Old Pierre stopped me as I was leaving and he didn’t mince words at all. From what he said, I gathered that it was just as well for me that I was leaving Le Mans. M. Lenotier didn’t care to sell me any wine and didn’t want me in his café at all.... Well, I did hope Lisa could manage him. I’d hate to think that I had been responsible for making her miserable. —7— I went to Chaumont, for the General to report to G.H.Q., which was there. I saw more generals and colonels around there than I ever knew existed. A poor enlisted man might as well have his arm hitched up to his cap: you had to salute every time you turned around, and half the officers didn’t bother to return the compliment. I didn’t much care for a place that was so lousy with officers and it wasn’t going to make me mad to go wherever we were headed. The General informed me in the afternoon as to the nature of our new work. “If this war had happened ten years earlier,” he said, “I would be taking my command into a zone of action—but that’s the price we pay for growing old. Now we’ll just work—and mostly far from the Front.” “What kind of work, sir?” I inquired. “Inspector General’s Department,” he replied. “General B—— is Inspector General of the A.E.F. and I am to operate as a representative of his office, although the major portion of our actual work will be in the S.O.S. and under the Headquarters at Tours.... Oh, it will be more or less interesting, and besides, somebody has to do it: someone has to keep an eye on these young officers who aren’t dry behind the ears yet, and see that some enterprising salesman doesn’t sell the Quartermaster Depot to the Spaniards.” Well, I never had heard of the Inspector General’s Department, and I frankly admitted my ignorance. “It isn’t the Intelligence Division,” he hastened to inform me. “We’re not secret service operatives or anything like that. We’re inspectors and reporters. We will inspect organizations and administrations and investigate cases of criminal misconduct and evidences of poor coördination between branches of the service. We merely report our findings and suggest corrections or improvements. That’s our job from now on.” So now I supposed we’d go out and inspect something or investigate somebody. Well, it suited me, as long as we got out of Chaumont. —8— We arrived in Tours the next day after a rather hectic trip from Chaumont via Paris. I didn’t care much for wartime France. Every house shut up tight at dusk. No street lights. Military Police every two feet asking you where you were going and why and who told you you could go. Not so pleasant. New work too, although I hadn’t done much yet, except just enough routine stuff to serve as an introduction to this kind of stuff. Entirely different from Divisional paper work, but I’d get it in time.