Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 64, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1919 — KEEPING THE CADENCE WITH MIKE IN FRANCE. [ARTICLE]

KEEPING THE CADENCE WITH MIKE IN FRANCE.

The following is an excerpt taken from a letter written by Michael Wagner-,-now -m -America's- army of occupation, to a Rensselaer boy, recently discharged: “Believe me they are sure making a changed boy out of me in this army. Prior to my coming here. I don’t think that I had ever delivered an untruth in my entire lifetime. Then what happens? They decided to hold an inspection one morning, and you know inspections are a bugbear to the veteran campaigner as

well as we fresh “rookies.” The commanding officer comes along, stops, gazes intently at me a moment as I stood at attention blushing like a schoolboy, then says to me: “See that dirt on the floor there by your bunk?” “Yessir, I answered, my knees imitating drum sticks and my voice fal-tering-as I turned around and looked in the direction that his • finger was pointing. I well knew what I was going to say before I ever looked.” “Well, then see that it is cleaned up,” he says. I had told my first falsehood as a members of the American army, for to my eye the floor was as barren of dirt as the Kaiser is of power.”