I went into Brest several times, but there was no particular excitement or entertainment to be found down there, because part of the city was under quarantine for cholera and the authorities had restricted all places of amusement that might interest me. Ben said he hadn’t seen a single one of these mademoiselles that looked clean enough to be of interest to a man of his tastes, and I quite agreed with him. Most of them were disappointing—nothing like before the war. Now they all looked so hard and worn, and the ones that American soldiers met were the same ones that the English, Australians, Italians, Portuguese and French Colonials had met before us. An American soldier must be conceited indeed if he thinks he could teach these girls anything in the way of love and its devices. It seemed to me that the French people were of two minds about us. The lower classes seemed to welcome us with open arms, call benedictions upon our heads, but they looked upon us as wild specimens of humanity from the outskirts of civilization. And in this view the upper-class Frenchmen concurred, I imagine, for the major portion of all France had had little or no acquaintance with Americans, not even the tourist class which has always been distinguished traditionally for its ignorance, lack of taste and vulgar displayism. As far as I could make out, the better-class French people were not quite certain whether we were savage barbarians or civilized Indians. They thought that they had nothing in common with us except this little matter of a war and the fact that we both belonged to the same species of the animal kingdom. They were glad of our help—just as they had been glad to use their own varicolored colonials, those half-savages who used knives instead of guns and refused to go into action without bayonets. It struck me that they felt toward us much the same as we would feel toward an army of Russians or Japanese in America: we would rejoice over their coming to our aid, but we would feel rather condescending toward them and surely would not relish the thought of our daughters mingling with them as social equals. Nice French girls would not have anything to do with American soldiers: any more than nice American girls would accept Japanese soldiers without reservations.... From some of the first-person narratives I’d heard in this camp, I should say that some of these Americans were sadly deluded on this point. Their “conquests” weren’t much to rave about, if they only knew the truth.