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Updated: October 23, 2025
The chauffeur's glance wavers, it seems possible that he might entertain the proposal. The gentleman steps forward, already has his hand on the door handle, when from somewhere in the darkness, helmet clad, stick in his hand, kit bag over one shoulder, a poilu permissionaire elbows his way through the crowd. There is no argument, he merely says,
The average Poilu has no sympathy with the man who grumbles at the number of hours he may have to spend in the factory. We heard the tale of a munition worker who was complaining in a cafe at having to work so hard. A Poilu who was en permission, and who was sitting at the next table, turned to him saying: "You have no right to grumble.
He doesn't seem to care. He is so occupied today fighting, just as he did in the days of the great Napoleon, that no one cares a rap how he looks and surely he does not. You might think he would be a bit self-conscious regarding his appearance when he comes in contact with his smarter looking Ally. Not a bit of it. The poilu just admires Tommy and is proud of him.
"Oh, yes, they tell me they're here," he said. "I've given a man a dollar to chase one." Evidently one of our millionaire privates who have aroused such burnings in the heart of the French poilu, with his five sous a day! We left him there, and staggered across the Seine with our bags. A French officer approached us. "You come from America," he said. "Let me help you."
He said the whole world would ridicule the Germans for the manner in which they had exploited the phrase "Gott strafe England," writing it even on the walls anywhere and everywhere. He added laughingly that it should not worry the English comrades. "When they read 'Gott strafe England' all they needed to reply was 'Ypres, Ypres, Hurrah!" Poilu And Tommy
That's going some, I should say," called a poilu who had overheard the confession. "Look here, Business, did I hear you say it won't be over in four years?" asked another. "Over? Why, it'll have only just begun. It was the Americans on the motor trucks who told me so, and I guess they ought to know!"
One of the men who was not a full thirty-third-degree poilu had compromised with the razor on a moustache as blazing red as his shock of hair. "I think that the colonel gave him the tip that he would light the way for Zeppelins!" said a comrade. "Envy! Sheer envy!" was the retort.
That she succeeded as she did is a high tribute to her kindness and tact as well as to her organising capacity, I cannot forbear quoting from the letter of a grateful poilu: "DEAR MISS, I am arrived yesterday very much fatiguated. After 36 o'clocks of train we have made 15 kms.
He was a hairy, dirty, forsaken looking poilu who, washed and shaved and classified, turned out to be an exchange professer from the Sorbonne, who had spent a year at Harvard, and it was he who told us of the bombing of the hospital at Landrecourt; we'll call it Landrecourt to fool the censor, who thinks there is no hospital there.
Without the assistance of this glossary it is almost impossible to read some of the numerous novels of poilu life. So far as I am aware the latest creation is the infinitesimal word "as," or rather, it is a case of adaptation. To-day all France, with that swift assimilation which has ever been one of its many mysteries, knows its new meaning and applies it.
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