Well Al you can’t break the rules when you are a corporal no more than a private but this bird went to Chi the day before yesterday on a leave and he was supposed to be back at 11 P.M. last night but he don’t show till 2 A.M. and he was all lit up like the City of Benton Harbor and of course the guard nailed him and he got called up before his captain and he busted him and I don’t mean he cracked him in the jaw but when a man gets busted in the army it means you get reduced to a private.  So I said to Red what a sucker this bird was and Red says maybe he wanted to get busted because a corporal has got such a load on their shoulders that lots of men would rather be a private.  So I said it must be a fine kind of a man that would turn down a job in the army because it was a tough job and Red says “Yes but everybody ain’t like you and some men don’t want no responsibility but you are one of the kind that the more they have the better they like it and everybody could see you was a born leader the way you acted in that trench drill today.”

So I suppose after all a man like Chambers has no business in a job like corporal because it is a cinch nobody would ever call him a born leader unless it was in the gin league but still a person would think he would try and behave himself after the captain give him that chance but still I should not worry and it is none of my business and all I got to do is set up the right kind of an example for my own command and leave the rest of them take care of themselfs.

Your pal, JACK.

CAMP GRANT, Oct. 23.

FRIEND AL: Well I have quit takeing French class lessons and I quit because I felt it wasn’t fair to either myself or Capt.  Nash because when a man is a corporal its all head work you might say and a man ought to keep their mind on their job evenings as well as day times and I felt like I couldn’t do that and be monking with French at the same time and it would be like as if I was back pitching baseball and trying to learn to play a saxophone or something at the same time and in the evenings when I ought to be figureing out how to pitch to Pipp instead of that I would have my mind on what keys to blow next though of course I just say that for a comparison because I could learn how to play the whole band and still make a sucker out of that bird because all you got to do is to pitch outside.  But besides that I figured that the man who was trying to learn us French didn’t know what he was talking about and what is the use of learning it wrong and then you got to start all over again when we got over there.  For inst. he asked me what was the English word for very in French so I knew it was tres so I said tres and he says no it was tray because you say the letter e like it was the letter a and you don’t pay no attention to the letter s.  So I asked him what it was there for then and he said that was just the French of it so I had a notion to tell him to go and take a jump in the lake but I decided to just say