In the autumn of 1917, zealous French police arrested two American ambulance corpsmen on suspicion of spying. One of the men was Edward Estlin Cummings, a young Harvard graduate and aspiring poet. The two were spent three months in the squalid detention center of La Ferté-Macé in Normandy. Cummings fellow prisoners—the Machine-Fixer, the Zulu, the Young Skippers Mate, the Wanderer, the Lobster—presented a human pageant reminiscent of Chaucer.