This morning we decided it wouldn’t be clubby to have breakfast
before we had rescued Howard and the car. We went to a garage which
was equipped with a beautiful lady, but no automobiles nor tow-ropes.
We found a livery stable that had every thing but a horse. We
commandeered a young man’s delivery cart from in front of a grocery
store and drove out to the scene of our car’s demise. Howard and the
corpse were still there. Howard thought it would be a good idea to
go to the nearest farm-house and rent a horse and a rope from the
proprietor. The proprietor was very ignorant. He couldn’t understand
our French. But in his employ was a German prisoner who could talk his
own language and ours and the funny one that is prevalent round here.
He explained our wants to the farmer and there ensued a few moments
of haggling over price. We finally rented two horses and a rope for
fifty francs and dragged the car back to town. From the looks of it, in
daylight, I would say the economical course would have been to leave it
out there in the road and keep the fifty francs.
The garage man says, in English, that he can make the necessary
“reparations” in three weeks. So far as I’m concerned, he can devote
three years to the job. Hereafter I’ll do my cross-country flitting
about on a train.
It’s on one now, Paris bound, that I’m writing. There is nothing to do
but write, for Howard is getting the sleep he missed last night and Joe
is too angry to talk. He has spoken one sentence since we got up this
morning.
“This is a queer war,” he said.
IV
FINALLY I GET TO THE AMERICAN CAMP; WHAT I FIND THERE
_Thursday, August 30. At an American Camp._
Me and a regular American correspondent, Mr. Bazin, who has been here
since before the war, but is still good-natured, took the train from
Paris this morning and reached our destination shortly after lunch
time. This is one of a string of villages in which the main body of the
Expeditionary Forces are billeted.
We were met at the train by one of the correspondents’ cars, a regular
he-man of a car from home, with eight cylinders and everything. Each
correspondent rents a seat in one of the machines at a cost of sixty
dollars a week. For this trifling sum he may be driven anywhere he
wants to go along the line.
The correspondents have a tough life. They are quartered in a
good--judged by French standards--hotel, and are not what you could
call overworked. There is nothing to write about, and if you wrote
about it you probably couldn’t get it through.
Mr. Corey, one of these slaves, invited me to accompany him to an
infantry billet, some eighteen miles distant. We sailed along over
the perfect roads at an average speed of about sixty, slowing up in
the villages to dodge a harmless course among the cows, chickens
and children, all of whom use the middle of Main Street for their
playground.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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