Today I encountered two boys who told me how they had “done” Paris.
“We stopped at a store and bought a bunch of post cards, all the famous buildings and everything. Then we got a taxi. After that all we’d do was to show the chauffeur a post card and he’d drive us to it,—then we’d show him another one, and so we kept a-goin’ until we’d seen most all of Paris. But gee! That taxi bill was a fright!”
This afternoon, coming down the “Boulevard de Wop,” as the boys call the Boulevard des Italiens, I paused beside a fiacre, attached to a particularly wretched looking old nag, which was drawn up by the sidewalk. Into it were piling merrily some eight or nine doughboys, the cabman fairly dancing on his seat as he uttered frantic but perfectly unheeded expostulations. Finally as the cabby appeared to be developing apoplexy, I spoke up.
“Boys, you know that really that broken-down old beast never could pull all of you!”
Whereupon half of them immediately piled out again. One of the remaining ones leaned out of the fiacre.
“Say Lady, can you talk French?” he demanded earnestly.
“Why a little.”
“Well tell that old guy for me, will you,” he indicated the still disgruntled cocher who, like the rest of his tribe, was crowned with an ornamental “stove-pipe,” “that I want him to lend me his hat.”
Tonight I met a girl I know who is in the Hut Equipment Department. She has just returned from an extended tour of inspection. I told her I didn’t know where my next assignment was to be.
“Why don’t you go to Verdun?” she asked. “The conditions about there are worse than any other place in France. Men are commiting suicide there every day.”