And with that Jay-Jay to think about besides!
—2—
Unexciting days passed until a day came when we learned that we were leaving for Le Mans in the morning. Didn’t know how long we’d be there, but from all I could learn Le Mans was a training area and the division might be there for a month or six weeks. The General seemed to think that we would be used as a replacement division. I didn’t know where he got the idea but that was the dope.
Nothing new happened, except that I heard from home again and Aunt Elinor said Vyvy heard that Jay-Jay had left the United States: if that was the case, he was liable to blow in any time and if he should discover that my outfit was still here, I didn’t see how I could avoid being found by him. Naturally I was glad we were moving out in the morning. He wouldn’t be free to hop all over the A.E.F. looking for me and it might be a long time before he got to Le Mans, by which time I shouldn’t be there. There was still hope.
Ben and I attended a song-fest in the afternoon—one of those affairs where a professional pep-guy gets up on a platform and leads the drunk-driven cattle in singing and cheering. Well, there was some excuse for cheering, as to-day the sun let us have a glimpse of himself, and that was cause for celebrating around this neck of the land of the franc and the plumbingless house. The songs, however, were really not much to write home about. Ben had learned already that “Pack Up Your Troubles” and “Madelon” were not army songs at all: they were for dress parade, he said. The real army songs were too dirty filthy rotten to sing at any sanctioned get-together. The real barrack-room ballads were fit only for barrooms and bedrooms and bathrooms—that is, if you sing in your bath.... To-day we waited patiently to see if they would sing something interesting, but the best they had to offer was “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—and Ben almost choked on his tobacco-quid when they started that. If there was one song that should never have been written, it was that! I quite agreed with Ben on that point. Ben said, “That song’s a lotta bull an’ what a man wants in a time like this is more calves and less bull!” Ben was certainly droll: he stood beside the “Y” window, waiting for the song leader to pass—I swear he only missed the poor devil’s nose by an inch. When my boy friend hurled the saliva, fond mothers shooed their loved ones off the street. A veritable Hawkeye!
CHAPTER 9
A Lousy Lady
—1—
We’d been in Le Mans a month and nothing very exciting had happened. We came down from Brest in those French box cars that are marked “8 chevaux 40 hommes” and it took me a week to recover from the ride, after which I went out and found myself a bath—thank God again!
I was really forced into it, though. The General had been making trips all over the surrounding country and Chilblaines and I had usually gone along. We went to Alençon to see the place they were fixing up there to take care of horses that were shipped over for the cavalry and artillery—although the cavalry didn’t have much to do in a war of this kind. We also visited Blois and its hospital center, and Tours, which was the headquarters of the Service of Supply. And we’d seen Orléans and Angers and I hoped to see Paris soon.
However, to get back to the bath:—We were on our way back from Tours when we had two flat tires in a row and Getterlow had to fix the second one, because we only had one spare. While we were standing around—I was trying to help him—the General noticed that I was doing quite a lot of fidgeting and scratching and finally asked me about it. “What’s the matter, Sergeant?” he inquired. “Received your allotment of cooties already?”