But for once his sign language failed him. He was offered everything in the store from a screw-driver to an egg-beater and only achieved the trap finally by stumbling over one on the floor. It was a French trap to be baited with flour and sewed up with thread; I looked at it skeptically, but the next morning we had caught a mouse. However today it was K. P. cookies as usual. “Bill,” I said, “you’ll have to borrow Iodine.” Iodine is the Medical Sergeant’s cat. “Aw shucks,” says Bill, “Iodine is a frog cat. She wouldn’t look at a mouse unless you served it to her on a platter dressed with garlic.” Bill says no home is complete without a dog. I quite agree with him. Only, I say, we must catch him young so we can bring him up in the way he should go. These French dogs for the most part seem to have neither manners nor morals. So Bill is keeping an eye out for a likely puppy. “But,” he said, “when we close up here, the only way we’ll be able to settle it between us will be to make him into sausages.” If we ever do get a dog I think I shall call him “Tin Hat” just because every other dog in the A. E. F. is named “Cognac.” Mauvages, November 20. Our relations to the French populace are enough to try a diplomat. Hardly a day passes in the hut but what some delicate social or ethical problem arises. First, there is Louis, a most disreputable old scamp if there ever was one. He keeps the café across the street and so is my deadly rival. The other day the old rascal appeared at my counter grinning from ear to ear, and demanded “_bonbons pour le rheum_,” producing, in witness of his urgent need, a feeble and patently artificial cough. When I answered that unfortunately we had none, he instantly substituted chocolate in his request. Unable to resist the rapscallion’s grin I gave him a handful, whereat in beaming gratitude he immediately invited me over to the café to have a glass of wine at his expense. And when I hastily informed him that I didn’t care for wine he genially amended the invitation so that it stood, “glass of beer.” And now I am told by the boys that he has announced that I, forsooth, am his “fiancée!” But chiefly there is Rebecca. We call her Rebecca because when Bill goes to the well to get a pail of water he usually happens to meet her there. Rebecca is thin and dark and lively. Her English vocabulary includes such phrases as “beeg steef” and “Mek eet snappee!” She is, as the boys put it, “full of pep.” Rebecca has a little black and villainous-looking husband who occasionally appears in town from the trenches, but for the most part she is free to follow where her fancy leads. If it should ever lead her to confession I am afraid she would make the old Curé’s eyebrows curl.