“Hell, no—not at Brest, that must have been a good town in them days. There was a rule made at the beginning of the war not to give this division anything good. We stayed in Brest that night and started for St. Nazaire _toot sweet_ the next day. God help anybody, even the M. P.’s who had to fight the _guerre_ in St. Nazaire. That town is the first place the Lord made and He forgot about it ten minutes after putting it up. It’s worse than the town old Bill Blodgett comes from. “Well, we got in the harbor there ’bout two o’clock. It was kinda foggy and rainin’ off and on. ’Ain’t quit since then. Still they call it ‘Sunny France.’ After a lot of waitin’ around they shoved us in the canal locks, and I’m a liar if we didn’t go right through the middle of the town. Some of the houses on both sides of the locks looked like twins or else as if they had been pushed apart so as the canal could run through the town. “Guess the first impression I got was that the Americans was still a new play toy for the French, ’cause there was a gang of kids and people runnin’ up and down the docks shoutin’ and wavin’ to us. Then I began to notice the buildings—whew! They looked old enough to be great-grandfathers to some of those four-hundred-year-old houses down in St. Augustine, Florida. Most of ’em had _Café_ or _Van Rouge_ written all over them. I never saw so many _cafés_ in all my life. Course the French people looked funny as hell to us. Some were all dolled up in fine clothes and others looked as if they would catch cold for want of somethin’ to cover them. There was more soldiers walkin’ up and down on the piers than we had in the whole American army at that time. I thought we must be pretty near the front as there was so many. Some of the Frenchmen wore helmets. That’s about all that most of the Frogs have got left now. Never saw so many widows in all my days. Most of the women who was dressed up at all wore black and long veils. They made me think ’bout the war, and I felt kinda good ’cause there wasn’t any woman to wear black in case I got knocked off at the front. “Some Americans, who acted as though they had just bought the town and could end the war with a snap of their fingers, came down to the edge of the locks and began shootin’ the bull. Most of the Americans wanted to know how the football games were coming off in the States. We told them we didn’t know as they hadn’t started good when we left. I had to explain to one guy that we didn’t come over on an express and that it took nearly a month to get here. He began tellin’ me where we could get our money changed and where the best champagne was and how to do things in general while in France. I asked him if he had been to the front yet and he said, ‘Oh no, I’m a receivin’-clerk, with the grade of corporal.’ ‘The hell you are! I thought you had been up endin’ the war,’ says I. But he didn’t seem to get my meanin’.