Yesterday I was talking with an engineer from Tours. He and his fireman had just brought a Belgian engine up from that city for use in the Abainville yards. The attitude of the train crew who received it was plainly “thank-you-for-nothing-sirs!”, Belgian engines being none too popular with A. E. F. railroad men. The two crews sat in the hut for a long while holding a symposium over the Belgian engine’s oddities; at last the home crew departed, looking very glum. In the course of my subsequent conversation with the visiting engineer I happened to ask: “Would you vote for Pershing for president?” “No sir!” he answered emphatically. “All the railroad men over here have got it in for him.” He went on to explain. French railroad engineers are allowed a certain amount of coal and oil with which to make their runs; for anything that they can save out of this, they are reimbursed. This idea appealed to the American train crews who were attached to the French. They set to work and saved,—far more than the French were able to! The French proceeded to depreciate the quality of coal allowed them, instead of giving them half dust and half briquets, they gave them three-quarters dust and finally all dust yet still the Americans were able to beat the French at saving. And each man in fancy was rolling up a tidy little sum for himself. “And then,” continued my informant, “Pershing came out and said that we weren’t here to make money off the French, but to help them, so we weren’t to get the money for all the coal and oil we had saved after all. And that’s why there isn’t a railroad man in France who has any use for him.” How much of politics could be reduced, I wonder, to a mere question of pocketbook? He went on to tell me among other things that although a French conductor would be furious if you stopped a train in the middle of a run for any other reason, if you just said; “Come on, ol’ top, and have a bottle of _vin rouge_ on me,” he was all beaming acquiescence. “Just imagine,” he concluded disgustedly, “stopping a main-line train in America so the crew could go into a saloon and get a drink!” Abainville, July 14. The Bastille has fallen! We celebrated its fall today with much enthusiasm. Ostensibly in order to signalize the Franco-American Alliance, the festivities in reality were planned as propaganda of a different sort. Surreptitiously but quite definitely the end and aim of them was to flatter the Major.