“Shall we require one of those?”

“Gentlemen are all wearing them, sir,” answered the tailor.

“How much?” queried Henry.

“Well, you gentlemen are a trifle thick, sir, and we’ll have to have them specially made, but I presume we may safely say $14 each, sir!”

Henry did not even look at me, but lifted the wormwood to his lips and quaffed it.  “Make two,” he answered.

The world should not be unsafe for democracy if Wichita and Emporia could help it!

We went to a show that night with the feeling of guilt and shame one has who has betrayed his family.  That $114 with ten more to come for brown shoes, flickered in the spot light and babbled on the lips of the singers.  They danced it in the ballet.  Each of us was thinking with guilty horror of how he would break the news of that uniform bargain to his wife.  So we went home tired that first night, through the grim dark streets of Paris and to our rooms.  And there were those 43rd street uniforms still unwrapped in the bureau drawer.  Henry again demanded a dress rehearsal.  He insisted that as we were going to have to wear them to the front we ought to know how we looked inside of them.  But we were weary and again put off the dread hour.  The next morning we bought our ten dollar brown shoes, and concluded that there was a vast amount of foolishness connected with this war.

During the long fair days while we waited for Major Murphy to take us to the front, we wandered about Paris, puffing and spluttering through the French language.  Henry never was sure of anything but toot sweet and some devilish perversion was forever sticking sophomore German into my mouth, when French should have risen.  The German never actually broke out.  If it had, we should have been shot as spies.  But it was so close that it always seemed to be snooping around ready to jump out.  That made it hard for me to shine in French.

These adventures with the French language were not exactly the martial adventures that Charley Chandler, of Wichita, and Warren Finney, of Emporia, thought we would be having at the Front, when they trundled us out to win the war.  Yet these adventures were serious.  They were adventures in lonesomeness.  We could imagine how the American soldier boy would feel and what he would say when this language began to wash about his ears and submerge him in its depths.  We could fancy American soldiers wandering through the French villages, unable to buy things, because they couldn’t understand the prices.  We could understand the dreary, bleak, isolated lives of these American boys, with all the desolation of foreigners hungering always for human companionship, outside of the everlasting camp.  And we came to know the misery of homesickness that hides in the phrase, “a stranger in a strange land!”