The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl

by Katharine Duncan Morse

CHAPTER VI: MAUVAGES—THE ORDNANCE

Abainville, October 26.

I have been to Mauvages; a reconnoitering expedition. As regards the town the most striking feature about it is the Egyptian Fountain. A somewhat startling structure to come upon in a little French mudpie village, it stands in the centre of the town and consists of the façade of a temple in front of which towers an ancient 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 extravagant 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 unspeakably dreary as the whole length is quite unlighted and the air damp and close beyond anything. More than once on these excursions a boy has fallen into the canal and had to be fished out again.

My hut-to-be is on the further edge of town in the centre of a beautiful open green field like a lawn. Just behind it is a large ruined stone house which the boys use as a background against which to take pictures “at the front” and on one side is a lovely tall wayside cross and a tiny chapel, the smallest I have ever seen, almost hidden in a little grove of bushes. The hut is a French recreation barracks; long, low, covered with black tar paper, the windows filled with grimy cloth, it is comprised of four walls, a roof, a tiny stage and a mud floor,—a good mud floor, the best mud floor, I am assured, in this part of France.

As for my billet, I am to lodge, it seems, with Monsieur le Curé. He was out when I called but the Major du Cantonment and Madame the Caretaker settled things between them. What Monsieur le Curé will say when he come home and discovers that une demoiselle Américaine is to live chez lui, I don’t know, but as Monsieur le Major himself suggested it, it must be in accordance with the clerical proprieties.

The Curé’s mansion is a rather stately, gloomy square house set back from the street with a rose-garden edging the path in front. My room has a Juliet balcony with a view of the Egyptian Fountain, the ancient church and a scrap of rolling hills beyond. Breakfasts I have arranged to take with Madame the Caretaker who lives several doors down the street, dinners and suppers I am to eat by courtesy of the C. O. at the camp.

When I returned tonight I told my landlady of my plans. Her eyes fairly danced with mischievous glee.

“Oh la la! You and the Curé!” she cried. “Le diable avec le bon Dieu! It will be necessary for you to become a good Catholic, say your prayers, and go to mass every morning. Who knows? Perhaps you may end by becoming a religieuse.”

Mauvages, November 2.

We are building. This proves to be a painful process, consisting largely of discovering what you can’t have and what you will have to do without. For instance, it appears that there is not enough lumber to be had in France to furnish me a complete floor, and I had set my heart on having a nice, whole, sweepable floor! French barracks, one should note in passing, are constructed of sections; the upper part of the walls containing the window sections being vertical, the lower sloping outward at an angle of about thirty-five degrees. By a process of begging, borrowing and salvaging—nobody says steal any more these days,—I have visions of getting the floor in the centre all filled in, but for the edges, under the sloping sides, I am afraid there is no hope. But I’m not going to mind, I tell the boys; I shall start a series of war gardens in the little mud-plots, cabbages in number one, brussels sprouts in number two, and violets just for my own satisfaction in three. And the boys can take turns hoeing them.

For the rest, we have cut a door in the side for general entrance, the original one being reserved for cooks, colonels and K. P.s, and across the front end opposite the stage we have constructed our store-room, kitchen and canteen. A lattice is all that separates the kitchen from the counter; this is so, in order to facilitate social intercourse between the cook and the customers, and also to enable the secretary, no matter if she is engaged in stirring the chocolate or washing the dishes, to keep a weather eye on what is going on outside. But the triumph of my hut-plan is the window-seat. Half-way down the hut we have a stove, a stove which looks as big as an engine-boiler, a stove which makes the eyes of all beholders fairly pop with admiration. “That’s a real stove,” say the boys. “That ain’t no frog stove I’ll tell the world!” And back of the stove we have a seat three sections long against the wall. Wonderful to say that seat is comfortable and what’s more it has sofa-cushions. “What are those pillers for?” demanded one boy suspiciously. “Are they for the officers to sit on?”

“D’you know what this is?” asked a boy today as he luxuriously stretched his length on the window-seat. “This is the Lounge Lizard’s Roost.” So the Lounge Lizard’s Roost it is.

The yellow curtains are already up in place. They give a rather stunning effect against the black tar paper when the æroplane camouflage curtains are let down. In each space between the windows 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 “coopératif,” and so I let it rest.

But you will be wondering how le diable is contriving to live with le bon Dieu.

Monsieur le Curé 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 Curé 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 Caretaker. 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 soupçon as it were, in every case. I merely 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 dugouts. I heard all about these souvenirs, as I was taking breakfast, 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 armchair 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 Lusitania.

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 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 battalion 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 accommodating captain and an egg-nogg. The sick boy I discovered in Madame the Caretaker’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.

“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-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 behind,” 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 hidden 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 11.

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 almost more like a sensation than a sound, a sort of incessant thrilling, 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 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 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. Bill has made me a stove-pipe out of a German powder can. Bill has installed an automatic closing attachment for the main door, which consists of a rope, a pulley, a stove grate 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 doctor 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 concern, 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. Moreover 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, 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 yesterday, “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 everything 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.

“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 diplomat. 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 café 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 beaming gratitude he immediately invited me over to the café 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 “fiancée!”

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 Curé’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 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 conversation 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 undoubtedly 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 at his wedding wearing a pair of wooden shoes; and of the doughboy 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 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 raincoat! 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 “Souvenir 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 canteen; 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 Sweethearts 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 compliment 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 when an innocent-looking lad will blandly select half a dozen “Dear Sweethearts” and put each in a separate envelope to send to a different 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 possessions 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 sentimentalist. 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 something 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 Gondrecourt 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 understood 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 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 sentiments 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 celebration 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 preparing for the show, Georges, the French operator, who was getting the machine ready, Georges the little dandy, always nonchalant and blasé, 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. “C’est les 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 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 Government that they would be sold only to Americans. But they refused 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.

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 blue-coated figures who were swarming into the canteen now had evidently spent the earlier part of the evening in the cafés. 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 skipping 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 attitude 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 défendu I explained, strictly and absolutely défendu 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 without effect. The little poilu wasn’t used to taking orders from a girl, especially one who spoke French so badly, but finally I won. “Bon!” he snapped explosively, turned on his heel and marched out. I fled precipitately to the kitchen and stayed there until closing 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 unlocked 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 passage-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 tumultuously 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 Curé 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 Curé 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 États-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 scrimmages. 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, manufacturing 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, without 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 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 café, they presently began to respond to the preacher’s exhortations with genuine religious fervor.

“Dat’s so! 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 another. 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 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 masterpiece 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 occurred 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-payday 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 reminded him that after all it would have only taken ten righteous to save Sodom, so might not eight save Mauvages?

Of course just as soon as the Reverend Gentleman and the Business 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 nothing 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 Mauvages 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 travelling and they can go like the wind: they possess just two disadvantages, their propensity for having engine trouble, and the ease with which they jump the track at the slightest provocation. It is told how in Abainville the other day a speeder jumped the rails, the engineer, after turning a half a dozen somersaults, 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 declare “ran through the trenches.” They would tell me wonderful 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 1915 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 approach 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 roadside, 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 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 doorway, 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 soit le boche qui détruit les églises,”—cursed be the Hun who destroys the churches. In this church, Madame the Caretaker tells me, the Germans commanded 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 beside 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 troubles 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 mountainous 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 absolutely 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 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 fountain.

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 batteries 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 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 Gondrecourt to demand, in view of the coming crowds, a new hut, an electric lighting system, an addition to the old hut, anything or everything, 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 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 countenance, 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 unpreparedness, 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 opposition. 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 Before-November-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 doughboy 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.

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. O., 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 shortcomings 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 Gondrecourt. It finally discovered the lost car, none the worse for its 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 displeased 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 Gentleman 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 refuge 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 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 continue 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 before 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 fireplace 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 between 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 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 initials 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 light of the altar-candles illumined the old windows with a soft radiance. They were Y. M. C. A. candles. Monsieur le Curé 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.

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 partake 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.

Today 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 afternoon 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 children in ten villages would I turn the boys out into the rain.

Tonight there is to be some sort of show, arranged by the entertainment 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. Inspectors had been visiting the dump. They had found it in a very dangerous state indeed. The wet weather has affected the explosives so that should the sun come out for a day or two the chemical 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 meanwhile 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 Gondrecourt and back again in the sleety rain, to buy it! The other was a package labeled; “Wishing you a Mary Xmas from the Operators 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 Curé.

Mauvages, December 28.

Neddy has come back! His battery has just arrived at Rosières 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; sardines and crackers; cracker-pudding and cocoa; crackers and jam. The boys gossiped and swapped yarns like two old veterans. 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 imagination. 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 unshakable 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 morning, however, I had an inspiration. I consulted the detail, they approved. 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 announce 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 started in, heating all the water we could manage, making chocolate 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 unashamed.

“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!” declared 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 cafés. 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 1, 1919.

Mes meilleurs voeux de Bonne Année! or, as the boys say; “Bun Annie!” We welcomed the new Year in con molto giubilo. Downstairs 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 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 pyrotechnics 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 Curé’s chamber just across from me. He had some champagne for the Curé, he explained in thick and execrable French. The Curé must drink it in honor of the New Year. It was good champagne. I could hear the Curé 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 Curé 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 Christmas I had sent little boxes of fudge to several of the men at the office, hoping thereby to curry favour for my canteen and counteract 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 explosives 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 Abainville 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 disheartened 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 instructed 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 captured 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 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 probably pro-German anyway.

Yesterday I had to witness the harrowing spectacle of a stalwart 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 exchange 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 continuously 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 batteries stationed at Rosières made a bonfire and burned the detestable 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. Raincoats 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 bunting 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 service every Sunday night, but since the artillery moved in we have been furnished with a full-fledged morning service by the regimental 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 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 time in the dark we witnessed a few feeble flickers on the screen and then darkness once more. The audience dribbled disgustedly away. They probably made up for their disappointment in the cafés.

This morning the driver stopped at the hut to take the machine away. “Have a good show, last night?” he asked.

“Umm hm,” said I, grinning cheerfully.

I am praying that the truth about that show never reaches the office!

Mauvages, January 10.

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 perfectly strong, perfectly rested. A week ago I went to Nancy and persuaded the lady in charge of the women workers of this division, after some argument, to let me go. I have already overstayed 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 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 Curé and the Colonel. Madame the Caretaker 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?