With the sophisticated eyes of a potential citizen of, say, Weeping Willow, Nebraska, the first speaker considered the wonderfully quaint and picturesque vista of weathered, slant-ended cottages stretching away down the hill, and then, as he moistened the tip of his pencil with the tip of his tongue:
“You shore said a mouthful—they're all just alike, only some's funnier-lookin' than others. I wonder why they don't paint up and use a little whitewash once in a while. Take that little house yonder now!” He pointed his pencil toward a thatched cottage over whose crooked lines and mottled colours a painter would rave. “If you was to put a decent shingle roof on her and paint her white, with green trimmin's round the doors and winders, she wouldn't be half bad to look at. Now, would she? No cigarettes, huh? Nor nothin'!” Inspiration came to him as out of the skies and he grinned at his own conceit. “Tell you what—I'll jest put it down as 'Nowhere in France' and let it go at that.”
On the following day my friend, the lieutenant colonel, brought to the noonday mess a tale which I thought carried a distinct flavour of the Yankee trench essence. There was a captain in the regiment, a last year's graduate of the Academy, who wore the shiniest boots in all the land round about and the smartest Sam Browne belt, and who owned the most ornate pair of riding trousers, and by other signs and portents showed he had done his best to make the world safe for some sporting-goods emporium back in the States. This captain, it seemed, had approached a sergeant who was in charge of a squad engaged in policing the village street, which is army talk for tidying up with shovel and wheelbarrow.
“See here, sergeant,” demanded the young captain, “why don't you keep your men moving properly?”
“I'm tryin' to, sir,” answered the sergeant.
“Well, look at that man yonder,” said the captain, pointing toward a languid buck private who was leaning on his shovel. “I've been watching him and he hasn't moved an inch, except to scratch himself, for the last five minutes. Now go over there and stir him up! Shoot it into him good and proper! I want to hear what you say to him.”
“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, saluting.
With no suspicion of a grin upon his face he charged down upon the delinquent.
“Here, you!” he shouted. “What do you mean, loafin' round here doin' nothin'? What do you think you are, anyhow—one of them dam' West Pointers?”
Floyd Gibbons, who was subsequently so badly wounded, rode one day into a battery of heavy artillery on the Montdidier Front. A begrimed battery man hailed him from a covert of green sods and camouflage where a six-inch gun squatted: “You're with the Chicago Tribune, ain't you?”