Besides the suit and cape I had made in Paris, they gave me two canteen aprons, aprons such as French working women wear, voluminous, beplaited, made in Mother Hubbard style. Now there is one point on which I am resolved. They can court martial me, they can send me home, or they can lead me out and shoot me at sunrise, but they cannot make me wear those aprons! What’s more, the very first minute that I have to myself I’m going to cut them up and make them into canteen dish-cloths.
Bourmont, December 3.
This French money is the very plague; not because it is French but because it is so flimsy. It may perhaps measure up to the national standards, but it fails utterly to meet American requirements; the difference lying chiefly in the fact that the French don’t shoot craps. It comes into the canteen in all stages of disintegration.
“She’s kinder feeble. Will she pass?” inquires a lad anxiously.
“With care maybe, and the help of a little sticking plaster,” I reply; and getting out the roll of gummed paper kept handily in the cash-drawer, I proceed to patch up the tattered bill.
“Guess this one must have been up to the front; it’s all shot to pieces,” another lad apologizes; then, at my casual references to shooting craps, grins guiltily. “But say now, ain’t it the rottenest money you ever did see?” “The United States ought to teach these Frenchies how to make paper money,” remarks a third; while still another adds; “When I’m to home I write to my girl on better paper than that.”
Sometimes the bills come in as a mere mass of crumpled tatters; then one must play picture-puzzle piecing it together. Sometimes they are beyond repair; for at times you will receive two halves of different notes pasted neatly together, or at other times one with the corner bearing an essential number lacking. The French banks refuse to pay a cent on their paper money unless it is just so.
“I’m sorry, but that bill’s no good,” you will occasionally have to tell a boy. Usually he will grin cheerfully as he stuffs it back into his pocket.
“Oh well, I’ll pass it along in a crap game.”
Then too, the boys have no respect for foreign money and so handle it carelessly with an obvious contempt that is irritating to the French.