tight around that 
 pitiful little peg-stick!" 
 
 The tenderness toward little children which the war has shown 
 forth so vividly has been a revelation of an inherent sweetness 
 in the boys' natures; this fondness for children other than their 
 own, being, I believe a distinctive characteristic of our American 
 men. Any number of companies have mascots, little French 
 boys, orphans usually, whom they dress in miniature uniforms, 
 take about from place to place with them, and, of course, spoil 
 quite shamelessly. And in every unit that possesses a mascot 
 you find boys whose dearest wish is to adopt the little fellow as 
 his own and take him back home; but this the French law forbids. 
 
 "That's the best part of France, the little kids," remarked 
 a boy to me as we passed a group of little tots by the road-side. 
 
 Unfortunately though, this petting has another side. Spoiled 
 by the soft-hearted soldiers, the French gamins have developed 
 into a brood of brazen little beggars. They have come to regard 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 259 
 
 all Americans, it seems, as perambulating slot machines for 
 "goom" and chocolate with whom, however, the purchasing 
 penny is quite superfluous. I shall never forget being held up, as I 
 was walking with a doughboy through the streets of Lourdes, by a 
 tiny lad who demanded pathetically; 
 
 " Une cigarette pour tnoi, et une pour Papa y et une pour Maman qui 
 est maladeV 
 
 Nor the fifteen year old conductor on a suburban tram line 
 near Paris, who took up our tickets with a forbidding scowl, and 
 then, his rounds made, hurried back down the car to confront us 
 with the wistful childish plea: "'Ave you goom?" 
 
 For some while there has been a red-headed urchin of perhaps 
 thirteen years hanging about the hut. As he was dressed jn an 
 O. D. blouse, breeches and leggings, I concluded that he was 
 somebody's mascot. He kept coming into the canteen to buy gum 
 and cigarettes; presently I discovered he was purchaser for a little 
 gang of ragamuffins who would wait for him just outside the door. 
 I asked the boys in the canteen if they knew anything about the 
 red-head, but no one seemed to know who he was or to what outfit 
 he belonged. The boy himself seemed stupid and sullen when I 
 questioned him. Finally I told him that I could sell him nothing 
 more. Tonight my friend the M. P. Sergeant asked casually; 
 
 "Do you remember that red-headed kid that used to hang 
 around? Well we've got him and eight others." 
 
 "Why, what for?" 
 
 "They're Propaganda Kids. They came over here from Ger- 
 many; they've been stealing American uniforms and smuggling 
 them to the German prisoners so they could escape in them." 
 
 CONFLANS, ArRIL 1 5. 
 
 Of all the roads over which I have ever passed, the road from 
 Conflans to Verdun will remain, I think, most sharply etched upon 
 my memory. 
 
 Leaving Conflans, as one passes through the occupied territory, 
 the predominant impression made upon one's mind is of signs. 
 
2 6o CONFLANS 
 
 German military signs. These are everywhere, painted in great 
 staring letters on the sides of buildings, covering bill-boards set at 
 the road's edge, or hung suspended from the branches of trees over 
 the truck drivers' heads. Here in this German sector behind the 
 lines every movement was timed, ordered and regulated. No one 
 could possibly go astray, no one could lose a moment in hesitation 
 as to where he should go, in what manner and at what rate. Half- 
 way between Conflans and the lines you come upon two great bill- 
 boards at the highway's edge, one duplicating the other, in order 
 that, marching past, what might have been missed on the first 
 board, could be supplied by the second. They are headed "Under 
 Enemy Observation!" and give in strict detail the order of pro- 
 cedure from that point forward, both by day and night, just 
 what strength the marching groups should be and how many 
 metres should intervene between them. The German thorough- 
 ness, the German system! Everything has been thought of, every- 
 thing provided for, everything possible done to reduce the indi- 
 vidual to an automaton, a mere senseless cog in a vast machine. 
 And yet among all these signs there is one that lacks, a sign that is 
 notable by its absence; it is the sign that should read Nach Verdun. 
 
 Once across the lines on the French side you are struck by the 
 startling difference; here the only signs that one sees are two, 
 poignant in their simplicity and directness. They are Poste de 
 Secours and Blesses a Pied. 
 
 Every time I approach Verdun by this road I thrill when I 
 think of the enormous energy that poured along it, directed, it 
 must have seemed, irresistibly, over - poweringly against the 
 city in the hills; a thrill only surpassed by the emotion that one 
 must feel when he traverses the Sacra Via on the other side of 
 Verdun, the "Holy Way" over which men and munitions flowed 
 incessantly to the defense of the beleaguered city. 
 
 Everywhere one sees the ineffaceable scars of struggle^ the 
 aftermath of destruction. The stately trees bordering the road- 
 side, the trees that Napoleon ordered planted along the highways 
 of France, are barked with great ugly gashes where mines had 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 261 
 
 been placed, the exploding of which would have felled the great 
 trees across the road, blocking the pursuer's way. Others bear 
 platforms high up in the branches where machine-guns were placed. 
 Rotting camouflages of every sort, paper strips woven like 
 lattice, curtains of branches woven through wire which once 
 screened the road for miles from the enemy's observation, now lie 
 disintegrating in the ditches. Shell holes pit the fields, concrete 
 " pill-boxes" lurk in unsuspected places, every mound is shelter 
 for a dug-out, walls are riddled with ragged holes cut for machine- 
 guns. Further on, one comes to the trenches zigzagging in what 
 seems erratic and aimless patterns and the interminable barbed- 
 wire entanglements, like the devil's brier patches. 
 
 Half across the open plain that lies before the hills of Verdun 
 you come upon a German tank defence, a long line of heavy 
 concrete pillars with enormous cables, once highly electrified, looped 
 between. A little farther and the road crosses an impromptu bridge 
 thrown hastily over the great gaping crater torn by an exploding 
 mine. And always here and there over the plain, little heaps of 
 glimmering whitish stones which mark the places where once were 
 villages. Starting to ascend the hills, one looks down upon a ghost 
 city, a city where many of the walls still stand, making you think of 
 nothing but a huddled host of tombstones, a city chalk-white, 
 naked, as if the flesh were all picked away from its dead bones; the 
 most haunted, the most wraith-like, the most desolate of any. 
 
 Climbing the hills, sweeping around one slow curve after another, 
 one beholds suddenly before him, a lesser hill ringed by higher 
 ones, Verdun, scarred, wounded, but victorious, like the Winged 
 Victory of Samothrace, mutilated yet triumphant! 
 
 When I first made the trip from Verdun to Conflans there were 
 still good pickings for the souvenir-hunter by the way; shell-cases, 
 helmets, gas masks lying along the roadside; but lately it has looked 
 as if these trophies had been thoroughly gleaned. Nor does one 
 wonder where they have gone when one sees the flivvers piled high 
 with homeward bound souvenirs pulling in at the post office 
 around the corner. But will they reach home, is the question? 
 
262 CONFLANS 
 
 Ominous rumours are abroad that salvage plants have been estab- 
 lished at the base ports for the particular purpose of confiscating 
 shell-cases on their way to America, and thereby saving the Allies a 
 fortune in brass. Some of the boys are inclined to try to carry their 
 trophies with them rather than entrust them to Uncle Sam's mail 
 service, but this entails some trouble to prevent their seizure dur- 
 ing inspections. Nowadays, passing by, one can tell when an in- 
 spection is in progress within, by all the junk which is hanging out 
 of the barracks windows! Homeward-bound troops have already 
 discovered a use for gas masks not mentioned in the Drill Manual: 
 the cases provide an excellent receptacle in which surreptitiously 
 one may carry photographs and post-cards! When I first came to 
 Conflans, camouflaged German helmets were a prize so rare as to 
 be much sought after by the souvenir enthusiast; but now cam- 
 ouflaged helmets may be had for the asking; an enterprising bugler 
 possessed of a knack with a paint-brush has gone into the business 
 of camouflaging them while you wait. 
 
 Yesterday, after having returned from Verdun, I noticed a post- 
 card in a Jarny shop. It showed a black cat and a white cat sil- 
 houetted against the moon, perched on the skeleton beams of a 
 half-demolished house, peering disconsolately about them. Under- 
 neath the sentence ran; Oil est-il le toil de nos amours? Where is 
 the roof of our love? Could any nation but the French thus make 
 light of such tragedy? 
 
 Paris, April 21. 
 
 I am on my way home at last. I am waiting here for my sailing. 
 This time I am really going all the way through. Now that I am 
 on the brink of the retour au civil, as the French say, it seems very 
 odd. For eighteen months I haven't worn white gloves, or silk 
 stockings, or a veil, no, nor even powdered my nose. And the 
 worst of it is, these things don't seem to matter any more. Even a 
 uniform, and a homely uniform at that, has tremendous advan- 
 tages as part of a working scheme of life. As one girl remarked; 
 
 "You don't have to spend any time thinking: Shall I put on the 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 263 
 
 pink or the blue tonight? The only question is, Do I or do I not 
 need a clean collar? " 
 
 Somehow I feel a little unfitted to go back to a civilian existence 
 once more. The same feeling one finds expressed continually among 
 the boys. 
 
 "When I get back home, if I see a line anywhere I'll go and stand 
 in it just from force of habit," remarked one boy, grinning ruefully. 
 
 But most often this feeling takes the form of a pathetic and 
 wistful fear. 
 
 "I'm afraid I'll shock Mother when I get home." 
 
 "They won't know what to make of us, back home, the way 
 we'll behave." 
 
 "I reckon I've forgotten how to act civilized." 
 
 And over and again they confess to a shame-faced apprehension 
 lest they should unguardedly relapse into the language of the army 
 and so frighten their women folk! 
 
 A famous French surgeon confided to my friend, the English 
 Lady: 
 
 "In that first year of the war when we were allowed no permis- 
 sions we became like savages. The first time that I returned home 
 I was afraid. I was afraid all the while, afraid before my wife, be- 
 fore my children, — afraid that I would act the beast." 
 
 If by coming to France, we women who have had this privilege 
 have discovered the American doughboy, the American doughboy, 
 by coming to France, has discovered America. I don't know who 
 first said; "After I get back, if the Statue of Liberty ever wants 
 to see my face again, she'll have to turn around," but whoever did, 
 uttered a sentiment which has been echoed and re-echoed all over 
 France. The doughboy has been to Paris, "the City of Light," 
 he has amused himself in the playgrounds of princes along the 
 Riviera, he has visited the chateaux and palaces of kings and 
 queens. And though he admits it is all mighty fine, in the face of 
 everything he holds staunchly to his declaration of loyalty; "I'll 
 tell the world the little old U. S. A. is good enough for me!" 
 
 At times perhaps his patriotic enthusiasm has outweighed his 
 
264 CONFLANS 
 
 manners. Again and again a French villager, evidently echoing 
 some doughboy's dissertation, has asked me a little wistfully; 
 
 "America bon, goode! France pas boil, no goode! Hein?" 
 
 "Anyway the war has done one good thing," I used to say to the 
 lads in the canteens," it has taught you to appreciate your homes." 
 
 "I used to want to get away from home," confided one boy to 
 me, "but when I get back there again I'm just going to tie myself 
 so tight to Mother's apron-strings that she'll never get the knot 
 undone." 
 
 "Say, when I get back," declared another lad as he helped me 
 wipe the dishes, "my mother's going to find I'm just the best little 
 K. P. she ever knew." 
 
 "When I get home, I'm going to lock myself in the house and 
 then I'm going to lose the key and stay right there for a month," 
 announced another. 
 
 "Who's in your house? " 
 
 "Just Mother. She's good enough for me." 
 
 Sometimes I have thought that three things have stood as con- 
 crete symbols of all that was desirable to the American boy through 
 his ordeal over here: a dollar-bill, the Statue of Liberty, his 
 mother's face. And only a shade less touching than the dough- 
 boy's realization of all that is implied by "Mother;" is his attitude 
 of chivalrous idealism toward the American girl. Once I ventured 
 to say something in praise of the women of France. 
 
 "But they're not as fine as our girls!" came the instant jealous 
 rejoinder. 
 
 "No Mademoiselles jranqaises for me, thank you. I've got a 
 little girl of my own back home!" 
 
 "Our American girls, they're as different from these French 
 girls," declared a tall Virginian, "as day is from night!" 
 
 "I've laid off of lovin' while I've been over here," confided one 
 little engineer, "but, oh boy! my girl's goin' to get an awful 
 huggin' when I get home! " 
 
 The most pitiful and hopeless cases that I have seen over here 
 were boys who had taken to drink because their girls at home had 
 
PIONEERS, M.P.S AND OTHERS 265 
 
 proved inconstant. "That man never touched a drop," confided 
 the buddy of one of these to me," until he got that letter from his 
 girl telling him that she was married to a slacker." 
 
 Not that the doughboy's conduct has always been above re- 
 proach. "Single men in barracks," as Kipling once remarked, 
 "don't grow into plaster saints;" and he has been sorely tempted. 
 But in his heart he has kept an ideal. It has stood between him 
 and utter darkness. In this ideal he has put all his faith. If he 
 loses it, he loses everything. Those women back home, I wonder, 
 do they really understand? 
 
THE TURN OF THE TIDE 
 
 Fully illustrated with original maps and sketches 
 
 \ By Lieut-Col. JENNINGS C. WISE, author of " The Long Arm of 
 Lee," " Gunnery," " Empire and Armament,".etc, etg. $2.00 
 
 To what extent were the great German reverses of the summer of 
 1918 due to American military prowess? What were Cantigny and 
 Chateau-Thierry from the military standpoint? And how much help 
 did Foch get from the Americans at the Second Marne? Such are 
 the questions to answer which Colonel Wise has written the " Turn of 
 the Tide." Fresh from France and the Historical Section of the 
 General Staff at Chaumont, Colonel Wise is the first writer to return to 
 this country fully equipped to discuss with authority our share in the 
 war. from the point of view of a battalion commander who saw much 
 action and as an Army Historian. 
 
 FIRST REFLECTIONS ON THE 
 CAMPAIGN OF 1918 
 
 By R. M. JOHNSTON, author of " The French Revolution," "Leading 
 American Soldiers," " Napoleon," etc, $1.50. 
 
 In undertaking to offer constructive criticism of our combat army 
 in France, Major Johnston does not speak without authority. He was 
 attached to the General Staff at Pershing's Headquarters for twelve 
 months or more. During this period he made a number of intimate 
 visits to the active fronts, and was also special envoy to Paris and 
 London on one occasion. Thus he was able to get a perspective on the 
 activities of our war machine without being detached from it and 
 without a sacrifice of the detailed knowledge which comes from per- 
 sonal contact. He sees the war whole and retains an unusual breadth 
 of point of view. 
 
 " SIMSADUS-LONDON " 
 
 AT U. S. NAVAL HEADQUARTERS ABROAD 
 
 By J. L. LEIGHTON. With numerous illustrations from actual photo- 
 graphs, and picture jacket. $4.00. 
 
 The facts and information offered in this book have a most opportune 
 interest as they throw light on the Naval affairs now receiving so much 
 public and official attention. The author's close personal contact with 
 conditions at the various Naval bases, his relations with the staff in 
 London and his active service on the ships of which he writes, vouch 
 for the authenticity of his work. 
 
 ARMY MENTAL TESTS 
 
 By CLARENCE S. YOAKUM and ROBERT M, YERKES, of the 
 National Research Council. Illustrated. $i-SO. 
 
 Authorized by the War Department, this book provides for business 
 men an account of a great achievement in scientific management whereby 
 the United States, employing suddenly four million soldiers, found the 
 right men for the right places. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 19 W. 44 St. (II 'ao) NEW YORK 
 
FIRECRACKER JANE 
 
 By Alice Calhoun Haines, author of " The Luck of the 
 Dudley Grahams," " Cock-a-doodle Hill," "Partners for 
 Fair." $1.50 
 
 Firecracker Jane is the motherless, lovable, red-haired 
 daughter of an American cavalry officer, and has grown up 
 with her father and " S. O. S.," a younger officer, for her 
 " pals." Stung by what she thinks is her father's indifference, 
 she elopes with Riccardo, her Mexican cousin, and is plunged 
 into the midst of the Mexican chaos of three years ago. 
 Follows then a series of adventures which culminate in her 
 capture by Valdes, the Lion of the North, a brutal revolution- 
 ary leader. Her escape, and the manner in which the love 
 tangle is unraveled after war with Germany began, provide 
 a happy ending. 
 
 The New York Evening Sun: "Lives up to its title, much strenu- 
 ous adventure." 
 
 San Francisco Bulletin: "Thrilling . . . calculated to stir the 
 blood of the most jaded fiction reader." 
 
 THE CHINESE PUZZLE 
 
 By Marion Bower and Leon M. Lion. 
 
 The characters, vitally drawn, are gathered at a great 
 English country house, and include, in the group of brilliant 
 worldlings, a Chinese Ambassador, wise, loyal, and finally — ? 
 There is a secret treaty, crime, intrigue and sparkling talk. 
 $1.60. 
 
 New York Times: " That all too rare literary product, an absorb- 
 ing mystery tale." 
 
 THE HAPPY YEARS 
 
 By Inez Haynes Irwin. The third of the " Phoebe and 
 Ernest" Series. $1.60. 
 
 The author's response to the request that she tell what 
 happened to Phoebe and Ernest when they grew up. We here 
 see each of them married, with children of their own, and with 
 delightful friends, and perhaps the happiest of all are 
 grandfather and grandmother Martin. The life of them all is 
 rich with responsibility, friendship, love, sorrow and happi- 
 ness. 
 
 New York Evening Post: " Has as much humor, truth, and appeal- 
 ing warmth as any of its predecessors." 
 
 Boston Evening Transcript: "What marks Mrs. Irwin's work is 
 her ability to catch the mood of the average American." 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS (vi '19) NEW YORK 
 
THE LIGHT HEART 
 
 By Maurice Hewlett. $2.00. 
 
 Hewlett has never done anything more brilliant than 
 this northern story of adventure in which the epic starkness 
 of the plot, drawn from the Iceland sagas, is softened by the 
 humanity of a gentler day. The result is a surprising com- 
 bination of thrilling narrative and delicate characterization, 
 seldom to be matched in literature. 
 
 THE BLACK KNIGHT 
 
 By Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick and Crosbie Garstin. $2.00. 
 
 A young Englishman is involved in the financial ruin and 
 disgrace of his father, and emigrates to Western Canada. 
 At first a penniless laborer, he eventually makes a fortune, 
 after many humorous adventures strongly reminiscent of 
 Owen Wister's " Virginian." Finally he returns to Paris, 
 where he finds the girl of his choice in the clutches of schem- 
 ing relatives, and then . A fascinating up-to-date romance. 
 
 TRUE LOVE 
 
 By Allan Monkhouse, Literary Editor of the Manchester 
 Guardian. $1.75. 
 
 This novel deals with the spiritual struggles of a young 
 playwright, torn between his love for a woman and his love 
 of country at one of the great moments of the world's history. 
 No more gallant struggle was ever made, and Monkhouse's 
 handling of it is worthy of a high place in contemporary 
 fiction. The picture given of the dramatic and literary life in 
 Manchester is of particular interest. 
 
 CAPE CURREY 
 
 By Rene Juta. $1.75. 
 
 This remarkable historical novel, which is also a first novel, 
 tells one of the strangest stories which has seen the light, even 
 in these wonder-loving days. Many of the characters have 
 descendants playing their parts now on the British imperial 
 stage.^ But the strange figure of Dr. James Barry has only 
 old wives' tales and this novel for memorial. The mysterious 
 garden is likewise no fiction, Sir Charles Somerset being 
 credited with the foundation of the first of its kind in the 
 Cape Province. 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
 19 W. 44TH St. (iii '20) NEW YORK 
 


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