In part, this sense of grievance, as I see it, is justifiable. An officer told me not long ago that he had recently been left behind when his outfit moved out from a village, as “Mop Up Officer” to settle the claims of the townspeople for damage done by the soldiers during their stay,—a pane of glass, a truss of straw, the tine of a pitchfork. Hearing a commotion in the town square he looked out; the town crier was announcing to the populace that now the Americans had gone the price of wine would be cut from five francs a bottle to two. But in part this sense of grievance is unjustifiable, for the American has in no small measure brought this state of affairs upon himself. From the start the doughboy’s disgust with the flimsy paper bills and the puzzling tricky scheme of the francs, sous and centimes engendered a carelessness toward French money which the tradespeople took as a delightful indication of unlimited wealth. “But everyone is rich in America!” I have heard them declare with childish conviction. So prices began to rise and presently, with the prices, the doughboy’s resentment, and then the poilu’s; for the rise automatically put all luxuries out of the French soldier’s reach and this of course he in turn blamed bitterly on the “rich” American. Indeed the sending of a large body of men paid at the rate of a dollar a day into a country where the native troops were paid at the rate of five cents a day was a social-economic error which somehow, say by some system of reserve pay such as the Australians have, should have been avoided. Then too, the American won’t haggle. The Frenchman, as a rule, won’t buy unless he can. Prices are fixed with the expectation of a compromise after bargaining. Not easily shall I forget a dramatic scene witnessed at the “Rag Fair” at the Porte Maillot in Paris between a prosperous householder and a “rag” seller over a second-hand padlock. The seller remained firm in demanding six cents for the padlock. The householder was equally determined not to pay more than five. Finally the householder with great dignity withdrew, only to be called back by a despairing yelp from the seller. He had capitulated. To the American such a performance seems both tedious and undignified; he either takes the article at the first price asked or leaves it. Nor can it be denied that the doughboy tends to be a bit of a prodigal. Chief of his spendthrift weaknesses are two; he will pay almost any price for sweets, sink almost any sum in a present for his girl. Then too the universal custom of gambling in the army, leading to swollen fortunes for the favoured ones, has helped to establish standards of extravagance. An officer in charge of a company belonging to a negro labor regiment told me of seeing two of his boys in a café sit down to a twenty-five franc bottle of champagne and then, the taste for some reason not quite suiting their fancies, walk out leaving the bottle practically untouched behind!