Occasionally the reverse will work however, and a boy, grinning and abashed, will select a handkerchief marked “Dear Wife” to send to his sweetheart. Sometimes during these sales one’s faith in the single heartedness of Young America receives a shock, as when an innocent-looking lad will blandly select half a dozen “Dear Sweethearts” and put each in a separate envelope to send to a different girl! Speaking of souvenirs, there is a boy who acts as fireman on the dinky little engine that pulls the work-train on the narrow-gauge between Mauvages and Sauvoy. He belongs to a regiment of engineers who served with the British in Flanders for some eight months. While there he dug up enough dead Germans,—“You could always tell where they were buried because the grass grew so much greener there,” he explained,—and picked enough gold fillings out of their teeth, to make a whole match box full. He was going to take it home and have a dentist put the gold in his teeth “for a souvenir,” but unluckily in the spring drive he lost all his possessions and the match box with them. Now this, as Kipling would say, is a true story. Mauvages, November 30. Let me recount to you the gentle tale of the German prisoners and the Thanksgiving movies, an incident which I consider a sort of sermon in a nutshell and a Warning to the Nations. Unluckily there is in this division a secretary who is a sentimentalist. He has an idea that an important part of his object in France is “to enliven the long evenings of the French villagers,” and particularly does he consider it his Christian duty to do something to demonstrate how much we love the poor German prisoners, those gentlemen who wear the big P. G. for _Prisonnier de Guerre_ on their backs and “ought,” as the boys say, “to have an I in the middle.” There are several hundred of them in a camp at Gondrecourt and they are, it is said, just as well housed and fed as our boys, and not made to work nearly as hard. Now, as there was no other sort of entertainment available, I had set my heart on having movies in my hut on Thanksgiving. I had presented my request at the Headquarters office and understood the matter settled. But the Sentimental Secretary it seems had made up his mind that the poor dear German prisoners must have a treat and, other schemes falling through, he also put in a request for the movies. There was only one portable machine in working order. Through some misunderstanding or something in the office, the P. G.s got the movies. To enlarge upon my sentiments when the news was broken to me Thursday morning or to record the opinions expressed by the boys in regard to the matter, is not to the purpose of this tale.