The boy took his hurting hand out of the blankets suddenly, expecting and getting no change, no magic. Then he unbuttoned the flap of his sweat-stained, mud-crumbly shirt pocket, and took out a soggy lump of newspaper clippings. He laid the clippings on his chest, took off the top one and brought it up to eye level. It was a syndicated Broadway column, and he began to read in the dim light:
“Last night—and step up and touch me, brother—I dropped in at the Waldorf to see Jeanie Powers, the lovely starlet, who is here to attend the premiere of her new picture, The Rockets’ Red Glare. (And don’t miss it, folks. It’s grand.) We asked the corn-fed Iowa beauty, who is in the big town for the first time in her lovely lifetime, what she wanted to do most while she was here. “Well,” said the Beauty to the Beast, “when I was on the train, I decided that all I really wanted in New York was a date with a real, honest-to-goodness G.I.! And what do you suppose happened? The very first afternoon I was here, right in the lobby of the Waldorf I bumped square into Bubby Beamis! He’s a major in public relations now, and he’s stationed right in New York! How’s that for luck?” … Well, your correspondent didn’t say much. But lucky Beamis, I thought to my—”
The boy in the hole crumpled the clipping into a soggy ball, lifted the rest of the clippings from his chest, and dropped them all, on the natural ground to the side of the hole.
He stared up into the sky again, the French sky, the unmistakably French, not American sky. And he said aloud to himself, half snickering, half weeping, “Oo la-la!”