“Why Boss,” expostulated Jo, “I only eats one meal a day! But dat,” he grinned, “am all de time!”
“Shines” the boys invariably call them.
Tonight we were amused to see a negro corporal, who, not content with the chevrons on his sleeve, had sewed an additional pair on his overseas cap!
Conflans, March 14.
My family at the hut consists of the Chief, Harry, Jerry and Slim. Harry and Jerry are as nice lads as one could find anywhere, but Slim is the bird that hatched out of the cuckoo’s egg. Lean, uncouth, according to his own claim, “the tallest man that Uncle Sam’s got in his army,” with an inordinately long neck and an Adam’s apple so prominent as to give him the appearance of an ostrich in the act of swallowing a perpetual orange, “Slim Old Horse” as the boys call him, seems to me at times more like an animated caricature of the middle west “Long Boy” than a being of flesh and blood and bone. How he ever became attached to the Y. is a point on which nobody seems certain, but here he is and here he sticks in spite of every effort to dislodge him. I fancy his “Top Kick” was only too glad to get rid of him and when he discovered Slim’s inclination toward the Y. simply let him go and washed his hands of him. Slim’s health is uncertain. Most of the time he only feels well enough to sit in the office and eat or “chaw.”
“I started in ter chaw terbaccer,”—he talks with a nasal twang which is impossible to reproduce,—“when I was a kid four years old; when my daddy an’ my mammy found it out, they sure did start ter raise hell with me, but I says to ’em; ‘All right, have it your way, but then it will be whisky and rum fer mine, when I’m twenty-one!’ So my mammy says ‘Let ’im chaw.’ An’ I’ve chawed ever sence.”
“I’ve only got one lung,” he remarked the other day, “and that’s a little one.”
“Slim,” I urged, “I’m worried about you. You oughtn’t to be here. You ought to be in the hospital where you could be properly cared for. Go to your medical officer and tell him from me that he must send you to the hospital.”
Slim reluctantly departed. I dared to hope we had seen the last of him. But before the afternoon was over he was back on his old perch. He had brought some little pills back with him. Just wait, I thought, until I meet that medical officer!
Slim seldom feels attracted to the meals at the mess-hall. So he sits in the office and lives chiefly upon cheese, Y. M. C. A. cheese purchased to make sandwiches for the canteen at a cost of a dollar and a quarter a pound. Sometimes he fries himself eggs, taking whatever mess-kit, Harry’s or Jerry’s or mine, happens to be handy and never, in spite of anything I can say, will he wash it up after him! Sometimes Harry and Jerry and I decide that instead of going to mess we would like to have a supper-party at the canteen ourselves, and then the question is, how to get rid of Slim?