I went to Colonel Hansell this morning and asked permission to resign from the job of the mess. He immediately granted my request. To-night at dinner he made a very pretty little speech, thanking me for my work under very trying circumstances and calling for three cheers for the retiring mess officer, which were given with a hearty good will. It was a most courteous thing, and I was deeply touched. What a relief to have the thing off my shoulders!
I walked to town with my wash and felt like a boy out of school. Cave joined me and we went down to the new headquarters. Everything was humming with activity. Tents line the road on both sides. Motors and motorcycles are flying in all directions. Engineers stringing wires and newly-made majors swaggering about, greatly impressed with their own importance, all looking very debonair and rather foolish. They are rather a fine-looking lot on the whole, the Western type easily predominating.
We lunched peacefully at the Hotel France.
Peck told me Bradley had asked for teams to go to the front for a two weeks' tour of duty and McWilliams had chosen me as a team mate. Hurrah!
September 13th. Haven't written. Little to write about. The evening of the 10th, Kildare and I walked along the canal to a little town called Luzy. There we made a find in the form of a nice, good-natured, well-nourished woman who keeps a little restaurant near the station. She cooked us a good omelet with potatoes and salad, with plenty of bread and good butter. Eating it in the court in front of the house, it was all right, and fired me with a sporting spirit of adventure and a bit of life in the open away from all this chaos and turmoil. So, on returning, I proposed to the room that we take a walking trip. Henry James was the only one who took me up and so the next morning, having obtained permission, we started with no definite destination other than to get lunch at Luzy with Madame and then push on to any old place.
Madame at Luzy told us that Nogent-la-Haute was an interesting old town about fifteen kilometers away, so we started off with full stomachs to reach it. We strolled along the canal with its sides lined with beautiful Lombardy poplars. The afternoon was hot, but, other than an occasional fisherman who never seemed to catch anything, there were no signs of life alongside the canal. The Marne babbled over the stones, here and there turning a water-wheel, and great gray cattle grazed peacefully in the meadows, and we breathed a deep breath of freedom, and joy of the open road crept into my bones. It seemed once again that care and responsibility had rolled away and that I was a boy with nothing to do but to wander where the spirit willed.
Then an idea struck us. How nice it would be to board a canal-boat and just idle along with it. But none came. Then a plan for taking a train and going to Belfort and from there out to the French, but at the station the timetable said the last train that day had gone, and then again the distance was given as one hundred and fifty-four kilometers, much too far in the short time at our disposal. So finally it was decided, at Faulein, to take the little narrow-gauge road to Nogent-la-Haute. So narrow-gauge it was; and it puffed up hill for twelve kilometers to a snug little village perched on a high rock surrounded with gardens and the biggest pine-trees I have ever seen. The tower of an old castle spoke of seigneurial days when "barons held their sway."
I looked forward to a nice, quiet, cozy little dinner and a good sleep and a morning's loaf, strolling about the town to the wonderful view from the great precipitous height on the west. But nothing of the sort. As we descended from the train a dozen urchins cried, "Les Américains!" and in half the time it takes to write it, a dozen more sprang up, taking up the cry, so that walking along the main street there was a troop of urchins crowding about us and from the windows heads appeared, the whole town coming to life. The urchins ran into the hotel and told Madame "les Américains" were on the threshold. Madame rushed out all a-flutter and courtesied us in. Mother and sister courtesied. Were we spending the night? Did we eat? We assured her we ate and were spending the night. Then, what would we eat and where would we eat it? This latter point was unfortunately settled by the chief permanent boarder, acting as a delegate and asking the honor of having us join them. There was no alternative. We simply had to dine with them, and we marched bravely in.
Talk! My God! My God! There was no end to it! Words rolled out in avalanches. Special brands of red wine were ordered, coffee, liqueurs—but always talk. Now, if you are not a professor of the French language and you are tired after a day's tramp, and if it is up to you to appear half intelligent (for James was lucky enough not to speak a word of French and so it was up to me), it is exhausting. Those moments were like sitting on a chair and having hot needles stuck all over one's body.
Talk! Talk! The war! Every one had a son or brother, or at least a brother-in-law, killed or wounded. We were doctors, so a minute account of their deaths or how they acted after they were wounded. Then what the war had done to them, and what they had done to the war. Then politics. What America would do. How independent the Americans were. They smoked cigarettes with their meals. They only smoked them half through, etc., etc., etc.