Chapter I: Bourmont—company a (2)

Yesterday several cases of free tobacco from the Sun Tobacco Fund arrived in camp. The boys in the orderly room opened the cases last night and hunted through and through them, trying to find packages which bore the names of unmarried lady donors. Unfortunately the Misses who contributed were few and far between, but hope dies hard.

“Say, mightn’t Asa be a girl?” the lads are asking me eagerly today.

“Lucien ain’t a man’s name, is it?”

Enclosed in each package is a postal-card on which one may, if so inclined, return thanks to the giver. The boys who are taking the trouble to write are doing it frankly with the hope that this may encourage the recipient to repetition. How to tactfully suggest this without seeming greedy is a problem whose delicacy proves difficult.

“You tell me how to say it,” they tease.

“Say, won’t you write it for me, please ma’am?”

I saw one postal-card accomplished after an evening of concentrated effort; “Your precious and admired gift,” it began.

Already Santa Claus in the person of Mr. Gatts has presented me with a beautiful white silk apron embroidered with large bunches of life-like violets.

Bourmont, Christmas Day.

_Joyeux Noël!_

As I came in last night there was a great log burning on the hearth.

“_C’est la bouche de Noël_,” said Madame and explained how it would burn all night, then Christmas morning she would take the little end that was left and put it away in the loft until the next Christmas: it would protect the house from lightning; it was a very ancient custom.

Back in the _Salle des Assiettes_ I found our table spread as for a little fête with a wonderful cake and a bottle tied up with a bouquet of chrysanthemums and long ribbon streamers of red white and blue. I was so innocent that I supposed at first that the chrysanthemums were in the bottle, an improvised vase, but Madame quickly enlightened me: “_C’est le vin blanc_,” she explained to my embarrassment.

The Gendarme and I took counsel together as to how we could best express our feelings on this occasion toward the Family Chaput, the household having been increased over night by the arrival of the married daughter and her small boy and girl. After various projects had been considered and abandoned, we finally took the little stand from our room, dressed it with evergreen and tinsel, then heaped it with nuts, candies, chocolate bars, and little jars of jam all from the canteen, together with a few small toys, and carried it in and placed it in front of the hearth. The family appeared delighted. We observed, however, that after the first toot, baby Max’s whistle was swiftly and silently confiscated. Later when _La Petite_, the little maid-of-all-work who takes care of our rooms, came in, we had a few trinkets dug from the depths of our trunks to bestow on her. Later still I carried chocolates and _confiture_ to my little old ladies of the Rue Dieu.

This Christmas day I fancy will be long remembered by the inhabitants of this part of France; for in every one of the villages about, our soldiers have given the French children a Christmas tree. I went to see the tree at Saint Thiebault. The ancient church, its chill interior ablaze with light, was crowded with villagers all dressed in their fête day best. The old people were just as excited and eager as the children; not one had ever seen a Christmas tree before. They stood on the pews in order to get a better view. The tree which was very large and beautiful stood just outside the altar rail. It bore a gift for every child in Saint Thiebault. While the tree was slowly being unburdened of its load, the band-master’s choir, high up in the choir-loft, sang an accompaniment. Some of the selections were of a sacred character, others frankly secular, such as Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes; but as one of the choristers remarked;

“As long as we sing them slow and solemn the Frenchies won’t know the difference.”

After the Christmas tree I went around to the little local hospital to take some gifts to the patients. There were half a dozen of them lying on cots in the bare barracks room, a dreary set in a drearier setting. In one corner lay a boy who muttered incoherently. He had just been brought in, they told me, and was very ill: the doctors were puzzled to know what was the matter with him. I left some little gifts for him when he should be better.

It was half-past four when I reached the hut. Suddenly it popped into my head that we ought to have a Santa Claus. At half-past six Santa walked in through the door. It was Pat in a big red nose, a red peaked cap, much white cotton-batting beard and whiskers, rubber boots, the Chief’s fur coat, covered over for the night with turkey-red bunting, and a fat pack slung over one shoulder. I had just dressed him in the mess hall, and for an impromptu Santa Claus, I flatter myself he was quite effective. The boys whooped. When they discovered who it was behind that nose, they yelped like terriers.

“Ain’t he the beauty! Oh you whiskers! Say Pat, kiss me quick!”

We got Santa safely behind the counter and then opened the pack. It was full of foolish little things; tricks, puzzles, games, mottoes, whistles, tin trumpets, paper “hummers”. The boys went wild. It was the musical instruments that made the hit. For two hours that hut shrieked pandemonium. Every last man in the company tootled and squawked as if his life depended on it, and every last one of them was tootling a different tune.

“_C’est des grands gosses!_” Truly, as Madame Chaput says, they’re nothing after all but so many big little boys.

After the stuff was distributed the Secretary and I invited the boys to partake of hot chocolate and sandwiches. But to our disappointment they only took a languid interest in the treat. Instead of the five and six cups apiece which many often swallow, not one of them consumed more than a cup and three-quarters. Too late we realized; they had already gorged themselves on the contents of their Christmas boxes from home.

Reports coming in from the village stated that one American Christmas custom had made a strong appeal to the feminine portion at least of the population. Quantities of mistletoe grow hereabouts. The French, although averring that it brings good-luck, consider it a pest and let it go at that. It took the American doughboys to enlighten the _Mademoiselles_ as to its Anglo-Saxon significance. It would be curious, I have been thinking, if the adoption of this ancient privilege should prove one of the lasting evidences of the American troops in France!

As I left the canteen I learned that the boy who had been so sick at the hospital was dead.

Bourmont, December 26.

Last night was a wild night in the barracks. This morning the hut was full of echoes of it. Company A indeed wore a jaded look. They had had very little sleep it was explained. And it was all on account of the Christmas hummers.

“I ain’t got nothin’ against you people, but I shore don’t think you gave A Company a square deal,” remarked my friend the Tall Kentuckian as he lit his cigarette at the counter.

“Why, didn’t you like the present that Santa Claus brought you?” I teased.

“Huh! I would shore have singed the ol’ gentleman’s whiskers for him last night if I could have caught him!” He went on to explain; “We’d just get settled down good to sleep when some guy or other would start up a-squawkin’ on one of them things. An’ Sergeant ——, well he’d had just enough to make him fightin’ mad, an’ he shore would rare around that there barracks tryin’ to find them fellers. Why, half the corporals in the outfit was marchin’ up and down the place most all the night long, shyin’ hob-nailed shoes in what they guessed was the direction of them noises.”

I began to discern what a night of terror it had been.

“Yes suh!” declared the Kentuckian. “There was one feller with a hummer we couldn’t get. He kept blowin’ Tipperary. He must have blowed it for two hours steady, on an’ off. I guess he had every last hob-nailed shoe in the hull barracks throwed at him.”

Nor is this all. It seems I have committed a ghastly _faux pas_. I have gotten the Y. in dreadfully dutch with the officers. It is all along of the Christmas calendars. The Christmas calendars arrived at the canteen just the day before Christmas. They were designed to be sold to the boys for five cents apiece in order that they might have something to send to the folks at home as a Christmas greeting. But since they reached us so very late the Secretary and I decided we didn’t have the face to put them on sale.

“Let’s give them away,” I suggested, and on his agreeing, laid them in heaps on the counter and invited the boys to help themselves. The boys weren’t bashful. They helped themselves with enthusiasm and zeal. They came back for more and more. For the rest of the day no one did a thing at the hut but sit at the tables and address envelopes. One boy, I learned later, sent off as many as thirty-five. I was awfully pleased to have the boys appreciate the calendars so. And I never once for a moment thought of the censors; but presently I heard from them. The company censors, two of the younger lieutenants, had been looking forward, it seems, to some leisurely care-free hours at Christmas. When the stacks of calendars started coming in they saw their holiday vanish into thin air, nay more, they saw themselves sitting up nights for weeks to come censoring those precious calendars. And they were swearing, raving mad. They were going to run the Y. out of the town! They were going to shut down the hut! Finally they compromised the matter with their consciences by censoring half and chucking the other half into the stove. But even then they couldn’t stop fussing and fuming over it. Tonight just to top the matter off, we received a sharp reprimand from the Business Manager at Bourmont for being so extravagant as to give the calendars away, unauthorized. Was there ever such a tragedy of good intentions?

Bourmont, December 27.

Today we buried the lad who died on Christmas night. I had never seen a military funeral before and I had never dreamed that such a ceremony could be so thrillingly beautiful.

The company formed at three o’clock in the road in front of the canteen, then filed slowly through the streets of the little grey age-old village. The band marching at the head of the procession played the _Marche Funèbre_ of Chopin. After the band came the officers of the company and then the firing squad of eight sharp-shooters, followed by an ambulance carrying the boy’s coffin covered with a great flag. Behind, marched the whole of Company A and after them crowded a throng of villagers. All the men in town, with the innate respect that the French have for death, stood uncovered as we passed, while many of the women watched with tears streaming down their faces.

We passed through the village and down the road to the little grey-walled cemetery, ringed around with evergreens and now deep in freshly fallen snow. All about stretched virgin shining snowfields and over them to the east rose Bourmont like a dream city, etched as delicately as by a silver-point against the soft dove-colored sky.

The majestic phrases of the Catholic burial service rang out clearly on the frosty air:

Eternal rest grant him, O Lord,

And let perpetual light shine upon him!

The coffin with the great flag burning in blue and scarlet was lowered into the grave. Slowly, with perfect expression, a bugler blew the poignant, unforgettable notes of Taps. The rifles of the firing squad cracked sharply; three volleys, it was over.

“Will they leave him there?” An old Frenchwoman asked one of the boys afterwards.

“’Till the war is over, then likely they will send him home.”

“But why? He won’t be lonely here. There will always be some one to put flowers on his grave.”

Tonight I was talking to the Supply Sergeant about the lad.

“I think he died of a broken heart as much as anything,” he told me. “They wouldn’t let his mother see him at the dock when we sailed. She came to say good-bye but it was against the rules. He never could get over that; he kept brooding all the time and fretting for her. I read some of her letters to him. They seemed more like a sweetheart’s than a mother’s.”

The doctors, however, diagnosed his disease as spinal meningitis. They have ordered the barracks in which he slept to be quarantined. Already a half a dozen boys in quarantine have taken to their beds, but this we hope is largely due to over-stimulated imaginations. Even if the disease doesn’t spread, however, I am wondering what will become of ninety-seven lively boys bottled up for two weeks in one barracks. Already various ones have eluded the guard and come sneaking furtively into the canteen to buy their cigarettes and chocolates. Whenever one of these unfortunates is recognized a regular howl goes up all over the hut.

“Outside! You’re one of the crumby ones!” they jeer, or; “Convict! Get back to your cell!”

Bourmont, December 28.

The worst of my job is playing dragon to the French children. In view of the fact that if allowed in the hut at all they swarm in, in such numbers as to fairly overrun it, and pester the boys with their insatiable appeals for “goom” and chocolate, it has seemed best to make a strict rule against their admission. (Besides which I don’t approve of giving them gum, for in the face of anything one can do or say they will insist on swallowing it, which is, I’m sure, not at all good for their tummies!) But in spite of this prohibition the place holds an irresistible attraction for them. At night one can often see their faces pressed flat against the isinglass windows as they peer inside; while chiefly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons they will slip slyly in, and then if the dragon isn’t on the jump to explain to each and every one in her very best French, that she is so sorry but it really is forbidden, why in a twinkling the hut becomes full of them. And they are so picturesque, so appealing, so full of shy wonder at the gramophone with the wheel that “marches by itself” that it is very hard to turn them out.

Since Christmas I have been kept busy by a tiny tad of a ragamuffin with a funny round cropped black head and a face as solemnly expressionless as a little carved Buddha. He slips in among the tables and he is positively too small to be seen. The Christmas tree with its shining ornaments is his stealthy objective. In vain I explain matters politely to him; without a sound, without the hint of a flicker in his little beady black eyes, he turns and clumps out in his ridiculous _sabots_, only to presently slip in again. And now it seems he has lain low and sagaciously observed my habits; for returning to the hut after mess this noon, I met him trudging along the Rue Dieu, his eyes encountering mine blandly without embarrassment, his absurd little figure bulging all over with purloined Christmas tree ornaments. In the hut I found our poor tree stripped to a height of four feet from the floor of all its finery.

These last few evenings the hut has been given over to writing Christmas thank-you letters home. The official writer of love letters for the company has been working overtime; not that his clients cannot write themselves, but because they feel he is more able to do justice to the subject. Every night now I see him sitting out in front of the counter, his Jewish profile bent low over the table as he covers sheet after sheet with his fine and fanciful handwriting, while next him perches anxiously the interested party, watching developments and occasionally proffering a suggestion. When it is done they must bring it to me for my approval.

“That’s a real classy letter, ain’t it?” the lover will query proudly and I assure him that it is indeed.

“When she gets that, I bet she’ll come across with that sweater she told me she was makin’ for me, all right!”

“Say do you think that ought to be good for a _cartoon_ of cigarettes?” another one inquires.

Of course there are many who, no matter what the effort, prefer to write their own. Sometimes when cleaning up the canteen tables I come upon specimens of such, first drafts discarded on account of blots. One such love letter, classic in its brevity, picked up the other day, ran:

Dear Sweetheart,

I am writing you a few interesting lines which I hope will be
the same to you wishing you a merry Xmas and a happy New Year

Your loving friend

Pvt. ——

Of late I have been moved to speculate wonderingly on the mental processes of the American public. I have been going through the stacks of magazines in the warehouse sent from the States for one cent per to provide amusement for the doughboys’ leisure moments. Among the rest I found the Upholsterer’s Monthly, The Hardware Dealer’s Journal, The Mother’s Magazine, Fancy Work and The Modern Needleworker. I showed some of these prizes to one of the boys; “Gee, but that’s the kind of snappy stuff to send a feller over the top!” was his comment. That numbers of the Undertaker’s Journal have also been discovered among the donations from home I have heard asserted on excellent authority, but as yet I have not personally come across any.

Just as we were closing tonight, Pat came up to the counter, solemnly leaned across it:

“Have you seen the new shoes they’re issuin’? he demanded. “They’ve got pitchers on them so a feller can’t see his own feet!”

Bourmont, January 2, 1918.

Once a week our peripatetic movie-machine makes its appearance among us. Louis, the sixteen year old French operator, unpacks the big cases, sets up the apparatus, and, if our luck holds, we have a show. Owing to the short range of the little machine the screen must be hung in the middle of the hut. This means that half the audience must view the pictures from the back, the essential difference being that the lettering is then reversed; “The Jewish Picture Show,” the boys call this. But then as half of us can’t read anyway, why should we mind?

The joy of the show lies in the audience. Just as soon as the lights are put out the fun begins: “Everbody watch their pocketbooks!” goes up the shout and from that moment we are never still.

The curly-headed heroine makes her coquettish entrance.

“Ooo la la! Oooo la la!” rises the enthusiastic welcome.

A bottle is displayed; “Cognac!” the yell shakes the roof.

The neglected wife begins to waver in response to the tempter’s wiles; “Now don’t forget your general orders, little lady!” admonishes an earnest voice.

Lovers indulge in a prolonged embrace; “Aw quit! Quit it! Yer make me homesick!” goes up the agonized appeal.

The enraptured lover stands registering ecstasy; “Hit him again, he’s coming to!” comes the derisive shout.

And so it goes. The actors aren’t on the screen, they’re in the house, and truly there isn’t a dull moment on the programme!

Last night, however, instead of the joyous chorus of running comment a subdued and decorous silence reigned, broken only by a few half-hearted sallies. What was the matter? I racked my brain to find the cause. All the joy had gone from the show. The evening was stale, flat and unprofitable. When the lights were lit again the mystery was immediately made plain. At one end of the counter stood an officer. I wonder if he dreamed what a spoil-sport he had been?

Once a week also a lady comes from the Bourmont office to give us a French lesson; not that Company A betrays any burning desire to learn to _parlez-vous_, but just that it seems obviously the proper thing to do under the circumstances, so French they must be taught willy-nilly. There were two lessons to be sure in which they took a degree of interest; the lesson about buying and counting money, and the lesson about food and drink. But when they had once learned to ask the price of things and to understand the answer, and had learned the words for eggs, bread, butter, beer, ham, beefsteak, chicken and French fried potatoes, their interest lapsed until it became positive boredom. Of late it has seemed to me that it was only the boys with French blood that learned anything and they, of course, knew it all already.

For entertainment Company A can upon occasion furnish its own show. This was demonstrated by an impromptu programme staged in the hut the other night; there’s no use we have discovered in planning things beforehand, if one does, as sure as fate, all the star performers “catch guard” that day! Pat by request acted as stage-manager and master of ceremonies. To stimulate the artists we announced prizes.

Private Dostal opened the programme; a large red-faced lad with a bland and simple cast of countenance, he is the comic balladist of the company. His first contribution was a selection popularly known among us as _Beside the dyin’ boxcar, the empty hobo lay_, a piece with a vast number of verses in which the dying hobo repents an ill-spent life, only, in the last line, to “jump up and hop the train.” For an encore we had _Papa Eating Noodle Soup_ which could best be described as a “gleesome, gluesome” recitative, the chorus of each of numerous verses consisting of a realistic imitation of Papa partaking of the Soup. Mr. Gatts gave us a jig. Then Bruno who, as the boys say; “Could sing pretty good, only he don’t sing nothin’ but wop,” favored us with _Oh Maria_, prefacing his performance with the earnest admonition, “No laffin! nobody!” and after that with an Italian folk dance in which he looked more like a grotesque little punchinello than ever. Our light-weight boxing champion then gave us _Love’s Old Sweet Song_ and the heavy-weight champion popularly known as _Magulligan_, together with Mr. Bruno rendered _Bye low my Baby_, antiphonal fashion. The last number was furnished by a poilu who had wandered in, in company with one of the boys. He sang a long dramatic ballad, entitled _The Last Cuirassier_, depicting some incident in the Franco-Prussian War. Just what the boys made of it I don’t know, but to me it was intensely thrilling, not on account of the words for I couldn’t catch them, but on account of the fervor, the imaginative sympathy, the martial spirit which that old fellow in his faded trench coat threw into his tones.

When the show was over Pat stood up on the counter and announced that as long as all the performances had been of such superlative merit, it was impossible for the judges to decide between them. So we handed out a couple of packages of “smoking” to each one of the artists, and everybody was satisfied.

Once too we had a party, an athletic stunt party. There were potato-races and sack-races, string-eating contests, three-legged and obstacle-races; but the sensational, the crowning event was, of course, the pie-race. The pies which were of French manufacture had only been arranged after difficulties: consulting the _boulangère_ at Bourmont I had discovered that the calendar now only allows two pie-days per week, Sunday and Wednesday; since the party was to be Friday, pie was unlawful, unless—and here the law, like all good laws allowed a loop-hole—unless the pie be made with commissary flour! The pie-race was the “dark horse” on the programme. Fearing that if the boys learned beforehand of the prospective pie not only would we be mobbed by would-be contestants but also that their interest in the rest of the programme would suffer, we had kept the pie-race a profound secret. Smuggled in when the hut was empty those pies had reposed serenely under the counter all afternoon and contrary to my fears not a boy had sniffed them! When the proper moment came the pies were placed on a board in the middle of the floor, the contestants, of whom Pat was one, knelt with their hands tied behind them. At the word _go!_ they fell to. The hut howled. Then it was discovered that Corporal G. laboured under a cruel handicap; _his_ pie was a cherry pie and every cherry had a stone in it. Half-way through his pie, Pat, jerking one hand loose, seized a large piece, plastered it on the head of his opponent opposite; the race ended in a riot. Strangely enough, when peace was restored not a trace of pie could be found anywhere,—nowhere, that is, except in the back hair of the contestants.

Bourmont, January 6.

Now I know how the prince in the fairy tale felt when he was bidden to climb the mountain of glass. For Bourmont Hill is sheeted with ice, and it is fairly as much as one’s life is worth to attempt to go up or down. Every morning I stand and look at that dizzying slide aghast, and wonder if I may possibly reach the foot alive; then assistance comes, sometimes in the shape of a French lad in _sabots_, sometimes as a stalwart doughboy with a sharp-pointed staff, and together the two of us go slipping, slithering down the hill-side. In the middle of the road yelling doughboys, seated on cakes of ice, whiz by at a mad rate of speed; long before they reach the bottom of the slope, the ice-cake splinters into bits, but the doughboy shoots on downward, sprawling, spinning like a top, while you hold your breath and gape to see that his neck isn’t broken. For the French people all this supplies the sensation of a life-time; they crowd their front doors and their front yards laughing, shrieking warning or encouragement, as they watch the progress of the mad Americans up and down the hill.

“If one could only have a movie of Bourmont Hill on a day like this!” sighs the Gendarme.

The other day I encountered a sergeant of engineers on the hill-side.

“You ought to have a sled, Little Girl,” he told me.

“Well why don’t the engineers make me one?” I unthinkingly retorted.

“Sure and they will!” he answered.

Since then I have gone in terror. If the sergeant should have that sled made for me, as he likely will, why I shall have to use it. And as for starting down Bourmont Hill on a sled, I would just as soon attempt Niagara in a barrel.

Ever since Christmas it has been cold, bitter cold. At the canteen I wash my chocolate cups with the dishpan on the stove in order to keep the water fluid; hanging the dish-cloth up to dry at the corner of the counter, in a few minutes I find it stiff with ice. At night the ink-bottles freeze and then burst, spreading black ruin all around them. What to do with the still unfrozen ones is a vexing problem; I might I suppose take them home each night with me and sleep with them underneath my pillow. In the little umbrella-stand stoves the green wood, which comes in so freshly cut, that the logs have ivy still unwithered twined around them, simply will not burn, and the stoves will smoke, _mon Dieu_, how they will smoke! Every time the wind blows, the stove-pipes, secured shakily by the canvas walls, become disjointed, parting company with the stoves, and then the clouds pour forth as if we housed a captive Etna.

In the barracks the boys tell me their shoes freeze to the floor over night. They have taken to sleeping two in one bunk for the sake of warmth. Blanket-stealing has been elevated to the rank of a deadly crime. Even the problem of keeping warm by day is an acute one. The boys who have money to burn are spending it to purchase extravagantly priced fur-lined gloves. The boys who can’t afford them, wait until they see somebody lay a pair down.

The taking of baths has become an act of heroism.

“Took a bath today,” growls a lad. “Think I ought to get a service stripe for that.”

While another boy grins; “Gee but I’m feelin’ rich! Took a bath today and found two pair o’socks and three shirts I didn’t know I had!”

“Now ain’t you sorry you cut off the bottom of your coat!” a long-coated doughboy taunts an abbreviated one. “I told you not to. First, you’re out of luck at Reveille ’cause the Top Kick can see you ain’t got no leggin’s on. An’ now before you know it, you’ll be havin’ chilblains in your knees.”

“You should worry,” growls back the short-coated one. “I couldn’t stand that thing flappin’ ’round my feet no longer. An’ most of the other guys done it too.”

Which is true. Before this cold spell set in, half the boys in the company had taken a slice off the bottom of their overcoats, a procedure which leads to an odd effect _en masse_ as each has chosen his own length which means everything from knees to ankles, and drives the exasparated Loots to demanding; “D’you want to know what you look like? Well, you look like _hell_!”

In the village streets snow-ball fights are in order. As soon as the boys start an offensive, all the inhabitants of the _Faubourg de France_ run out and put up their shutters. Better to sit in the dark while the battle rages than to risk a pane of precious window-glass! Yesterday out at Iloud the boys caught the Y Secretary, a meek and mild little man, in the road and started to give him a thorough pelting. He ran for the hut, they chased him, he gained his refuge, locked the door after him; they proceeded to heap about half a ton of snow against it, making it immovable. The unhappy man had to remove a window frame and crawl out through the opening, then spend the rest of the afternoon digging out his hut door.

Here at our billet our little pea-green porcelain stove with the lavender thistles growing over it has proved to be more ornamental then useful. Since the Gendarme is one of your naturally efficient souls, I feel that such practical details as building fires belong to her. If she wishes to coax and cozen the wretched thing for an hour on end, well and good. As for me I prefer to go and hug the cook stove in Madame’s parlor. French fires don’t burn the way American fires do, I tell Madame. But to her the matter is quite simple. The stove, she says, doesn’t understand English.

Today I met the sergeant of engineers. Some imp impelled me to question jovially;

“Where’s that sled you promised me?”

“It’s almost done.” My knees went weak beneath me.

Tonight I confided my apprehensions to the Gendarme. She looked at me with an unpitying eye.

“The more goose you, for encouraging him,” was her cold comfort. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to pray for a thaw,” I told her.

Bourmont, January 8.

Life at the Maison Chaput doesn’t flow quite so peacefully these days as it did before Christmas. The disturbing factor is four-year old Max, left by his mother to visit his grandparents. Max is a spoiled child according to the Chaput point of view. He is expected to walk a chalk line with his little red felt toes, and failing this, he is spanked early and often. It is unlucky for him that the fagots by the hearth afford a continual supply of handy switches.

“The little Jesus will never bring you anything again at Christmas,” warns Grandmamma; “never again! And neither will the _Père Nicolas_!” Then she appeals to me; “All the little children in America are always well-behaved, are they not?”

“But yes, certainly!” I reply, avoiding Max’s eye.

Coming home in the evening I often stop on my way back to the chilly _Salle des Assiettes_, in response to an urgent invitation, to warm myself at the fireplace. Old Monsieur will be sitting on one side of the hearth and I on the other, while Baby Max toasts his toes in their scarlet slippers on a stool between us. Sometimes they will sing for me. Monsieur had a fine voice when he was young and even now he sings with a delightful air, a sort of indescribable old gallantry that is a joy to me. When he and Max sing together the effect is irresistible.

“Now we will sing _Le Drapeau de la France_,” cries Monsieur. “We must stand for this!” And Monsieur in his gay red neck cloth and little Max in his blue checked pinafore stand up before the fire and sing with their hearts in the words “_Saluons le drapeau de la France._” When they come to that line, Monsieur le Commandant veteran of 1870 and baby Max salute together.

Then, “_Vive la France!_” I cry, and “_Vive la France!_” they echo.

When new troops pass through town Max must always run to the door to cry “_Bonjour les Américans!_” a salutation which is often followed I fear by a request for cigarettes, for Max, baby that he is, enjoys a smoke, much to his grandparents’ amusement.

Among the china-ware at the Maison Chaput there is a funny little jug which the Gendarme and I use for fetching hot water. It is made in the shape of a fat frog with a blue waistcoat and a pipe in one of his webbed feet. I had thought it was the famous frog who would a-wooing go, but Monsieur has his own explanation. It is the original St. Thiebault toad he declares, to tease me. Every time I come to draw a little hot water from the stove he must crack the self-same joke.

“_C’est le crapaud de Saint Thiebault_,” he cries and baby Max pipes up; “_Il a soif!_”

Yesterday as I was passing through the front room on my way to the canteen Monsieur stopped me to draw me into conversation. There were several neighbors present. They gathered in a ring around me. I could see they had some weighty question to put to me. After a moment’s hesitation it came out:

“_Pourquoi_,” they demanded, “_pourquoi_, does the American soldier blow his nose with his fingers?”

I stared, taken aback. In order to make their meaning quite clear they illustrated with expressive gestures.

“Why,” I stammered, “does the poilu never do such a thing?”

“But never!” they declared in chorus. “The poilu always uses his handkerchief!” And again they illustrated in pantomime.

I labored to explain; the French climate had given the boys colds, and the question of laundry and clean handkerchiefs presented difficulties....

“But,” declared old Monsieur sagely, “in America I have heard it is the custom. There all the _haut monde_, it is said, lawyers, doctors, ministers, statesmen, blow their noses in that manner!”

This was too much. I hurried from the room.

This morning Monsieur accused me of being a coquette. Hotly I denied the charge. But why then, he rejoined triumphantly, had I asked for a looking-glass in my bed-room?

Bourmont, January 9.

Company A is going to China! Somebody heard somebody say that somebody told him that the Chaplain had said so. The boys are all excitement over the idea.

“Won’t that be jolly! You’ll all be coming home with little shiny pigtails hanging down your backs!” I tease them.

“Yes sir! an’ we’ll learn to eat our chow with chopsticks!” I have solemnly promised the boys that if Company A goes to China I will go too. What’s more I will learn to make Chop Suey for them. I have always wanted to visit China.

Thus does the army rumor make sport of us. Reports of this sort incessantly spring up among us, flourish for a day, to be forgotten on the morrow. It is just a sign I suppose of the restlessness that is rife among the boys, the nostalgia, the rebellion at the grinding monotony of their lives. Half the men in the company, it seems, have gone to their officers begging to be transferred into one of the two divisions that have already been in the lines.

“I’m sick o’ this kind o’ life; what I came over here for was to fight,” they growl.

In the canteen they look at the French National Loan poster which has the Statue of Liberty on it, and speculate as to their chances of ever seeing her again.

“Oh boy! but I bet there’ll be some noise on board ship when we catch sight o’ that ol’ gal again!”

“They wouldn’t be breakin’ my heart if they gave out orders tonight to start for home termorrer.” The chorus groans assent. “No sir!” speaks up Private Gatts, “I don’t want to go home until I’ve killed some of them Germans.”

“Aw, come off,” rises the incredulous jeer; “you know, if they’d let you, you’d start out to walk to Saint Nazaire tonight if you had to carry your full pack an’ your rife an’ your extra shoes.”

To beguile the tedium they indulge in what appears to be, next to crap-shooting, the most popular indoor sport of the A. E. F.—mustache raising. I don’t believe there’s a man in the company outside of Cummings and Maggioni who hasn’t tried his luck at it. Sometimes it seems as though an epidemic of young mustaches will break out overnight as it were. The second lieutenants jeer and witticize in vain. There is one squad who have solemnly pledged themselves to remain mustachioed until they “can the Kaiser;” but for the most part, the little “Charlies” are fleeting affairs that come and go according to their owner’s whim. This makes it quite confusing for me, because no sooner have I got to know a lad with a mustache by sight, than he shaves it off and alters his appearance so that I have to learn him all over again. But even the excitement of raising a mustache and having your picture taken and sending it back home to your best girl and then waiting to hear what she will say about it, affords only a brief diversion. And when that is done, we are face to face again with the stark sheer stupidity of drilling and hiking, hiking and drilling, day after day, week in and week out, in the slush, the mud, and the rain.

“Another day, another dollar,” remarks my friend Mr. Brady with philosophic resignation as he comes in from walking post at night, “Betsy the Toad-sticker,” as he familiarly terms his rifle, over his shoulder.

“I sure was strong on the patriotic stuff when I enlisted,” mourns a lad cast in a less stoic mould, “but since I got over here I’ll tell the world my patriotism is all shot to pieces.”

“Who called this here land _Sunny France_, I’d like to know?” is the indignant question which someone is bound to propose at least once a day.

“I’ve only seen the sun twice since I’ve been here,” complained one lad, “and then it was kind of mildewed.”

“It stopped raining for three hours the other day,” remarked another, “an’ I wrote home to my folks an’ told ’em what a long dry spell we’d been having.”

Altogether we are inclined to take a very pessimistic view at present of our surroundings.

“This land is a thousand years behind the times,” is the reiterated comment, and who can blame them, having seen nothing of France but these tiny primitive mud-and-muck villages? “It ain’t worth fightin’ for. Why if I owned this country I’d give it to the Germans and apologize to ’em.”

“It ain’t the country, it’s the people in it,” asserted another lad darkly.

While the Tall Kentuckian declared, “When I came to France, the height of my ambition was to kill a German. Now the height of my ambition is to kill a Frenchman.”

What can one say to them? I try fatuously to comfort by reminding them of the good time coming when we all get home again. I paint rosy pictures of a grand parade of the division up Fifth Avenue, but they are sceptical.

“Huh! That won’t be for us! All the fuss will be for the National Guard and the draft guys. The reg’lars don’t never get no credit.”

Then someone will start to hum the song which goes;

“O why didn’t I wait to be drafted?
Why didn’t I wait to be cheered?”

“Well I’ll tell the world that you deserve the credit!”

Anyway Company A has settled one point: if they ever march up Fifth Avenue I am to march with them.

Bourmont, January 11.

The “convicts” are out of quarantine, and none the worse it seems for the experience. Yet my family is still depleted. Forty boys from the company have been sent out on a wood-chopping detail. Detachments from each of the four companies in rotation are being sent out into the forest to cut fuel for the use of the First Battalion and now it is our turn.

The boys, we learn, are billeted in a twelfth century fortress in a tiny village at the forest’s edge. From time to time some of them hike the four miles in to Saint Thiebault after the day’s work is done, in order to get a cup of hot chocolate and to tease a candle out of me. For the chateau boasts none of the modern luxuries of heat and light.

“What do you do in the evenings?” I asked Mr. Gatts.

“Sit in the _café_. It’s the only place there is to go.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Well you needn’t worry about the boys drinkin’. They ain’t none of them got no money. All they can do is to sit and watch the Frenchies.”

Indeed such a long time has passed since our last payday that the whole company is feeling the pinch of poverty. Canteen sales have narrowed down to the three essentials; chocolate, cigarettes and chewing gum. I am running accounts on my personal responsibility, giving them “jawbone” as the boys say, a proceeding at which our Secretary looks with a disapproving eye. To be sure the air is full of rumours of impending payday but meanwhile there is no disguising the fact that the great majority is “dead broke.”

Says Sergeant X to Sergeant Z, a boy with a curious cast of countenance; “Say, Bill, do you remember the time I paid ten cents to see you in a cage at Barnum’s? Well I want that dime back now.”

Another lad in answer to the appeal of “got a cent?” replies with feeling; “One cent? Why man, if I had a cent I’d go to Paris!”

They have court-martialed the lieutenant who beat Malotzzi. His punishment is to be transferred to another regiment.

Bourmont, January 14.

Madame is sick and I am worried. It isn’t so much that she is dangerously ill as that she is dangerously old. She lies in the big blue room upstairs, looking like a patient aged Madonna, without a fire, and with no one to look after her. Monsieur it seems has made up his mind to her demise and piously resigned himself. I called in an army doctor.

“She’s pretty low,” he said, “but it isn’t medicine she needs so much as nursing.”

I informed Monsieur. He must get a woman to come in and take care of her. But there was no such woman. He must try to find one. But no, it was impossible! “Well at least, you can make a fire in her room,” I told him. As for _La Petite_, she has proved herself a broken reed. Lacking Madame’s rigid eyes upon her, she has become lazy and negligent. Moreover she is indubitably in love with some doughty doughboy, the proof being that she spends the time when she should be gathering the harvest of dust from the _Salle des Assiettes_ in copying English phrases from our books on to the Gendarme’s pink blotting-paper. Yesterday we found “Welcome Americans” scrawled all over it. Meanwhile Monsieur seems to consider himself as qualifying for a martyr’s crown because he gets his own meals and washes his own dishes. “_Mais, regardez Mademoiselle!_” he calls to me as I pass through the living-room, and flourishes the dish-cloth at me with a tragic air. So between excursions to the canteen I am trying to play nurse to Madame, and a pretty poor one I make, I fear. Worse still, I must act as interpreter for the Doctor, whose French is absolutely nil, at every visit and since my scanty stock of French phrases hardly includes a sick-room vocabulary I am often absolutely at a loss. But we muddle through somehow and the Doctor gets his reward when we stop to speak to Monsieur in the front-room afterwards, for then Monsieur must bring out a bottle of champagne and together they sit in front of the fire and toast each other.

Yesterday the Doctor prescribed fresh eggs. I told Monsieur. But there were none in Bourmont he declared.

“Very well,” I said, “then I’ll get them.”

I started out to search. I knew of course that eggs in France these days were difficult. In some places the Americans have been forbidden, on account of the scarcity, to buy either eggs or chickens; a ruling which officers have been known to evade by the simple expedient of renting laying hens. But no such prohibition exists at present in Saint Thiebault. Just the other day a lad told me he had consumed twelve fried eggs at one sitting.

“Yes and Corporal G. ate more than I did.”

“How many did he eat?”

“Oh, just thirteen.”

“No wonder,” I observed, “that the French talk about _la famine_!” I started a house-to-house canvas of Saint Thiebault only to be met by a shake of the head and “_Pas des oeufs_” everywhere I went. Finally back at the canteen I put the question in despair to the boys. “Have you been to the tobacco shop?” they inquired. So to the tobacco shop I hurried and sure enough there they were, all one wanted at the rate of seven francs a dozen.

Last night Madame had an egg-nogg and this morning an omelette. Now the Doctor says that she is better.

Bourmont, January 17.

If my fairy god-mother should lend me her magic wand, the very first thing I would wish for would be a dinner, a real dinner just like Mother used to cook, for Company A. It would start with turkey and cranberry sauce and end with several kinds of pie, ice-cream and chocolate layer cake. There would be no soup on the menu. Such a meal I am sure would do more to raise the morale of Company A than the news of a smashing allied victory. It is the everlasting sameness, the perpetual reiteration of a certain few articles of food, I suppose, that makes the boys’ “chow” so depressing.

“I’ve eaten so much bacon since I’ve been in the army,” remarked one boy mournfully,” that I’m ashamed to look a pig in the face.”

There is one question which the whole A. E. F. would like to have answered. They’ve “got the bacon,” but what became of the ham?

Far more hated than the bacon, however, is the “slum,” a word which Pat informs me is derived from the “slumgullion” of the hobo. It is this “slum” that gives the doughboy his horror of anything like soup.

“When I get back to New York,” said a lad to me the other day, “I’m going to go into a real swell hotel and order a big dish o’ slum. Then I’m going to order a regular dinner, beefsteak and oysters and all the fixings, and then I’m going to sit and laugh at the slum.”

Pat came in with a whoop after dinner yesterday. “We had a change today,” he sang out, “they put a pickle in the beans!” This noon he bounced in again. “We had a change today,” he shouted, “they cut the beans lengthwise instead of cuttin’ them acrosst.”

I made a fatal error. “Don’t you like beans?” I asked. “Why I’m very fond of them. I wish they’d give them to us at our mess once in a while.”

Pat looked at me with his sharp eyes narrowing. “D’you mean it?”

“Why of course I do!”

He turned and walked out of the hut. Two minutes later he returned with a hunk of bread and a mess-kit brimfull of beans; he laid them on the counter in front of me. I gasped but did my best to rise to the occasion. I was delighted to see those beans, I assured him. I had just been starting out to go to mess; a little bird had told me they were to have roast pork, French fries, and peach pie for dinner, but now I would stay at the hut and eat beans instead. Then I tasted the beans. They were as hard as bullets, they stuck in my throat; I had never known anything could be quite so awful. But Pat’s eyes were upon me. There was nothing for it but to swallow those beans. So swallow them I did, every last one, and there were positively at least a thousand. Then I washed the mess-kit and returned it to friend Pat with effusive thanks. At least, I complimented myself, I had been game. Tonight, just as I was starting out for my supper of toast and chocolate with the little old ladies of the Rue Dieu, Pat suddenly appeared on the other side of the counter.

“We had ’em again tonight,” he announced joyfully, “and I thought since you were so fond of ’em,”—he pushed another mess-kit full of beans across the counter. I glared at him. I had vainly been trying to recover from the dinner beans all afternoon.

“Take those things away,” I snapped, “I don’t want to lay eyes on another bean as long as ever I live!” Pat had called my bluff.

For the last week Company A has had guests in the mess-hall. Several French soldiers have been sent here to instruct the boys in some special drill; it was arranged that they eat and sleep with the Americans. Dreary as the boys find their chow, it proved a treat to the poilus who evidently spread the news of their good fortune among their friends in the vicinity, for day by day the number of Frenchmen messing with Company A was mysteriously increased.

“Yes sir!” the indignant Mess Sergeant declared to me. “They started in with five and now they’ve grown to be fifteen. I can’t tell one from t’other because all these frogs look alike to me, and they know as how I can’t sling their lingo. That’s a nice thing for them to be putting over on me!”

But yesterday he got his chance to get even. He caught one of the Frenchmen putting a piece of bread in his pocket. It is of course a military offense to carry food out of the mess-hall.

“I just sailed right into that guy”—the Mess Sergeant is a large and husky specimen—“and I sure did wipe up the floor some with him. And since then the whole gang of ’em has been scared stiff. Those frogs just watch me all the time. There ain’t a minute when I’m in the mess-hall that one of ’em takes his eyes off me.”

The other day, they tell me, one of the boys in the company, possessed of a practical turn, employed his newly-issued “tin derby” as a kettle in which to boil some eggs. The delicacy proved dear. Betrayed by the blackened helmet, he was tried and fined twenty dollars.

Bourmont, January 20.

I’m off for Paris! My eyes have been in a horrid state for the last week. I have had all the doctors in the neighborhood treating them and they only get worse and worse. The Chief is going up to Paris tomorrow and has decided that the best thing to do is to take me along to see a specialist.