“We had a French painter here a few days ago,” said the major. “I purposely seated him where he could look at this picture. He took one look, then asked me to change his seat.”
The major inquired whether I had noticed the picture of the château which decorates the doors of our automobiles.
“When you go out to-morrow,” he said, “you’ll observe that none of the army cars is without its symbol. An artillery car has its picture of a gun. Then there are different symbols for the different divisions. I saw one the other day with three interrogation marks painted on it. I inquired what they meant and was told the car belonged to the Watts division. Do you see why?”
I admitted that I did.
“Well, I didn’t,” said the major, “not till it was explained. It’s rather stupid, I think.”
This afternoon an American captain, anonymous of course, called on us. He is stopping at G. H. Q., which is short for General Headquarters, his job being to study the British strategic methods. He and the major discussed the differences between Americans and Englishmen.
“The chief difference is in temperature,” said the captain. “You fellows are about as warm as a glacier. In America I go up to a man and say: ‘My name is Captain So-an-So.’ He replies: ‘Mine is Colonel Such-and-Such.’ Then we shake hands and talk. But if I go to an Englishman and say: ‘My name is Captain So-and-So,’ he says: ‘Oh!’ So I’m embarrassed to death and can’t talk.”
“’Strawnary!” said the major.
At tea time a courier brought us the tidings that there’d been an air raid last Sunday at a certain hospital base.
“The boche always does his dirty work on Sunday,” remarked the American captain. “It’s queer, too, because that’s the day that’s supposed to be kept holy, and I don’t see how the Kaiser squares himself with his friend Gott.”