“While I was gettin’ away with the _petite dayjunay_—as madame called what I was monjayin’—she told me that her _marrieh_, her husband, was a lieutenant in the Frog artillery—_swasont kans_—which means the same as our three-inch pieces. Showed me _beaucoup_ pictures of the old man and lots of souvenirs. He’d been in the _guerre_ three and a half years—wounded three times. I began thinkin’ that us Americans didn’t have so much kick comin’ bein’ as how we were about four years late in gettin’ in against the Kaiser. “When Louise came home from school she took me out for a walk. Say, you ought to have seen the guys pike me off. ‘What you doin’, Jimmy, teachin’ kindergarten?’ lots of ’em asked me. I told ’em no, that she was my _fiancée_ and was goin’ to _partee_ to _Amérique_ with me. Louise _compreed_ that line and said, ‘_Oui_’ all the time. “There was a band concert in the little square that afternoon, and, believe me, the Frogs sure enjoyed it. They hadn’t heard any music since the _guerre_ started, except the church organ, I guess. I had a flock of little mademoiselles hangin’ on to me by that time, as Louise was mighty popular with ’em all. Course, as luck would have it, I had a bar or two of chocolate in my jeans, and I handed it over to Louise and her little friends. Boy, they thought I was a regular Santa Claus after that. “When we left Dienville two days later all the kids in the village was cryin’ because the Americans was _parteein’_. I sure got to hand it to those people in that place, they was the old darb for us. Course things has changed a good deal since then—we ain’t new to the Frogs any more and lots of ’em with stuff to sell have found out that we get a darn sight more _frankers_ a month than the Frog army pays. “We hiked ’bout five days or so, stoppin’ every night in some village and finally got to the area which was to be our rest-camp. Just got settled in the billets when we got an order to _partee toot sweet_. We was kinda sore, but most of us said, ‘_Say la guerre_,’ and let it go at that. Nobody knew what the hell it meant as we was miles from newspapers and telegraph wires, and never got any news of the _guerre_. That’s how we started the seventeen-day hike from down around Joinville straight up to the Toul front. “That hike was one of the worst things we bucked against durin’ this _guerre_. There wasn’t but two days on which the sun came out at all. It rained day and night. The roads was all mud and so slippery that the men and horses was slidin’ all over the place. There wasn’t no way to carry fresh rations, so we _monjayed_ ‘corn willy,’ black coffee, and hardtack seventeen days straight. The horses had a hell of a time, too, as there never was enough hay and oats for all of ’em to _monjay_ at one time. Guess we covered ’bout twenty-two kilofloppers every day. Never got up later than three bells in the mornin’ and generally got to _cushay_ around _nerver_. That’s nine o’clock in this country.