All day long they ran a zigzag course, taking a long cut to France, as Pete Connigan would have said, the general tension relieved by the emergency drills, manning the boats and so forth.
In the afternoon hours of respite from his duties he met Frenchy, whose patience had been a little tried by some of Uncle Sam’s crack jolliers, and they sat down on the top step of a companionway and talked.
“Zis I cannot bear!” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “To be called ze Hun! Ugh!”
“They’re only kidding you,” said Tom; “fooling with you.”
“I do not like it—no!”
“But if you hadn’t become an American before the war,” said Tom, “you couldn’t have enlisted on our side because you really were a German—a German citizen—weren’t you?”
“Subject, yess! Citizen, no! All will be changed. Alsace will be France again! We go to win her back! Yess?”
“Yes,” said Tom. “I only meant you belonged to Germany because you couldn’t help it.”
“You are a lucky boy,” Frenchy said earnestly. “Zare is no—what you say?—Mix-up; Zhermany, France, America—no. You are all American!”
“I got to remember that,” said Tom simply. “I know some rich fellers home where I live. They let me join their scout troop, so I got to know ’em. One feller’s name is Van Arlen. His father was born in Holland. They got two automobiles and a lot of servants and things. But anyway my father was born in the United States—that’s one thing.”