Page 42 - down-and-out-in-paris-and-london

‘I will tell you what Jews are like. Once, in the early
months of the war, we were on the march, and we had halt-
ed at a village for the night. A horrible old Jew, with a red
beard like Judas Iscariot, came sneaking up to my billet. I
asked him what he wanted. ‘Your honour,’ he said, ‘I have
brought a girl for you, a beautiful young girl only seventeen.
It will only be fifty francs.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘you can take
her away again. I don’t want to catch any diseases.’ ‘Dis-
eases!’ cried the Jew, ‘MAIS, MONSIEUR LE CAPITAINE,
there’s no fear of that. It’s my own daughter!’ That is the
Jewish national character for you.
‘Have I ever told you, MON AMI, that in the old Rus-
sian Army it was considered bad form to spit on a Jew? Yes,
we thought a Russian officer’s spittle was too precious to be
wasted on Jews …’ etc. etc.
On these days Boris usually declared himself too ill to
go out and look for work. He would lie till evening in the
greyish, verminous sheets, smoking and reading old news-
papers. Sometimes we played chess. We had no board, but
we wrote down the moves on a piece of paper, and after-
wards we made a board from the side of a packing—case,
and a set of men from buttons, Belgian coins and the like.
Boris, like many Russians, had a passion for chess. It was
a saying of his that the rules of chess are the same as the
rules of love and war, and that if you can win at one you can
win at the others. But he also said that if you have a chess-
board you do not mind being hungry, which was certainly
not true in my case.

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