However, to get back to the story:—We came ashore on a dirty old lighter that must have been a coal barge before the war. The day we landed was one of the three hundred and fifty days of rain in the customary French year. Up around that part of Brittany, the natives must be thankful that Leap Year doesn’t come every year, because the chances are it would be just another rainy day. The usual quota of sunshiny days there is one-per-month. I always recalled France as a land of sunshine and sparkle, but the first ten days in Brest sadly disillusioned me. We had only one day that didn’t show a rainfall! And imagine poor little me tramping through the mud and water in a cold, drizzling downpour—me, who was experiencing the first “hike” of this kind in my life! Everyone except the high officers had to march from the docks out to the Pontanezan Barracks, a walled camp that was built by Napoleon more than a hundred years ago. This place is four miles out of Brest, and it wouldn’t have been such a bad walk if there hadn’t been so much mud and other contributing causes for discomfort. We never had any adequate drill on board the transport, most of us were suffering from the effects of that awful dysentery, all of us were weak of legs and weaker in the stomach. It was certainly one tough stretch, and I hope I don’t have to go to war like that any more. I’d prefer to ride to my death in a G.M.C. or a flivver ambulance. When we were just getting started, Ben let Esky out of his barracks bag and observed very sourly, “If this ain’t a hell of a fine way to welcome a bunch o’ real heroes, my old man was a priest!” A priest by the name of Garlotz! “Was he a priest, Ben?” the man on the other side of him inquired, probably for the sake of hearing Ben’s profanity. “Priest hell!” declared the big boy. “I don’t think he knew what a priest looks like. My old man helped build the subway with a pick and shovel!” And he proceeded, between curses anent the weather, the frogs, the officers, the Government, the President, and General Pershing’s progeny even unto the fourth and fifth generations, to tell us about his “old man” who, it seems, was a remarkably able man who never got a nickel for fighting but could beat the daylights out of his prize-fighting son any time he became drunk enough to so desire. Anyone would have to read between the lines of that speech to discern the fact that Ben must really have thought a lot of his father. Personally, it never before occurred to me that he had a father: a man like Ben is so eye-filling that you just don’t think of him as having a family somewhere, and a father and mother just like ordinary people.