And one of the soldiers was declaiming about the fat bourgeois who
stayed at home and let himself be defended and then wouldn't give
a helping hand to the poor soldier on rest leave! To get rid of them,
I put a franc in the beret. This was received with acclamations,
and they inquired to whom should they drink a toast with the money.
I said, 'Oh, give a good Vive l'Amerique. That'll suit me best!'
They both shouted, 'Oh, is Madame an American?' And to the dismay
of the two bourgeois, put first one long leg and then another through
the window and came in noisily to sit down (they were standing on
the running-board all this time with the train going forty miles
an hour...a thing which was simply unheard-of in France before the
war...one of the 'privileges' which the poilu take!). Well, they
shook hands with me two or three times over and assured me they
had never seen an American before...and indeed the two bourgeois
looked at me curiously. Then one of them began to talk boisterously,
expressing himself with great fluency and occasionally with a
liberty of phrase which wasn't conventional at all, another poilu
privilege! They sat down, evidently for a long visit. They were
typical specimens: one was noisy, fluent, slangy, coarse, quite
eloquent at times, a real Parisian of the lower classes, the kind
which leaves its shirt open at the neck over a hairy chest and
calls itself proudly 'the proletariat.' The other was a fresh-faced,
vigorous country man from Bourgogne, the type that corresponds to
the middle western American, a kind of Emporian! He hadn't much
to say, but when he did speak, spoke to the purpose. They both,
through all their roughness and coarseness and evident excitement
over starting on their 'permission,' had that French instinctive
social tact and amenity (of a sort) which keeps decent women from
being afraid of them or from hesitating to talk with them; and they
were both very sincere, and desperately trying to express something