The mule-skinner grew red as a beet, stared at me horrified.
“I couldn’t repeat it, ma’am! I couldn’t repeat nary word of it!”
That a general should so scandalize a mule-skinner, and a Texas mule-skinner at that, by his address, was so intriguing to my fancy that I laughed all the way home.
We have a new colonel; he has declared that the regiment is not fit for the front, and so has laid out a two weeks’ programme of gruelling hikes and intensive training, in order at the eleventh hour to try to jack us up to standard.
The Gendarme leaves tomorrow to go en permission.
Goncourt, February 25.
If I were God I would lay a blight on every grape-vine in France; then I would sink every still, wine press, distillery and brewery to the bottom of the sea.
We have had payday. It happened Friday. The total results didn’t make themselves evident immediately; it was instead a cumulative effect, a crescendo, beginning Friday and reaching its climax yesterday. On these three days, out of the twenty-five hundred men stationed here, twenty-four hundred and ninety-three, I could take my oath, have come into the canteen and leaned over the counter, drunk;—that is to say, visibly and undeniably under the influence of liquor. When a lad, as some half dozen did,—those composing the regular attendance in the group about the fire,—came into the canteen entirely and unmistakably sober, one welcomed him as a drowning man does a spar. For a moment one had come in touch with something stable in a reeling world.
Out of a company of two hundred and fifty last night ninety were capable of standing Retreat.
I have learned to gauge the stages. When a man looks you squarely in the eye and declares vociferously, “Never took a drink in all my life!” he is very drunk indeed. And there is always someone nearby to wink and comment; “He must have joined the gang that pours it down with a funnel.”