Imagine something like that coming out of the blue, and to a boy who has been "fed up" on army cookery and who even has lost his taste for the delicacy of French cookery. You may take it direct from me that the hut there at Vichy held a kitchen and that it was a good kitchen. Can you imagine any first-rate American club that ever would fail in such an essential? And from that modest cuisine there in the pulsing heart of the bubbly town came truly vast quantities of the trivial foodstuffs that are forever dear to the stomach of the doughboy. Ice cream--of course--and small meat pies, each in its own little coat of oiled paper--and creamy custards--and, of course, once again--coffee and all manner of sandwiches, imaginable and unimaginable. And, because there were many of the doughboys who could not possibly make their way to the hut, even on crutches or in wheel chairs, a camionette drove away from its kitchen each day with seventeen gallons of ice cream tucked in it--all for the benefit of bedridden American soldier boys. Remember, if you will, that this once disreputable Elysée Palace--in the glory of war aid becoming not only reputable but almost sanctified--held a theater; small, but completely equipped. Our Red Cross workers did not lose sight of that when they chose the place as a headquarters for their endeavors. Four days a week this became a moving-picture house--just like the Bijou or the Orpheum back home. On Wednesday French wounded--for whom comfort provisions were never too ample--were guests there of the American Red Cross, and each _poilu_ carried away a little gift of American cigarettes--to any Frenchman the very greatest of all treasures. Saturdays were set aside for "competitive vaudeville" or an "amateur night"--very much as we saw it at Savenay. Gradually a stock company--capable at least of one-act plays--was evolved from the dramatic material immediately at hand--soldiers and Red Cross and hospital men and women workers--with the result that by Thanksgiving Day, 1918, a very creditable production entitled "The Battle of Vichy" was produced there in the hut, after which the company moved on toward the conquest of the neighboring "metropolitan" towns of Moulins and Châtel-Guyon. Some one is going to come along some day and write the analysis of the innate desire of the American to dabble with play-acting. The plethora of war-time musical shows that became epidemic among the divisions of the A. E. F. and spread not merely to Paris--where one of these entertainments followed upon the heels of another--but eventually to New York and other cities of the country, affords interesting possibilities for the psychologist. It was a huge by-product of the war and one not entirely expected. * * * * *