If my fairy god-mother should lend me her magic wand, the very first thing I would wish for would be a dinner, a real dinner just like Mother used to cook, for Company A. It would start with turkey and cranberry sauce and end with several kinds of pie, ice-cream and chocolate layer cake. There would be no soup on the menu. Such a meal I am sure would do more to raise the morale of Company A than the news of a smashing allied victory. It is the everlasting sameness, the perpetual reiteration of a certain few articles of food, I suppose, that makes the boys’ “chow” so depressing. “I’ve eaten so much bacon since I’ve been in the army,” remarked one boy mournfully,” that I’m ashamed to look a pig in the face.” There is one question which the whole A. E. F. would like to have answered. They’ve “got the bacon,” but what became of the ham? Far more hated than the bacon, however, is the “slum,” a word which Pat informs me is derived from the “slumgullion” of the hobo. It is this “slum” that gives the doughboy his horror of anything like soup. “When I get back to New York,” said a lad to me the other day, “I’m going to go into a real swell hotel and order a big dish o’ slum. Then I’m going to order a regular dinner, beefsteak and oysters and all the fixings, and then I’m going to sit and laugh at the slum.” Pat came in with a whoop after dinner yesterday. “We had a change today,” he sang out, “they put a pickle in the beans!” This noon he bounced in again. “We had a change today,” he shouted, “they cut the beans lengthwise instead of cuttin’ them acrosst.” I made a fatal error. “Don’t you like beans?” I asked. “Why I’m very fond of them. I wish they’d give them to us at our mess once in a while.” Pat looked at me with his sharp eyes narrowing. “D’you mean it?” “Why of course I do!” He turned and walked out of the hut. Two minutes later he returned with a hunk of bread and a mess-kit brimfull of beans; he laid them on the counter in front of me. I gasped but did my best to rise to the occasion. I was delighted to see those beans, I assured him. I had just been starting out to go to mess; a little bird had told me they were to have roast pork, French fries, and peach pie for dinner, but now I would stay at the hut and eat beans instead. Then I tasted the beans. They were as hard as bullets, they stuck in my throat; I had never known anything could be quite so awful. But Pat’s eyes were upon me. There was nothing for it but to swallow those beans. So swallow them I did, every last one, and there were positively at least a thousand. Then I washed the mess-kit and returned it to friend Pat with effusive thanks. At least, I complimented myself, I had been game. Tonight, just as I was starting out for my supper of toast and chocolate with the little old ladies of the Rue Dieu, Pat suddenly appeared on the other side of the counter.