It's an office, all right, for it has a typewriter in it. No, not the feminine person who usually decorates offices; simply the typewriting machine. It has a calendar too, as all well-regulated offices should have. The only things every well-regulated office has which it lacks are the red-and-white signs "Do It Now" and the far more cheerful wall motto, "Out to Lunch."
It has lamps, to be sure, not electric lights, as is the custom among offices in the States. It has maps on the walls, but they differ a great deal from the ones which used to hang above the Boss's desk back home, and at which we used to stare blankly while waiting for him to look up from his papers and say, "Well, whazzamatternow?" These maps have no red circles marking zones of distribution, no blue lines marking salesmen's routes and delimiting their territories, no stars marking agencies' locations. True, they have lines on them, and a few stars on them, but they stand for far different things....
Furnishings are Simple.
The office has a few rickety chairs, and one less rickety than the others which is reserved for the Big Works, as he is affectionately called, on the occasion of his few but none the less disquieting visits. It has a rickety table or two, usually only one, for firewood is scarce in France. It has a stove, which, from its battered appearance, must have been used as a street barricade during the Reign of Terror in the days of the First Revolution. Said stove requires the concentrated efforts of one husky Yank, speaking three languages—French, United States, and profane—all the live-long day to keep it going. Even then the man sitting nearest the window is always out of luck.
The walls are unkempt in appearance, as if the plaster had shivered involuntarily for many a weary day before the coming of "les Americains" and their insistence upon the installation of the stove. The paper is seamed and smeared until it resembles a bird's-eye view of the battlefield of the Marne. The ceiling is as smudged as the face of a naughty little boy caught in the midst of a raid on the jam in the pantry, due, no doubt, to the aforesaid stove and to the over-exuberant rising-and-shining of the kerosene lamps. Some people ascribe the state of the celling to the grade of tobacco which the Boss smokes; but the Boss always thunders back, ["Well, what the devil can a man do] in a country where even cornsilk would be a blessing?" And, as what the Boss says goes, that ends it.
There is one rug on the floor, a dilapidated affair that might well be the flayed hide of a flea-bitten mule. There is a mantlepiece, stretching across what used to be a fireplace in the days of the First Napoleon, but which is a fireplace no more. On top of the mantlepiece is a lot of dry reading—wicked-looking little books full of fascinating facts about how to kill people with a minimum of effort and ammunition. On the floor, no matter how carefully the office occupants scrape their hobnails before entering, there is always a thin coating of mud.
The office telephone is on the wall, instead of on the Boss's desk, as it ought to be. One has to take down receiver and transmitter all in the same piece in order to use it. And it has the same old Ford-crank attachment on the side that is common to phones in the rural free [delivery districts of the United States of America.]
Why Hats Are Worn.
Instead of being lined with bright young men in knobby business suits and white stiff collars, the office is lined with far brighter young men in much more businesslike khaki. They keep their hats on while they work for they know not when they may have to dash out again into the cold and the wind and the rain. They keep their coats on for the same reason; there are no shirt-sleeves and cuff protectors in this office, for the simple reason that there are no cuffs to be protected and that shirt-sleeves are "not military."
There is no office clock for the laggard to watch. Instead, there are bugle calls, sounded from without. Or, again the hungry man puts the forearm bearing his wrist watch in front of his face, as if to ward off a blow, when he wants to know the time. Save for the clanking of spurs and the thumping of rubber boots, it is a pretty quiet office, singularly so, in fact, considering the work that is done in it.