“Eh? What’s that?”
“She wants to know,” explained Stanley, with exaggerated patience, “if you want butter. It’s extra.”
Kendall signified his desire for butter. “I’ve just been out looking at the town,” he said. “The fellows that built it knew what they were doing, didn’t they?”
“They knew how to do a lot of things. Staying here, of course.”
“Didn’t know where else to go. You, too?”
“Have been a month, but if I’m going to live here for the duration, and it looks as if I were, I’d like to get somebody and take a little apartment somewhere.... Over in the Quartier Latin or up on one of the streets off the Étoile. Have some comfort. Live cheaper, too. Get a cook for sixty or seventy francs, and be regular people.... Say, if you’re set down in Paris, come on in with me.”
“Sounds reasonable,” said Kendall, tentatively. “Haven’t the least idea what they’ll do with me, though.”
“Well, you run up and see, and, whatever happens, meet me here at half past six and I’ll take you to a regular place to eat, and then we’ll go out and look at the sights.”
“You’re on,” said Kendall, “bigger than a house.”
Captain Ware had hoped to be assigned to active duty with a combat unit. He had studied and trained himself for the duties of an intelligence officer at the front, and for months had looked forward with enthusiasm to those interesting and invaluable duties which such an officer performs. He was not a young man to welcome a desk job or to be contented with a position in the Safety of the Service of Supplies region. In that he resembled thousands of other young officers whose fortune it would never be to hear a cannon fired in battle, to take part in a charge, or to be nearer to the front than some small town in the interior of France. None of them had chosen their places. They had been sent where they were most needed and where their work was essential to the victories to be won against the enemy.... Captain Ware, like these others, must perform the task set for him, wherever it might lie—hoping always for a new assignment that should carry him to the dugout and to the trench. It was, therefore, with grievous disappointment that he learned he was to be stationed in Paris, apparently in permanence. He could still hope, for in the army in France no man can tell what to-morrow will bring him. Orders come and men go.... Somehow it did not seem possible to him that he would thus go to war without going to war; that he should journey across the ocean to this mightiest of all conflicts without the experience of battle....