“In France?” he gasped.
“Yes, in France,” I repeated.
“Oh, no. It is not possible. How do you know?” he exclaimed.
With a perfectly straight face I told him that the only way I knew was that every man who came across was given a number as he sailed, and that I had been in France only two weeks, and that my number was 3,246,807, and I was quite sure that the difference had been made up. If he had asked me to repeat those figures I couldn’t have done it to save my life. He looked thoughtfully at the floor, which gave Davis and me the opportunity to smile and wink at our little joke.
“How long do you think the war will last?”
I bowed my head and rubbed along my temples as if in deep thought, then suddenly looking up at him as if some muse had given me a correct solution of the problem, I told him that while it was very hard to tell accurately, most Americans felt that it would be not less than three years and not over five. The officer threw back his hands in utter horror like a spinster at her first view of a t. b. m. production.
“Three years more of this Hell?” he said. “Ugh! It will be not more than three months.”
I agreed with him entirely, although I did not say so.
“Three months?” I said in surprise. “Do you think you will win this war in three months?”
“No, Germany will not win the war,” he sighed in apparent regret, “but we will quit, for we cannot win. We lost our last chance when he failed to get to Paris in July.”