But I didn’t want to argue about it any longer and so I told him, “You’ve got me wrong, Ben. You may never believe it was not me at Le Mans, but that’s the truth and can be proved. However, I do insist upon making up to you for the pay you’re losing, merely because I appreciate your trying to help me when you thought I needed help. And that’s all there is to it!” “Well, it looks kinda fishy to me,” he contended. But I refused to argue with him. I made him take twenty dollars on account and I determined he’d take the balance as soon as I could get a check cashed. I knew he didn’t know whether to believe me or not, but I just couldn’t explain the thing to him. Lord knows, there were enough loose ends to this affair already. I didn’t know where Leon was or when I was liable to meet him. And Jay-Jay was liable to breeze into Tours any day. What if he should see Leon and me together? Might the good Lord stick with me yet a while! I wished I could have seen that scrap in Le Chien Rouge! Poor old Pierre—Ben must have done an awful job on him. And to think that it was all my fault.... I wondered if Lisa saw Leon. Maybe it had been explained to Pierre by now: if so, we had something else to worry about. Oh, sweet existence! —4— God, but I worked those next two weeks! Believe me, there was a big battle being fought in this S.O.S, regardless of all the current jokes about non-combatants. About twelve hundred years ago a strong-arm Frankish hero by the name of Charles Martel turned back the invading hordes of Arab Moors that had swept up through Spain and was threatening all Western Europe. That Battle of Tours was one of the decisive battles of history, and this 1918 Battle of Tours was going to be a decisive one, too, for this was the very heart and lungs of the American army. We’d just about covered all the nooks and crannies of this vast organization, from the base sections at Brest, St. Nazaire and Bordeaux, to the great depots of Nevers and the zone of action that began above Chaumont, but always we had to come back to the headquarters at Tours, and the center of this tremendous S.O.S. which constituted in itself one of the most expansive battles of the war—for it required three men to keep one man at the Front, and thousands times that three were warriors of the S.O.S. It was amazing—like a nation within a nation, a huge octopus of an organization embracing everything from hospitals and rest camps and leave areas to quartermaster and ordnance depots. It was all a gigantic business, a military government which owned and operated all its machinery, materials and human constituents.