Reveille sounds at half-past five in the morning; we are then served with coffee, followed by drill till half-past ten when we have dinner, consisting of rich soup, meat, potatoes, etc. We get no sweets whatsoever. After dinner we peel potatoes, and after that drill till half-past four, at which time we have supper, there being the same bill of fare as dinner. We are free from five-thirty until nine, when we have inspection and then sleep. It is hard to get accustomed to the drill as the commands are in French, and scarcely any of the soldiers understand that language, even slightly.
Last Sunday we walked through the city in the company of an Englishman who came from Ceylon to enlist. He is a “younger son” and spends money lavishly when he has it. At present he is not in funds.
To the east of Lyon is a range of mountains, and on one of the highest mountains is a church. We visited it while military service was being held and the edifice was crowded. It has the handsomest and most costly interior decorations of any church I have ever seen. It is called the Chapelle de Notre Dame de Fourvière.
The view from the heights was magnificent. Lyon is in a valley and has two rivers running through it very swiftly. They say that Mt. Blanc, in Switzerland, can be seen from this church on a clear day. We saw many snow-capped mountains in the distance, but as the day was overcast we could not see the main attraction.
Last Monday we were transferred to the 2nd company of the same First Régiment étrangère. This is to be our permanent company and it is in another barracks. The day before we reached Lyon two Americans arrived from La Rochelle where they had enlisted. One had seen service in the Philippines, in the cavalry, while the other had served in the navy. So we were not so lonely after all.
When we reached the new barracks we found four more Americans, one of whom had been in the army, another in the navy; one was a doctor and the other a lawyer. The doctor is forty-nine years old; he came over at the beginning of the war to join the Red Cross. The ex-army man fought in the insurrection in Chili, and served in Mexico under Villa and he works a machine gun. He has since left us for the front.
These new barracks are located in a new school house, not quite completed. Our room is about ninety feet long and thirty feet wide; it has a row of eight windows on each side, and accommodates one hundred men.
At intervals of about a week volunteers who desire to go to the front are called for from the different companies. Of course we volunteered, but were refused because there is a severe form of typhoid in the trenches which, it is said, kills a man in four hours. On this account nobody is allowed to go until he has been inoculated four times; we had not been inoculated at all. The volunteers are put in a special company and drilled separately. Larney and I with the three other Americans (the doctor not included) are in this company.
This Legion is the most cosmopolitan organization in the world. In one corner of the room you will hear Greek spoken, the next group will be speaking Spanish, then German spoken by the Swiss, Polish from another corner and English from our crowd.
I saw a fight through interpreters. A Greek got into an unintelligible argument with a Pole and as neither could speak the other’s language nor “parly” French, their fellow countrymen were called, and they being slightly acquainted with French, that was the language resorted to. When all arrangements were completed the combatants proceeded to pommel each other, and before long the interpreters were also engaged, and it was a very lively party when the officers arrived. There are many such happenings and they afford much amusement.