Then he said:  “Now I’ll tell you a good story to make up for fooling you.”

“You had better,” I said with a sheepish grin.

Then he began: 

“There was a fellow named Rosenbaum brought in with me last week to the Paris hospital, wounded in three places.  They put me beside him and he told me his story.

“It was at Belleau Wood and the Americans were plunging through to the other side driving the Boche before them.  This Jewish boy is from New York City, and one of the favorites of the whole marine outfit.  He had gotten separated from his friends.  Suddenly he was confronted by a German captain with a belching automatic revolver.  The Hun got him in the shoulder with the first shot.  Then the American made a lunge with his bayonet, and ran the captain through the neck, but not before the captain shot him twice through the left leg.  The two fell together.  When the boy from New York came to consciousness he reached out and there was the dead German officer lying beside him.

“The boy took off the captain’s helmet first, and pulled it over to himself.  Then he took his revolver and his cartridge-belt and piled them all in a little pile.  Then he took off his shoes and his trousers and every stitch of clothes that the officer had on, and painfully strapped them around himself under his own blouse.  After he had done this he strapped the officer’s belt on himself.  When the stretcher-bearers got to him and had taken him to a first-aid and the nurses took his clothes off, they found the officer’s outfit.

“‘Say, boy, are you a walking pawnshop?’ the good-natured doctor said, and proceeded to take the souvenirs away.

“This was the military procedure, but the New York boy cried and said:  ‘I’ll die on your hands if you take them away.’

“He was a serious case, and so they humored him and let him keep his souvenirs, and when I saw them take him out to a base hospital this morning, he still had them strapped to him, with a grin on his face like a darky eating watermelon.”

“What did you say his name was?” I asked.

“Rosenbaum,” the boy replied.  “Rosenbaum from New York.”

“Say, if they’d only recruit a regiment like that from America, we’d send the whole German army back to Berlin naked,” added another soldier who was standing near.

Then we all had another good laugh, which in its turn disturbed the old men playing checkers on the bench under the trees back of Notre Dame.  But the soldier who told me the story added thoughtfully a truth that every one in France knows.

“At that, I’m tellin’ you, boy, there aren’t any braver soldiers in the American army than them Jewish boys from New York.  I got ’o hand it to them.”

“Yes, we all do,” I replied.

This good-natured raillery goes on all over the army, for it is a cosmopolitan crowd, such as never before wore the uniform of the United States, and each group, the negro group, the Italian group, the Jewish group, the Slav group, the Western group, the Southern group, the Eastern group, all have their little fun at the expense of the others, and out of it all comes much sunshine and laughter, and no bitterness.