THE GIRL WHO WENT TO WAR
On the ship that bore me from New York to Europe in the first week of
December, 1918, there were many war workers--and of many sorts and
varieties. We had men and women of the Y. M. C. A., of the Y. W. C. A.,
of the Jewish Welfare Board, of the Knights of Columbus--and twenty-five
women of the American Red Cross. And so, in the close-thrown intimacy of
shipboard, one had abundant opportunity to study this personnel at
rather short range, and the fact that our ship, which had been builded
for South African traffic rather than for that of the North Atlantic,
nearly foundered in mid ocean only served to increase the opportunity.
There were women war workers of nearly every age and variety in that
motley ship's company. There were school-teachers--one from Portland,
Maine, and another from Portland, Oregon--stenographers, clerks, women
of real social distinction, professional women, including a well-known
actress or two, and girls so recently out of finishing school or college
that they had not yet attained their full places in the sun. Few of them
had known one another before they had embarked upon the ship; there was
a certain haziness of understanding in many of their minds as to the
exact work that was to be allotted to them overseas. A large percentage
of the women, in fact, had never before crossed the Atlantic; a goodly
number had not even seen salt water before this voyage. Yet with all
this uncertainty there was no timidity--no, not even when the great
December storm arose, and with the fullness of its fury lashed itself
into a hurricane the like of which our captain, who had crossed the
ocean a hundred times or more, had not seen. And when the fury of this
storm had crashed in the cabin windows, had torn the wheelhouse away,
had set the stout ship awash and the passengers to bailing, the courage
and serenity of these American women remained undisturbed. They suffered
great personal discomforts, yet complained not. And with our national
felicity for an emergency organization--that sort of organization really
is part and parcel of our individualism--relieved the steward's crew at
night and cooked and served the Sabbath supper.
There were women in uniform on our ship whose mouths were tightly shut
in the grim determination of service--one could fairly see "Z-E-A-L"
written in unmistakable letters upon their high foreheads--and there
were girls who fretted about the appearance of the curls under the edges
of their small service caps and who coquetted with the young British
aviators returning home after service as instructors on the flying
fields here in the United States. Between these extremes there was vast
range and variety. But the marvelous part of it all was that all of
them--each after her own creed or fashion, for the dominating quality of
our individualism multiplies geometrically in the case of our American
womanhood--ranged true to any test that might be put upon them. The
storm showed that. I did not have the personal opportunity of seeing the
Red Cross girls in battle service; but I did see them in the canteens in
the hard, hard months that followed the signing of the armistice, saw
them in the wards and the recreation huts of hospital after hospital,
saw them, too, in Paris headquarters, working under very difficult
conditions of light and ventilation--living of every sort--and at manual
or office work or humdrum dreariness. The girl in uniform who sat all
day in a poorly lighted and aired room at a typewriter or a filing case
had a far less dramatic or poetic job than the traditional Red Cross
girl who stands at a battlefield canteen or in a hospital ward holding
the hand of some good-looking--and perhaps marriageable--young captain
or colonel. Yet her service was as real as uncomplaining and--for the
reasons we have just seen--vastly more difficult.
None of the women's work over there was easy--the romantic girl who went
to France lured on by the dream pictures of some artist-illustrator as
to the dramatic phases of canteen or hospital work was quickly
disillusionized. The real thing was vastly different from the picture. A
dirty and unshaven doughboy in bed or standing in a long queue waiting
for his cigarettes or chocolate, and speaking Polish or Yiddish when he
came to them, was a far, far different creature from the young wounded
officer of the picture who must have been an F. F. V. or at least from one
of the first families of Baltimore or Philadelphia. And the hours! They
were fearfully hard--to put it lightly. Eight, ten, or twelve hours at a
stretch was a pretty good and exhausting test of a girl's vitality. Nor
was this all of the job, either. Many and many a woman worker of the Red
Cross or, for that matter, the Y. M. C. A., too, has stood eight or ten
or twelve hours on her feet in a canteen and then has ridden twenty or
thirty miles in a truck or camionette to an army dance, has danced three
or four or five more hours with soldier boys who, even if they do not
happen to be born dancers, do covet the attention and interest of decent
girls, and has returned to only a few hours of sleep, before the long
turn in the canteen once again. And has repeated this performance four
or five times a week. For what? Because she was crazy for dancing? Not a
bit of it. For of a truth they became sick of dancing--"fed up" is the
phrase they frequently used when they spoke of it at all.
"I feel as if I never wanted to hear an orchestra again," one of them
told me one day as I stopped at her canteen--in a French town close to
the occupied territory. "But I have four dates already for next week and
three for the week after. Another month of this sort of thing and I
shall be a fit candidate for a rolling chair."
"Why do you do it?" I ventured.
"Why do I do it?" she repeated. "The boys need us. Have you noticed the
kind of girls that drift up here from Paris? If you have, you will
understand why my job is unending, why it only pauses for a very little
while indeed at night, when I jump into my bed for six or seven hours of
well-earned sleep."
I understood. I had spent an evening in the grand boulevards of Paris
and had watched a "Y" girl, under the escort of a member of the American
Military Police, save foolish doughboys and their still more foolish
officers--from themselves. In a few minutes after ten o'clock that
evening an overcrowded hotel of one of our largest American war-relief
organizations had regretfully turned away sixteen of our soldiers and in
this time there were fifteen French girls waiting to give the
hospitality that the sadly overburdened hotel had been compelled to
refuse them. No wonder that our Red Cross was forced into the building
of the great Tent City there on the Champs de Mars. As these French
girls of the Paris streets came up to the doughboys the job of the "Y"
girl began. In a few more minutes she had convinced the boys that it was
not too late to give up hope of securing lodgings in overcrowded Paris;
and was quick with her suggestions as to where they might be found. It
was not a pleasant job. I hardly can imagine one more unpleasant. But
the girl had her reward, in the looks of gratitude which the doughboys
gave her. One or two of them cried like babies.
* * * * *
This was an unusual job to be sure. But our American Red Cross also was
filled with unusual jobs for women as well as for men; jobs that took
not merely endurance and courage, but in many, many cases rare wit and
tact and diplomacy, and these were rarely lacking, and sometimes came
where they were least expected.
I am not all anxious to over-glorify these women. It would hardly be
fair; for, after all, they were very human indeed--witness one young
widow on our ship to Europe who not merely confessed but actually
boasted that she had received three proposals of marriage upon that
stormy voyage. And one little secretary girl from the Middle West, who
was of our ship's company, wanted to be a canteen worker, although she
was specifically enrolled for the office work for which she was
particularly qualified, but when she found that the canteen to which she
was to be assigned was located in a lonely railroad junction town in the
middle of France, demanded that she be sent to Coblenz, where the Army
of Occupation had its headquarters; she said quite frankly that she did
not want to be robbed of all her opportunities of meeting the nice young
officers of the army. She was very human, that young secretary, and
eventually she got to Coblenz. Insistence counts. And she was both
insistent and consistent.
But at the Rhine her lot, oddly enough, was not thrown in with officers
but with the doughboys--the enlisted men of our most amazing army. She
fed them, walked with them, danced with them, wrote their letters, and
finally began to understand. And so slowly but surely came to the
fullness of her real value to the country that she served.
One evening she dined in the Y. W. C. A. hostess house at Coblenz with two
of these boys. Left alone, she would have dined by herself. She was
tired, very tired. There comes the hour when a woman worker wearies a
bit at sight of a ceaseless file of chattering and khaki-clad men. And
so when she seated herself in one of the little dining booths of the
"Y. W." restaurant, it was with a silent prayer that she might be left
alone--just that evening. Her prayer was not granted. A big doughboy
came and sat down beside her, another across the narrow table from her.
The second vouched for the first.
"You will like Hank," said he. "He's one of the livest in the whole
First Division. He's from Waco, Texas, and say, he's the best gambler in
the whole army."
At which Hank grinned and produced a huge wad of ten and twenty and
fifty and hundred franc notes from his hip pocket.
"Don't you let him string you, Miss Tippitoes," said he, "but if ever
you get where you need a little spare change you know where your Uncle
Hank is to be found."
He called her "Miss Tippitoes" because he could not remember her real
name even if ever it had been given to him. But he had danced with her
and watched her dance, and marveled. And well might he have marveled.
For if I were to give you Miss Tippitoes' real name you might know it as
the name of the most graceful and popular dancer in a fashionable suburb
of Chicago.
Hank edged closer to her. It was in the crowded restaurant, so he took
off his coat and unbuttoned his blouse, as well as the upper buttons of
his undershirt. And Tippitoes stood for it--it was a part of her job and
she knew it--while Hank leaned closer to her and confided some of his
troubles--they were troubles common to so many of the doughboys.
"It's a dump that we're billeted in, miss," said he, "and it's all the
fault of our colonel--him and that Red Cross girl he's stuck on. Just
because he's got a mash on her he had the regiment moved in to G----.
But I've got his number. And as for her--why, that girl comes from my
home town. I've got hers, too."
Tippitoes' eyes blazed. She could have lost her temper so easily. It is
not difficult when one is fagged and nerves begin to get on edge, but
she kept her patience.
"Don't be foolish, young man," said she, "otherwise somebody will have
to take the trouble to tell you that a colonel does not locate his
regiment. He has no more to say about where you shall all be billeted
than you yourselves. And as for the Red Cross girl, she is in the same
position. Moreover, your remark is not worthy of an American
soldier--and a gentleman."
There was something in the way she said these things--no type may ever
put in upon paper--that, in the language of the motion-picture world,
"registered." In a little time Hank was ashamed of himself, and with the
innate generosity of his big, uncouth heart, apologized--like a
gentleman and an American soldier.
* * * * *
Ofttimes, even though with the American Army women were not permitted to
go very close to the front line, the job of the Red Cross girl was
fraught with much real danger. The air raid was too frequent and too
deadly a visitor not to have earned an awsome respect for itself. The
tooth marks of Big Bertha still show all too plainly as horrid scars
across the lovely face of Paris--the beauty of the world. The _boche_,
as we all very well know, did not stop his long-distance warfare from
the air even at the sight of the roofs which bore crimson crosses and so
signified that they were hospitals and, under every condition of
civilization and humanity, exempt from attack. The story of these
hospital raids, with their casualty lists, not merely of American boys
already sick and wounded, but of the wounding and killing of the men and
women who were laboring to give them life and comfort, is already a
well-known fact of record; yet even this was not all. Death never seemed
far away in those hard months of 1917 and 1918, and Death was no
respecter, either of persons or of uniforms or of sex. Upon the honor
roll of our Red Cross there are the names of twenty-three American
women, other than nurses, who made the supreme sacrifice for their
country.
The experiences of the Red Cross girls in the air raids were as many and
varied as the girls themselves. That of a canteen worker at Toul was
fairly typical. She had been over at the neighboring city of Nancy to
aid in one of the innumerable soldiers' dances which had been given
there. In the middle of the dance it had suddenly occurred to her chum
and herself that neither had eaten since morning. A young lieutenant had
taken them to a very good little restaurant in the great Place Stanislas
that all through the hard days of the war held to a long-time reputation
of real excellence, and had insisted that they order a dinner of
generous proportions.
Yet before their soup had been fairly served an air raid was upon them.
The roar of the planes and the rattle of cannonading were continuous.
Every light in the place went out instantly, and because the proprietor
insisted even then in keeping his shades and shutters tightly drawn the
place was inky black.
"What did you do?" I asked her.
"What did we do? We went ahead and ate our dinner. It was the best thing
we could do. I realized for the first time in my life the real handicaps
of the blind. I don't see how they ever learn to eat fried chicken
gracefully."
* * * * *
In an earlier chapter I told of the remarkable work done by the Smith
College girls at the crux of the great German drive. It was impossible
in that chapter to tell all of the sacrifice and the devotion shown by
these women--the most of them from five to fifteen years out of college,
although one of the best of them was from the class of 1882 and still
another from that of 1917. "We were an unbaked crew," one of them
admitted quite frankly to me.
Miss Elizabeth Bliss was typical of these college girls. A long time
after Château-Thierry they were all working behind the lines in the
Argonne, Miss Bliss herself in charge of a sanitary train for the Red
Cross from the railhead back to the base hospital. It was part of her
job to work up to midnight and then be called at three o'clock in the
morning to see the four o'clock train start off with its wounded. On
one of those October mornings, when the weather was a little worse than
usual, if that could be possible, she exerted a perfectly human
privilege and decided not to get up.
But no sooner had this decision been made than the still, small voice
spoke to her.
"Can you afford to miss even one day?" it said to her.
"I'm all in. I just can't get up," she replied to the S. S. V.
"Can you afford to miss--even one day?" it repeated.
She got up and dressed and made her way down in the rain to the waiting
train. As she went into the long hospital car a wounded doughboy raised
himself on one elbow and shouted to all his fellows:
"Hi, fellows, I told you that a Red Cross girl would be here, and here
she is. I told you she'd come."
"Just think if I hadn't," says Miss Bliss in telling of this incident.
* * * * *
When life back of the front was not dangerous or dramatic, it was apt to
be plain dreary. There is not usually much drama just in hard work. Take
once again the case of Miss Mary Vail Andress, whom we found in charge
of the canteen at Toul. Miss Andress came to France on the twenty-fourth
of August, 1917, one of a group of seven Red Cross women, the first of
the American Red Cross women to be sent over. The other members of the
party were Mrs. Dickens, Mrs. Lawrence, Miss Frances Mitchell (who was
sent to the newly opened canteen at Épernay), Miss Rogers, Miss Andrews,
and Miss Frances Andrews, and were immediately dispatched to Châlons.
For a short time Miss Andress was the assistant of Henry Wise Miller,
who was then in charge of canteen work in France. She, however, enlisted
for canteen work and so asked Mr. Miller to be allowed to go into the
field and was sent to Épernay. From there she went back to Paris and on
to Chantilly, where she prepared a home for girls in canteen work. She
came to Toul in January, 1918, and, as you already know, was the first
woman worker to reach that important American Army headquarters.
"For a while it seemed as if I could never quite get down to the real
job," she says, "it seemed so often that something new broke loose and
always just at the wrong time. While we were working to get the first
canteen established here at Toul--we had a nurses' club in mind at the
time--word came from the hospital over there back of the hill that the
Red Cross was needed there to help prepare for the comfort of the nurses
in that big place. I went there at once--of course. Within fifteen
minutes after I got there I was hanging curtains in the girls'
barracks--couldn't you trust a woman to do a job like that? I did not
get very many hung. Captain Hugh Pritchitt, my chief, came bursting in
upon me. 'They're here,' he shouted.
"I knew what that meant. 'They' were the first of our American wounded,
and they must have comfort and help and immediate attention. They got
it. It was part of our job, you know. And after that part was organized
there was nothing to it but to come back to Toul and set up our chain of
canteens there."
And you already know how very well that particular war job was done. And
doing it involved much devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice, not
only on the part of the directress, but on that of her staff of capable
assistants.
Talk about devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice! Into the desolate
ruin of the war-racked city of Rheims there walked last October two
American Red Cross women on a sight-seeing trip. They had had months of
hard canteen work and were well tired out, and were about to return
home. In a week or so of leave they went to Rheims because that once
busy city with its dominating cathedral has become the world's new
Pompeii. And the man or woman who visits France without seeing it has
missed seeing the one thing of almost supreme horror and interest in the
world to-day.
The two Red Cross women had but a single day to see Rheims. That was
last October. They still are there; for back of the ruins, back of the
gaunt, scarred hulk of that vast church which was once the pride of
France, and to-day the symbol of Calvary through which she had just
passed, there rose the question in their minds: what has become of the
folk of this town? It was the sort of question that does not down. Nor
were the two women--one is Miss Emily Bennet of the faculty of a
fashionable girls' school in New York and the other Miss Catherine
Biddle Porter of Philadelphia--the sort that close their souls to
questions such as these.
They found the answer. It was in the basement of the commercial high
school--a dreary, high-ceilinged place, but because of its comparatively
modern construction of steel and brick a sort of _abri_ or bombproof
refuge for the three or four hundred citizens that stuck it out through
the four years of horror. In that basement place of safety an aged
school-teacher of the town, Mademoiselle Fourreaux, month in and month
out, prepared two meals a day--bread and soup--for the group of refugees
that gathered round about her and literally kept the heart of Rheims
abeat. The Red Cross women found this aged heroine--she confesses to
having turned seventy--working unaided, and within the hour were working
with her, sending word back to Paris to send up a few necessary articles
of comfort and of clothing. That night they slept in Rheims, and were
billeted in a house whose windows had been crudely replaced with oiled
paper and whose roof was half gone.
In a short time relief came to them. The American Red Cross
sent in other supplies and workers and established a much
larger and finer canteen relief in another section of the town. Other
organizations--French and British and American--poured in relief; but
Miss Bennett and Miss Porter stuck it out, and soon began to reap the
fruit of their great endeavors.
* * * * *
I have cited here a few instances of women who have gone
overseas--frequently at great personal sacrifices--to help bear the
burden of the war. If space had permitted I might easily have given five
hundred, and each of them would have had its own personal little
dramatic story. I might simply tell of some of the women whom I have met
on the job; of Miss Lucy Duhring of Philadelphia, setting up the women's
work of the Y. M. C. A. in the leave areas of the occupied territory; of
a girl superintendent of schools from Kansas, working in the hospital
records for the Red Cross at Toul; of another girl from
Kingston-on-Hudson running a big Y. W. C. A. hotel for army girls in Paris
and running it mighty well; of still another woman--this one a welfare
worker from a big industrial plant in Kansas City--as the guiding spirit
in the hostess house at Coblenz. The list quickly spins to great
lengths. It is a tremendously embracing one, and when one gazes at it,
he begins to realize what effect this great adventure overseas is going
to have upon the lives of the women who participated in it; how it is
going to change the conventions of life, or its amenities, or its
opportunities. How will the weeks and months of camaraderie with
khaki-clad men, under all conditions and all circumstances affect them?
Many of the silly conventionalities of ordinary life and under ordinary
conditions of peace, have, of necessity, been thrown away over there.
Men and women have made long trips together, in train or in motor car,
and have thought or made nothing of it whatever. On the night train up
from Aix-les-Bains to Paris on one of those never-to-be-forgotten nights
the autumn the conflict still raged, two girls of the A. E. F. found it
quite impossible to obtain seats of any sort. Four or five marines, back
from a short leave in a little town near there, did the best they could
for them and with their blankets and dunny rolls rigged crude beds for
them in the aisle of a first-class car, and there the girls rode all
night to Paris while the marines stood guard over them.
The gray-uniformed woman war-worker knows that she may trust the
American soldier. Her experience with the doughboy has been large and so
her tribute to the high qualities of his manhood is of very real value.
Moreover, she too, has seen real service, both in canteen work and in
the still more important leave area work which has followed--this last
the great problem of keeping the idle soldier healthily amused.
"I have known our girls," she will tell you, "to go into a miserable
little French or German town filled with a thousand or twelve hundred
American boys in khaki and in a day change the entire spirit of that
community. There has been a dance one night, for instance, with the boys
restless and trying stupidly to dance with one another, or in some
cases, even bringing in the rough little village girls from the streets
outside. But the next dance has seen a transformation. The girls of the
A. E. F. have come, they are dancing with the men; there is cheer and
decency in the very air, there are neither French nor German
present--the place is American.
"You have told of what the American girl has been to the men of our
army; let me tell, in a word, what the army has been to the American
woman who has worked with it: We have trusted our enlisted men in khaki
and not once found that trust misplaced. Night and day have we placed
our honor in their hands and never have trusted in vain."
"The reason why?" we venture.
"The mothers of America," is the quick reply.
I know what she means. I have read letter after letter written by the
doughboys to the mothers back here, and the mass of them still stay in
my mind as a tribute that all but surpasses description. Some of them
misspelled; many of them ungrammatical--where have our schools been
these last few years?--a few of them humorous, a few pathetic, but all
of them breathing a sentiment and a tenderness that makes me willing to
call ours the sentimental as well as the amazing army. Add to these
letters the verbal testimony of the boys to the women of their army.
"We're not doing much," one after another has said, "but say, you ought
to see my mother on the job back home. She's the one that's turning the
trick."
* * * * *
It was a large experiment sending women with our army overseas--in the
minds of many a most dubious experiment. In no other war had an army
ever had women enrolled with it, save possibly a few nurses. It is an
experiment which, so far as the United States is concerned, has more
than justified itself. Our women have been tried in France--in other
European lands as well--and have not been found wanting; which is a very
faint way, indeed, of trying to tell of a great accomplishment. For if
the American soldier, through many months of test and trial--and test
and trial that by no means were confined to the battlefield--has kept
his body clean and his soul pure through the virtue of woman which has
been spread about him through the guarded years of his home life, how
about the virtue of the women that, clad in the uniform of our Red Cross
and the other war-relief organizations, guarded him successfully when he
was far away from home? There is but one answer to such a question, but
one question to follow after that. Here it is: Is it fair to longer
consider such a real accomplishment a mere experiment? I think not. I
think that it is rather to be regarded as a real triumph of our
Americanism.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Obvious errors of punctuation and diacritical marking have been
corrected.
Hyphen removed: over[-]burdened (p. 160), soup[-]kitchen (pp. 146-7),
team[-]work (p. 23).
Hyphen added: post[-]office (p. 246), to[-]day (p. 288).
The text uses "coöperation", "coördination", etc. consistently, except
when hyphenated, where "co-operation", "co-ordination", etc. are used.
With the removal of the hyphenation, these have been changed to use the
diaeresis everywhere.
P. 9: "plaîl" changed to "s'il vous plaît" (s'il vous plaît).
Pp. 10, 222: "embrochure" changed to "embouchure" (the Seine embouchure,
the embouchure of the Loire).
P. 28: "civilan" changed to "civilian" (military and affairs).
P. 29: "obtainalbe" changed to "obtainable" (were not readily
obtainable).
P. 30: "Agriculture" changed to "Argiculture".
P. 36: added "a" (without a coördinated system).
P. 49: duplicate "the" removed (the main stems).
P. 49: "sizeable" changed to "sizable" (fifty-five sizable trucks).
P. 52: "similiar" changed to "similar" (a few similar trifles).
P. 55: "their" changed to "there" (there is nothing light).
P. 62: added "it" (but if it had lasted two weeks).
P. 71: "carrry" changed to "carry" (As it was impossible to carry).
P. 72: "dack" changed to "back" (After that we drove back).
P. 92: "Quai de la Lorie" changed to "Quai de la Loire".
P. 97: "a" added (so to prepare a proper system).
P. 98: "Salt Park" changed to "Salt Pork".
P. 107: "authorites" changed to "authorities" (the French authorities).
P. 107: missing "t" replaced (keep down the buoyant spirit).
P. 117: "whatsover" changed to "whatsoever" (is no railroad whatsoever).
P. 118: "spall" changed to "shall" (I shall speak to the railway
authorities).
P. 118: added "a" (within a stone's throw).
P. 122: "exquistite" changed to "exquisite" (its exquisite cathedral).
P. 124: "pastboard" changed to "pasteboard" (a sizable pasteboard box).
P. 126: "geen" changed to "been" (the vines had been growing).
P. 131: "Colombes-la-Belles" changed to "Colombes-les-Belles".
P. 147: "ofter" changed to "after" (case after case).
P. 149: "opportunites" changed to "opportunities" (seek out the
opportunities).
P. 157: "troup" changed to "troupe" (a troupe of seventeen girls).
P. 165: "tubes" changed to "cubes" (bouillon cubes from a stock).
P. 171: "Mareieul" changed to "Mareuil".
P. 220: "atrractiveness" changed to "attractiveness" (great
attractiveness).
P. 225: "to" changed to "too" (that passed none too quickly).
P. 236: "Neaves" changed to "Mesves".
P. 246: "men" changed to "women" (the efforts of these women).
P. 259: missing "t" replaced (the ebb tide of American troops).
P. 262: "placed" changed to "place" (the vast placed packed to the
very doors).
P. 266: "procelain" changed to "porcelain" (white porcelain pitcher).
P. 273: "Beet" changed to "Beef" (Roasted Filet of Beef).
P. 284: "of" added (the job of the Red Cross girl).
P. 284: "respector" changed to "respecter" (Death was no respecter).
P. 286: "wark" changed to "work" (just in hard work).