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March 13, 1973.

Dear Alice:

The main building of the cavalry school at Saumur has walls of stone and big stone pillars on the porch at the entrance. On those pillars are carved the names of distinguished alumni, one of the earliest being that of Marshal Ney. The first rooms past the entrance were offices. There was an amphitheatre upstairs. In 1[[strikethrough]]8[[/strikethrough]]^[[9]]17 all the rest of the building ^[[was]] dormitory space. Each room housed two men comfortably, and there were enough rooms to accommodate the 400 new American artillery officers who moved in at the end of September.

Soon after arriving we were assembled and counted off into sections of 20 men each. Our group of Tennesseans happened to be standing where the counting began, so we found ourselves in Section 1. John Ransom had sort of attached himself to our group from Southampton on, so there were now seven of us. Each section had a cluster of contiguous rooms in the dormitory. Our original six paired off into three adjoin^[[in]]g rooms just as we had in the hotel in New York. I am not sure who Ransom's roommate was, but I think it was Bob Hussey, a congenial soul who came from one of the north shore suburbs of Chicago. Over the next three months I became acquainted only with the men of our own section and the one next to us. We often went on field exercises with Section 2, but had little contact with any of the others. I never saw a roster of the 400 men in that class at Saumur, [[strikethrough]]so[[/strikethrough]] so I don't know how as a group they made out in later life. But they impressed me as being something of an elite collection. Some time in the 1930's  Howard Vincent O'Brien wrote something in his column in the Chicago Daily News that identified him as one of us. I wrote to him and got a cordial note in reply. While there I knew by sight R. Norris Williams, once international tennis champion, and Charles P. Taft, whose only claim to prominence at the time was that he was the son of an ex-president. Then there was John Crowe Ransom, but he had then published only his first thin volume entitled "Chills and Fever".

A French lieutenant took charge of each section. Ours was a round-faced, swarthy little Provencal named De Salinelles. Over him, in general charge of five sections, was Captain Risler, an Alsatian. He was one of three Alsatians on our teaching staff. All