March 8, 1919

Everybody has gone to a dance tonight, but I don’t feel much like dancing, especially with a lot of French girls, who can’t dance anyway.

Of course it’s all right to say, “Get out of the army.” But the fact is that three of our men who left here in December and January are down in a little hole 20 miles from the coast and have not yet been deloused. The process of delousing a man is deemed necessary by an all-wise government, whether the subject need it or not. It is a pre-essential to embarkation. It consists in a thorough cooking of all wearing apparel, which is then fit for salvage, nothing else; and a thorough bathing of the wearer, who in the end, is also about ready to be salvaged. They want to wash all the year’s accumulation of dirt in France of you at one fell swoop, as though the frogs were charging them extra if they carried off any of it.

But to continue, these boys had fine excuses to get home and suffer no delays, and they aren’t at the embarkation camp yet. Small detachments and single men are easily lost or still easier sidetracked. The machinery of demobilization in retail lots is not yet hitting on all eight. Perhaps it is as well not to buck that proposition for a while. When men begin going home in numbers, there will be plenty of little odd corners on the boats and they will have learned how to handle individuals. Then I may try to get out.

But of course there is always the possibility of a release before long, in case the whole outfit goes back. The 26 who were to leave here have not yet gone, but it is beyond question that they are going; it will probably be tomorrow. They are going to Washington to work in the photo lab. I have had enough photo labs, what with Columbia and this, but at times I am sorry I did not get on the list.

Every one of the men on it is really needed for financial reasons at home, though being a soldier in Washington is hardly calculated to restore the fortunes of any family. But the point is that every single one I have spoken to expects to exert influence and to get out of the army. That will be fine. More power to them; I know that each case is really deserving and it is one of the fairest things that has been done in the Photo Division. Besides, if they were really needed and they get out, they make a hole which must be filled; they may make room for more of us.

It is very hard to tell, rather to foretell, when the lab is going to quit. One day things look very bright for an early release and breaking up, and the next they are a dark sienna. Officers don’t know – nobody seems to know just how far this elastic cinch can be stretched. Cinch it is, for certain of them here, who are making far more than a normal world thought them worth. They are the real profiteers, taking unholy gain from the government and from the lives of others. You have seen how the signs veered from hopeful to despairing. Today it is a little of each.

Next post March 11.