The M. P.s live in the hotel next door. Naturally we see a good deal of them. I try to treat them extra nicely because I feel sorry for them. They can’t help being M. P.s any more than they can help being unpopular. And though many of them go about with a chip on their shoulders and an attitude of I-don’t-give-a-tinker’s-damn, still to know that you are anathema to the major portion of the A. E. F., to be publicly referred to as Misery Providers, Mademoiselle Promenades, and Military Pests, besides being made the subject of songs such as; _Mother take down your service flag, Your son is only an M. P._, must be galling to the most insensitive. Just as soon as the armistice was signed the doughboys started in to pester the M. P.s with the classic taunt: “Who won the war?—The M. P.s!” For a long while the M. P.s could think of no more crushing rejoinder than the time-honored; “Aw, go to hell!” But lately some bright soul has hit upon a bit of repartee that goes far to salve the M. P.s’ self-respect. Now if a soldier is so rash as to jeer; “Who won the war? The M. P.s!” the response comes instantly: “Yep! They chased the doughboys up front!” There are two M. P.s from the detachment next door who have lately joined themselves to our family. Like Slim, they came unsolicited, and like Slim, they stick. They are known respectively as the Littlest M. P. and the Fattest M. P. The Littlest M. P. is a pest. I feel sorry for him because he is so young and has no mother; otherwise there would be no tolerating him. He hangs about the canteen from morning until late at night under pretence of assisting us, and eats and eats and eats and eats. The other day I heard him proudly averring that he hadn’t taken a meal in the mess-hall for two weeks, and I believed him. Yet when you ask him to do any particular piece of work, like filling up the wood box or fetching a pail of water, in return for his board, he always has some perfectly good reason for not doing it. Besides which, he has no morals. The other day he confided to me triumphantly that the reason that they didn’t put him on guard work was that they knew he would take money to let men into cafés at prohibited hours. He went on to tell me about the town of S. “That was a good place, you could get twenty-five francs for lettin’ a feller into a café out of hours there.” I have tried to find out what he does in return for Uncle Sam’s dollar a day and have discovered that his job is sweeping out the halls in the M. P. Hotel. “But I skip about twenty feet at each end every time, so it don’t take me more’n ten minutes.” Yesterday morning he came in with an air of righteousness rewarded. “I told ’em I’d got to have help on that job,” he announced, “so they put another feller on too.”