I had to laugh. “That’s what everyone thinks, Ben, when they get seasick. I know what it is.”
He just moaned and began sucking one of the lemons. I got out—looking at him made me feel unsteady, too, and both of us couldn’t be sick at once.
I spent that day running back and forth between Ben and the General, and I must say that being with the General was like recreation compared to what I had to endure there. Ben wasn’t the only one that was sick. About half the compartment was on the trot to the G.I. can and up on deck every other man was sucking a lemon. The mess hall was doing a very, very dull business: you didn’t have to stand in line very long now to get your chow.
And what an education I was receiving! Every man around me had a different way of swearing and it seemed that each one was trying to outdo every other one in the matter of thinking up the dirtiest, vilest, rottenest expressions. And since Ben was no slouch when it came to cussing, I got more than my share of earfuls.
If Auntie could only see her “Leona dear” now! I knew I was in the army. “Gangway for a bucket o’ slop!”
—4—
Well, in spite of the salt-water soap that don’t soap worth a damn, in spite of my tummy playing funny tricks that threatened seasickness, in spite of Esky having joined Ben in le mal de mer, in spite of the fact that we couldn’t see our convoy any longer and that we were in the middle of the Atlantic and fair game for submarines, and in spite of hell itself, I felt pretty good that night! And that’s saying a mouthful without a single promise for the morrow—for to-morrow I was planning to get a bath, in fresh water! I’d itched and squirmed and sweated and suffered as long as I could: to-morrow I was going to take the leap—if I got caught, I’d just have to get caught, that’s all. I had to have a bath.
But that night I was happy anyway, because that afternoon I received a nice little surprise from the General.
He had sent me out with some papers for the Divisional Adjutant and when I reported back to his stateroom, I found him reading a paper-covered French novel which a colonel had given him the day before. I knew he could read French and I was surprised, not to say a little suspicious, when he asked me to translate several lines of the text for him.
“I can fuddle through the ordinary stuff and manage to get the general sense of a passage,” he explained, “but now and then I find something that is too idiomatic for my limited knowledge and just don’t make sense at all.”