Another rainy day – Sunday, too. The worst of it is that it never really rains – it just gets wet. Imagine a cold, raw hopeless November rain, all day every day, and you have the setting for our last two months.
Yet things are pretty cheerful. The frogs accept such a winter stoically, and the Americans are too busy with Christmas, home and springtime thoughts to pay much attention to it.
There is anticipation in the air. We’ve hired the Chalet du Lac – a large music-hall place near the lake in the Bois de Vincennes, about five minutes walk from here. There’s to be a slapstick movie which we are doing ourselves. You can imagine Jack as a general. Several vaudeville stunts, dancing and eats will round out the evening. Lots of French women and Red Cross and Y.M.C.A. girls are to be on hand. Just now there’s a lot of polishing up of almost forgotten dress shoes, and the laundries are rushed to death.
I had wanted to hear Reveillon, which is a noisy frog way of ushering in Christmas and New Year’s day. The nine-thirty closing law, however, is still in force and public Reveillons are out of the question.
I wish I had a newspaper in the states now. I’d be a propagandist. It is terrible to think of how these diplomatic controversies are going to drag out; of all the over-polite, word-veiled, quibbling and squabbling that will be done, while we sit here and waste our lives. If everyone in the states would realize the uselessness of it, if the journals would take up the cry, if, in short, public opinion could be stirred, I’m sure that in two weeks a peace, equally durable and satisfactory, could be concluded.
Nellie came around this morning with what is known in the A.E.F. as “beaucoup jack”; in English it means he was holding, for he’d just been paid, and he now rates three-stripe pay. I must have dinner with him. I did – at Mme. Jeanne’s. Then we went downtown and boulevarded until we struck a cinema, but we went for supper first then came back. Of course there was a Charlot in the “Paperhanger” – perhaps the doughiest of his pictures, and greatly appreciated by the French. There was also a Gaumont for which I was strong – it showed a view of Broadway and the Woolworth Building. It was, however, a French picture with a strong American accent, for I could see the hand of a real picture-man throughout. The hero was an American soldier, really and reelly, who married the French girl, finally. Very good.
Meanwhile Nellie went right on paying the way, so now I owe him a treat.
Next post December 29
Letters from Sidney Friend During The Great War 