German printed French francs. They were good until a year ago, and at that time they were worth fifty to the dollar, and many a man has a tractor now instead of simply one mule who knew how to send them home through his Esses, or sometimes his G’s.
“I never stole anything except the compass because I thought it was bad luck to steal, unnecessarily, in war. But I drank the cognac and I used to try to figure out the different corrections on the compass when I had time. The compass was the only friend I had, and the telephone was my life. We had more wire strung than there are cunts in Texas.”
“Please keep telling me and be as little rough as you can. I don’t know what the word means and I don’t want to know.”
“Texas is a big state,” the Colonel said. “That is why I used it and its female population as a symbol. You cannot say more cunts than Wyoming because there are less than thirty thousand there, perhaps, hell, make it fifty, and there was a lot of wire, and you kept stringing it and rolling it up, and stringing it again.”
“Go on.”
“We will cut to the break-through,” the Colonel said. “Please tell me if this bores you.”
“No.”
“So we made the mucking break-through,” the Colonel said, and now his head was turned to her head, and he was not lecturing; he was confessing.
“The first day most of them came over and dropped the Christmas
