“Will you please tell me,” asked a serious-looking lad tonight, “what consideration could possibly induce two American girls to come to a place like this?”
Continually I am encountering boys who are sure that they’ve “seen me somewhere.”
“Say, didn’t you use to live in Milwaukee?”
“Haven’t I seen you in Seattle? Well, if it warn’t you, it was somebody that looked just like you!”
I suppose it is simply because I look American that I look familiar to them. But the facts in the case seem to be that I have been observed by some member of the A. E. F. in practically every one of the large cities of the U. S. A. One boy nearly started a fight in camp the other night by declaring that in spite of the evidence of my nose he knew I was of Hebraic origin. He had seen me, he solemnly insisted, “goin’ with a Jew feller in Philadelphia.”
Undoubtedly it is because they have so little to think about in these drab days that they are so pathetically curious. Every little thing you say or do is repeated, discussed all over camp. Sometimes curiosity gets hold of one of the bolder spirits to such an extent that he ventures the question;
“How much do you get paid for smiling at the soldiers?”
And when they learn that you are a volunteer and are paying for the privilege of being there, their amazement is so blank as to be positively ludicrous.
Goncourt, February 13.
One of the nicest things about Goncourt is our mess. This we have at the House Across the Street, which is next to the House of the Madonna. We mess en famille with the family Peirut, the Gendarme, Mr. K. and I, and we eat the family fare which consists chiefly of soup, boiled meat and carrots, supplemented by various additions such as sugar, cocoa, jam and canned corn from the commissary. I can never quite decide which is quainter, the family or the setting.