"Thank you, sir," replied the man as he saluted, executed a snappy right about face and strode out of the dining-room.
"Strange thing about that chauffeur of mine," said the General to me. "I had a lot of extra work yesterday on his account. I had to make out his income tax returns. He and his dad own almost all the oil in Oklahoma. When he paid his income tax, Uncle Sam got a little over a hundred thousand dollars. He went in the army in the ranks. He is only an enlisted private now, but he's a good one."
Walking out of the Gare du Nord one day, I saw a man in an American uniform and a French Gendarme vainly trying to talk with each other. The Frenchman was waving his arms and pointing in various directions and the American appeared to be trying to ask questions. With the purpose of offering my limited knowledge of French to straighten out the difficulty, I approached the pair and asked the American soldier what he wanted. He told me but I don't know what it was to this day. He spoke only Polish.
It was not alone amidst the gaiety of Paris that our soldiers spread the fame of America. In the peaceful countrysides far behind the flaming fronts, the Yankee fighting men won their way into the hearts of the French people. Let me tell you the story of a Christmas celebration in a little French village in the Vosges.
Before dawn there were sounds of movement in the murky half-light of the village street. A long line of soldiers wound their way past flaming stoves of the mess shacks, where the steaming coffee took the chill out of the cold morning stomachs.
Later the sun broke bright and clear. It glistened on the snow-clad furrows of the rolling hills, in which, for centuries, the village of Saint Thiébault has drowsed more or less happily beside its ancient canal and in the shadow of the steeple of the church of the good Saint Thiébault.
Now a thousand men or more, brown-clad and metal-helmeted, know the huts and stables of Saint Thiébault as their billets, and the seventy little boys and girls of the parish know those same thousand men as their new big brothers—les bons Américains.
The real daddies and big brothers and uncles of those seventy youngsters have been away from Saint Thiébault for a long time now—yes, this is the fourth Christmas that the urgent business in northern France has kept them from home. They may never return but that is unknown to the seventy young hopefuls.