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made the long run to Bordeaux, stayed overnight there, and on the third day took another train southward along the coast.  About 40 miles south of Bordeaux we passed Arcachon, a town to which I returned on Sundays while I was at Cazaux.  It was the first seaside resort I had ever seen.  That may explain why I have always remembered it as the most beautiful.  It was not that the buildings were especially splendid.  It was rather the setting.  The harbor is almost circular, with lovely beaches all the way around it.  It was dotted with sailboats.  In the background were sand dunes. I have never seen Arcachon since 1918, and I have never heard of American tourists going there.

I spent three weeks at Cazaux, at great cost to the American taxpayer.  It still disturbs me to think of all the ammunition I shot away there.  We never shot when both the marksman and the target were stationary.  With French cavalry carbines we shot at toy balloons rising in the air.  (The French had surplus carbines and cartridges for them, because cavalry had been useless since the first weeks of the war.)  We fired with shotguns at clay pigeons.  We fired machine guns from speeding motor boats at targets floating on the lake.  We went up in old Parmans, fitting with pontoons and fired down with machine guns at floating targets.  Finally, flying in old-model Caudrons, we fired machine guns at windbag targets being towed by other planes.

That trip to Cazaux had some depressing aspects.  First there was the detour we had to make around recent German conquests to reach Paris.  On that detour we passed a camp where a division of Italians were being kept in a kind of quarantine.  It had been involved in the debacle at Caporetto.  Its morale was so low that the Italian command had shipped it out of Italy for fear of the influence in might have on the home folks.  No longer trusted for any combat service, those Italians stayed there consuming rations until the war was over.  Then at Cazaux I had my first contact with Indo-Chinese.

I don't know whether those I met were Vietnamese, Laotians or Cambodians.  They were not called by any of those names.  And as far as I can remember I first began to hear the name Indochina some time after WW1.  In my school geography the whole region now called Indochina was lumped under the name Annam.  The French called them Annamites, so we did also.  They were the smallest men I had ever seen.  A few of them worked at menial jobs around the school.  I remember one in particular who carried big bunches of toy balloons and released them