For the last few days we have had a visiting clergyman with us. To all appearances a meek and long-suffering little man, he has been giving special revivalistic discourses at the huts and eating at our mess. This morning he was asked to say grace. In the middle of a long and earnest exhortation I was startled to hear these words: “Oh Lord, Thou knowest we are apt to grow lean and to starve in Thy service!” I fairly had to stuff one of the one franc canteen handkerchiefs, which serve as napkins at the mess, into my mouth to keep from laughing.
Bourmont, December 12.
In Paris a man who lectured to us said: “Get the fellows who have influence with you, and you can swing the crowd.” Sometimes I think that if Pat were our enemy instead of our friend we might almost as well shut up the hut. For Pat the sharp-shooter, Pat the dare-devil, Pat, who in company phrase “has Harry Lauder and George Cohen stopped in a hundred places,” Pat the happy-go-lucky adventurer is one of the leading spirits in Company A. He has served, it seems, already in the war with the Canadian army.
“But how did you get out of it?” I asked.
Whereupon Pat regaled me with a wonderful rigmarole involving an extraordinary case—his own—of shell-shock out of which I could make neither head nor tail. Later, from one of the Secretaries who had been at Saint Thiebault before I came, I learned the truth. When America had declared war, Pat had deserted from the Canadian in order to enlist in the American army. Pat had showed him a letter from one of his old-time friends; it ended:
“Of course I wouldn’t think of splitting on an old pal like you, Pat, but I do need twenty dollars like hell.”
“What did you do?” asked the Secretary.
“Sure an’ I sent him the money,” grinned Pat.
Shortly after I first became acquainted with him, Pat, who is naturally gallant, with a tongue inclined to blarney, extracted a promise from me. Some day, after the war, if we should happen to meet, say, strolling down Fifth Avenue, Pat “dressed in a nice blue serge suit” is going to “take me away from the other feller” and take me out to dinner. It was after solemly pledging my word to this agreement that I learned that Pat had formerly been a saloon keeper and had had an extensive police-court record. Immediately I began to hope that Pat would forget that post-war party, but not he. Instead, he is constantly reminding me of it, always before an audience, dwelling on it and elaborating it, until now I find it has grown from a mere dinner, to dinner, the theatre and a dance!
Lithe, wiry, lean-faced with close-cropped hair, pale blue gimlet eyes and an almost unvarying expression of intense seriousness on his face, Pat, when present, is the life of the hut. Forever at his clowning, you would never dream from his demeanour that Pat’s domestic affairs are in a state little short of catastrophic. His wife, according to her photograph a handsome, sullen, passionate type, half Mexican, ran away about a year ago, taking with her all his money that happened to be handy, together with his new automobile. Encountering some of Pat’s friends, she had explained her apparently care-free single state by telling them that Pat was dead. Now she has discovered that Pat is in France, she is all for reconciliation. She has written him a letter in which she addresses him as her dear husband about six times to each sheet, informing him that she needs money, and inquiring of him what he wished her to do with his clothes.