It was the lower classes that took us to their hearts. They discovered that Americans were jolly good fellows with pockets full of francs and a tremendous fancy for wine, women and excitement. Naturally they weren’t so finicky. They weren’t used to being finicky anyway. From the stories I heard, it seemed that they were even open-hearted enough to accept our colored soldiers as genuine American Indians: they thought the darkies were real cavemen, noble specimens of virile nature, who looked every inch the part and apparently, with a mademoiselle, more than established the fact of their virility. In some camp towns, the street girls didn’t have anything to do with the white soldiers. Obviously they were as deluded as our soldiers were in other places.... Indeed, that was my view of the whole works just now: everyone misunderstood everyone else, and the result was a sort of not unpleasant but not very congenial confusion.... Of course, the mademoiselle end didn’t interest me, but Ben said he just found out about a place where he could get a girl for a cake of American soap. I told him he’d better swipe a carton from the canteen and start a harem. He said that when the regulars first appeared in France it was possible to get the prettiest and most adept girl in town for a tobacco coupon, and he was bemoaning the fact that he had a whole box full of coupons at home that he was too late to use now. It certainly was tough: he should have enlisted a year earlier: he would have had children scattered all over France by now! I’ll bet he was a son-of-a-gun with the women: sometimes he reminded me of nothing so much as a great animal, a sort of Bull of the Camps, as it were. Of course, I knew that he was more than an animal: the things he said very often showed unmistakable signs of intelligence, and he certainly was a good friend to have. We had to drill several times, and every morning we had calisthenics. The setting-up stuff didn’t bother me but the drilling was a little too much—I guess I wasn’t built for that kind of stuff. My back got a kink in it and the muscles of my legs seemed to knot right up after a mile or so of walking under the strain of drill. Every morning when I heard the call to “fall in” my mind would start to sing that army ballad about the sergeants “who are the worst of all,” because “He gets you up in the morning before the bugle call; And it’s Squads Right! Squads Left! Right Front Into Line! Then the dirty son-of-a-b——, he gives you double time!”