“Next Sunday,” he said, “I am going to take the other half of the force down the Seine to a beautiful place where we can have dinner out-of-doors and have a look at French life of the old régime. I mean that my men shall get all there is in a foreign sojourn.”
I told him that I thought he was pretty fine to give all his leisure to his soldiers. He blushed like a boy and said: “They deserve it and I enjoy it. Besides, it is a part of my job to make these men as intelligent individuals as possible. They need to be intelligent. They have eight hours a day of particularly responsible work.
“Here in Paris they have to keep their eyes out for deserters. It is their business to know that every American soldier who walks through a street here has a right to do it. They have to be keen to look for spies in American uniforms. Oh, yes, they have picked up more than a few of these gentry. They might have slipped past the French soldiers, because they don’t know Americans, but they couldn’t fool a U. S. A. P. M. Every suspicious character gets nabbed sooner or later. If there is any doubt about his status our men bring him in here. If he can satisfy us, all right. But there is never an apology due him from the policeman.
“One of our men may be transferred from patrol work to riding on railroad trains and keeping track of our soldiers on their travels. He may be transferred to the front, where he becomes a traffic cop and also one of the men who take captured Germans in charge.
“We have a school here for our motorcycle cops. These men become inspectors of police. They have an added responsibility. They speed directly to the scene of any great or small disaster, and they assist the French gendarmes and military police. When the long-distance gun hit that church on Good Friday, killing seventy-six people, our men were the first on the spot. They rescued the wounded and brought out the dead. They also did excellent service in that great fire near Paris when the powder works blew up.
“As quickly as an air raid is over our men are out on their cycles looking up the damage inflicted by the bombs. They report back here where every bomb fell. Often they are able to put out small fires caused by the bombs.
“They are a fine bunch,” ended the lieutenant. “Not one of my men has ever been in trouble, and the fact that our cooler here in Paris often has as many as a hundred and fifty people in it shows not only that their work is essential, but that it is performed to the king’s taste.”
With that kind of a police force and that kind of officers commanding it, you can be sure that your sons haven’t very much opportunity to go astray. Once in a while a man may evade the military police. Occasionally I have seen it done. But it happens rarely, and the chances are a hundred to one against it happening twice to any one man.
CHAPTER XII
INTO THE TRENCHES
There comes a day when our sons cease to be soldiers in training and become fighting men. It is a day looked forward to with dread by those at home, with eager enthusiasm by the soldiers. I have seldom met a soldier who had not something uncomplimentary to say of the powers for not sending him more promptly to the front. The weeks spent in rest billets, that is, the training camps, seem endless to the men. Every move forward is hailed with joy. But progress from one village to the next is exasperatingly slow, especially after they reach a point where the rumble of guns, like distant thunder, is heard.