Commander, Provost of the C.A., and one by way of advice, without
signature, but making mention of the signature, to the Provost of
the Force Publique d'Amiens and of the centers of the district, of
which you have the list--in envelopes, of course, of the general
commanding the district. It's very simple,' he says.

"I'd drawn back three paces to wait till he'd done with jawing. Five
minutes after, I went up to the sergeant. He said to me, 'My dear
sir, I have not the time to bother with you; I have many other
matters to attend to.' As a matter of fact, he was all in a flummox
in front of his typewriter, the chump, because he'd forgotten, he
said, to press on the capital-letter lever, and so, instead of
underlining the heading of his page, he'd damn well scored a line of
8's in the middle of the top. So he couldn't hear anything, and he
played hell with the Americans, seeing the machine came from there.

"After that, he growled against another woolly-leg, because on the
memorandum of the distribution of maps they hadn't put the names of
the Ration Department, the Cattle Department, and the Administrative
Convoy of the 328th D.I.

"Alongside, a fool was obstinately trying to pull more circulars off
a jellygraph than it would print, doing his damnedest to produce a
lot of ghosts that you could hardly read. Others were talking:
'Where are the Parisian fasteners?' asked a toff. And they don't
call things by their proper names: 'Tell me now, if you please, what
are the elements quartered at X--?' The elements! What's all that
sort of babble?" asked Volpatte.

"At the end of the big table where these fellows were that I've