It is rather tiresome sitting in the hospital when I am not sick in the least, but to suggest leaving is to insult the man with authority to release me. When he finally decides to let me go, it will take three days for the red tape to be carried through, which permits me to return to the Ecole d’Aviation. Meanwhile, I am losing several hours of flying. The good September season is just opening, and the days are delightful. We are given permission to leave the hospital and spend a day wandering around the historical city of Tours. I have been making pencil sketches and water colors, and it would really be very enjoyable if I were not so restless to get to work. You see, the time is a rather critical one. Anything is liable to happen; the United States Government may take us over. They want monitors in the States to teach flying, and if we are taken over we will probably be sent back without any fighting experience to act as monitors in the training school over there.
This is all very indefinite, but I do not like to get behind the bunch or be away from the camp at a time when these changes may be made; still there is no use fretting and I suppose things will work out all right. Anyway, I am not sick, and they must let me out pretty soon. I am on good terms with the chief doctor, who is a painter, and took an interest in my sketches and paintings. He offered to take me out to his house and show me his collection. I do not know when he will do so. I am trying to develop my general culture while there is opportunity, and have read six of Balzac’s novels, historical and otherwise. There is a wonderful chance to study architecture, and I am keeping up my sketching in water color, as well as studying a little French. Unfortunately, I left my history book in Paris, but will get what I can from Baedeker, and all the time I am storing up energy to use when the time comes. As to this prospect of the members of the Foreign Legion returning to America as monitors, most of the men do not like the idea of returning without some fighting experience. I am of that turn of mind. Men going back would be so much more able monitors if they had served on the Front, and they would be much more contented to return. There would be no doubt in my mind that I would remain in the French Foreign Legion if it were not for the fact that at present they are making monitors first lieutenants, with high pay, and a respectable office. Reason dictates that this will be changed very soon. I believe the men who are already officers will not be put back, however. If this should be the case, the time to enter United States service is now. Money is not everything, but three thousand a year is not to be ignored. This is all conjecture, and I have not made up my mind as to what to do, and shall not until fuller and more reliable information is given out.
The life here in the hospital is very pleasant. We wake at seven and have a little French breakfast of bread and coffee in bed; then we lie awake and read or doze for an hour or so. Rising at eight-thirty, we clean up and make our bed and read or write letters till lunch, which is a heavy meal served at eleven. By permission from the doctor, we are then at liberty to go out and spend our time as we please until five, when we eat again. Of late I have been going over and watching the full moon rise on the river Loire after supper; I retire at eight or nine.
The French have a strange custom of closing all their windows at night, but Americans are permitted to have one window open in their end of the room. French medical authorities are convinced that two open windows in the same room are very unhealthy and dangerous.
We have a good time wandering about the quaint, narrow streets, where strange people peer out of small, low windows, and undersized doors. The houses are so old that different materials and workmanship of a dozen repairs give their façades a mottled appearance of many centuries, which suggest a strange collection of antiques within. This is carried out by glimpses through windows whose shutters are hanging aslant or thrown open. Within are seen old four-poster beds with canopies and feather mattresses which are round and swelled up as if inflated. Wrinkled old women with queer caps squint as they peer out, while their hands rest in embroidery. Elsewhere, little low passageways open into crammed little courts, with uneven tile floors, scrub trees, and a half-open circular stone staircase. Natural flowers and grass grow from the moss-covered tile roofs.
Washing hangs from front windows, and people come out to empty their wash water and their refuse in the street gutter. Cats abound. I hope the sights and experiences of war will not wipe out all these quaint and pleasant sights which make Europe what it is.
Your Son.
Dear Family:
Things are speeding up. I’m out of the hospital. Came to the school Friday. Found I had about the best bed in our barracks and was in the smallest class with one of the best monitors—more luck. I am an hour and a half of flying behind the other fellows, but that is not bad.
Well, the hospital did not cure my bronchitis. That, however, is nothing but a chronic cough which will mend here better than there. What it did cure, however, was my distaste for my fellow-countrymen; the cure was absolute, and of greater value than my physical cure could have been. My, but it was good to get back with the bunch again. All my old interest in people has revived, and I am more than content.