WHEREIN WE FIND THAT "OUR FLAG IS STILL THERE"
This chapter will contain the story of our visit to General Pershing
and the American troops. But before we came to that part of France
which holds our men we passed through divers warlike and sentimental
enterprises which lay across our path, and while we relate the story
of these adventures, the reader must wait a few moments before we
disclose the American flag. But the promise of its coming may buoy
him up while the preliminary episodes clog the narrative.
One afternoon we were chugging along in our Red Cross ambulance
coming down from the first aid posts where we had been talking to
some American Ambulance boys on the French Front, when we noticed
the arrives were landing regularly so we knew that the Germans were
after something in the neighbourhood--perhaps a big gun, perhaps an
ammunition dump. We were speculating upon the nature of the target
when we whirled around a corner and saw it. It was a cross-road.
Four roads forked there; the Germans, of course, had it marked. It
was getting its afternoon pour parler; for they believed that the
ammunition trains would be passing that cross-road at that time.
And as we looked out of the windows of the ambulance our hearts
jumped--at least Henry's and mine jumped--as we saw that between
us and the forks of the road a great French camion had skidded and
stalled, with two wheels over the embankment that raised the road
from the swamp about us, effectually blocking our way. "This,"
said Major Murphy, taking in the situation quickly, "is a mighty
dangerous place." As the word "place" escaped him he was on the
ground. He had slid through a window of the ambulance. The ambulance
drivers--Singer and Hughes--neglecting to unlock the ambulance
doors, ran up the road and began working with the drivers of the
camion to get the great van on the road again. The other occupants
of the ambulance also hurried to the camion--through the windows
of the ambulance; no one was left to unbutton the thing for Henry
and me. Henry insists that he was there alone; that he was afraid
to follow me through the window for fear of sticking in it. He had
not been avoiding fats, sugars and starches for a year and had no
girlish lines in his figure. And the arrives were certainly bouncing
in rather brashly. The rest of us were out in the open where we
could duck and perhaps avoid the spray of shrapnel. But an ambulance
was no more protection against fifty pounds of German junk than an
umbrella. And there sat Henry in the ambulance wistfully looking
through the window of the vehicle and realizing that his exposure
was less in a dignified sitting posture in the ambulance than
it would be horizontally half in and half out of the thing, held
fast in the vain endeavour to get away. So he waited for the next
"arrive" to come with commendable fortitude. And then it came. It
sounded like the old grand-daddy of all shells. We fancied we could
sense its direction; possibly that was imagination. But anyway we
looked toward the German lines and realized Henry's grave danger.
And then it struck--whanged with an awful roar about seventy-five
feet from us, against the bare trunk of a shell-stripped tree.
We knew without looking that the shell had hit the tree. Then our
consciousness recorded the fact that a French soldier had been
standing by that tree. And slowly and in terror we turned our
eyes tree-ward. The tree was a mass of splinters. It looked like
a special sale of toothpicks in a show window. Then we turned our
eyes toward the place where we had last seen the French soldier.
We hardly dared to look. But instead of seeing a splatter of blood
and flesh upon the earth by the tree stump, we saw the soldier
rise from the buck-brush where he had been ducking, and light a
cigarette. The shell had hit not a dozen feet above him, but had
sprayed its fountain from him, instead of toward him. He had some
trouble lighting his cigarette and was irritated for a second at
his inconvenience. But so far as we could see, the fact that death
had reached for him and missed him by inches had left no impression
upon his mind. Three years in war had wrought some deep change in
him. Was it entirely in his nerves or was it deeper than nerves,
a certain calmness of soul--or was it merely a dramatic expression
of a soldierly attitude? We did not know. But to Henry and me, who
had been rescued from death by that tree that stopped the shell
headed straight for us, it seemed that we should come back after
the war was over and nail a medal of honour and a war cross on the
stump, and put up a statue there with an all-day program! We had
no desire to hide our fright! It relieved us to chatter about the
tablet on that tree stump!
The French soldier strolled over to us; helped to straighten out
the camion, and when we learned that he was going down the hill
we gave him a lift. He was a hairy, dirty, forsaken looking poilu
who, washed and shaved and classified, turned out to be an exchange
professer from the Sorbonne, who had spent a year at Harvard, and
it was he who told us of the bombing of the hospital at Landrecourt;
we'll call it Landrecourt to fool the censor, who thinks there is
no hospital there. At the mention of the hospital the Major turned
to us and said: "That's where we sent that pretty red-headed nurse
who came over with you on the boat. And," added the Major, "that
is the hospital equipped by Mrs. Chesman, of New York!" whose name
is also changed to fool the censor. It was a better known name!
"Say," exclaimed Henry, "the Aunt of the Gilded Youth!"
"You mean our ambulance boy who came over on the boat with you--the
multimillionaire?" asked the head of the American Ambulance service.
"The same," answered Henry, who turned to me and said in his
oratorical voice: "The plot thickens." Then the Frenchman told us
the story of the raid: How the airmen had come at midnight, dropped
their bombs, killing nurses and doctors, and how the discipline
of the hospital did not even flutter. He said that the head nurse
summoned all her nurses, marched them to the abri at the rear of
the hospital, and stood at the door of the abri, while the girls
filed in, and just as the last nurse was going into the dugout with
the head nurse standing outside, the airmen dropped a bomb upon her
and erased her! None of the nurses inside was hurt. Two doctors
were killed and a number of patients. Landrecourt was on our way
and we hurried to it.
[Illustration: He had some trouble lighting his cigarette and was
irritated for a second at his inconvenience]
Was there ever a martial adventure without a love story in it?
Little did it seem to Henry and me as we left our humble homes in
Wichita and Emporia to make the world safe for democracy, that we
two thick-set, sedentary, new world replicas of Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza should be the chaperons and custodians of a love affair. We
were not equipped for it. We were travelling light, and our wives
were three or four thousand miles away. No middle-aged married man
gets on well with a love affair who is out of daily reach of his
wife. For when he gets into the barbed wire tangle of a love affair,
he needs the wise counsel of a middle-aged woman. But here we were,
two fat old babes in the woods and here came the Gilded Youth, the
Eager Soul and the Young Doctor--sping! like a German shell--right
into our midst, as it were.
There at Landrecourt we found the Eager Soul, a badly scared young
person--but tremendously plucky! And mad--say, that girl was doing
a strafing job that would have made the kaiser blush! And the fine
part of it was, that its expression was entirely in repression.
There was no laugh in her face, no joy in her heart, and we scarcely
knew the sombre, effective, business-like young person who greeted
us. And then across the court we saw something else that interested
us. For there, walking with his patrician aunt, we saw the Gilded
Youth. Evidently he had heard of the raid, had run over from
Valaincourt on some sort of military permission.
"Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring eyes. "Mrs.
Chesman--this is practically her hospital. I mean she and her group
are keeping it equipped and going--a wonderful work. I mean here
is a real thing for a woman to do. And, oh, the need of it!"
[Illustration: "Oh, yes," answered the Eager Soul to our enquiring
eyes. "Mrs. Chessman--this is practically her hospital"]
"Nice sort?" This from Henry, observing that there was no move
toward us, on the part of the Gilded Youth and Auntie. Henry may
have had his theory for their splendid isolation. But it received
no stimulus when the Eager Soul answered:
"Oh, yes, I believe so. I haven't met her yet. They all say she
is charming." Henry looked at me. She caught the glance. Then to
cover his tracks he grinned and said: "Charm seems to run in their
family."
"Yes," she returned amiably. "One meets so many nice people on the
boat."
And Henry, still in pursuit of useful social information, insisted:
"Well, are they as nice in the war zone as they are--on the boat?"
We got our first dimple then, and the Eager Soul tucked in a wisp
of red hair, as she answered: "Well, really, I've been too busy to
know." She turned absent-mindedly toward the figure of the Gilded
Youth, across the court. But the dimples and the smile faded and
she closed the door firmly and finally on romance, when she said:
"On the record of service shown by my entrance card, they have made
me assistant to the new head nurse who is coming over from Souilly
to-night."
After we had told her that we were going to American headquarters
soon, she smiled again, to show us that she knew that when we
went probably we would see the Young Doctor. But she let the smile
stand as her only response to Henry's suggestion of a message. In
another moment she turned to her work.
"Well," said Henry, "some pride! 'One meets so many nice people on
the boat!' The idea being that her outfit at home is just as good
as Auntie's group in New York, even if he didn't introduce her!
You know I rather like the social spunk of our Great Middle West!"
While we were talking the Gilded Youth began moving Auntie slowly
but rather directly around the court to us. It occurred to me that
perhaps he realized that we were the only social godfathers that
the Eager Soul had in Europe, and that if he introduced us to Auntie
it would be an indication that the affair of the boat, if it was
an affair, was to be put upon a social basis! And in two minutes
more he had docked Auntie at our pier. A large, brusk, well-groomed,
good-looking woman of fifty was Auntie. Her Winthrop and Endicott
blood advertised itself in her Bostonese, but she was sound and
strong and the way she instantly got at the invoice price of Henry
and his real worth, pleased me. She was genuine American. The
thing that troubled me was the fear that Henry would begin too soon
to lambast onion soup. But he didn't and in a few moments we were
having this dialogue:
HENRY: "Oh, yes, indeed; we've grown fond of her. Her father was--"
AUNTIE: "Oh, yes, I knew her father. Mr. Chesman and he were
interested together in New Mexican mining claims in the eighties;
I believe they made some money. But--"
THE GILDED YOUTH: "Well, Auntie--would you mind telling me how--?"
AUNTIE: "Why, on her application blank, of course, with her father's
name, age and residence."
THE GILDED ONE: "But you never mentioned it to me?"
AUNTIE: "Nor to her, either. Why should I? This is hardly the place
to organize the Colonial Dames! I believe you said a few minutes
ago that you had met her on the boat."
HENRY: "One meets so many nice people on the boat!"
ME: "You've heard of the woman who said she didn't know the man
socially, she had just met him coming over on the boat!"
The Gilded Youth looked quickly at me, catching me suppressing a
wink at Henry, who grinned at the expiring ghost of it. Then Auntie
led the talk to the raid of the night before; and invited us to
come up for a night's sleep in a civilized bed in the hospital. We
were quartered for the night with the Ambulance boys, sleeping in
a barn loft, so naturally, we accepted her invitation. Just as we
were leaving to get our baggage, out into the court came the Eager
Soul bearing a letter. We did not see the address, but it was,
alas, plainly dimpled in her face, for the Gilded Youth to see,
and after greeting him only pleasantly, she handed the letter to
us, saying: "Would you be good enough to deliver this for me at
Gonrecourt next week, as you are passing? It is to a friend I met
on the boat!"
"Yes," said Henry; "one meets so many nice people on the boat."
"Sometimes," she answered, as she turned to her work.
That night we slept like logs until after midnight; then the moon
rose, and the hospital began to come to life. The stir and murmur
of the place wakened us. And we realized what a moonlight night
means in a hospital near the front line. It means terror. No one
slept after moonrise. It was a new experience for Henry and me.
So we rose and met it. And we realized that in scores of hospitals
all over the war zone, on the side of the allies, similar scenes
were enacting. The Germans were literally tearing the nerves out
of hundreds of nurses by their raiding campaign--nurses whom the
raiders did not visit, but who were threatened by every moonlight
night!
It must have been after two in the morning, when we saw the Eager
Soul and the Gilded Youth walking around the court as they used to
pace the deck together. Once or twice they passed our window, and
we heard their voices. They were having some sort of a tall talk
on philosophical matters, which annoyed Henry. The ocean and onion
soup and philosophical theorizing never seemed reasonable, normal
expressions of anything properly in the cosmos to Henry; he professed
to believe that persons who tolerated these things would sooner
or later be caught using the words "group" and "reaction" and
"hypothesis," and he would have none of them. But for all that she
used the word group and once confessed that she was a subscriber
to the New Republic, Henry did like the Eager Soul; so he waked me
up from a doze to say: "Bill, she's putting him through the eye of
the needle all right. And he's sliding through slick as goose-grease. I
heard him telling her a minute ago that the war isn't for boundaries
and geography; but for a restatement of human creeds. Then she said
that steam and electricity have over-capitalized the world; that
we are paying too highly for superintendence and that the price
of superintendence must come down, and wages must come up. Then
he said that he and his class will go in the fires burning out
there--melted like wax. And she told him that they both had a lot
of stolen goods on them--bodies and minds, and hearts cultivated at
the expense of their fellow creatures whose lives had been narrowed
that theirs might be broadened. And you should have heard her talk
about the Young Doctor--a self-made man, who had earned his way through
college and medical school, and made his own place professionally.
She said he was the Herald of the New Day. Bill," sighed Henry,
"what would you give if you could talk like that--again?" But from
me, drowsily, came this: "Henry--do you suppose she will get around
to that slapping tonight she promised him on the boat? That would
be worth staying up to see!"
"She'll never slap him. He'll never need it. She's talked him clear
out of the mood!"
"Yes, she has--yes, she has," came from me. And Henry insisted:
"She may have to slap the Doctor; but she has steered this boy out
of the danger zone into the open sea of friendship."
"Oh, yes, she has; oh, yes, she has," came the echo from the other
bed! And Henry subsided.
But the buzzing about the hospital would not let us sleep. At three
o'clock evidently they were serving tea to the nurses, or lunch of
some kind. The moon was shining straight down into the court; the
Gilded Youth and the Eager Soul had gone in, and another couple,
a stenographer and a hospital orderly were using it as a parlour.
"Queer, queer business, this love-making under the rustle of the
wings of death," said Henry. A French plane flying across had filled
the compound for a moment. But everyone soon recognized its peculiar
buzz. Then for a few seconds from afar came the low ominous hum
of the German planes. But they circled away from us. Perhaps the
French drove them back. However, it was the excitement in the court
that caused Henry's remark. For the young people did not deflect
their monotonous course about the compound, when the sky-gazers had
returned indoors. Around and around they went, talking, talking,
talking, with the low insistent murmur of deeply interested people.
Their nerves were taut; emotion was raw; they were young, and their
blood moved riotously. And there was the moon, the moon that, since
man could turn his face upward, has been the symbol of the thing
called love. And now all over that long line slashed across the
face of Europe, the moon is the herald of death. Men see it rise
in terror, for they know that the season of the moon is the season
of slaughter. Yet there they walked in the hospital yard, two
unknown lovers, who were true to the moon.
Henry's next remark was: "Bill, fancy when you were young doing
your courting out there where a shell is liable to wipe you out
any second. We at least had the advantage of elm trees to protect
us from the shafts of death."
"Do you suppose, Henry," answered his friend, "that they miss the
drip of oars, the shade of the overhanging willows, the suggestive
whisper of waters frisking over the ripples at the ford? How can
they make love in such a place?"
"'Gold,'" replied Henry, quoting from Solomon, who was wise, "'is
where you find it!'" Then we heard the insistence of the lovers'
babble drawing near us again. As they turned a corner, Henry heaved
a sigh at the perversity of youth in the flaunting neglect of sleep
and death, which ever are vital to middle years. We both looked out
to the white courtyard, heard the snarl of another plane, obviously
French, but still disconcerting, saw the slow even pace of the
lovers, unaffected by the approaching growl of the plane, and it
came to me to quote one wiser even than Solomon: "O death, where
is thy sting!"
We took but a cat-nap that night, and in the morning set down the
score on our love affair. The record indicates that during the
day Henry had lost; during the night he had won. He put it down in
his black book against the time when we should get to Paris, where
money would buy things. For we ate at camps, slept in hospitals
or in barns or in mess rooms of the ambulance men, and day by day
and night after night we saw much misery and were "acquainted with
grief." There are so many kinds of hospitals in France! The great
streams of broken men that flow unceasingly down from the front are
divided as they reach the base hospitals and field hospitals into
scores of smaller currents, each flowing to a separate place, where
specialists treat the various cases. The blind go one way; those
dumb with shell-shock go another; jaw cases separate from men with
scalp wounds, and hip fractures are divided from shoulder fractures
as the sheep from the goats. Travelling about among the hospitals
one picks up curious unrelated and unexplained bits of information;
as, for instance, that the British Tommy is the most patient man
in Europe under pain. He likes to distinguish between himself and
his wound and is likely to reply to the doctor any fine morning,
"Me? Oh, I'm right at the top form, Sir; but my leg is bothering
me a bit, Sir!" The Canadian isn't so game under a roof as he is
under the open sky and in the charge. And the American grunts more
than he should. But here is a queer thing. The French tubercular
soldier is despondent. With Americans, tuberculosis breeds hope.
Perhaps it is the buoyancy of the young blood of our country; but
no American feels he is ever going to die with tuberculosis. He
feels he is hit hard; that it may take six months or a year to get
on his feet; after that--he goes on dreaming his dream. But the
tubercular French soldiers are the saddest looking men in Europe.
Back in Kansas last spring we had heard a story to the effect that
the Germans were inoculating the French and Belgians behind the
lines of the allies with tubercular bacteria. We asked French and
American and British doctors about that story, and they all answered
that there was nothing to it. The doctors told us that the Germans
have a cheaper and better way to fill France with tuberculosis
than by wasting serum on their enemies. And then, one day in a
tuberculosis hospital we picked up this story, which explained what
the doctors meant.
We met a young man from Lille. It was his birthday; Henry bought
him a bouquet. He told us his story. He said:
"Three years ago when the war broke out I was 19 years old and was
living in Lille with my parents. The Germans came to our house one
day with their guns and took me away. They took me to a town in
Germany; I think it was Essen, where they made me work in an iron
or steel mill. I worked fourteen hours a day, slept on straw outside
the works in a shed, had only the clothes they took me in and had
only bran to eat!"
"Only bran?" we asked, doubting it.
"Only bran," the interpreter repeated, and from half a dozen
cots near by, where others who had suffered as he had, heard our
question, came the echo of his confirmation, "Only bran to eat!"
He soon caught cold, and soon the "cold" became tuberculosis, and
after three years of this his sick days exceeded his work days, and
in due course he and five hundred others were assembled, put on a
train and shipped out of Germany through Switzerland to Evian in
France. Three hundred thousand of these poor husks, men, women,
and children, have been dumped into France in the last seven months.
Two trainloads of them arrive at Evian every day. The men and
women, mostly tubercular, do not tarry. They push on into France,
a deadly white stream.
In time the week ended that marked our first trip to the French
front. During that week we lived almost entirely in the war zone,
and under war conditions. The food was good--better than good, it
was excellent, but not plentiful, and the beds were clean and full
of sleep. The only physical discomfort we found was in the lack of
drinking water. We were warned against all local water.
My feelings on the subject of the French coffee and milk were
something like Henry's antipathy to onion soup. But we both loved
water with our meals. We had been vaccinated against typhoid, and
we were rather insistent that we could drink any kind of water, if
it was reasonably clean. But men said "this country is no place to
drink water. It has been a battle-ground and a cemetery for three
years." Still we insisted, and then, Mr. Norton, head of the American
ambulance, told us this one: "Out behind a barrage once near the
Champagne; helping the stretcher bearers; nasty weather, rain, and
cold. But there we were. We couldn't get in. We ducked from shell
hole to shell hole. Finally I found a nice deep one, with water in
the bottom--oh, maybe five feet of water in a fifteen foot hole,
and I stayed there; two days and nights. My canteen went dry, and
for a day or two I scooped water out of the shell hole and drank
it. Good enough tasting water so far as that goes, and fresh too!
But at the end of the third day, I decided it wasn't agreeing with
me and quit."
"Why?" we asked. "Did you leave the shell hole?"
"No--oh, no. It was a good shell hole. I stayed. But you know
Fritzie came up!" he answered.
So our taste for water with our meals, which is America's choicest
privilege, passed. Henry could drink the coffee, but it didn't
taste good to me. The brackish red wine they served with the army
ration tasted like diluted vinegar and looked like pokeberry ink.
It seemed only good to put in our fountain pens. A tablespoonful
would last me all day. Our week's trip ended at Monter-en-Der,
where there was a hotel and an Ambulance corps unit that had been
over to visit the American troops and had brought back from the
commissary department much loot. Among other things was water--bottled
water, pure unfermented water. And when we sat at table they brought
me a bottle.
Try going seven days on pokeberry ink and boiled coffee yourself
and note the reaction. Your veins will be dry; your stomach will
crackle as it grinds the food. The water in that bottle, a quart
bottle, evaporated. They brought another. It disappeared. They brought
a third. The waiters in the hotel were attracted by the sight. No
Frenchman ever drinks water with his meals, and the spectacle of
this American sousing himself with water while he ate was a rare
sight. The waiters gathered in the corner to watch me. Henry saw
them, and motioned toward me, and tapped his forehead. They went
and brought other waiters and men from the bar. He was a rare
bird; this American going on a big drunk on water. So they peered
in doors, through windows and stood in the diningroom corners to
watch the fourth bottle go down. And when at the end of the meal
the American rose, and walked through the crowd, they made way
for him. A desperate man at least commands respect, whatever his
delusion may be.
And that night we left the French front, and nosed our car toward
Paris.
There we made preparations to go to the headquarters of the
American Army. In Paris also we got into our new regulation Red
Cross uniforms. Ever since man first pinned a buffalo tail to the
back of his belt, and stuck a rooster feather in his matted hair,
he has been proud of his uniform. Sex vanity expresses itself
most gorgeously in a uniform, and when they put Henry and me into
uniforms, even carefully repressed Red Cross uniforms, open at the
neck and with blue dabs on our coat lapels to distinguish us from
the "first class fighting man," we were so proud that often five
or six consecutive minutes passed when we weren't afraid of what
our wives would say about the $124 each had spent for the togs. At
times our attitude toward our wives was not unlike that of drunken
rabbits hunting brazenly for the dogs! But when we slipped into
citizen clothes, sobriety and remorse covered us, and we shook sad
heads. We wore the uniforms little about Paris; for our Sam Browne
belts kept us returning salutes until our arms hurt. They couldn't
break me of the habit of saluting with a newspaper or a package or
a pencil in my hand. And my return of the interminable round of
salutes from French, British, and Italian soldiers who throng Paris,
probably insulted--all unbeknownst to me--hundreds of our allies,
and made them sneer at our flag. So it seemed best for us to wear
these uniforms only where soldiers congregated who would know us
for the gawks that we were and forgive us our military trespasses.
Then a real day came when our Red Cross duties took us to General
Pershing's headquarters.
[Illustration: He was a rare bird; this American going on a big
drunk on water]
For Americans during the year 1918, "Somewhere in France," will
mean the Joan of Arc country. It is not in the war zone, but lies
among the hills of Central France, a four or five hours' auto ride
from Paris. To reach the American "Somewhere in France" from Paris,
one crosses the battle-field of the Marne, and we passed it the
day after the third anniversary, when all the hundreds of roadside
graves that marked the French advance were a-bloom and a-flutter
with the tri-colour. Great doings were afoot the day before on that
battle-field. Bands had played triumphant songs, and orators had
spoken and the leaders of France--soldier and civilian--had come
out and wept and France had released her emotions and was better
for it. We passed through Meaux and hurried on east to St. Dizier,
where we stopped for the night. We put up at a dingy little inn,
filled to overflowing with as curious a company as ever gathered
under one roof. Of course there were French soldiers--scores of
them, mostly officers in full dress, going to the line or coming
from it. Then there were fathers and mothers of soldiers and sisters
and sweethearts of soldiers and wives of soldiers bound for the
front or coming home. And there we were, the only Americans in the
house, with just enough French to order "des oeufs" and coffee "au
lait" and "ros bif and jambon and pain" and to ask how much and then
make them say it slowly and stick the sum up on their fingers. We
were having engine trouble. And our car was groaning and coughing
and muttering in the gloomy little court of the inn. Around the
court ran the sleeping rooms, and under one end, forty feet from
the diningroom, was what was once the stable, and what now is the
garage. Frenchmen wandered up, looked at our chauffeur (from Utica,
N. Y.) tried to diagnose the case, found we did not understand and
then moved away. But it was a twelve-cylinder American machine and
the Frenchmen, discovering that, kept coming back to it. As we sat
on the cement platform of the tavern, kicking our heels against it
and bemoaning the follies of youth which had corrupted our Freshman
and Sophomore French, there came and sat beside us a pretty woman.
She had black snappy eyes, fresh dark skin, and jet black hair, so
curly that it was almost frowsy. She listened to us for a moment,
then hopped aboard our talk like a boy flipping a street car:
"Kansas--eh? I once lived in Oklahoma City. My father ran the Bee
Hive!"
"Angels of mercy, angels of light!" This from me. "Say, will you
interpret for us?"
"Sure mike! sir," she said. And then added: "And if it's engine
trouble my husband upstairs is a chauffeur. Shall I get him?"
And when she returned with him, he fell to, glad enough to get a
look into a twelve-cylinder American car. Henry stood by him, and
with the woman acting as interlocutor, between our driver and her
husband we soon had the trouble located and the dissimulator--Henry
maintains that all engine trouble is connected in some way with a
dissimulator--rectified, and while the job was going on, he expounded
the twelve cylinders to the French, puffed on his dreadnaught pipe,
and left the lady from Oklahoma City to me. She was keen for talk.
Between her official communiques to her husband and our driver,
she got in this:
"Yes, I know Frank Wickoff in Oklahoma City--knew him when he was
poor as Job's turkey, and then my folks used to borrow money at his
bank. Before we came to Oklahoma City we lived in Austin. We ran
the Good Luck, or was it the Fair; no, we ran the Fair in Dallas."
At a quick look at her face from me she laughed and said: "Oh, yes,
I'm Jew all right. No," she returned to a query, "I never was in
Wichita. But when we moved to Blackwell we used to take the Beacon!"
"Henry, come here," came the call from me. "Here is old Subscriber
and Constant Reader!" Then Henry came up and the subsequent
proceedings interested me no more. For Henry took the witness. And
the three of us, kicking our heels on the cement wall below us,
sat swapping yarns about mutual friends in the Southwest. It seems
that in France the lady is a pedlar who goes from town to town
on market day with notions and runs a little notion wagon through
the country between times. She told us of an air raid of the night
before on St. Dizier where eleven people had been killed and
urged us to stay for the funeral the next day. It was to be a sight
worth seeing. Most of the dead were women and children. There was
nothing military in the little town but the two hotels that housed
soldiers and their friends and relatives going to the front and
coming back. Yet the Germans had come, dropped a score of bombs
on the town, then had flown away for another town, dropping their
hateful eggs across country as they went. Luneville had lost half
a dozen, Fismes half a score, and other towns of the neighbourhood,
accordingly--all civilians, mostly women and children; and not a
town raided had any military works or if it had a munition factory,
the bombs had hit miles from the plants.
[Illustration: Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the
lady from Oklahoma City to me]
We were beginning to realize slowly what a hell of torture and
disease and suffering this war means to France. Half a million
tuberculars in her homes, spreading poison there; two million homeless
refugees quartered beyond the war zone; millions of soldiers living
in the homes fifty miles back from the line, every month bringing
new men to these homes left by their comrades returning to the
battle front; air raids by night slaying women and babies; commerce
choked with the offering to the war god; soldiers filling the
highways; food, clothing and munitions taking all the space upon
the railroads; fuel almost prohibitively high; food scarce; and
always talk of the war--of nothing, absolutely nothing but the
war and its horrors. That France has held so long under this curse
proves the miracle of her divine courage! As we sat under the shrouded
torches in the inn courtyard and considered what life really means
to the men and women of St. Dizier, once more we wondered how we at
home would react under the terrific punishment which these people
are taking; what would Wichita do with her houses bombed, her homes
crowded with refugees; her parks and schools and public buildings
turned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves,
her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever the mourners
going about the street and man to his long home. How would Emporia
act with the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever near
her; with her women and children slaughtered, merely to break the
morale of the people and cause them to plead for peace; with cripples
from the war hidden away in a hundred sad homes, with fatherless
children and children born out of wedlock among the things that
one had to face daily? Perhaps our young Jewish friend thought we
were wearying of her. For she rose and said, "Well, good-night,
gents--pleasant dreams!"
Pleasant dreams--indeed!
But in the morning we arose refreshed and hurried along a misty
plain, forty miles or so from the American troops. Always in the
background were great bushy trees, and lush green grass, and the
thing was composed. How the French manage to compose their landscape
is too much for me. But at any of a thousand points the scene might
have been photographed for a Corot, by getting a few good-looking
girls in nighties to dance on the grass of the middle distance!
American landscape has to be picked apart to have its picture taken;
a tree selected here, a hill there, a brook yonder, and if ladies
in nighties are needed, they are brought from afar! They are not
indigenous to the soil. But one feels that in France they might
come sidling out from behind any willow clump with their toes rouged
ready for the dance!
The road that morning seemed traversing a great picture gallery,
unwinding into life as from a dream within a dream! And then,
after two hours of joyous landscape, we waked and saw America! Now
America was not a vision; it was substantial, if not beautiful. As
we switched around a bend in the road we came upon America full-sized
and blood raw--a farmer boy--bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, with
the Middle West written all over him. He wore a service hat at a
forward pitch over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo the
sound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy of
his own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and he
sat cross-legged high up on the quarter deck of a great four-story,
full-rigged Missouri mule. He didn't salute us but called "Hi" as
we passed, and then we knew that "our flag was still there" and
that we were near our troops.
The boys must be popular in the neighbourhood. For in the next
village, which by the way was a town of ten thousand, our American
Red Cross uniforms were treated with distinguished courtesy. Henry
wanted a match. He could talk no French but a little boy at the
inn, seeing him fumbling through his clothes with an unlighted
pipe, came running to us with a little blue box of matches. Henry
gave the boy a franc--more to be amiable than anything else. The
boy flashed home to his mother proud as Punch! And just as we were
pulling out of the village the boy came running to us with another
little blue box of matches. We thought the boy had discovered that
matches would bring a franc a box from Americans and was preparing
to make his fortune. So Henry took the box, and as the car was moving
handed the boy another franc. We noticed him waving his hands and
shaking his head. And when we were a mile out of the village Henry
opened his second box and found his original franc in it. The boy's
mother was ashamed that he should have taken any money for a box of
matches, and had made him bring back the money with another box to
show how much the French appreciate the Americans coming to France.
We met many instances like that.
Soon the road was cluttered up with American soldiers. They were
driving motors, whacking mules, stringing along the by-paths and
sweating copiously under the autumn sun. We wondered in passing
what an American farmer boy and his self-respecting mule thought
of the two-wheeled French carts they were using. Then we turned the
corner and came into a new view; we saw our first troop of American
soldiers quartered in a French village. They were busy building
barracks. We stopped and visited them, and they showed us their
quarters: In barns, in lofts of houses, in cellars, in vacant
stores--everywhere that human beings could slip in, the American
soldiers had installed themselves. The Y.M.C.A. hut was finished,
and in it a score of boys were writing letters, playing rag-time
on the pianos, and jollying the handsome, wise-looking American
women at the counter across one end of the room. An Irish Catholic
padre in a major's uniform was in charge of the sports of the camp
and he literally permeated the Y.M.C.A. hut. He was the leader of
the men. The little village where this troop lived faded into the
plain and we rode again for five miles or so, and then came to another
and another and still another. At that time thirteen villages in
an arc of forty miles or so contained most of our American troops.
We stopped many times on our long day's journey. Once we stopped
for mid-day dinner and there came to Henry and me our first
estrangement. It is curious, as the poet sings, "how light a thing
may move dissension between hearts that love--hearts that the world
in vain has tried and sorrow but more closely tied." Well--the
thing that came between us was cooking--cooking that has parted
more soul mates than any other one thing in the world! For two
weeks more or less we had been eating in the French mess, or eating
at country hotels or country homes in France, eating good French
country cooking, and it was excellent. A mid-day meal typically was
a melon, or a clear soup, or onion soup, brown and strong; a small
bit of rare steak or chop, or a thin sliced roast in the juice with
browned potatoes or carrots, a vegetable entree--peas, spinach,
served dry and minced, or string beans; then raw fruit, and cheese.
The bread, of course, was black war bread, but crusty and fine. That
was my idea of a lunch for the gods. What we got at the American
mess was this: a thick, frowsy, greasy soup--a kind of larded
dishwater; thin steak fried hard as nails, boiled beans with fried
bacon laid on the beans--not pork and beans, but called pork and
beans--with the beans slithery and hard and underdone; lettuce,
cabbage, and onions soused in vinegar, white bread cut an inch
thick, soft and spongy, boiled potatoes that had stood in the water
after they were cooked done, and then bread pudding, made by pouring
water on bread, sticking in some raisins, stirring in an egg, and
serving a floury syrup over it for sauce! There was enough, of course,
to keep soul and body together. But the cooking had spoiled a lot
of mighty good food. And Henry liked it! There were two preachers
with us, and they bragged about the "good old American cooking!"
And when they heard me roar they said, "He is insulting the
star-spangled banner," and Henry threatened to take my pajamas out
of his black valise!
[Illustration: And he sat cross legged]
After passing through many villages crowded with our troops we came
to the headquarters of the American Expeditionary forces. We found
General Pershing in a long brick building--two or three stories
high, facing a wide white parade ground. The place had been used
evidently as a barracks for French soldiers in peace times, and
was fitted to the uses of our army. We met a member of his staff,
a sort of outer guard, and with scarcely a preliminary halt were
taken to the general. He seems easy of access, which is a sign
that he plays no favourites and has no court. Anyone with business
can see him. He met us in a plain bare room with a square new
American-looking desk in the midst of it. He sat behind the desk,
cordial enough but with the air of one who will be pleased to have
business start, and politenesses stop. So we plunged straight to
the business in hand. We were from the American Red Cross in Paris,
and our leader had come to get a definite idea of what part the Red
Cross was to play in the recreation activities of the army. The Y.
M. C. A. was spending millions upon recreation problems. The Red
Cross had millions to spend.
Recreation in Paris, of course, means soldier hostels, homes,
clubs, houses where American soldiers can go while in Paris on leave
of absence. The Red Cross had one single donation of one million
dollars to be devoted to a club for American soldiers in Paris.
The Y. M. C. A had started to equip two or three great Parisian
hotels as clubs. The Red Cross had money donated for certain other
recreation purposes in camp. The Y. M. C. A. believed it should
control the camp and Parisian recreation activities of the American
troops.
We stated our case about as briefly as it is here written, and in
three minutes. In two minutes more General Pershing had assured us
that there would be no need to spend money for hotels or clubs in
Paris, that few soldiers would be given leave to go to Paris, and
that the lavish expenditure of American money in Paris would be
bad for America's standing in France.
And then he allotted the recreation problems of men in the hospitals
to the Red Cross, and the recreation enterprises for men outside
of hospitals to the Y. M. C. A.
He was brief, exact, candid and final. He stood for the most part,
as he talked; spoke low, fumbled for no word, and looked into his
hearers' eyes. The politician looks over their shoulders. We spoke
for two or three minutes with him about the work of our troops
this winter, and were impressed with the decision of the man. He
seemed--perhaps subconsciously--afraid that public opinion at home
would demand that he put our men into the trenches to hold their
own sector too early. He evidently believed that during our first
winter the men should go in by squads and perhaps companies or
later in regimental units for educational purposes, working with
the English and the French learning the trench game. But we felt
clearly that he believed strongly that it would be spring before
we should occupy any portion of the line ourselves. There was a
firmness about him, not expressed in words. No one could say that
he had said what we thought he had conveyed to us. Yet each of us
was sure that the General would not be moved from his decision.
He breathes confidence in him into people's hearts. He never seems
confidential; though he is entirely candid. Again one feels sure
that there is no court around him. He seems wise with his own
wisdom, which is constantly in touch with the wisdom of everyone
who may have business with him. He will not be knocked off his feet;
he will do no military stunts. The American soldiers will not go
into action until we have enough troops to hold our part of the
line and we will not start an offensive until we can back it up.
This all came glowing out of the firm, kind, wise, soldierly face
of General Pershing, and it needed no words to verify it. Superfluous
words might have contradicted the message of his mien; for they
might have added boast to simple statement.
It is all so orderly, so organized, so American, this thing we are
doing in France. It is like the effective manipulation of a great
trust. The leadership of the American forces in France in the army
and in the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. is made up of men known
all over the United States; the names of those leaders who are
soldiers may not be mentioned. They have dropped out of American
civilian life so quietly that they are scarcely missed. Yet for
weeks we lived in the hotel with one of the prominent figures in
American finance who is working eighteen hours a day buying supplies,
assembling war material--food, fuel, clothing--putting up scores
of miles of barracks, building a railroad from tidewater to the
American headquarters, equipping it with American engines, freight
cars, and passenger coaches; sinking piles for the first time in a
harbour which has been occupied for two thousand years, and unloading
great ships there which were supposed to be too big for that port.
He is the marvel of the French. Hundreds like him are over there
lending a hand. They are about to handle in a year an army half as
large as the other allies have been three years building. Houses,
furniture, fuel, food, guns, ammunition, clothing, transportation,
communication, medicine, surgeons, recreation--the whole routine
of life for a million men and more must be provided in advance
by these organizing men. This work, so far as these men consider
it, is purely altruistic. They are sacrificing comforts at home,
money-making opportunities at home, and they are working practically
for nothing, paying their own expenses, and under the censor's
wise rules these men can have not even the empty husks of passing
fame. For their names may not be mentioned in the news of what
the Americans are doing in Europe. Yet wherever one goes in Europe
he is running across these first-class men. Their sincerity and
patriotism may not be questioned.
But they are getting something real out of it all. The renewal of
youth in their faces through unstinted giving is beautiful to see.
They are going into a new adventure--a high and splendid adventure,
and while many of them may snap back after the war to the old
egoistic individualistic way of looking at life, their examples
will persist, and their lives, when they go back to the old rut,
will never be the same lives that they were before.
But here is a story, an American story which has in it the makings
of a hero tale. It came to us in Paris, bit by bit. We saw it and
no one told it to us. Yet here it is, and it should begin in form.
Once upon a time in America when the people were changing their
gods, a certain major god of finance named James Hazen Hyde, head
of a great insurance company, fell into disfavour; and the people,
changing their gods, cast him away. If men had been serving the
old gods they would have said, "Go it while you're young," to the
youth, but instead they said unpleasant things. So he went to France
and vanished from the map, but he did not entirely understand why
he was banished. He had done nothing that other young gods did not
do and he was amazed, but he faded. He lived in Paris as an exile,
not as a god, and he couldn't for the life of him tell why. But
when the war came he had a mighty human desire to serve his country;
just to serve, mind you, not to be exalted. He was fifty years old,
too old to pack a rifle; too old to mount an airship; too old to
stop a bullet without taking two or three other good men and true,
younger than he, to watch him. So he had hard work to find service.
Then along came the American Red Cross and it wanted servants--not
major generals, not even captains; but just chauffeurs and interpreters
and errand boys and things. And young Jimmy Hyde, who had been the
Prince of Wales of the younger gods of fashionable finance, and
who was cast out when the people changed their gods, came to Red
Cross headquarters with his two cars, and offered them and himself
to serve. And they put him in a uniform, with a Sam Browne belt,
and a Red Cross on his cap; and it was after all his country's
uniform, and he was a servant of his country. And men say that even
in the days of his young godhood he was not so happy, nor did his
face shine in such pride as it shines today. For he is a man. He
serves.
After our visit to the American troops we went down to Domremy,
the birth place of Joan of Arc. It was good to view her from the
aspect of her Old Home Town. There is a church, restored, where
she worshipped, and the home where she was born and lived. It was
a better house than one is led to suppose she lived in, and indicates
that her people were rather of more consequence than common. We
visited the home, went into the church, and walked in the garden
where she met the angel; but we met postcard vendors instead. Yet
it is a fair garden, back from the road, half hidden by a wall, and
in it is a lovely drooping tree. A fair place it was indeed for an
angel to choose. Some way Joan leaves me without much enthusiasm.
Perhaps it is because she has had two good friends who have done
her bad turns. The Pope, who made her a saint, and Mark Twain, who
made her human. It is difficult to say, off-hand, which did her
the worse service. Some way, it seems to me, she could live in our
hearts more beautifully in the remote and noble company of myths
like the lesser gods, made by men to express their deepest yearnings
for the beautiful in life. The pleasant land in which she lived,
the gentle hills whereon she watched her flocks, and the tender
sky of France, all made me happy, and if Joan did not get to me,
perhaps it was because one can take away from a place only what he
brings there.
When we left Domremy, the hills--soft green hills, high but never
rugged, stretched away in the misty purple distance and we dropped
into those vales where Joan watched her sheep and heard the voices.
It did not seem impossible, nor even difficult to hear voices amid
such beauty. So we fell to discussing the voices that reach this
world. And Henry said: "Always there are voices in this earth--always
they come in youth, calling us forward and upward. And if we follow
them, though they lead to long marches and hard bivouacs, and to
humiliation and sorrow, yet are we happy and triumphant."
"But Germany?" insisted someone. "Where were her voices?"
"Her voices came when Heine sang, and Beethoven made music, and
Goethe and Schiller wrote and Schopenhauer thought! If ever a land
had the philosophy and the poetry of democracy Germany had it.
Democracy tried to bloom in the revolutionary days of the forties,
but Germany strangled her voices. And now--"
"And now there are no voices in the world!" sighed one of our party;
but even as he spoke from out of the purple distance came the thin
faint sound of a bugle trembling among the hills. It was an American
bugle. And Henry caught its significance, and cried: "There is the
new voice--the voice that the world must follow if we find the old
peace again on earth."