This morning while I was at breakfast she came bouncing in and proceeded to fill the house with lamentations. Last night a tipsy soldier had stolen the key to her front door! Then she delved into history for my benefit, recounting how, some weeks before, two soldiers, having sent her out of the room on an errand, had proceeded to rob her till, the sum amounting to almost three hundred francs!
“Oh! Ils sont des monstres, des cochons!” she wailed.
Whereat I, with some asperity, remarked that if the French people wouldn’t sell drink to the Americans, the soldiers wouldn’t become zig-zag and do such things. Immediately she became conciliatory. Of course, everyone knew that there were good people and bad people in every nation, but certainly! Then she changed the subject abruptly, demanding; why, why in the name of common sense did I do anything so contrary to all the dictates of reason as to sleep with my window open?
Last night, as Mr. K. and I were coming home from the canteen, the door of the cafe opposite was suddenly opened and a man’s figure appeared, half pushed, half thrown outside. The door slammed shut,—it was long after closing hour for the cafe,—the figure fell like a log to the ground. We watched a minute to see the fellow pick himself up, but he lay motionless. It was a freezing night. Mr. K. went over to investigate. The man was in a drunken stupor.
“You go along,” he called to me, “I’ve got to get this fellow home.”
I left reluctantly. Subsequently Mr. K. told me the night’s history. After considerable coaxing, he had finally succeeded in extracting the information that the boy belonged to F Company. So to F Company barracks, a good half-mile north of the canteen, they had proceeded, Mr. K. half dragging, half carrying the fellow who was head and shoulders taller than he, and broad to boot.
When they had nearly reached their journey’s end, Mr. K. by this time fairly in a state of collapse, his burden suddenly baulked. The barracks evidently didn’t look like home to him. Mr. K. began to have a sickening sense of something gone wrong. At last the wretch drowsily recalled the fact that he didn’t belong to F Company at all, but to I Company far on the other side of town. So around they turned and back through town they crawled until finally they arrived at I Company’s abiding-place; and this time the derelict was satisfied.
Indeed a walk home from the canteen at night with Mr. K. at any time is likely to prove an adventure. For should we meet a boy who has had more than is “good for him” and is in an irritable mood, we must stop and talk with him, in order, as Mr. K’s theory puts it, to divert his mind. “Get them thinking about something else,” is his slogan. The other night we stood out in the sleety drizzle until my feet fairly froze solid into the freezing mud, carrying on polite conversations with two boys who had just been put out of the House of the Madonna and were in a state of mind to wreck the town. One of them Mr. K. got started on the subject of taking French lessons. He was ambitious to study French he explained and would Mr. K. kindly arrange for a teacher and a course of lessons? I listened with one ear; here was the first man I had found in France who expressed an earnest desire to learn French and he was tipsy! The other one, evidently ashamed, explained to me at length how he hadn’t wanted to get drunk, the trouble was that he was just naturally “dishgushted with this country, just dishgushted.” And that it seems to me is the whole thing in two words. The boys are “just dishgushted.” Considering it all, who can blame them?
Goncourt, February 15.
The M. P.s who live in the second story of the Guard-House are my good friends. They help sweep out the hut often in the mornings and when they make taffy in their mess kits they bring me some. These M. P.s are in reality cavalrymen detached from their regiment for the time being in order to do police duty. As far as I can see, there seems to be no special hard feeling between them and the doughboys.