It is laughable. The News Dept. now has orders to go on making enlargements from negatives suitable for news use, but under no circumstances to distribute any. Can you imagine the New York Times gathering news, ads, stories, features, editorials, in short getting out an issue all printed and ready for the newsdealer, and then going no further. That’s our shape now. We are ordered to let our news pictures pile up in the desk drawer.
Doesn’t it seem sensible to deny, in the face of this, the application of the News Dept. for return to the states? Yet they did. You see our major is all for the major, and he has more money and influence than he ever had as an optician on the Pacific Coast. If his force here decreases, it hastens his home-going. That’s all. I don’t pretend that he’s the big power, but he is so “slick” that he can out-talk the big birds and make them come round. He’s got them convinced that this whole place here is more important than even the Army of Occupation.
It is pretty comfortable in the office here – warm and friendly, for we have a fine time now that there’s little to do. Just now we had a good laugh. There is a motion picture projection room here, where they run the films we take. The operator was running something without looking and the first thing someone wandered into the projection room to find a two-hour picture being run and not a soul watching. They’d all got up and gone out, probably to get a drink. We went in to tell the adjutant so he could enjoy, as we did, this sight of the efficiency of the place, but he merely said, “Huh!” and went on teaching his dog to lie under the desk at the command, “Couches-tod.”
About the middle of November, Mme. Bellamy gave me a little 1919 French diary. Right then and there I wrote and showed her “Jour de depart,” on Friday, May 30th. It was a wild guess, for at the time the armistice had just been signed and there was nothing to base a calculation on. But it was a good guess, because I think now that we’ll pull out of here not much later than Decoration Day. Of course we may not be home by July 4th, but whatever we do we will be on the way some day! And as long as we must remain I want to be right here. I have no desire to go to some muddy camp. Nor do I envy Frank his job of photographing the Argonne Forest with numb fingers. I much prefer Billy’s warm fire, before which I am now sitting, in a vain effort to combat the dead, grey cold of “Sunny France.”
Next post February 2.
Letters from Sidney Friend During The Great War 