ronts from the Marne to Smyrna, who proposed toasts,
and made speeches in response, especially by the officer who that day
had received the Croix de Guerre and a wound.

I sat next to a young man who had been talking learnedly of dumdum
bullets and Parisian restaurants. They asked him to recite, and to my
horror he rose. Until that moment he had been a serious young officer,
talking boulevard French. In an instant he was transformed. He was a
clown. To look at him was to laugh. He was an old roue, senile,
pitiable, a bourgeois, an apache, a lover, and his voice was so
beautiful that each sentence sang. He used words so difficult that to
avoid them even Frenchmen will cross the street. He mastered them,
played with them, caressed them, sipped of them as a connoisseur sips
Madeira: he tossed them into the air like radiant bubbles, or flung them
at us with the rattle of a mitrailleuse. When in triumph he sat down, I
asked him, when not in uniform, who the devil he happened to be.

Again he was the bored young man. In a low tone, so as not to expose my
ignorance to others, he said.

"I? I am Barrielles of the Theatre Odeon."

We were receiving so much that to make no return seemed ungracious, and
we insisted that John T. McCutcheon should decorate the wall of the new
mess-room with the caricatures that make the Chicago _Tribune_ famous.
Our hosts were delighted, but it was hardly fair to McCutcheon. Instead
of his own choice of weapons he was asked to prove his genius on wet
whitewash with a stick of charred wood. It was like asking McLaughlin
to make good on a ploughed field. But in spite of the fact that the
whitewash fell off in flakes, there grew upon the wall a tall, gaunt
figure with gleaming eyes and teeth. Chocolat paid it the highest
compliment. He gave a wild howl and fled into the night. Then in quick
succession, while the Frenchmen applauded each swift stroke, appeared
the faces of the song writer, the comedian, the wounded man, and the
commanding officer. It was a real triumph, but the surprises of the
evening were not at an end. McCutcheon had but just resumed his seat
when the newly finished rear wall of the mess-hall crashed into the
room. Where had been rocks and cement was a gaping void, and a view of
a garden white with snow.

While we were rescuing the song writer from the debris McCutcheon
regarded the fallen wall thoughtfully.

"They feared," he said, "I was going to decorate that wall also, and