“They’ve been more than diligent with us,” said he. “They’ve never shown impatience when we failed to grab their point, but have gone over it and over it till we’ve learned it to suit them. The difference in languages makes it hard sometimes to get what they’re after, but they eventually manage to make themselves understood. The only fault I have to find with them,” he confided, “is that they don’t give us credit for knowing anything at all. They tell us this thing’s a rifle, and the thing on the end of it is a bayonet, and so forth. And one of them showed me a barbed-wire entanglement one day, and told me what it was for. I’d always been under the mistaken impression that it was used for bedclothes.”

We had to turn down this captain’s luncheon invitation, but we stopped at his house for light refreshment. His lieutenant, a young University of Michigan boy, had come over on the first transport, and related interesting details of that historic trip.