“It’s a shame you can’t stay longer,” we say to them.
“I’ll say it is!”
“I’m awfully sorry you have to go.”
“You ain’t half so sorry as I am, Lady.”
“Maybe some day you’ll be coming back again.”
“I’ll tell the world one thing; I’m going to be good as gold when I get back to camp, so they’ll let me.”
One of the Y women tonight repeated what one boy on leaving had confided to her:
“If I said to you that this had been my happiest week since I joined the army it wouldn’t mean much,” he told her, “but that’s not what I’m going to say. What I’m going to say is that this has been the happiest week of all my life.”
So far I have found just one man who wasn’t enjoying himself here. He had been stationed for six months at Paris. Aix, he declared, “Weren’t no town at all, nothin’ but a one-horse place.” He evidently had no soul for the beauties of nature.
Paris, April 22.