“The officers live on the top of the hill,
The flying cadets in the slush and the swill—
I don’t want any more Army.
Gee, how I want to go home.”
He came to the last barrack of all, which was only about three-fourths built. Going inside, he found it empty of human life, but the contents was reassuring. Under the neatly spread double-decker bunks were officers’ boots, and the walls were covered with overcoats bearing the single stripe of a first lieutenant, and with various flying clothes and equipment. In what would be the middle of the long building was a single large stove which feebly radiated its rays of heat against the blasts of cold damp air from the open end. Near that end were several unoccupied bunks, one of which Tommy decided must be for him.
It was commencing to get dark outside, and colder, too. The little flyer huddled closer to the stove and smoked a cigaret. Somebody must come in before long. Somebody did.
There was a clatter on the duckboards outside and a horde of flying lieutenants trouped in, making loud noises and crowding around the stove. Tommy scanned their faces anxiously, but there was nobody there he knew. A tall, thin man eyed him in a friendly manner, and Tommy asked him to help him with his baggage. The other assented readily, and they excavated the large French trunk and fancy bed roll which marked a man who had enlisted in Paris, and one by one dragged them inside.
“You might as well take this bunk next to me and Fat,” said the tall man, who was known as Long John. “We got left behind for a day in Paris by accident, and when we got here the barrack was almost full up, so we had to take bunks near the end. What ground school did you go to?”
“I never went to ground school,” returned Tommy. “I was an ambulance driver and enlisted in Paris.”
He looked around curiously at his companions in the barrack. They were of an unfamiliar genus, men who had had their preliminary training and got their commissions in the States.
There were various strange divisions in the early days of the Air Service in France. At the French school at Tours there were, outwardly at least, several different breeds of Americans. First the Foreign Legion trained there, and then a lost or strayed detachment of American gobs. Then the Army started enlisting men in Paris, mostly former ambulance drivers, who continued the old feud between the American Ambulance and Norton Harjes, but united in scorn for those whose service had been confined to the Mexican Border.
Then one day a body of men marched into camp in column of fours, a military evolution which the ambulance drivers regarded with pitying contempt.