“Willing to earn your passage, ain't you?” he inquired when the introductions were concluded. “Well then, climb into the back of my bus and stand by to get busy, heaving out the cargo.”
I looked then and saw his truck was loaded to the gunwales with boxes of California oranges.
“What the-?” I began, in surprise.
“Go on and say it,” he urged. “Don't hang back just because I'm a parson by trade. Trailing around with this man's army, I'm used to hearing cuss words. Quite a jag of freight, isn't it? Some good fellow out in my state shipped a train-load of oranges across with the request that they be distributed among the boys, free gratis for nothing, and it's my present job to catch up with this division and give part of the stuff away. I lit out from Paris before daylight this morning and here I am. But I can't steer this wagon and pass out the truck at the same time so if you'll go aft and do the Walter Johnson, I'll play Bobby Waltour here at this end and between us we can spread the light and keep right on moving at the same time.”
Before we ran out of oranges, which was about three o'clock in the afternoon just as we rolled into the village where the headquarters company and the colonel and his staff—and incidentally I—were to be billeted for the night, I had a sore arm to keep company with my sore feet. All day this had been our procedure: As we ranged up behind a column of marching troops my new pal, the red-haired dominie, would yell out “Who wants a nice, juicy orange, fellows?” and then as we rolled on by I would fling out the fruit, trying to make sure that every man got one orange and that no man got more than one.
I threw oranges to men afoot, to men on wagons and on guns, to men and officers on horseback and to men perched upon ambulances and wagons. My throwing was faulty but the catching approximated perfection. An arm would fly up and the flying orange would find a home in the deftly cupped palm of the band at the far end of the arm. The news travelled ahead of us, somehow, and whole companies would be lined up as we arrived, to get their share.
A few minutes before the finish of the trip came, we caught up with a couple of French battalions. Neither of us remembered the French word for orange, but that made no difference. His whoop of announcement and my first fling in the direction of a trudging Poilu, were as signals to all the rest and up went their paws. Their intentions were good, but I don't think I ever in all my life witnessed such a display of miscellaneous muffing, and I used to see some pretty raw fielding back at Paducah in the days of the old Kitty League. As the scorers would say, there was an error for nearly every chance. Among the Americans not one orange in ten had been dropped; among the Frenchmen not one in ten was safely held.
“Get the answer, don't you?” inquired the preacher-driver as we left the trudging Frenchmen behind and hurried ahead to connect with a khaki-clad outfit just defiling out of a crossway into the main road a quarter of a mile ahead of us.
“Sure,” I answered, “the Yanks make traps of their paws but the Frenchmen make baskets of theirs. The orange stays in the trap but it rolls out of a butter-fingered basket.”
“Yes,” he said, “but the real cause goes deeper down than that. Baseball—that's the answer. Probably every American in France played baseball when he was a kid, or else he still plays it. No Frenchman ever knew anything about baseball until we came over here last year and introduced it into the country. The average Frenchman looks on a sporting event as a spectacle, but the average American, at some time or other in his life, has been an active participant in his national sport and the lessons we learn as children we never entirely forget even though lack of practice may make us rusty.”