“Oh well,” I say, “Gaby is different.”
This afternoon Rebecca appeared at the canteen and asked for Bill. She was so elegantly attired that at first I didn’t know her. After a parley at the door, Bill, with an odd expression on his face, takes his second-best raincoat from the peg and hands it to her. I looked my inquiries. An old doughboy sweetheart of the lady’s, it appears, had returned on leave and they were going travelling together.
“Going off on a honey-moon with another feller, in my raincoat! Gosh, it’s a cruel war!” grinned Bill.
Mauvages, November 24.
Now that the time is drawing on toward Christmas the boys,—bless them!—are all wanting to send some remembrance to mothers, sisters, wives and sweethearts at home. But what to send has been the desperate question. One sort of goods and one only is offered for such purposes by the French stores in this locality, a line of flimsy silk stuff, handkerchiefs, scarfs and little aprons, machine-embroidered with gay flowers and each bearing the legend “Souvenir de France.” They are fragile slazy things, absurdly high-priced, inappropriate and often hideous. But to the boys they are altogether beautiful. After many requests and inquiries I gave in. I went to Gondrecourt and purchased what I could find that was the least tawdry, the least exorbitant. I brought them to the canteen; they proved so popular that three days afterward I had to make another trip to town to buy some more. Now we carry a regular stock of fancy silk handkerchiefs and aprons in addition to the chewing tobacco and cigarettes. But here one is faced with a delicate problem. Each handkerchief is embroidered with some such specific legend as To my Sweetheart, To My Dear Wife, To my Darling Daughter,—I refused to consider the bit of lacy frippery marked To my Dear Son!—and this complicates matters immensely I find. Somehow we always manage to have a supply of Sweethearts on hand when a man is in quest of a Dear Wife and vice versa. In vain I artfully suggest that it would be a pretty compliment to call one’s wife “Dear Sweetheart,” to their minds there seems to be something essentially compromising in such a notion. Occasionally the reverse will work however, and a boy, grinning and abashed, will select a handkerchief marked “Dear Wife” to send to his sweetheart. Sometimes during these sales one’s faith in the single heartedness of Young America receives a shock, as when an innocent-looking lad will blandly select half a dozen “Dear Sweethearts” and put each in a separate envelope to send to a different girl!
Speaking of souvenirs, there is a boy who acts as fireman on the dinky little engine that pulls the work-train on the narrow-gauge between Mauvages and Sauvoy. He belongs to a regiment of engineers who served with the British in Flanders for some eight months. While there he dug up enough dead Germans,—“You could always tell where they were buried because the grass grew so much greener there,” he explained,—and picked enough gold fillings out of their teeth, to make a whole match box full. He was going to take it home and have a dentist put the gold in his teeth “for a souvenir,” but unluckily in the spring drive he lost all his possessions and the match box with them. Now this, as Kipling would say, is a true story.
Mauvages, November 30.
Let me recount to you the gentle tale of the German prisoners and the Thanksgiving movies, an incident which I consider a sort of sermon in a nutshell and a Warning to the Nations.
Unluckily there is in this division a secretary who is a sentimentalist. He has an idea that an important part of his object in France is “to enliven the long evenings of the French villagers,” and particularly does he consider it his Christian duty to do something to demonstrate how much we love the poor German prisoners, those gentlemen who wear the big P. G. for Prisonnier de Guerre on their backs and “ought,” as the boys say, “to have an I in the middle.” There are several hundred of them in a camp at Gondrecourt and they are, it is said, just as well housed and fed as our boys, and not made to work nearly as hard.
Now, as there was no other sort of entertainment available, I had set my heart on having movies in my hut on Thanksgiving. I had presented my request at the Headquarters office and understood the matter settled. But the Sentimental Secretary it seems had made up his mind that the poor dear German prisoners must have a treat and, other schemes falling through, he also put in a request for the movies. There was only one portable machine in working order. Through some misunderstanding or something in the office, the P. G.s got the movies. To enlarge upon my sentiments when the news was broken to me Thursday morning or to record the opinions expressed by the boys in regard to the matter, is not to the purpose of this tale.