Esky acted as if he knew something was up. He’d eat Ben alive when he saw him. I thought I could almost kiss the big galoot myself—but unfortunately kissing wasn’t in the manual of arms and it wouldn’t be very soldierly. Anyway I knew I’d feel better with him around. CHAPTER 10 THE BATTLE OF LE CHIEN ROUGE —1— Can you beat it? After my going to all that trouble to get Ben transferred, we were informed that the big ape was in the jug at Le Mans! God alone knew what he’d been up to. I thought of everything, from drunkenness and disorderly conduct to assault upon an officer. When the personnel clerk told me about it, I couldn’t say a word, just vanished in order to digest this information. I couldn’t decide whether to tell the General and ask his help or what to do. Finally I marched back to the clerk and told him that the General said that unless Garlotz was being held on a manslaughter charge, he should be released and transferred here at once. “Will that be much trouble?” I asked disarmingly. “I’ll see what can be done,” he said. And that was all I knew about Ben for a while. The General said, “That new man ought to be here to-day, shouldn’t he, Sergeant?” All I could say was “Yes, sir” and let it go at that. —2— The personnel chap told me they had arranged for Ben’s transfer at once and that he was on prison detail, serving out a sentence on which there were several days to go yet. “Did they say what he had done?” I asked. The clerk laughed. “It appears that he ran wild one night not long ago and wrecked a café or something—nothing serious.” So Ben was on the way. —3— He arrived in the morning and was put to work immediately driving us around Tours. I think the General wanted to try him out before we started off on any journeys. Anyway, the result was that I didn’t have two minutes alone with the new arrival until evening, and I was dying to ask him for an explanation of his fall from grace. So as soon as we were out of earshot of any listeners, I put the question to him: “What the devil have you been up to, Big Boy? What’s the sad story about prison bars and fines?” He gave me kind of a nasty look and said, “Don’t kid me, Leony. Don’t kid me.” “What do you mean ‘kid you’?” I insisted. “It’s right on your record in plain writing!” “Listen—” he ordered, with a wave of his hand, “is that any way to thank a guy fer savin’ yer life?” “Whose life? When? Where? How?” I demanded, at a loss to divine what he was driving at. “Say—don’t ya s’pose I know who I see? What I wanta know is why the frog was lammin’ hell outa ya. What the hell you been doin’ to his wife? I gave you credit fer better taste than that—but now I wouldn’t put nothin’ past ya!” I didn’t know what he was talking about at all, and promptly said so.