h the passageway, making no sign, certainly making no complaint.
John Bass collected all our newspapers, candles, and boxes of
cigarettes, which the hospital stewards distributed, and when we
returned from dinner our neighbors were still wide awake and holding a
smoking concert. But when in the morning the bugles woke us we found
that during the night the wounded had been spirited away, and by rail
transferred to the hospital ships. We should have known then that the
army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly, so leisurely, that it
seemed like merely a shifting from one point of the front to another.

We dined with the officers and they certainly gave no suggestion of men
contemplating retreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner was served had
been completed only that afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement,
and the interior walls were covered with whitewash. The cement was not
yet dry, nor, as John McCutcheon later discovered when he drew
caricatures on it, neither was the whitewash. There were twenty men
around the dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes and Standard Oil
cans, and so close together you could use only one hand. So, you gave
up trying to cut your food, and used the free hand solely in drinking
toasts to the army, to France, and the Allies. Then, to each Ally
individually. You were glad there were so many Allies. For it was not
Greek, but French wine, of the kind that comes from Rheims. And the army
was retreating. What the French army offers its guests to drink when it
is advancing is difficult to imagine.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by R. H. Davis._

Headquarters of the French commander in Gravec, Serbia.]

We were waited upon by an enormous negro from Senegal with a fez as tall
as a giant firecracker. Waiting single-handed on twenty men is a serious
matter. And because the officers laughed when he served the soup in
a tin basin used for washing dishes his feelings were hurt. It was
explained that "Chocolat" in his own country was a prince, and that
unless treated with tact he might get the idea that waiting on a table
is not a royal prerogative. One of the officers was a genius at writing
impromptu verses. During one course he would write them, and while
Chocolat was collecting the plates would sing them. Then by the light
of a candle on the back of a scrap of paper he would write another and
sing that. He was rivalled in entertaining us by the officers who told
anecdotes of war f