SUNNY FRANCE
Later on "Sunny France" became a mocking byword uttered by wet and muddy
men, but during the early days in the training area no one had any just
complaint about the weather. Come to think of it there wasn't anything
very wrong with those early days in rural France. Five o'clock was
pretty early for getting up but the sun could do it and keep cheerful.
It was glorious country with hills and forests and plowed fields and red
roofed villages and smooth white roads. The country people didn't throw
their hats in the air like Parisians, but they were kindly though calm.
"Down in ----," said a little doughboy who came from an Indiana farm,
"everybody you meet says 'bon jour' to you whether they know you or not.
That means 'good morning.' I was in Chicago once and they don't do it
there."
It wasn't Eden though. There was the tobacco situation against that
theory. To a good many soldiers, pleasant weather and kindly folk and
ample rations meant nothing much. These were minor things. The
quartermaster had no Bull Durham. When the supply of American tobacco
and cigarettes ran out the men tried the French products but not for
long. "So they call these Grenades," muttered a soldier as he examined a
popular French brand of cigarettes, "I guess that's because you'd better
throw 'em away right after you set 'em going."
French matches were less popular than French tobacco. The kind they sold
in our town and thereabouts were all tipped with sulphur and usually
exploded with a blue flame maiming the smoker and amusing the
spectators. Political economists and others interested in the law of
supply and demand may be interested to know that when the tobacco famine
was at its height a package of Bull Durham worth five cents in America
was sold by one soldier to another for five francs. This shortage has
since been relieved from several sources, but there has never been more
tobacco than the soldiers could smoke.
Reading matter was also ardently desired during the early months in the
Vosges. An enterprising storekeeper in one town sent a hurry call to
Paris for English books and a week later she proudly displayed the
following volumes on her shelves: "The Life of Dean Stanley," "Sermons
by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon," "The Jubilee Book of Cricket," "The
Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins (Lord of Brampton)," and "The
Recollections of the Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West."
A few companies had libraries of their own. I wonder who made the
selection of titles. The volumes I picked out at random in one village
were: "The Family Life of Heinrich Heine," "Fourteen Weeks in
Astronomy," "Recollections and Letters of Renan," "Education and the
Higher Life," "Bible Stories for the Young," and "Henry the Eighth and
His Six Wives." The librarian said that the last was the most popular
book in the collection although several readers admitted that it did
not come up to expectations. Just as I was going out the top sergeant
came in to return a book. I asked him what it was. He said, "It's a book
called 'When Patty Went to College.'"
Our town was big and had moving pictures twice a week, but up the line
in the little villages there was no such source of amusement. After the
men had been in training for a week or more, a French Red Cross outfit
stopped at one of the villages with a traveling movie outfit and
announced that they would show a picture that night. According to the
announcement the picture was "Charlot en 'Le Vagabond.'" It sounded
foreign and forbidding. The doughboys anticipated trouble with the
titles and the closeups of what the heroine wrote and all the various
printed words which go to make a moving picture intelligible. Still they
were patient when the title of the picture was flashed on the screen and
they tried to look interested. The first scene was a road winding up to
a distant hill and down the highway with eccentric gait there walked a
little man strangely reminiscent. He drew nearer and nearer and as the
figure came into full view the soldier in front of me could stand the
strain no longer. He jumped to his feet.
"I'm a son of a gun," he shouted, "if it isn't Charlie Chaplin."
Recognition upon the part of the audience was instantaneous and
enthusiasm unbounded. If the Americans go out tomorrow and capture
Berlin they cannot possibly show more joy than they did at the sight of
Charlie Chaplin in France. Never again will the French be able to fool
them by disguising him as "Charlot."
After a bit the soldiers learned to entertain themselves and several
companies developed a number of talented performers. The first company
show I attended mixed boxing and music. They began with boxing. There
was a short intermission during which the first tenor fixed up a bloody
nose. He had received a bit the worst of it in the heavyweight bout. The
other members of the quartet gave him cotton and encouragement. Finally
he put on his shirt and hitching up his voice, began, "Naught but a few
faded roses can my sweet story tell." His comrades joined him at "My
heart was ever light," and they finished the ballad in perfect
alignment.
Almost all the songs were sentimental and many were old. They had
"Dearie," and "Where the River Shannon Flows," and that one about
Ireland falling out of Heaven (just as if the devil himself had not done
the very same thing). Later there were "Mother Machree" and "Old
Kentucky Home." Patriotism was not neglected. "When I Get Back Home
Again to the U.S.A." was the favorite among the recent war songs. The
only savor of army life in the program on this particular evening was in
a couple of Mexican songs brought up from the border by men who went to
get Villa. They brought back "Cucaracha" with all its seventeen obscene
Spanish verses. There was also one parody inspired by this war and sung
to the tune of "My Little Girl, I'm Dreaming of You." It went something
like this:
America, I'm dreaming of you
And I long for you each day
America, I'm fighting for you
Tho' you're many miles away
We'll knock the block right off the Kaiser
And we'll drive them 'cross the Rhine--
And then we'll sail back home to you, dear
To the tune of "Wacht am Rhein"!
The American soldier does not seem to be much of a song maker. Songs by
soldiers and for soldiers are not common with us yet. We have nothing as
close to the spirit of the trenches as the British ditty "I want to go
home," which always leaves the auditor in doubt as to whether he should
take it seriously and weep or humorously and laugh. Possibly there is
something of both elements in the song. The mixture has been typical of
the British attitude toward the war. Here is the song:
I want to go 'ome
I want to go 'ome
The Maxims they spit
And the Johnsons they roar
I don't want to go to the front any more
Oh take me over the seas
Where the Alley-mans can't get at me
Oh my; I don't want to die,
I want to go 'ome.
The American army is still looking for a song. None of the new ones has
achieved universal popularity. However the many who heard the quartet of
Company L sing on this particular evening seemed to have no objection to
the old songs. In fact they were new to many in the audience for as the
concert went on French soldiers joined the audience and townspeople hung
about the edges of the crowd. They listened politely and applauded,
though indeed one must get a strange impression of America if his
introduction is through our popular songs. Such a foreigner is in danger
of believing that ours is a June land in which the moon is always
shining upon a young person known as "little girl." Yet the French
expressed no astonishment at the songs. Only one feature puzzled them
profoundly. At the end of a particularly effective song the captain
said, "Those men sang that very well. Bring 'em each a glass of water."
No villager could quite understand why a man who had committed no more
palpable crime than tenor singing should be forced to partake of a
drink which is cold, tasteless and watery.
Most the villages in our part of France had only one dimension. They
consisted of a line of houses on either side of the roadway and they
were always huddled together. Land is too valuable in France to waste it
on lawns and suchlike. Some of the villages were tiny and shabby, but
none was too small or too mean to be without its little café. It took
the doughboys some little time to get over their interest in the
startling fact that champagne was within the reach of the working man,
but they went back to beer in due course and now champagne is among the
things which shopkeepers must not sell to American soldiers. The
prohibition of the sale of cognac and champagne is all that the army
needs. Beer and light wines are not a menace to the health or behavior
of our army. Beer is by far the most popular drink and it would be an
ambitious man indeed who would seek the slightest deviation from
sobriety in the thin war beer of France. He might drown.
Absolute prohibition for the army in France would be well nigh
impossible. It would mean that every inn and shop and railroad station
and farmhouse would have to be classed as out of bounds. In fact
prohibition could not be enforced unless our soldiers were ordered never
to venture within four walls. Wine is to be had under every roof in
France and you can get it also in not a few places where the roof has
been shot to pieces. The French are interested in temperance just now.
On many walls posters are exhibited showing a German soldier and a black
bottle with the caption, "They are both the enemies of France," but when
a Frenchman talks of temperance or prohibition or the abolition of the
liquor traffic he never thinks of including wine or beer. The civil
authorities of France would not be much use in helping the American army
enforce a bone-dry order. They simply wouldn't understand it.
There was some excessive drinking when the army first came to France but
it has been checked. A number of influences have made for discretion.
One of the most potent is the opportunity for promotion in an army in
the field. Officers have been quick to point this out to their men. One
captain called his company together in the early days and said, "Some of
the men in this company are going out and getting pinko, stinko, sloppy
drunk. Any man who gets drunk goes in the guard house of course and more
than that he will get no promotion from me. I'm going to pick my
sergeants from the fellows that have got sense. You may notice that some
of the men who drink are old soldiers. Don't take an example from that.
Remember that's why they're old soldiers. There isn't any sense in
blowing all your money in for booze. Now if I took my pay in a lump at
the end of a month I could buy every café in this town and I could stay
drunk for a year. That would be fine business, wouldn't it?"
"I guess maybe I exaggerated a little about the length of time I could
stay drunk," the captain told me afterwards, "but do you know that talk
seems to have done the trick."
One factor which worked for temperance was the French fashion of making
drinking deliberate and social. When an American can be induced to sit
down to his potion he is comparatively safe. These little village cafés
did no harm after the first brief period when the American soldier had
his fling and they served the good purpose of encouraging fraternization
between doughboy and poilu.
The contact with French soldiers brought no great vocabulary to our men
but if they learned few words they did get the hang of making their
wants understood. In a week or two innkeepers or women in shops had no
trouble at all in attending to the wants of Americans. Probably the
French people made somewhat faster linguistic progress than the
soldiers. The Americans were willing to be met at least halfway. When I
asked one doughboy, "How do you get along with the French? Can you make
them understand you?" he said, "Why, they're coming along pretty well. I
think most of 'em will pick it up in time."
But there was one French word the soldiers had to learn. That was
"fineesh." The children forced that word upon them. They were always at
the heels of the American soldiers. They galloped the doughboys up and
down the village streets in furious piggyback charges. They borrowed jam
from company cooks and rode in the supply trucks. Of course there had to
be an end to the rides, sometimes, and even to the jam and the only way
to convince the children of France that an absolute unshakable limit had
been reached was to thrust two hands aloft and cry "fineesh." The old
women liked the doughboys too because they would draw water from the
wells for them and occasionally lend a hand in moving wood or wheat or
fodder. Nor do I mean to imply that the younger women of the little
villages did not esteem the doughboys. "Tell 'em back home that there
aren't any good looking women in France," was the message that ever so
many soldiers asked me to convey to anxious individuals in America. I
hand the message on but must refuse to pass upon its sincerity.
American officers got along well with the French but they never reached
the same degree of chumminess that the men did. They met French officers
at more or less formal luncheons and had to go through a routine of
speeches largely concerned with Lafayette and Rochambeau and Washington.
Poilus and doughboys did not go so far back for their subjects of
conversation. The American enlisted man had a great advantage over his
officer in the matter of language. He might know less French, but he was
much more ready to experiment. An officer did not like to make mistakes.
His was defensive French, a weapon to be used guardedly in cases of
extreme need. When a visiting officer hurled a compliment at him he
replied, but he seldom took the initiative. After all he was an American
officer and he feared to make himself ridiculous by poor pronunciation
and worse grammar. The soldier had no such scruples. He saw no reason
why he should be any more abashed by French grammar than by English and
as for pronunciation he followed the advice of a little pamphlet called
"The American in France" which was rushed out by some French firm for
sale to the American army. In the matter of pronunciation the book said,
"Since pronunciation is the most difficult part of any language the
publishers of this book have decided to omit it." The soldiers were
ready to adopt this method and only wished that it could be extended to
other things. To trench digging for instance.
The most daring man in the use of an unfamiliar language was not a
soldier but a second lieutenant. He took great pride in his talent for
pantomime and asserted that his vocabulary of some thirty words and his
gestures filled all his needs. He was somewhat startled though on an
afternoon when he went into a shop to purchase "B.V.D.'s" and found the
store in charge of the young daughter of the proprietor. Pantomime
seemed hardly the thing and so he paused long to think up a word for the
garment he wanted or some approximation. At last he smiled and exclaimed
brightly, "Chemise pour jambes, s'il vous plait."
Stores were not the strong point of our bit of France. We soon came to
regard our town as a metropolis because people journeyed there to make
"shopping tours." One afternoon I marked fifteen visiting soldiers with
their eyes glued against a shop window which displayed half a dozen
electric flashlights, two quarts of champagne, a French-English
dictionary and a limited assortment of postcards. These, of course, were
barred from the mail by censorship but the soldiers collected them to be
taken home after the war.
"These French postcards aren't exactly what some of the boys back home
are going to expect," one soldier admitted. "I went to three shops now
but the others have been ahead of me and all I could get was these two.
One's a picture called 'l'eglise' and the other's 'la maison de Jeanne
d'Arc.'"
The shops had hard work in keeping up with more commodities than picture
postcards. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for canned peaches
and sardines. Somehow or other men who have been on a long march simply
crave either sardines or canned peaches. The doughboys did a good deal
of eating at their own expense. Army food was plentiful and moderately
varied. Beans and corned beef hash were served a good many times
perhaps, but there was no lack of fresh meat and there was plenty of jam
and of carrots and onions and heavy gravy. Food, however, was an outlet
for spending money and in some villages the men got so eager that they
would buy anything. Little traveling shops in wagons came through the
smaller villages in the northern part of the training area loaded with
all sorts of gimcracks intended for the peasant trade. The peddlers had
no time to put in a special line for the soldiers. They found that it
was not necessary. Desperate men with pockets full of money would
purchase even the imitation tortoise shell sidecombs which the itinerant
merchants had to sell.
The purchasing capacity of the soldier was not limited to his pay alone.
The villagers were wildly excited about the white bread issued to the
American army. It was the first they had seen since the second year of
the war. One old lady seized a loaf which was presented to her and
crying "il est beau," sat down upon a doorstep and began to eat the
bread as if it were cake. The rate of exchange fluctuated somewhat but
there were days when a loaf of white bread could be exchanged for a
whole roast chicken.
The eagerness of the American soldier to spend his money had the result
of tempting French storekeepers to raise their prices and as the cost of
living mounted the civilian population began to complain. Even the
soldiers had suspicions at last that they were being charged too much in
some stores and the American officers took over price control as another
of their many responsibilities.
"I went to the mayor," one town major explained, "and I said, 'Look
here, Bill, I don't mind 'the shopkeepers putting a little something
over. All I ask is that they just act reasonable. They'll get all the
money in time anyhow, and so I wish you'd tip them off not to be in so
much of a hurry.' He couldn't talk any English, that mayor couldn't, but
the interpreter told him about it and he went right to the front for us.
From that day to this we've had only one complaint about anything in our
village. That came from an old lady who had some doughboys billeted in a
barn next to the shed where she kept her sheep. She came to me and said
the soldiers talked so much at night that the sheep couldn't sleep."