“When you go out to-morrow,” he said, “you’ll observe that none of the
army cars is without its symbol. An artillery car has its picture of a
gun. Then there are different symbols for the different divisions. I
saw one the other day with three interrogation marks painted on it. I
inquired what they meant and was told the car belonged to the Watts
division. Do you see why?”
I admitted that I did.
“Well, I didn’t,” said the major, “not till it was explained. It’s
rather stupid, I think.”
This afternoon an American captain, anonymous of course, called on us.
He is stopping at G. H. Q., which is short for General Headquarters,
his job being to study the British strategic methods. He and the major
discussed the differences between Americans and Englishmen.
“The chief difference is in temperature,” said the captain. “You
fellows are about as warm as a glacier. In America I go up to a man
and say: ‘My name is Captain So-an-So.’ He replies: ‘Mine is Colonel
Such-and-Such.’ Then we shake hands and talk. But if I go to an
Englishman and say: ‘My name is Captain So-and-So,’ he says: ‘Oh!’ So
I’m embarrassed to death and can’t talk.”
“’Strawnary!” said the major.
At tea time a courier brought us the tidings that there’d been an air
raid last Sunday at a certain hospital base.
“The boche always does his dirty work on Sunday,” remarked the American
captain. “It’s queer, too, because that’s the day that’s supposed to
be kept holy, and I don’t see how the Kaiser squares himself with his
friend Gott.”
I laughed, but the major managed to remain calm.
The American captain departed after tea, and the major and I sat
and bored each other till the Harvard professor and his illustrious
companions returned. They told me I missed a very interesting trip.
That’s the kind of trip one usually misses.
At dinner we resumed our enlightening discussion of Chinese, but
it was interrupted when the major was called to the telephone. The
message was from the captain who was supposed to meet Mr. Gibbons and
Mr. O’Flaherty and take them to the trenches to spend the night. The
captain reported that his machine had broken down with magneto trouble
and he’d been unable to keep his appointment. He requested that the
major have Mr. Gibbons and Mr. O’Flaherty located and brought home.
This was done. The disappointed correspondents blew in shortly before
closing time and confided to me their suspicion that the trouble with
the captain’s machine had not been magneto, but (the censor cut out a
good line here).
To-morrow we are to be shown the main British training school and the
hospital bases.
_Friday, September 7. With the British._
We left the château at nine and reached the training camp an hour later.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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