They held the leaves up. The boys kept leaving; fewer and fewer came, then finally none. Last week they disbanded the force of workers at Aix; a few stayed to look after things until such time as the crowds should start to pour in again; the rest were sent back to Paris to be reassigned.
If I thought the trip down was a chore, it wasn’t a patch on the trip back. We waited half the night for the train at the Aix railway station. When it finally pulled in, I found my seat was in a compartment which was full, and had evidently been so for hours, of French people. Now life in France tends to cure you of belief in several popular superstitions; one is the idea that it is dangerous to have wet feet, and another that there is anything in the germ theory; but there is one notion to which I still cling, an obstinate belief in the desirability of fresh air. I put my head in the compartment, then withdrew, shutting the door. For the twelve hours it took to reach Paris I stood up outside in the corridor.
Arrived in Paris, they assigned me temporarily to the Avenue Montaigne Club House. This is a beautiful building, the home of one of Napoleon’s generals; but the best thing about it is the tea-room restaurant, for here they serve apple-pie, chocolate cake and ice-cream. Since the latest food restrictions were issued, forbidding the French to make desserts employing milk, cream, sugar, eggs or flour, such dainties have been unobtainable anywhere else in Paris; but the Americans drawing supplies from their own commissary, are of course untouched by such regulations. Indeed the saddest sign in France these days I often think is that over the deserted shops which reads Patisserie. To be sure some of these stores still make a show at doing business, filling their windows with raisins, dried prunes and other prosaic edibles, together with heaps of pseudo-chocolates wrapped gayly in tin-foil, but which when purchased proved to be nothing but what one boy termed “the same old camouflage,”—an unappetizing paste of dried fruits and ground nuts. Yesterday a curly-headed lad, who looked about sixteen, came into the canteen carrying a big bunch of pink carnations. These were for the waitresses, he said, because they were the first American ladies that he had seen in France. We each pinned a spray to the front of our pink aprons, and then, since he pretended famine, let him have “seconds”,—quite against the rules—on everything, with all the ice-cream and cake that he could swallow.
Yesterday I saw Mr. T. who was with us for a while at Goncourt. He told me that French troops en repos were occupying that area at present. They had asked for the use of our hut and of course it had been granted them. A Y man, happening by the other day, had stopped in. They had converted our beautiful hut into a regular French Cantine with three men to hand the bottles over the counter “and a smell enough to knock you down.” Who shall say that this is the least of life’s little ironies?
This morning I met N. who had reached Rattentout the day I left. She tells me that all the villages occupied by our troops in the sector have, one by one, been shelled. Rattentout was shelled and two Frenchwomen killed. Because of the constant shelling all the Y women workers had been withdrawn from the canteens and sent back to safety at Souilly where they have nothing to do but sit and possess their souls in patience.
Tonight they gave me my new assignment. It is at Gondrecourt. I leave tomorrow. I am glad, so glad over the prospect of being back on a real job once more! Here at the Avenue Montaigne as in the gilded casino at Aix I have been desperately homesick, to be back in a real hut again!
CHAPTER IV: GONDRECOURT—THE ARTILLERY
Gondrecourt, April 28.
Gondrecourt is quite a place. It boasts a brewery, a hotel, a mediœval tower and a number of little stores. Each one of these stores contains at least one pretty girl on its selling force and the ratio between the sales of goods and the charms of the ladies is, I fancy, quite exact. From the military point of view Gondrecourt is important as being the site of the First Army Corps Training Schools. But to me the really distinguishing feature of Gondrecourt is the fact that it boasts a bath-tub. If anybody had said bath-tub to me the day before I arrived here, I would have said with the doughboy that,—short of Paris—“there ain’t no such animal.” But now I have beheld it with my own eyes, a white-enamelled bath-tub, a Y. M. C. A. bath-tub, in the basement at Headquarters. The tub is supposed to be a strictly family affair,—on the door are posted hours for the Lady Secretaries and hours for the Men Secretaries,—but in spite of the plain English before their eyes, it seems that army officers occasionally slip in and steal a bath off us, yes, even impinging on the sacred bath hours of the ladies!
My first day here they sent me to “The Café.” This was once a very wild place indeed. When the Y. first came to Gondrecourt it tried to buy the proprietor out, but the proprietor refused; he was doing too profitable a business. Then one night Providence sent some Boche planes wandering in this direction. There was a panic among the populace; the proprietor, with visions of his place wrecked by a bomb, sold out in a hurry and left town. Since then the Cafe has led a reformed and decorous existence but the old name still clings. My second day I spent at the “Double Hut,” the big hut built up on the hill close by the Infantry School. The third day I was introduced to my own canteen.