OFF DUTY
There is a strict but unwritten law of the French Army as regards the
canteen: no man may take a drink by himself. _Faire suisse_ is the term
applied, if one goes to the canteen alone, and the rest of the men in
the conscript's room look on him as something of a mean fellow if he
does such a thing as this. Of course, it works out at the same thing
in the end, and share and share alike is not a bad principle, while it
is eminently good Republicanism. Jean must share his remittance from
home with somebody; he can pick the men whom he desires to treat, but
he must not lay himself open to the accusation of _faire suisse_, no
matter what arm of the service he represents. It is bad comradeship,
for his fellows, when they have a slice of luck, would not think of
doing it. Why should he?
Thus, and with justice, they reason, and out of such reasoning comes
the sharing of the last drops of water with a comrade on the field, the
acts of self-denial and courageous self-sacrifice for which men of the
French Army have always been famed. It is a little thing in itself,
this compulsory sharing of one's luck, but it leads to great things, at
times.
Should Jean go to the canteen alone, punishment awaits him from his
comrades. If he is well liked, he will get off with having his bed
tipped up after he has got to sleep at night. If he is a surly fellow,
he may reckon on what British troops know as a "blanket court-martial,"
which means that his comrades of the room will catch him and place
him in a blanket, the edges of which are held all round by his fellow
soldiers. At a given signal the blanket will be given a mighty heave
upward by all who are holding it, and Jean will fly ceiling-ward, to
alight again in the blanket and again be heaved up. This process,
repeated a dozen times or so, leaves Jean with not a sufficiency of
breath to beg for mercy, while at the same time he is quite undamaged,
and, if he is wise, he will not incur the accusation of _faire suisse_
again.
He may be fool enough to report the matter to his sergeant, as, by the
rules of the service, he is entitled to do. In that case the sergeant
will threaten Jean's comrades with punishment for causing annoyance to
a man, but the threat, as the men well know, is all that will happen
to them--but not all that will transpire as regards Jean. The French
soldier abhors a sneak, and treats him as he deserves. Jean will get
a rough time for many days to come, and will not dare to complain to
the sergeant again. It is rough justice, but effective; so long as a
man plays the game properly with his fellows, he is all right, and the
sergeant knows it. Hence Jean may make complaints till he is black in
the face about the conduct of his fellows, but by so doing he will only
make himself unpopular, and before he has got far into his first year
of service he learns to take his own part, and not to go running to the
sergeant with his little troubles. It does not pay--and, if it did, the
French Army would not be what it is in the matter of comradeship and
good feeling.
One good thing about the canteen is its cheapness. One can get coffee
and a roll--which amounts to a French conscript's breakfast--for the
equivalent of three halfpence, and this charge is a fair sample of
the prices of all things. Whatever one may ask for, too, it is served
in good quality, for the canteen is under strict supervision of the
officers, who are quick to note and remedy any cause for complaint on
the part of the men.
Early morning breakfast, as it is served in the British Army, is
unknown in French units. On turning out in the morning, coffee is
brought round to the barrack rooms, but the first real meal of the day
is "soup" at ten o'clock. The food is properly served in dishes, and a
corporal or a man told off for the duty is at the head of each table
to help each man to his allowance, for which an enamelled plate is
provided. Crockery is unsafe in a barrack room, and the fact is wisely
recognised.
The canteen of the British Army, so far as drinks are concerned,
provides beer only for its men, but beer is scarcely ever seen in a
French canteen. Various brands of wine are at the disposal of the
conscript, and it is possible to get a bottle of drinkable stuff for
fivepence, though in order to obtain a really good brand one must pay
at least a franc, for which the wine obtained is equal to that for
which many a London restaurant will charge half a crown. Wine is the
staple drink of the Army, though brandy finds favour among the hardened
drinkers. The man who goes to the canteen for a bottle of wine to share
with a comrade must not be regarded as a tippler, for the clarets which
the canteen provides are not very alcoholic beverages, containing as
they do but little more alcohol to the pint than supposedly "teetotal"
ginger beer of some brands.
To each company of infantry, as to each squadron of cavalry and
battery of artillery, is allotted a barber, whose business is to
shave every conscript of his company at least twice a week free of
cost, the barber being remunerated by the authorities. Since most men
need to shave every day in order to fulfil the requirements of parade
appearance, it is obvious that the efforts of the barber in this
direction must be supplemented by the men themselves, and on the whole
the barber gets an easy time as a rule, for the man who shaves himself
three times a week will usually get the business done without troubling
the barber at any time.
Complaints used to be made, especially in infantry stations, about the
sanitation and lack of washing accommodation in French barracks, but
modern custom has remedied all this. Chief cause of reformation was the
Russo-Japanese War, which showed that an army is twice as effective
if matters of sanitation are properly attended to--it does not pay to
have men falling sick from the presence of nursery beds for infectious
diseases. The French Army, ever first in experiment for the efficiency
of its men and in search of ways to increase the fighting value of
the forces available, has taken the lessons of modern sanitation to
heart. In practically all barracks, now, the soldier can enjoy a hot
bath or a cold one when he wishes; all that is still to be desired
is a greater regard for necessary sanitary measures, and a greater
regard for personal cleanliness among the men themselves. The peasant
lad, who has lived a comparatively lonely life in absolutely healthy
surroundings, does not understand at first that barrack life exposes
him to fresh dangers, and he has to be taught what, to a town dweller,
are elementary facts as regards infection. For this reason, tubercular
and allied complaints still rank rather high in the medical statistics
of the French Army, though every year sees an improvement in this
respect.
But a dissertation of this kind has taken us far from the canteen,
and the methods employed by the conscript in spending his spare time.
Not that the canteen is the only place of amusement, but in stated
hours, as in the British Army, the canteen is the rallying point of
men off duty. It is closed to men undergoing _salle de police_ at all
times, and this forms a not inconsiderable part of their punishment;
for to a soldier the canteen is not merely a place where he may obtain
refreshments, alcoholic and otherwise, but also a place to meet his
friends, hear a good song, discuss the doings of various companies, and
of various friends, whom he meets here and with whom he can compare
notes. The barrack room may not contain more than one close friend--if
that--and the other men in the squad to which the conscript belongs
may be of different provinces, of totally different ideals and ways
of thought--as if a Highland Scot were planted down in a squad of
Londoners. In the canteen, however, a man can be certain of meeting
and sitting down for a confab with his own chums, men not only of his
year--that is, joining on the same first of October as himself--but
also hailing, perhaps, from the same town or village as himself, glad
to share a bottle of claret at a franc the bottle and to talk over the
things left behind with civilian clothing.
As for canteen songs, one may guess that in the French Army there is
always plenty of real talent, for the nation as a whole, like all
Latin nationalities, is a very musical one, and since all come to the
Army, the singers come with the rest. The songs, perhaps, are not of
the highest drawing-room order, even for French drawing-rooms, but the
musical and vocal abilities of the singers are beyond question; for in
a gathering of men where the best can be obtained, little short of the
best ventures to bring itself to notice.
This mention of canteen songs recalls the fact that the French
infantryman beguiles the tedium of route-marching by songs,
interminably long songs which go on and on for miles; in recalling
what the next verse will be, a man forgets the number of miles between
him and the end of the march, or he thinks he may be able to, which
amounts to very nearly the same thing. They still sing songs that were
in vogue at the time of Fontenoy, as they march at ease along the
endless straight roads of the country, with their rifles slung anyhow
and their formations broken up that friend may march with friend.
This is when marching "at ease" only, for let a column of marching
infantrymen come to the streets of a town, and they immediately stiffen
up to show themselves at their best before the girls at the windows.
The Army of the Republic is a part of the nation, but the women of
the nation manifest no less interest in it for the fact that their
fathers and brothers have served. There is something in the sound of
a military band and the sight of a column of uniformed men that will
always bring faces to the windows of a French house. "So our Jacques is
perhaps marching somewhere," they say, or--"Thus we marched to relieve
Bazaine," will remark a veteran of the '70 campaign, feeling the while
that these men may yet make of "'70" a thing no longer to remember in
connection with lost provinces. And, once the town or village street is
left behind, and the road stretches unbroken before the column, the
men begin to sing again, and their officers smile at the song--they are
too wise, in the French Army, to suppress the singing and the cigarette
smoking, and thus the men march well. As well, certainly, as any
infantry in the world, and probably better than most.
Although it is a conscript army, there are regimental traditions, as
in the British or in any other service. Your conscript in his second
year of service will tell how his regiment captured the colours
here, or saved the position there, in the way-back days, and is
nearly as proud of it as if he, instead of the fellow soldiers of his
great-grandfather, were concerned in the business. _Esprit de corps_,
though now a common phrase in connection with the British Army, was
first of all a French idiom--and is yet, and an untranslatable one
too--designed to express the French soldier's pride in his own unit of
the service, or in his own branch of the service. At the present time,
it has as much application to the French Army as in the day when the
phrase was coined; pride in his own powers of endurance, and pride in
the unit in which he serves, still characterise the French conscript,
and in the last ten years or so this feeling has grown to such an
extent as to place the French Army, although a conscript organisation,
on a level with a voluntary force.