And pretty soon Leon would be showing up over here, and it’d just be my luck to run into him—and further complicate matters. If Jay-Jay ever saw the two of us, he’d know at once there was something wrong.... Well, anyway, I had to retract all those horrid things I thought of my fair brother. Of course, he could have started sooner for camp, but then, after all, he started and did try to get there, and now he’d proved his mettle by enlisting again. Only I couldn’t for the life of me see where I was going to end up. What if he should get killed over here, or lose a leg or an arm or something like that? I could never get out of this mess! It seemed like everything was going wrong all at once. The General looked over the administration of the organization at Bourges and kept me busy for two days making out a detailed report of the place, giving reams and reams of statistics on every conceivable detail of the American establishment there. I was afraid the General was so full of regulations and knowledge of how organizations should function that my life from now on was going to be very hectic indeed. A couple of reports like this one and I’d be bleary. We traveled in a big touring car. I had a field desk and a portable typewriter that wasn’t worth two whoops, and which I didn’t use unless I couldn’t find a better one wherever we happened to be. Chilblaines was the boss’s errand boy and Getterlow drove. I guess the General kept Chilblaines with him for the latter’s protection: the lieutenant’s father or mother or uncle or somebody was a close friend of the General’s and I guess he figured the best turn he could do Chilblaines was to keep him away from any outfit that might go near the Front: Chilblaines wouldn’t last a week up there. Someone would let the sky fall on him, probably. I saved Getterlow from the consequences of his sins several times, just to avoid a scene. I hated to see a fellow get bawled out. But he was getting worse. He got drunk every time we stopped and he thought every mademoiselle in France had been waiting for him to arrive. The end was near. The General discussed the possibility of getting rid of Getterlow. I wrote to Ben, but didn’t hear from him, so didn’t know where I’d find him when the time came. —10— We were in Tours five days but I was too tired to do anything but work with the General. We had a busy trip from Dijon on, jumping all over this section of France, visiting aviation fields, all kinds of training schools, hospitals, ordnance depots, quartermaster depots, motor transport parks, and God only knows what else. We were in all kinds of crazy places, including Cosne, Issoudun, Romorantin, Orléans and Blois, and now we were back in the headquarters of the S.O.S.