“I’ll say so!  I’ll say so!” was the laughing reply.

“Wow!  There’d be somethin’ doin’ at home then, wouldn’t there?” my friend the artillery captain said with a grin.

But about the funniest thing I heard along the sunshine-producing line was not in France but coming home from France, on the transport.  It came from a prisoner on the transport who was sentenced to fifteen years for striking a top-sergeant.

One night outside of my stateroom I heard some words, and then a blow struck, and a man fall.  There was a general commotion.

The next morning the fellow who struck the blow was summoned before the captain of the transport.

“See here, my man, you are already sentenced for fifteen years, and it’s a serious offense to strike a man on the high seas.”

“I didn’t strike him on the high seas, sir, I struck him on the jaw.”

The captain was baffled, but went on: 

“What did you hit the man for?”

“He argued with me.  I can’t stand it to be argued with.”

“But you shouldn’t strike a man and split his mouth open just because he disagrees with you,” said the captain severely.

“I just don’t seem to be able to stand it to have a guy argue with me,” he replied, not abashed in the slightest.

“Well, you go to your bunk.  I’ll think it over and tell you in the morning what I’ll do about it,” said the captain, and turned away.

But the man waited.  The captain, seeing this, turned and said:  “Well, what do you want?”

“All I got to say, captain, is that you mustn’t let any of them guys argue with me again, for if they do I’ll do the same thing over if you give me fifty years for it.  I just can’t stand it to have a man argue with me.”

Silhouettes of Sunshine?  France is full of them.  There were the fields full of a million blood-red poppies back in Brittany, and the banks of old-gold broom blooming along a thousand stone walls; there were the negro stevedores marching to work, winter and summer, rain or shine, night or day, always whistling or singing as they marched, to the wonderment of French and English alike.  Their spirits never seemed to be dampened.  They always marched to music of their own making.  There was that baseball game, when an entire company of negroes, watching their team play a white team, at the climax of the game when one negro boy had knocked a home run, ran around the bases with him, more than two hundred laughing, shouting, grinning, singing, yelling negroes, helping to bring in the score that won the game.  Then there was that Sunday morning when several white captains decided that their negro boys should have a bath.  They took their boys down to an ocean beach.  It was a bit chilly.  The negroes stripped at order, but they didn’t like the idea of going into that cold ocean water.  One captain solved the difficulty.  He took his own clothes off.