Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/98

 "Dead Man's Hill," Dugout Number Twenty-seven, with a busy Colonel's quarters in the Bois de Bethelainville. I couldn't make a great deal out of the conversation, so I soon left them and went into their kitchen. A middle-aged man with a rough, black beard stood beside the stove which happened to be one of the regulation army kitchen wagons placed in one corner of the room. I shouted "Bon jour, Monsieur," at him two or three times before he heard me. Finally he turned around and looked me over very carefully. Then (I think someone must have told him that an American Section was nearby) he burst out with, "Well I'll be darned. You are the first person from the States I have seen for eighteen months. What's your home town, anyway." He said it all so fast that I could not make him out for a minute. But I came to shortly and then it was my turn to ask questions. He told me that he had gone to America when he was seventeen, and settled in New York City. For some years, along with another Frenchman, he had conducted a well-known hair-dressing establishment on Fifth Avenue. When the war broke out he had debated for some time whether he ought to leave his family or not. But finally he couldn't stand it any longer; and so it happened that he sailed back to France in the fall of 1914. We got into a long conversation; he wanted to know all