Tom had nothing to say about the Hindenburg line.  In fact, for the first half of the dinner he hardly spoke.  I think he was worried about his left hand.  There is a deep furrow across the back of it where a piece of shrapnel went through and there are two fingers that will hardly move at all.  I could see that he was ashamed of its clumsiness and afraid that someone might notice it.  So he kept silent.  Professor Razzler did indeed ask him straight across the table what he thought about the final breaking of the Hindenburg line.  But he asked it with that same fierce look from under his bushy eyebrows with which he used to ask Tom to define the path of a tangent, and Tom was rattled at once.  He answered something about being afraid that he was not well posted, owing to there being so little chance over there to read the papers.

After that Professor Razzler and Mr. Quiller discussed for us, most energetically, the strategy of the Lorraine sector (Tom served there six months, but he never said so) and high explosives and the possibilities of aerial bombs. (Tom was “buried” by an aerial bomb but, of course, he didn’t break in and mention it.)

But we did get him talking of the war at last, towards the end of the dinner; or rather, the girl sitting next to him did, and presently the rest of us found ourselves listening.  The strange thing was that the girl was a mere slip of a thing, hardly as old as Tom himself.  In fact, my wife was almost afraid she might be too young to ask to dinner:  girls of that age, my wife tells me, have hardly sense enough to talk to men, and fail to interest them.  This is a proposition which I think it better not to dispute.

But at any rate we presently realized that Tom was talking about his war experiences and the other talk about the table was gradually hushed into listening.

This, as nearly as I can set it down, is what he told us:  That the French fellows picked up baseball in a way that is absolutely amazing; they were not much good, it seems, at the bat, at any rate not at first, but at running bases they were perfect marvels; some of the French made good pitchers, too; Tom knew a poilu who had lost his right arm who could pitch as good a ball with his left as any man on the American side; at the port where Tom first landed and where they trained for a month they had a dandy ball ground, a regular peach, a former parade ground of the French barracks.  On being asked which port it was, Tom said he couldn’t remember; he thought it was either Boulogne or Bordeaux or Brest,—­at any rate, it was one of those places on the English channel.  The ball ground they had behind the trenches was not so good; it was too much cut up by long range shells.  But the ball ground at the base hospital (where Tom was sent for his second wound) was an A1 ground.  The French doctors, it appears, were perfectly rotten at baseball, not a bit like the soldiers.  Tom wonders that they kept them.  Tom says that