“Slim, it’s getting near chow-time,” we say, “I’ll bet they’re going to have mashed potatoes and brown gravy tonight. Isn’t that ‘Soupy’ I hear going now?”
But Slim refuses to budge any more than a bump on a log, so we usually have to end by inviting him. But if I find Slim a burden, how must the Chief feel toward him? For Slim has appropriated the extra cot in the office, which also serves as the Chief’s bed-room, and so has fairly camped down on him. And the Chief is a gentleman of nerves and delicate perceptions.
“He gets up in the middle of the night,” confided the Chief to me today in an almost awe-struck voice, “and he goes for the water-bucket and drinks a half a pail without stopping. He makes a noise just like a horse swallowing it.”
I have given up trying to do anything with Slim. Nothing that I can say seems to make the least impression on him. Slim is a married man, yet yesterday I caught him embracing Louise, Madame’s cross-eyed maid of all work, in the passage-way. I undertook to reprove him.
“Why that ain’t nawthin!” he turned a blameless and unabashed eye upon me. “That’s jest a man’s nature.”
This is the first time that I have eaten regularly from a mess-kit and I am learning things. I have learned that the aluminum mess-cup draws the heat from the hot coffee so that it is impossible to drink out of one until the liquid has become half-way cold, and that it is most unappetizing to have to wash one’s mess-kit afterwards in a pail of greasy soap suds in which a hundred odd other mess-kits have already been bathed. I used to tease the boys with their mess-cups in the chocolate line by telling them that I could tell just how recently they had had inspection by the shine on their mess-cups, but now whenever I look at the state of my own cup I think I won’t have the face to ever tease them that way again! I have also learned that cold “gold fish” or “sewer carp,” as the boys call their canned salmon, is just as bad as they say it is, and that slum made of hunks of bacon, potatoes, onions and unlimited water is no easy thing to swallow. But this sounds ungrateful and I don’t mean to be, for the cooks are nice as can be and never say a word no matter how late I may be. While as for the boys, they put on all their company manners for me.
Here at the hut we are busy building an addition in order to enlarge our restaurant business. This is in the shape of a room on the terrace. The Germans had kindly built a roof over one end, a detail from the ordnance detachment at Jarny is enclosing the sides; we are to have three real glass windows looking out onto the street and a door connecting the terrace-room with the present canteen. This afternoon the detail ran out of lumber; the Chief managed to get the loan of a truck to fetch some more. He asked Slim to go with the truck. The afternoon wore away, neither Slim nor the truck appeared, the detail, disgusted, sat and twiddled their thumbs. Nobody could understand what had happened as the lumber yard was just around the corner! Jerry went out to search. There was no trace of Slim or the truck to be found. About five o’clock he turned up. He had gone to Mars-la-Tour he told us coolly. We had been talking of going to the commissary at Mars-la-Tour for canteen supplies, and that great goose had gotten into his head that the lumber was to be obtained there! At least that is his explanation. But Harry and Jerry insinuate darker things:
“We didn’t know you had a girl in Mars-la-Tour before,” they tease. “Oh Slim, you old devil, you!”
I wonder now, just what was he up to in Mars-la-Tour all afternoon?
Conflans, March 19.