I came on my friend telling this crowd of eager new secretaries of the damage that the Gothas had done the night before.  There they stood in a corner of the hotel with open ears, eyes, and mouths.  Most of them were on their toes ready to make a break for their rooms and get all the horrible details down in their letters home and their diaries before it escaped them.  They were torn between a fear that they would forget some of the horrid details and for fear some other fellow would get the big story back home to the local paper before they could get it there.  When I came in, this nonchalant narrator was having the time of his young life.  He was revelling in description.  Color and fire and blood and ruin and desecration flowed from his eloquent lips like water over Niagara.

When I got close enough to hear, he was at his most climactic and last period of eloquence.  He made a gesture with one hand, waving it gracefully into the air full length, with these words:  “Why, gentlemen, I didn’t see anything worse at the San Francisco earthquake.”

In three seconds that crowd had disappeared, each to his own letter, and each to his own diary.  Not a detail must escape.  How wonderful it would be to describe that awful destruction, and say at the end of the letter:  “And this happened just the night before we reached Paris.”

Only the vivid artist of description and myself remained in the hotel lobby, and having heard him mention San Francisco, my own home, I was naturally curious and wanted to talk a bit over old times, so I went up to the gentleman and said:  “I heard you say to that gang that you hadn’t seen anything worse at the San Francisco earthquake, so I thought I’d have a chat about San Francisco with you.”

“Why, I was never in San Francisco in my life,” he said with a grin.

“But you said to those boys, ’I didn’t see anything worse at the San Francisco earthquake,’” I replied.

“Well, I didn’t, for I wasn’t there.  I just gave them guys what they was lookin’ for in all its horrible details, didn’t I?  Ain’t they satisfied?  Well, so am I, bo.”

This story has a meaning all its own in addition to the fact that it produced one of the bright spots in my experiences in France.  That eloquent secretary represents a type who will tell the public about anything he thinks it wants to know about the “horrible details” of war in France, and facts do not baffle his inventive genius.

One characteristic of the American soldier in France is his absolute fearlessness about dangers.  He doesn’t know how to be afraid.  He wants to see all that is going on.  The French tap their heads and say he is crazy, a gesture they have learned from America.  And they have reason to think so.  When the “alert” blows for an air-raid the French and English have learned to respect it.  Not so the American soldier.

“Think I’m comin’ clear across that darned ocean to see something, and then duck down into some blamed old cellar or cave and not see anything that’s goin’ on!  Not on your life.  None o’ that for muh!  I’m going to get right out on the street where I can see the whole darned show!”