SO THIS IS FRANCE?
The first shift is coming out from the tables. White-haired plump Madame scurries over to her place at the door to collect the dinner toll. [Silver clinks into her country cash register, a cigar box] with the lid knocked off.
The second shift edges toward the dining room where Suzanne and Angel and Joan are rushing about, clearing away the traces of the first service.
"How's the chewin'?" asks the Albany rifleman.
"Pretty good, pretty good," says the engineer boy from Los Angeles. "Good place to fill up on tan bread for a change."
Close your eyes and shut out the khaki. The buzzing voices, the scraping hob nails take you back to the Democratic convention of Pottewantamis County last Spring when the delegates came in through a sleet storm and dried their socks around the stove in the Chamber of Commerce. Or you're back in the locker room hearing the coach's final instructions for the county championship tussle with Lincoln High.
The second service is finishing. Four soldiers are rolling the old tin-throated piano into the middle of the floor. One of them used to be a rag-time "song-booster." Oh, baby, how he can torment those keys!
There they go, in a chorus of fifty roof-raising voices:
"Twice as nice as Paradise,
And they called it Dixie Land!"