Pat looked at me with his sharp eyes narrowing. “D’you mean it?”
“Why of course I do!”
He turned and walked out of the hut. Two minutes later he returned with a hunk of bread and a mess-kit brimfull of beans; he laid them on the counter in front of me. I gasped but did my best to rise to the occasion. I was delighted to see those beans, I assured him. I had just been starting out to go to mess; a little bird had told me they were to have roast pork, French fries, and peach pie for dinner, but now I would stay at the hut and eat beans instead. Then I tasted the beans. They were as hard as bullets, they stuck in my throat; I had never known anything could be quite so awful. But Pat’s eyes were upon me. There was nothing for it but to swallow those beans. So swallow them I did, every last one, and there were positively at least a thousand. Then I washed the mess-kit and returned it to friend Pat with effusive thanks. At least, I complimented myself, I had been game. Tonight, just as I was starting out for my supper of toast and chocolate with the little old ladies of the Rue Dieu, Pat suddenly appeared on the other side of the counter.
“We had ’em again tonight,” he announced joyfully, “and I thought since you were so fond of ’em,”—he pushed another mess-kit full of beans across the counter. I glared at him. I had vainly been trying to recover from the dinner beans all afternoon.
“Take those things away,” I snapped, “I don’t want to lay eyes on another bean as long as ever I live!” Pat had called my bluff.
For the last week Company A has had guests in the mess-hall. Several French soldiers have been sent here to instruct the boys in some special drill; it was arranged that they eat and sleep with the Americans. Dreary as the boys find their chow, it proved a treat to the poilus who evidently spread the news of their good fortune among their friends in the vicinity, for day by day the number of Frenchmen messing with Company A was mysteriously increased.
“Yes sir!” the indignant Mess Sergeant declared to me. “They started in with five and now they’ve grown to be fifteen. I can’t tell one from t’other because all these frogs look alike to me, and they know as how I can’t sling their lingo. That’s a nice thing for them to be putting over on me!”
But yesterday he got his chance to get even. He caught one of the Frenchmen putting a piece of bread in his pocket. It is of course a military offense to carry food out of the mess-hall.
“I just sailed right into that guy”—the Mess Sergeant is a large and husky specimen—“and I sure did wipe up the floor some with him. And since then the whole gang of ’em has been scared stiff. Those frogs just watch me all the time. There ain’t a minute when I’m in the mess-hall that one of ’em takes his eyes off me.”
The other day, they tell me, one of the boys in the company, possessed of a practical turn, employed his newly-issued “tin derby” as a kettle in which to boil some eggs. The delicacy proved dear. Betrayed by the blackened helmet, he was tried and fined twenty dollars.