The most daring man in the use of an unfamiliar language was not a soldier but a second lieutenant. He took great pride in his talent for pantomime and asserted that his vocabulary of some thirty words and his gestures filled all his needs. He was somewhat startled though on an afternoon when he went into a shop to purchase "B.V.D.'s" and found the store in charge of the young daughter of the proprietor. Pantomime seemed hardly the thing and so he paused long to think up a word for the garment he wanted or some approximation. At last he smiled and exclaimed brightly, "Chemise pour jambes, s'il vous plait."
Stores were not the strong point of our bit of France. We soon came to regard our town as a metropolis because people journeyed there to make "shopping tours." One afternoon I marked fifteen visiting soldiers with their eyes glued against a shop window which displayed half a dozen electric flashlights, two quarts of champagne, a French-English dictionary and a limited assortment of postcards. These, of course, were barred from the mail by censorship but the soldiers collected them to be taken home after the war.
"These French postcards aren't exactly what some of the boys back home are going to expect," one soldier admitted. "I went to three shops now but the others have been ahead of me and all I could get was these two. One's a picture called 'l'eglise' and the other's 'la maison de Jeanne d'Arc.'"
The shops had hard work in keeping up with more commodities than picture postcards. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for canned peaches and sardines. Somehow or other men who have been on a long march simply crave either sardines or canned peaches. The doughboys did a good deal of eating at their own expense. Army food was plentiful and moderately varied. Beans and corned beef hash were served a good many times perhaps, but there was no lack of fresh meat and there was plenty of jam and of carrots and onions and heavy gravy. Food, however, was an outlet for spending money and in some villages the men got so eager that they would buy anything. Little traveling shops in wagons came through the smaller villages in the northern part of the training area loaded with all sorts of gimcracks intended for the peasant trade. The peddlers had no time to put in a special line for the soldiers. They found that it was not necessary. Desperate men with pockets full of money would purchase even the imitation tortoise shell sidecombs which the itinerant merchants had to sell.