We traveled many miles from the field gun school before we came to the camp of the heavies. This, too, was a French school which had been partially taken over by the Americans. The work was less interesting here, for the men were not firing the guns yet, but studying their mechanism and going through the motions of putting them in action. Many of the officers attached to the heavies were coast artillerymen and there was a liberal sprinkling of young reserve officers who had come over after a little preliminary training at Fortress Monroe. The General in charge of the camp told us that these new officers would soon be as good as the best because the most important requirement was a technical education and these men had all had college scientific training or its equivalent. Just then they were all at school again cramming with all the available textbooks about French big guns. They did not need to depend on textbooks alone, for the camp contained types of most styles of French artillery. The pride of the contingent was a monster mounted on railroad trucks. It fired a projectile weighing 1800 pounds. After the French custom, the big howitzer had been honored by a name. "Mosquito" was painted on the carriage in huge green letters. "We call her mosquito," explained a French officer, "because she stings." "Mosquito" had buzzed no less than three hundred times at Verdun, but she had a number of stings left. The Americans detailed with the gun were loud in its praises and asserted that it was the finest weapon in the world. There were other guns, though, which had their partisans. Some swore by "Petite Lulu," a squat howitzer, which could throw a shell high enough to clear Pike's Peak and still have something to spare. There were champions also of "Gaby," a long nosed creature which outranged all the rest. Marcel could talk a little faster than any gun in camp, but her words carried less weight. All the menial work about the camp was done by German prisoners. I was walking through the camp one day when I saw a little tow-headed soldier sitting at the doorstep of his barracks watching a file of Germans shuffle by. They were men who had started to war with guns on their shoulders, but now they carried brooms. "Do you ever speak to the German prisoners?" I asked the soldier. "Oh, yes," said the youngster; "some of them speak English, and they say 'Hello' to me and I say 'Hello' back to them. I feel sorry for them." The little soldier looked at the shabby procession again and then he leaned over to me confidentially and said with great earnestness as if he had made up the phrase on the spot: "You know I have no quarrel with the German people."