use,--he said, "Now, my boy, what can I do for you?"

First he placed a guard around the wreckage of my machine; then we had
tea in the summer pavilion, where I explained the reason for my sudden
visit. While I was telling him the story, I noticed that every window
of the house, which stood at one end of the garden, was crowded with
children's heads. War orphans, I guessed. Either that or the children
of a large family of sons at the front. He was the kind of man who
would take them all into his own home.

Having frightened his cows,--they must have given cottage cheese for a
week afterward,--destroyed his fences, broken his apple trees,
accepted his hospitality, I had the amazing nerve to borrow money from
him. I had no choice in the matter, for I was a long way from Verdun,
with only eighty centimes in my pocket. Had there been time I would
have walked rather than ask him for the loan. He granted it gladly,
and insisted upon giving me double the amount which I required.

I promised to go back some day for a visit. First I will do acrobacy
over the church steeple, and then, if the cows are not in the pasture,
I am going to land, _comme une fleur_, as we airmen say, on that
hill.

XII

CAFARD

It is mid-January, snowing, blowing, the thermometer below zero. We
have done no flying for five days. We have read our most recent
magazines from cover to cover, including the advertisements, many of
which we find more interesting, better written, than the stories. We
have played our latest phonograph record for the five hundred and
ninety-eighth time. Now we are hugging our one stove, which is no
larger than a length of good American stove-pipe, in the absurd hope
of getting a fleeting promise of heat.

Boredom, insufferable boredom. There is no American expression--there
will be soon, no doubt--for this disease which claims so many victims
from the Channel coast to the borders of Switzerland. The British have
it without giving it a name. They say "Fed up and far from home." The
more inventive French call it "Cafard."

Our outlook upon life is warped, or, to use a more seasonable
expression, frozen. We are not ourselves. We make sarcastic remarks
about one another. We hold up for ridicule individual peculiarities of
individuality. Some one, tiring of this form of indoor sports, starts
the phonograph again.

Wind, wind, wind (the crank)
Kr-r-r-r-r