This officer, another captain, spoke in complimentary terms of the French assistance.
“They’ve been more than diligent with us,” said he. “They’ve never shown impatience when we failed to grab their point, but have gone over it and over it till we’ve learned it to suit them. The difference in languages makes it hard sometimes to get what they’re after, but they eventually manage to make themselves understood. The only fault I have to find with them,” he confided, “is that they don’t give us credit for knowing anything at all. They tell us this thing’s a rifle, and the thing on the end of it is a bayonet, and so forth. And one of them showed me a barbed-wire entanglement one day, and told me what it was for. I’d always been under the mistaken impression that it was used for bed-clothes.”
We had to turn down this captain’s luncheon invitation, but we stopped at his house for light refreshment. His lieutenant, a young University of Michigan boy, had come over on the first transport, and related interesting details of that historic trip.
We went on to the other captain’s, and lunched with him and his major and colonel. The beautiful young lady proved every bit as pretty as a pair of army shoes. But the food was good and the captain’s French better. He kept hurling it at the beautiful young lady, who received it with derisive laughter. His accent, it appeared, was imposseeb.
“I like to make her laugh,” he told me. “It takes me back home among the coyotes.”
On the street of the village I held converse with a private, aged about twenty-three. I said I supposed he was glad it was pay-day.
“What’s the difference!” he said. “I got more money now than Rockefella. I ain’t spent more’n a buck since we been over, and then it was just to be spendin’ it, not because they was anything to buy. I seen a fella the other day light a cigarette with one o’ these here dirty twenty-franc notes. He was sick o’ carrying it round. And they was another fella went up to one o’ these here village belles and slipped her a hundred francs. He never seen her before, and he won’t never see her again. He just says ‘Souvenir’ and let it go at that.”
“Did she take it?”
“Oh, I guess not! She’s to gay Paree by this time already.”
“She won’t burn up that town with a hundred francs.”