They were the most confident lot of men I ever saw. This was the first visit to Paris for most of them. They had been out there for two years, getting leave only among the little villages back of the line, but they didn’t seem to mind going back to the trenches. And they were always talking about the war and their campaigns. The soldiers of other nations seemed fed up with it, but not so with the Canadians. Why, I heard two of them, a private and a captain, in a heated argument across a table as to how they could capture Lens without letting the Germans destroy the coal mines. The private leaned over and poked the captain in the stomach to emphasize a point, and the captain tried to out-shout his companion. One would have thought them to be a couple of privates. On the morning of the third day we left Paris for our port. Dave Tibbott, a classmate of mine, practiced talking French to a lad in the train, and Bill Rahill said “_Oui_” and “_Voilà_” to a pretty girl who shared the compartment. She seemed to be partial to Bill’s smile, for we all had him beaten on slinging the French. When she left the train, Bill helped her out and kissed her hand by way of farewell. When we kidded him about it, he defended himself on the ground that they did such things in France and one must follow the customs of the country. We had many yarns to spin when we boarded our ship and we were careful to tell the boys about the fine baths in the hotel, although we omitted the fact that there was no hot water. When we described the wonderful soft beds, it looked as though there might be a lot of desertions from the _Corsair_. * * * * * I saw many interesting sights during my stay in French waters, but my eyes went bad and they put me ashore where I stayed a month and a half waiting for a ship to take me home. I was finally sent back to the United States in August and, to my great sorrow, received a medical discharge. The life is hard in the Navy in the war zone, harder than anything I had ever done before, but I would give ten years of my life to have been able to stick it out with the boys on the old _Corsair_ and do my share. FOOTNOTES: [1] See Chapter XIV. [2] Returned home on ship twenty-three months later. [3] Destroyer _Cummings_. CHAPTER III AT SEA WITH THE BRETON PATROL