I suggested that the American army was in process of upheaval in a good many directions, and he agreed with me. I ought not to leave the Africans without paying a tribute to the American negroes who by thousands are helping to build camps and railroads and docks in southern France. And in many other parts of France as well. They are doing splendid work and behaving wonderfully well. France is bewildering to these men, and one of the most bewildering things is the fact that it has a dark-skinned population which does not speak United States. It is enough to rattle any good-natured black man from a Louisiana rice field to speak to a brother laborer and have him answer back in French or Arabic. “Go ’way with tha’ talk,” he exclaims. “You ain’t no real colored man nohow. Cain’t speak your own language.” But if the colored American is short on language in a foreign land he is all there when it comes to imagination. Some of the men from the far South are illiterate, but the majority can read and write, and according to the regimental censors some of the letters they write home to the folks must keep Georgia and Mississippi neighborhoods keyed up to the boiling point of excitement. Hundreds of miles removed from the fighting lines does not prevent the letters from dripping gore. “Just back from a hard day in the trenches,” writes a man whose job is working on a slag heap. “I tell you we done some bloody work. I tell you. We killed a hundred Germans in one trench and cut um up like sausage meat. I cut a officer’s head clean off with my bayonet. I cuts Germans ears off when I kills um. I got a whole string of ears in my bunkhouse. Write soon, ’cause I might get hit with one of them big guns and killed.” These lurid recitals emanate from the gentlest and most childlike of all our enlisted forces. They sit around evenings in the Y. M. C. A. huts reserved for them, eat candy, look at illustrated papers and sing their plantation and campmeeting songs in voices sweet and lonely. The French children creep up to the doors and windows of the huts to look and listen in wonder. Of all the queer and fascinating Americans in their land the colored men are the queerest and most fascinating. If it were not for the children and their shy friendliness I don’t know what the colored fellow would do, for he is very, very far from home. CHAPTER VI GOING TO SCHOOL IN THE ARMY Ridiculing and belittling the American army in France is no longer the great indoor sport of the German government. It was the last one the government has left and until lately it was played desperately with the view of diverting the minds of the people, and keeping hope alive in their sinking hearts.