THE UNCENSORED LETTERS OF A CANTEEN GIRL
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1920
Copyright, 1920
By
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
TO
PAT
GATTS
BRADY
SNOW
NEDDY
BILL
NICK
HARRY
JERRY
and
THE REST
THIS BOOK
is
DEDICATED
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. BOURMONT—COMPANY A
II. GONCOURT—THE DOUGHBOYS
III. RATTENTOUT—THE FRONT
IV. GONDRECOURT—THE ARTILLERY
V. ABAINVILLE—THE ENGINEERS
VI. MAUVAGES—THE ORDNANCE
VII. VERDUN—THE FRENCH
VIII. CONFLANS—PIONEERS, M. P.’s AND OTHERS
FOREWORD
To M. D. M. and M. H. M:
_My dears_,
These letters were all written for you; scratched down on odds and ends
of writing paper, in a rare spare moment at the canteen; at night, at my
billet, by candle-light; in the mornings, perched in front of Madame’s
fireplace with my toes tucked up on an ornamental _chaufrette_
foot-warmer. Why were they never sent? Simply because all letters mailed
from France in those days, must of course pass under the eyes of the
Censor. And as the Censor was likely to be a young man who sat opposite
you at the mess-table, it meant that one mustn’t say the things one
could, and one couldn’t say the things one would. So, after my first
fortnight over there I decided to write my letters to you just as I
would at home, putting down everything I saw and thought and did, quite
brazenly and shamelessly, and then keep them,—under lock and key if need
be,—until I could give them to you in person.
Written with the thought of you in my mind, these letters are first of
all for you, and after that for whoever they may concern, being a true
record of one girl’s experience with the A. E. F. in France during the
Great War.
CHAPTER I: BOURMONT—COMPANY A
Bourmont, France, Nov. 24, 1917.
My village has red roofs. When I first came to France and saw that the
villages were two kinds; those with red roofs and those with grey, I
prayed _le bon Dieu_ that mine should be a red-roofed one. Heaven was
kind. Every little house in town is covered with rose-colored tiles. We
came here yesterday from Paris. Our orders, which were delivered to us
in great secrecy, read: Report to Mr. T——, Divisional Secretary,
Bourmont, Haute Marne; then followed a schedule of trains. That was all
we knew except that some one told us that at Bourmont it had rained
steadily all fall.
“It cleared off for several hours once,” concluded our informant. “But
that was in the middle of the night when nobody was awake to see.”
Bourmont is a city set upon a hill, a hill that rises so sharply, so
suddenly, that no motor vehicle is allowed to take the straight road up
its side, but must follow the roundabout route at the back. Already we
have heard tales about our hill; one of them being of a lad belonging to
a company of engineers stationed here, who in a spendthrift mood, being
disinclined to climb the hill one night after having dined at the café
at its foot, bribed an old Frenchman with a fifty franc note to wheel
him to the summit in a wheelbarrow. The Frenchman, for whose powers one
must have great respect, achieved the feat eventually, the spectators
agreeing the ride a bargain at the price.
Two-thirds of the way up the hill on the steep street called grandiosely
_Le Faubourg de France_ we have our billet, at the home of Monsieur and
Madame Chaput. These are an adorable old couple; Madame a stately yet
lovably gentle soul, Monsieur le Commandant, a veteran of the
Franco-Prussian War and member of the _Légion d’Honneur_. His wonderful
old uniforms with their scarlet trousers and gold epaulets rub elbows
with my whipcord in the wardrobe.
Outside, the Maison Chaput resembles all the other houses which, built
one adjoining another, present a solid grey plaster front on each side
of the street. Like all the rest it has two doors, one opening into the
house and one into the stable, and like every other house on the street
the doors bear little boards with the billeting capacity of house and
stable stenciled on them, so many _Hommes_, so many _Off._ (for
_Officiers_). It is told how one lad after walking the length of the
street exclaimed;
“Gee! Looks as if this were Dippyville. There’s one or two off in every
house!”
Another boy gazing ruefully at the sign on his billet door, groaned;
“Twelve homes! Why, there ain’t one there!”
One stable door nearby wears the legend in large scrawling letters;
“Sherman was right.” At first the owner was furious at this defacement
of his property, but when someone explained the significance of the
words to him, he became mollified and even took a pride in them.
“Where are you stopping?” asks one boy of another.
“Me? Oh, at the Hotel de Barn, four manure-heaps straight ahead and two
to the right.”
The distinguishing feature of the Maison Chaput is the corner-stone.
This shows as a white stone tablet at one side of the door. On it is
carved “Laid by the hand of Emil Chaput, aged one year. Anno. 1842.” It
is the same Emil Chaput who with his tiny baby hand “laid” the
corner-stone who is now our genial host.
“It is droll,” said Madame; “When strangers come to town they must
always stop and read the corner-stone. They think the tablet is placed
there to mark the birthplace of some famous man.”
The Gendarme and I,—Madame has christened G—— my companion the Gendarme
on account of her vigorous brisk bearing,—live in the _Salle des
Assiettes_, at least that is what I have named it, for the walls of the
room which evidently in more pretentious days served as a _salle à
manger_, are literally covered with the most beautiful old plates. Not
being a connoisseur I don’t know what their history is nor what might be
their value; I only know that they are altogether lovely. The designs
are delicious; flowers, insects, birds, little houses, Chinamen fishing
in tiny boats, interspersed with spirited representations of the Gallic
cock in rose and scarlet. I exclaimed over them to Madame, whereat
Monsieur, candle in hand, bustled across the room and called on me to
regard one in particular.
“_Ça coute_,” he averred proudly, “_quarante francs!_”
Since that moment I have been vaguely uneasy. What if, in a moment of
exasperation, I should throw an ink-bottle at the Gendarme’s head,
and—shatter a plate worth forty francs!
Our room is the third one back. The front room is kitchen, dining and
living room. The in-between room is quite bare of furniture, lined all
about with panelled cupboards, and quite without light or air except
that which filters in through the opened doors. In one of these
cupboards Monsieur le Commandant spends his nights. When the hour for
retiring comes, he opens a little panelled door and climbs into the hole
in the wall thus revealed, leaving the door a crack open after him. When
we pass through on our way to breakfast we hurry by the cupboard with
averted faces. The family Chaput are not early risers.
Already Madame has taken us into her warm heart. She will be our mother
while we are in France, she tells us. Everything about us is of
absorbing interest. When the Gendarme exhibited her wardrobe trunk, she
was fairly overcome.
“_Ah, vive l’Amérique_,” she cried, clapping her old hands, and, “_Vive
l’Amérique!_” again.
Bourmont, it seems, is army Divisional Headquarters. It is also
headquarters for this division of the Y. There is a hut here, a
warehouse, and headquarters offices, employing a personnel of sixteen or
seventeen. By tomorrow the Gendarme and I will know what our work is to
be.
Bourmont, November 28.
I have a canteen; the Gendarme, who has had some business training, is
to work in the office. My canteen is in Saint Thiebault, the village
next door. In the morning I go down the hill, past the grey houses built
like steps on either side—some with odd pear trees, their branches
trained gridiron-wise flat against the fronts,—over the river Meuse,
here a sleepy little stream, to Saint Thiebault. On the way I pass lads
in olive drab with whom I exchange a smile and a hello, villagers
bare-headed, in sabots, and poilus in what was once horizon blue. In
Paris the uniforms were all so beautiful and bright, but here at
Bourmont one sees the real hue, faded, discolored, muddy, worn. The
soldiers, middle-aged men for the most part, slouch about, occupied with
homely, simple tasks, chopping wood and drawing water. One feels there
is something painfully improper in the fact that they should be in
uniform; they should, each and every one, be propped comfortably in
front of their own hearthsides reading _l’Echo de Paris_, in felt
slippers while their wooden shoes rest on the sill outside. And yet
these very ones, I think as I look at them, may be the defenders of
Verdun, the victors of the Marne, the veterans of a hundred battles!
The Bourmontese, who are proud and haughty folk, and call themselves a
city though they number only a few hundred souls, look with disdain on
the smaller village of Saint Thiebault, _Saint Thiebault des Crapauds_
they call it, Saint Thiebault of the Toads. Approaching Saint Thiebault
one sees two unmistakable signs of American occupancy; first, a large
heap of empty tin cans and then the Stars and Stripes fluttering from a
flag pole in the centre of the village. For Saint Thiebault is
Regimental Headquarters and it is the boast of the old Colonel that
wherever the regiment has gone that flag has gone too. Down the main
street of the town I go, past the drinking fountain placarded; “Do not
drink, good only for animals,” but at which, nevertheless, the doughboys
frequently refresh themselves, cheerfully risking death, not to mention
a court-martial, in order to get a drink of unmedicated water; and out
along the Rue Dieu until I turn off the highway just beyond the village
wash-house. The wash-house, known to the French as _la Fontaine_, is a
beautiful little building like a tiny stone chapel, with tall arched
windows filled with iron grills. Through the centre runs a long oblong
pool; at its brim the women kneel to do their scrubbing, handsome
peasant wenches many of them, with fresh, high coloring. Often one sees
a soldier leaning against the grill, engaged in some attempt at
gallantry through the bars. Sometimes one even glimpses a form in olive
drab kneeling by the side of one of the peasant girls, he scrubbing his
socks, and she her stays, while she gives him a lesson in French and in
laundering _à la Française_. When the Americans first came to Saint
Thiebault they had only a small-sized guard-house. Then came one
historic payday when after months of penury the troops were paid. That
night the accommodations at “the brig” proved inadequate and the
wash-house had to be requisitioned for the over-flow. This was well
enough until the lodgers fell to fighting among themselves and so fell
headlong into the pool. Then such a hullabaloo broke loose that the
whole camp turned out to see who had been murdered.
Back of the wash-house lies a group of long French barracks, and here
lives Company A of the —— Regiment, infantry and “regulars.” Beyond the
mess-hall is the hut, a French _abri_ tent with double walls. Ducking
under the fly, one finds oneself in a long rectangular canvas room,
lighted by a dozen little isinglass windows. The room is filled with
folding wooden chairs and long ink-stained tables over which are
scattered writing materials, games and well-worn magazines. Opposite the
door, at the far end, is the canteen counter, a shelf of books at one
side, a victrola and a bulletin board, to which cartoons and clippings
are tacked, on the other. Back of the counter on the wall, held in place
by safety pins, are the hut’s only decorations, four of the gorgeous
French war posters brought with me from Paris. There are two stoves
resembling umbrella-stands for heating in the main part of the hut and
behind the counter another, about the size and shape of a man’s derby
hat, on which I must make my hot chocolate. For lights at night I am
told that occasionally one can procure a few quarts of kerosene and then
the lamps that stand underneath the counter are brought out and for a
few days we shine; but usually we manage as our ancestors did with
candle-light. Our candlesticks form a quaint collection; some are real
tin _bourgeois_ brought from Paris, some strips of wood, some
chewing-gum boxes, while others are empty bottles, “dead soldiers” as
the boys call them. As for the bottles, I am particular about the sort
that I employ and none of mine are labeled anything but Vittel Water.
Others I observe are not so circumspect,—yesterday I chanced in at a
canteen in a neighboring village kept by a Y man; on a shelf three “dead
soldier” candlesticks stood in a row and their labels read; Champagne,
Cognac, Benedictine! For the rest, the hut is equipped with a wheezy old
piano, a set of parlor billiards, and a man secretary. It is invariably
dense with smoke, part wood and part tobacco, and usually crowded with
boys.
The first night after the Chief had taken me over to call at my canteen
and I had had one cursory glance at them, I came back feeling that my
hut contained the roughest, toughest set of young ruffians that I had
ever laid eyes on. The second night I came home and fairly cried myself
to sleep over them—they seemed so young, so pitiful and so puzzled
underneath their air of bravery, so far away from anything they really
understood and everybody that was dear to them. It was Cummings in
particular I think who did it for me. He owns to seventeen but I would
put fifteen as an outside estimate. A mere boy who hasn’t got his growth
yet, with soft unformed features and a voice as shrill as a child’s, I
am sure he ran away from home to go to war just as another lad might
have run away to see the circus. Although the regiment is a regular army
organization, a large part of the men were raw recruits only last
summer, a fact which causes the old-timers, whose service dates from
Border days or before, no little regret.
“This Man’s Army ain’t what it used to be,” they complain; “it’s getting
too mixed.”
The “veterans” have a stock saying which they employ to put the
youngsters in their places: “Call yourself a soldier do you? Why I’ve
stood parade rest longer than you’ve been in the army!”
This is sometimes varied, when the speaker happens to be the tough sort,
by; “Huh! I’ve put more time in the guard-house than you have in the
army!”
Tonight a boy came up to the counter and asked: “Goin’ to serve hot
chocolate tonight?”
“Sure thing!”
“Then I guess I won’t go out and get drunk.”
It’s going to be hot chocolate or die in that hut every night after
this!
Bourmont, November 31.
I don’t like my uniform. I don’t like women in uniform anyway. I suppose
it is because one is so used to the expression of a woman’s personality
in dress that when she dons regulation garb she seems to lose so much.
And then to really carry off a uniform requires a flair, a dash, a
swagger, and such are rarely feminine possessions. The consensus of
opinion seems to bear me out.
“Of course I think women in uniforms look very snappy,” confided a lad
to me today; “but somehow they don’t look like women to me!”
“_Pas joli_,” says Monsieur le Commandant severely, referring to my hat.
“_Pas joli!_” But when I put on my old blue civilian coat he fairly goes
into raptures.
“Be-u-ti-ful!” he ejaculates. “Be-u-ti-ful! _Toilette de ville. Pas
toilette de Y. M. C. A.!_”
Besides the suit and cape I had made in Paris, they gave me two canteen
aprons, aprons such as French working women wear, voluminous, beplaited,
made in Mother Hubbard style. Now there is one point on which I am
resolved. They can court martial me, they can send me home, or they can
lead me out and shoot me at sunrise, but they cannot make me wear those
aprons! What’s more, the very first minute that I have to myself I’m
going to cut them up and make them into canteen dish-cloths.
Bourmont, December 3.
This French money is the very plague; not because it is French but
because it is so flimsy. It may perhaps measure up to the national
standards, but it fails utterly to meet American requirements; the
difference lying chiefly in the fact that the French don’t shoot craps.
It comes into the canteen in all stages of disintegration.
“She’s kinder feeble. Will she pass?” inquires a lad anxiously.
“With care maybe, and the help of a little sticking plaster,” I reply;
and getting out the roll of gummed paper kept handily in the
cash-drawer, I proceed to patch up the tattered bill.
“Guess this one must have been up to the front; it’s all shot to
pieces,” another lad apologizes; then, at my casual references to
shooting craps, grins guiltily. “But say now, ain’t it the rottenest
money you ever did see?” “The United States ought to teach these
Frenchies how to make paper money,” remarks a third; while still another
adds; “When I’m to home I write to my girl on better paper than that.”
Sometimes the bills come in as a mere mass of crumpled tatters; then one
must play picture-puzzle piecing it together. Sometimes they are beyond
repair; for at times you will receive two halves of different notes
pasted neatly together, or at other times one with the corner bearing an
essential number lacking. The French banks refuse to pay a cent on their
paper money unless it is just so.
“I’m sorry, but that bill’s no good,” you will occasionally have to tell
a boy. Usually he will grin cheerfully as he stuffs it back into his
pocket.
“Oh well, I’ll pass it along in a crap game.”
Then too, the boys have no respect for foreign money and so handle it
carelessly with an obvious contempt that is irritating to the French.
“Tain’t real money,” they declare.
The paper francs and half-francs they call “soap coupons.”
“Why, you might just as well be spendin’ the label off a stick o’
chewin’ gum!” they jeer.
Next to the paper money that comes to pieces in their fingers, the boys
detest the big one and two cent coppers. Known to the navy as
“bunker-plates,” in the army they pass as “clackers.” “You get a
pocket-full o’ them things and you think you’ve got some money, and all
the time it ain’t more than ten cents altogether,” they grumble.
“I can’t be bothered carryin’ that stuff around,” they declare when I
beg them to pay me in coppers. “I always throw ’em away or give ’em to
the kids.” A prejudice which greatly complicated the matter of making
change until I had an inspiration. Now I give them their small change in
boxes of matches or sticks of chewing gum.
Then there is the annoyance of the local money. Since the war, the
cities of France have taken to issuing their own paper francs and
half-francs. We accept all this local money in the canteens and send it
to Paris to be redeemed. But the French tradespeople in general refuse
to honor these bills except in the city that issues them or its
immediate vicinity. Many a puzzled doughboy has been driven to indignant
protest or even to “chucking the stuff away” in his exasperated disgust
when told by the shopkeepers that his paper money was _pas bon_. But the
grievance is not quite all on one side: no small amount of worthless
Mexican money, brought over by Border veterans, I am told, was palmed
off on shopkeepers at the port when the Americans first landed!
In contrast to their disdain for this foreign currency the boys cherish
to a degree that is half funny, half pathetic, any specimens of “real
money” that they are lucky enough to possess.
“Say, I had an American dollar bill in my hand the other day,—I felt
just as if the old flag was waving over me!” And another lad; “Saw a U.
S. Dollar bill today. Oh boy! but it looked a mile long to me!”
If anyone displays an American greenback at the counter a little riot is
sure to ensue. All the boys nearby crowd about, feast their eyes on it,
touch it, pat it, kiss it even.
“Lemme see!” “Ain’t she a beauty?” “That’s the real stuff!” “Say, how
much will you sell her for?”
Even the half-dollars, quarters and dimes are precious.
“You don’t get that one,” they say as they pull a handful of change from
their pockets. “That’s my lucky piece. I’m savin’ that there little ol’
nickel to spend on Broadway.”
French money, Belgian money, Swiss money, English money, Spanish money,
Italian money, Greek money, Canadian money, Luxembourg money,
Indo-Chinese money, money from Argentine Republic, and yesterday a
German mark even, all come across the counter and go into the till
without comment. But when any American money comes in I always feel
badly over it. For, be it a crisp five dollar bill, an eagle quarter or
only a buffalo nickel I know it signifies just one thing,—bankruptcy.
Bourmont, December 7.
To be a corporal in the Ninth Infantry, it is said, a man must be able
to speak eight languages, one for each soldier in his squad. The same
could be said with almost equal truth of our regiment. I don’t know
whether it is this mixture of many nationalities that gives my family
its flavour; be that as it may, Company A has more color, more
character, more individuality to the square inch than I had dreamed any
such group could possess. And they are so funny, so engaging in their
infinite variety and their child-like naivete!
First there are Gatts and Maggioni; Gatts, lean, tall, honest-eyed, with
a grin that won’t come off and a quaint streak of humour,—Gatts who
looks pure Yankee, but is, if the truth were told, three-quarters
German,—Gatts who hangs about my counter hour after hour; and by his
side sticks little Maggioni, who told the recruiting officer that he was
seventeen but whose head just tops the canteen shelf, and who looks,
with his pink cheeks and his great dark eyes, like nothing in the world
but an Italian cupid in the sulks. The two have struck up the oddest
comradeship.
“Me an’ Gatts, we’re goin ’to stick side by side,” explains Maggioni,
“an’ if I see a crowd o’ Germans pilin’ onto him, why I’ll just go right
after ’em, an’ if too many of ’em come for me ter oncet, why Gatts here,
he’ll just lay right into ’em.”
And Gatts nods, looking down at Maggioni with a parent’s indulgent eye.
“He thinks he’s a tough guy for sich a little feller,” he comments
reflectively; “but he’s the only one in the regiment that knows it.”
“You all think I’m mighty little!” snaps the cupid. “When I joined at
Syracuse everybody said to me ‘Baby, where’d you leave your cradle?’ But
lemme tell you, I’ve growed since I’ve been in the army!”
“Waal I do believe there’s one part of him that’s growed;” Gatts is very
solemn.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“His feet.”
Private Gatts has promised me one of the Kaiser’s ears!
Then there is Brady, “Devil Brady” the little black Irish coal-miner
from Oklahoma, who spends his days trying to get put in the guard-house,
so he won’t have to drill.
“I’m plumb disgusted,” he confided to me today. “I never worked so hard
in my life as I did the other night gettin’ drunk, an’ then the guard
was so much drunker than I was, I had to carry him to the guard-house. I
thought sure they’d give me thirty days at least, but they only kept me
twenty-four hours and then out!”
“Hard luck,” I sympathized.
“I just knew how it would be,” he mourned. “It was Friday the thirteenth
when I joined the army; there were just thirteen of us fellers, and the
thirteenth was a nigger.”
He tells me the most wonderful yarns about the miners and their pet
rats, about explosions and disasters and rescue parties. Last night he
told me the story of one mine-horror that will stick in my memory.
“And we shoveled the last three men and a mule into one bag,” he
finished.
Now and then I catch a glimpse of Jenicho the Russian giant, but he is
very shy. A huge lumbering fellow, sluggish, and seemingly stupid, with
little pig eyes that are quite lost to sight when he smiles, Jenicho is
the butt of the Company. When he joined the regiment last summer, they
tell me, he knew no word of English. The first phrase that he acquired
was; “You no bodder me.” For the boys can’t resist the temptation to
plague Jenicho, and though his strength is such that if he once should
get his hands on his tormentors he could break them into bits, he is so
slow withal that they always can elude him. Not long ago Jenicho was
walking post one night when the Officer of the Day hailed him and
announced himself. To which Jenicho lustily responded; “Me no give damn.
Me walk post, gun loaded, bay’net fixed. You no bodder me. Me shoot!”
And the Officer of the Day discreetly walked on.
Then there is little Philip R. who plays our decrepit old piano quite
brilliantly by ear, and who is, he tells me, half Greek and half
Egyptian. Philip R. is the pet of a French family in one of the
neighboring villages. He stopped at a house to ask for a drink of water
when out walking one day. Madame asked him in, pressed him to stay to
supper. The family made much of him, and all because forsooth he was the
first “American” they had ever seen. Since then he has been a constant
welcome visitor.
There is St. Mary too. If you can conceive of a cherub eating watermelon
you have a perfect picture of St. Mary. St. Mary converses entirely in
words of one syllable and very few at that. He makes smiles serve for
speech. St. Mary loses everything he owns; not long ago he lost his
overcoat, now he has lost his bayonet. Yet St. Mary is the best natured
boy in the company; he needs to be. When St. Mary helps me stir the
chocolate it seems as if half the company lined up on the other side of
the counter to shout; “St. Mary! Take your dirty hands out er that there
chocolate!” and St. Mary never says a word but grins until his eyes are
nothing but little slits and ducks his head until only the curls on top
are visible.
“St. Mary, he’s kind o’ simple,” explains Private Gatts. “But there
ain’t anybody in camp that’s got a better heart.”
And there is Bruno, Angelo Bruno, a little grinning goblin of a man, but
strong, they say, as a gorilla. Bruno gives the non-coms no end of
trouble; he’s a “tough nut to manage.” Whenever he is told to do
anything that does not suit his tastes, he merely shrugs his shoulders,
“No capish,” and that’s the end of it. The other day while on guard he
was interrogated by the Officer of the Day.
“What’s your name?”
“Bruno.”
“What are your general orders?”
“Angelo.”
The Officer gasped, thought he would try again. “What are your special
orders?”
Bruno saw a light. “They’re ina my pock!”
When I first came to Saint Thiebault I was puzzled by the silver
half-francs in my cash drawer which were bent in the middle, some of
them so far as almost to form a right-angle. Then the boys explained.
Bruno was once a strong man in a circus sideshow. He did things with his
teeth. The crooked half-francs were the results of his exhibiting his
prowess to the boys. So now when damaged half-francs appear I know that
our little Angelo has been trying his teeth again. At present our social
intercourse with Bruno is limited. He is serving thirty days in the
guard-house. But every day or two he slips into the hut to do his
shopping, the kind-hearted guard standing at the door, as he does so, a
sheepish look on his face. If there is one military duty which the
doughboy hates above all others, it is this job of “chasing prisoners,”
and when you meet a file of guard-house habitués escorted by a rifle in
the rear, it is invariably the guard, and not the prisoners, who looks
the culprit! The interest of Bruno’s visits lies largely in seeing what
is his latest acquisition in the way of jewelry. For Bruno has a pretty
taste for finery and enlivens the dull evenings of his captivity by
winning away the ornaments of his fellow prisoners. Already he has come
into the canteen decked out with seven large rings and a fat watch and
chain. Today he appeared with his latest prize, a pair of gold-rimmed
eye glasses. They are hideously unbecoming, they pinch his nose so that
it hurts, moreover he can’t more than half see out of them, and yet it
is quite evident those eyeglasses are the pride of his heart.
Last week our Secretary conceived a big idea. He would educate A
Company. He would teach them to read, write and speak English. He
started a class. On the first night there was a large crowd, eager and
interested; the second night there were six, the pupils when sought out
complaining they were “tired” or “busy;” the third night there was Saint
Mary who made one; the fourth night the class died an easy death. I am
afraid Company A is going to continue uneducated. As Brady said:
“There were just two things I learned in school; one was to throw a spit
ball, the other was to bend a pin convenient for somebody to sit on.”
And it looks as if it would have to go at that.
“Why, those birds don’t even understand their own names,” complain the
officers; “except on payday, and then they’ll answer no matter _how_ you
pronounce them.”
Bourmont, December 9.
There is something queer about me. I don’t mind the mud, I don’t mind
the rain, I don’t mind the hill, I don’t even mind the mess. Of course I
admit that the food isn’t quite what one is used to, and the
surroundings are a trifle unsavoury, but it is, after all, so much
better than the state of semi-starvation that I was led to half
anticipate, that I for one am quite content.
Our mess is held at the house of an old couple who live a little way
above our billet on the hill. The house was differentiated from the
others in the row by a spindling and discouraged tree which stood in a
green tub outside; as this was the only tree in front of a house on the
whole street it has always been easy to pick out our otherwise
undistinguished entrance. Last night however, the weather waxing colder,
the tree moved indoors. This morning the whole Y. personnel wandered
distractedly up and down the hill trying to identify the mess-house
door, until some kindly villagers, sensing the situation, came out on
their front steps and pointed us to the place.
The house, like most of the village dwellings, consists, downstairs, of
just two rooms. In the front room the family cooks, eats and spends its
days. In the back room the family sleeps, and here we have our mess. The
drawback of this arrangement is that one has to pass through the kitchen
in order to reach the dining-room and this is likely to spoil one’s
pleasure in the meal that follows. As for me, I go on the principle that
what one doesn’t know won’t take one’s appetite away, and so hurry
through the kitchen with one eye shut and the other fixed on the door
ahead of me.
Said my right-hand neighbor to my left-hand neighbor at supper the other
day, as he offered him the _pièce de résistance_ of the meal:
“You aren’t taking rice tonight?”
“Thanks no. Saw the old lady picking ’em out this noon.”
“That’s nothing. I saw the old man picking ’em out of the beans
yesterday.”
But why should people come to war if they are going to be so squeamish?
A few days ago one rash soul among us conceived a hankering for salad.
She went to Madame and, being ignorant of the French word, demanded
simply.
“_Avez-vous_ lettice?”
Madame shook her head uncomprehending, but finally as the words were
repeated a light dawned.
“_Ah oui, oui, oui!_”
She turned and hurried upstairs, descending triumphantly a moment later
with a large bundle of old letters! In just what form she expected us to
have them served I have not yet been able to ascertain.
The mess-room is so crowded that to reach a seat often requires
considerable manœuvering. In one corner stands an ancient dressmaker’s
dummy—by popular vote awarded as sweetheart to the most bashful man at
table; in the corner opposite is the bed of Madame and Monsieur. The men
who get up for early breakfast, swallow their bread and jam and coffee
with Monsieur watching from his couch of ease. Today Madame was
indisposed and when we came to supper we found that she had retired
already. All through the meal she lay there, under the red feather-bed,
looking like a dingy, weazened old corpse, staring at the ceiling, her
mouth wide open.
For the last few days we have had a visiting clergyman with us. To all
appearances a meek and long-suffering little man, he has been giving
special revivalistic discourses at the huts and eating at our mess. This
morning he was asked to say grace. In the middle of a long and earnest
exhortation I was startled to hear these words: “Oh Lord, Thou knowest
we are apt to grow lean and to starve in Thy service!” I fairly had to
stuff one of the one franc canteen handkerchiefs, which serve as napkins
at the mess, into my mouth to keep from laughing.
Bourmont, December 12.
In Paris a man who lectured to us said: “Get the fellows who have
influence with you, and you can swing the crowd.” Sometimes I think that
if Pat were our enemy instead of our friend we might almost as well shut
up the hut. For Pat the sharp-shooter, Pat the dare-devil, Pat, who in
company phrase “has Harry Lauder and George Cohen stopped in a hundred
places,” Pat the happy-go-lucky adventurer is one of the leading spirits
in Company A. He has served, it seems, already in the war with the
Canadian army.
“But how did you get out of it?” I asked.
Whereupon Pat regaled me with a wonderful rigmarole involving an
extraordinary case—his own—of shell-shock out of which I could make
neither head nor tail. Later, from one of the Secretaries who had been
at Saint Thiebault before I came, I learned the truth. When America had
declared war, Pat had deserted from the Canadian in order to enlist in
the American army. Pat had showed him a letter from one of his old-time
friends; it ended:
“Of course I wouldn’t think of splitting on an old pal like you, Pat,
but I do need twenty dollars like hell.”
“What did you do?” asked the Secretary.
“Sure an’ I sent him the money,” grinned Pat.
Shortly after I first became acquainted with him, Pat, who is naturally
gallant, with a tongue inclined to blarney, extracted a promise from me.
Some day, after the war, if we should happen to meet, say, strolling
down Fifth Avenue, Pat “dressed in a nice blue serge suit” is going to
“take me away from the other feller” and take me out to dinner. It was
after solemly pledging my word to this agreement that I learned that Pat
had formerly been a saloon keeper and had had an extensive police-court
record. Immediately I began to hope that Pat would forget that post-war
party, but not he. Instead, he is constantly reminding me of it, always
before an audience, dwelling on it and elaborating it, until now I find
it has grown from a mere dinner, to dinner, the theatre and a dance!
Lithe, wiry, lean-faced with close-cropped hair, pale blue gimlet eyes
and an almost unvarying expression of intense seriousness on his face,
Pat, when present, is the life of the hut. Forever at his clowning, you
would never dream from his demeanour that Pat’s domestic affairs are in
a state little short of catastrophic. His wife, according to her
photograph a handsome, sullen, passionate type, half Mexican, ran away
about a year ago, taking with her all his money that happened to be
handy, together with his new automobile. Encountering some of Pat’s
friends, she had explained her apparently care-free single state by
telling them that Pat was dead. Now she has discovered that Pat is in
France, she is all for reconciliation. She has written him a letter in
which she addresses him as her dear husband about six times to each
sheet, informing him that she needs money, and inquiring of him what he
wished her to do with his clothes.
“What did you answer?” I asked, for Pat, who must always share his
correspondence, had shown me the letter.
“I told her,” grinned Pat, “she cu’d keep the clothes and maybe she’d
find another man to fit ’em.”
But there is another and more serious side to the matter. It seems that
the lady in the case has written to the Captain of A Company, requesting
him to forward a large proportion of Pat’s pay to his deserving and
indigent wife. Whether or not this will be done is still uncertain. Pat
refuses to discuss the possibilities, but from the glint in his eyes I
have a premonition that if next pay day Pat finds any considerable
deduction made from his pay, that that night one wild Irishman will run
amuck in Saint Thiebault.
Occasionally in the midst of Pat’s racy discourses I overhear things not
meant for my ears, such as his remarking how in Rochester once he “went
on a seven day’s pickle in company with a female dreadnut.” But usually
he is very careful to only “pull gentle stuff” in my hearing. The other
day he delivered himself of a wonderful dissertation on the
deceitfulness of pious people, ending with this gem;
“So whenever I see one of these guys comin’ towards me with a gold crown
on his bean, looking’ as if he couldn’t sin if he had to, why I nip
tight on to my pocketbook and I cross to the other side of the street!”
Today Pat came into the canteen with a newspaper clipping and a letter
to show me. The letter was from the Chief of Police of K——, one of the
many cities in which Pat has resided during his short but crowded life,
the clipping from the K—— Daily Sheet. The clipping was comprised of a
letter which Pat had written to the Chief of Police giving in humorous
phrase his version of life in France and an accompanying paragraph
stating that though the writer had given the police force no little
anxiety during his residence in K——, still he had been in spite of all,
a good-hearted and likable rascal, and now that he had gone to war for
his country, bygones should be bygones and K—— must be proud of him. The
letter from the Chief was in much the same vein.
“Yes,” ruminated Pat; “I kept the old feller pretty busy, though me an’
him were friends just the same. But it sure would get the old man’s
goat, just after he’d had me up and fined me, to come home and see me
settin’ at his dinner-table alongside of his pretty daughter.”
Bourmont, December 14.
Because it took too much time right in the most important part of the
day to climb Bourmont Hill for mess at night, I have arranged to take my
suppers with two little old ladies here in Saint Thiebault. The suppers
are to consist of a bowl of cocoa and a slice of bread with jam. The
little ladies supply the bread and milk for the cocoa and I supply the
rest, paying them one franc a day.
At half-past five I put on my things, light my little candle-lantern and
set forth. The boys, coming in after mess, will be crowding the hut; a
chorus of anxious voices queries.
“You’re comin’ back sure, ain’t you?”
And, “What time is that hot chocolate goin’ to be ready?”
I pick my way down the slippery duck-boards to the highway. Trudging
along the muddy road, friendly voices hail me from the dark. I am known
by the little light I carry. At number two Rue Dieu I rap and enter,
trying desperately to leave some of the mud from my boots on the
door-step, for in this land of wooden shoes scrapers are as unknown as
they are unnecessary. Once inside I have to fairly strain my eyes in
order to be able to see anything, for all the light in the room is
supplied by the embers on the hearth and one tiny gasolene lamp with a
flame not much bigger than the point of a lead pencil. Kerosene is
unobtainable for civilian use; the price of candles is prohibitive.
“_C’est la guerre. Cest la misère_,” say the little old ladies. “One
must sit in the dark—“_Cest triste comme ça._”
My candle doubles the illumination, yet in spite of that, so strong is
the instinct for economy, they will not rest easy until they have blown
it out.
The little old ladies are cousins. The elder of the two, “Madame,” is
lame and has snow-white hair. She sits by the fire always in the
self-same spot. The younger, “Mademoiselle,” is a tiny dwarfish creature
with a back that is not quite straight. Over her dark dress she wears a
jaunty little scarlet apron sewn with black polka dots. I am grateful
for that apron; it makes the one bit of color in the sombre room.
I sit in front of the fire at the round table and sip my chocolate. The
table has an oil-cloth cover on which is printed a map of France, so as
I eat my supper I can take a lesson in geography. It is a pre-war
tablecloth I fancy; over at one edge shows a slice of Germany. The
little old ladies point to that side of the table with scorn, “_Les
sales Bodies sont là!_” they explain.
I wonder that it doesn’t give them heart-burn to look down and see the
captive and devastated districts of France lying beneath their tea cups.
Think of setting your salt-cellar on the city of Lille or your mustard
pot on the sacred citadel of Verdun!
As I sup I endeavour to converse politely, but as my French is little
more than camouflage, this is a dubious proceeding. Whenever I prove
particularly stupid, out of the corner of my eye I catch Madame shaking
her old head at Mademoiselle despairingly.
“_Elle ne comprend pas!_” she murmurs sotto voce, pityingly; “_elle ne
comprend pas!_”
At odd times they turn an honest penny by doing a little sewing for the
villagers. But life is very difficult these days: the prices of
everything have gone so high. Why, wooden shoes that cost five francs
before the war now fetch fifteen!
Tonight I noticed an item in a Parisian Journal lying by my plate. It
was to the effect that at the Madeleine that day Mlle. X had married
Lieut. Z., a veteran of the war who had lost both arms and both legs. I
showed it to the little ladies.
“_Ah oui!_” sighed Mademoiselle with a shiver. “_Elle a beaucoup de
courage, celle-là!_”
And Madame shook her white head and echoed. “_Oui, elle a beaucoup de
courage!_”
Upstairs an American officer is billeted. I fancy his presence supplies
a certain dash of romance to the little old ladies’ lives. The Americans
are nice, they say, and make little noise in the village; when the
Russians were here it was different.
“It will be lonely when the Americans are gone,” sighs Mademoiselle.
“The houses will seem empty.”
Bourmont, December 18.
Yesterday I explored the top of Bourmont Hill. It is here that the
Quality Folk live, and here are some stately old houses with beautiful
carved doorways and even an occasional gargoyle. Here too the general
commanding the Division lives, and I have often observed with glee
corpulent colonels and rotund majors puffing and blowing and growing red
in the face as they climbed the hill to Headquarters. At the top of the
hill there are two churches. Some two weeks ago, it is whispered, a spy
was caught signaling from the tower of Notre Dame. His signals, it is
said, were flashed to another spy stationed on the hills to the east,
who in turn sent the messages on to the lines. The Curé of Notre Dame is
being held under suspicion of complicity.
From Notre Dame an avenue bordered by magnificent old trees sweeps
around to the Calvary, a tall wooden cross surmounting a curious
structure of rough stone, ringed about with shallow steps—the Mecca of
many pilgrimages. Beyond the Calvary one comes to the Mystery of
Bourmont. A faded sign declares _Défense d’éntrée_, but one looks the
other way and slips by. For once past the gate you are in an atmosphere
of enchantment. No one seems to know just what it is, nor how it came
about; I can get no intelligent explanation from Madame or Monsieur. To
me it seems like the forgotten playground of an old mad king in some
fantastic legend. For here among the trees are stone stairs, walls and
terraces, and, cut in the curiously cleft rocks, are niches and
tunnelled passage-ways, all mantled over now with green moss and ivy,
the whole making one think of a dream garden out of Mæterlinck.
Coming down Bourmont Hill afterwards I was startled by the beating of a
drum; looking back I saw a woman, bare-headed, her blue apron fluttering
in the wind, descending the street after me; from her shoulders was
slung the drum which she was beating with a martial vim. It was the
town-crier, _le tambour_ as the French put it. Arrived at an appropriate
spot, she stopped, pulled out a paper, cried “_Avis!_” and began to read
in a rapid high official monotone. The wash-house was to be closed
between two and four o’clock the following afternoon on account of the
new water system the Americans were installing. Certain requisitions of
grain were to be levied.... The villagers were notified to call at the
Mayory for their bread cards, without which, after such a date, no bread
could be obtained.... One or two women came to the doors of the houses
and listened. She took no notice of them. The reading over, she rolled
the paper up with a quick decisive gesture, and resumed her march, the
sharp rub-a-dub-dub of her drum pursuing me all the way to Saint
Thiebault.
Of late the air has become fairly vibrant with disquieting rumours: one
does not know what to believe, what to reject.
The Germans are massing for a gigantic drive on Nancy. In three weeks,
some say, the offensive is to begin; three days, say others. Nancy is to
be another Verdun. If they break through they will pass this way. The
American troops are being withdrawn from this neighborhood: any day the
order may come for us to leave. At Paris the political situation is
dark. Some people even fear a popular uprising against the government. I
hinted at this to Monsieur, he shook his old head hopelessly. But yes,
things were in a bad way. Now if France only had _Veelson_ at her head!
France and _Veelson_! His gesture indicated the grandeur of such a
contingency. As it was, France lacked a leader. And underneath all this
runs another rumour, still darker, still more disquieting. The French,
the gallant French, they say, are “laying down.” They are ready to make
peace at any price. They are played out, sick to death of it all!
“Forty-two months in the trenches!” cried a sergeant _en-permission_
last night; “It is enough! I am through. Let the Americans do it!”
And this feeling, they tell us, is wide-spread. The people see our
soldiers day after day, in the training camps, inactive. “What are they
here for?” they are asking. “Why don’t they fight? Are they going to
wait until it is all over?”
Will our soldiers, half-trained as they are, and a mere handful, be
forced, to satisfy them, into the trenches?
In the canteen I look into the boys’ faces and smile, but my heart turns
sick within me.
Bourmont, December 20.
Such a strange, incredible thing has happened,—a thing that has upset
all my preconceived ideas of human nature. It began with Malotzzi.
Malotzzi as his name betrays is a “wop;” he is also the smallest fellow
in the company which contains many small men. Nor is he only small, but
with his thin olive-tinted face and his slender body, he looks so
delicate, so ethereal that you feel a breath of wind might fairly blow
him away. To the company he is “a good kid, quiet, never makes any
trouble.” To me he has always seemed an elfin, changeling creature, a
strayed pixie, whose impishness has turned to gentleness. Child of the
tenements that he is, he is possessed of the most exquisite
old-fashioned courtesy that I have ever yet encountered; and he has the
starriest eyes of any mortal born.
Not long ago he came to the counter to show me a post-card from his
sweetheart. It had an ugly picture of a red brick city block upon it,
and the message scrawled in an unformed hand beneath contained little
except the simple declaration that when he came home she would go with
him to the photographer’s over the candy store at the corner and they
would have their pictures taken together. Yet no flaming and lyric
love-letter could have rendered him more naively proud. Malotzzi with a
sweetheart! It was absurd, he was nothing but a child! I can well
believe that Malotzzi wouldn’t make a very “snappy” soldier.
This afternoon when the company was out for drill, a certain Second
Lieutenant discovered that Malotzzi hadn’t got his pack rolled up right.
This was not the first time he had offended in this manner. The
Lieutenant had warned him. He was angry. He took Malotzzi over to the
bath-house, stripped off his blouse, tied his hands so he couldn’t
struggle, and beat him with a gunstrap until he fainted.
The story flashed around the camp. When I came back from supper I found
the boys at white-heat with indignation. They fairly seethed with anger.
I think if the Lieutenant had happened in, they might have killed him.
Presently a little crowd carried Malotzzi in. They rolled back his
sleeves and showed me the great purple welts upon his arms. His back was
all like that, they said. He had to be held up in order to keep his
feet.
“You had better take him to the hospital,” I told them.
They carried him out again. He is at the hospital now, where he is
likely to stay for some time. His lungs are delicate and the beating
caused congestion. The medical officer made a report and the Lieutenant
has been placed under arrest.
I have never met the Lieutenant to know him, but curiously, the
Secretary, who messes with the officers, asserts that of all the men
there this Lieutenant has always appeared as the most clean-spoken, the
most cultured, the most gentlemanly. And the boys have always considered
him a very decent sort. The whole thing is absolutely and blankly
incomprehensible to me. There is one explanation the boys offer; which
is that the Lieutenant, having a yellow streak, has lost his nerve at
the prospect of going to the front, and has done this as a desperate
expedient, in the hope of being dishonorably discharged. The only other
possible explanation which I can come upon is that the Lieutenant has a
German name.
Bourmont, December 23.
The burning question that is on every lip: Will the Christmas turkeys
come?
We had been promised turkey. What’s more I had been promised some of
that turkey too, at Company A’s mess table. Now uncertainty holds us in
torment. Every sort of a rumor is rife. Some darkly insinuate that
neighboring organizations have sidetracked those turkeys. Others declare
that the turkeys, having been smuggled in by night, are now actually in
camp among us.
“Huh!” snorts my friend the Tall Kentuckian. “Funny turkeys they have in
this army! I done heard those turkeys had four legs and a pair of
horns!”
Of course Christmas won’t be Christmas without the turkeys, but anyway
we have done our best to bring Christmas into the hut. The question of
Christmas trees was taken up in the Bourmont office some days ago. An
application was made to the Mayor; the Mayor referred the matter to the
representative of the Bureau of Forestry. The Bureau of Forestry proved
to be a good scout. He ruminated a while, “Mademoiselle,” said he, “this
matter is so tied up with red tape, that if one were to unwind it all,
it would be New Year’s before you got your tree. My advice is that you
select your tree, wait until after dark, then go out, cut it down close
to the ground, and cover the place carefully with snow.”
Tonight when the subject of Christmas trees came up in the canteen I
repeated this anecdote to the boys. It was then growing dusky. Several
boys immediately disappeared. In an hour they were back again, dragging
not one, but two beautiful hemlocks. We set up the more perfect one, and
cut the other up for trimmings. With flags, paper festoons, Japanese
lanterns, tinsel which the French call “angel’s hair,” and tree
ornaments the hut was transformed in a twinkling as if by magic. Now it
is no longer a muddy-floored tent, but a green bower threaded with
myriad bits of bright color, and I have really never seen anything of
the sort that was any prettier.
Yesterday several cases of free tobacco from the Sun Tobacco Fund
arrived in camp. The boys in the orderly room opened the cases last
night and hunted through and through them, trying to find packages which
bore the names of unmarried lady donors. Unfortunately the Misses who
contributed were few and far between, but hope dies hard.
“Say, mightn’t Asa be a girl?” the lads are asking me eagerly today.
“Lucien ain’t a man’s name, is it?”
Enclosed in each package is a postal-card on which one may, if so
inclined, return thanks to the giver. The boys who are taking the
trouble to write are doing it frankly with the hope that this may
encourage the recipient to repetition. How to tactfully suggest this
without seeming greedy is a problem whose delicacy proves difficult.
“You tell me how to say it,” they tease.
“Say, won’t you write it for me, please ma’am?”
I saw one postal-card accomplished after an evening of concentrated
effort; “Your precious and admired gift,” it began.
Already Santa Claus in the person of Mr. Gatts has presented me with a
beautiful white silk apron embroidered with large bunches of life-like
violets.
Bourmont, Christmas Day.
_Joyeux Noël!_
As I came in last night there was a great log burning on the hearth.
“_C’est la bouche de Noël_,” said Madame and explained how it would burn
all night, then Christmas morning she would take the little end that was
left and put it away in the loft until the next Christmas: it would
protect the house from lightning; it was a very ancient custom.
Back in the _Salle des Assiettes_ I found our table spread as for a
little fête with a wonderful cake and a bottle tied up with a bouquet of
chrysanthemums and long ribbon streamers of red white and blue. I was so
innocent that I supposed at first that the chrysanthemums were in the
bottle, an improvised vase, but Madame quickly enlightened me: “_C’est
le vin blanc_,” she explained to my embarrassment.
The Gendarme and I took counsel together as to how we could best express
our feelings on this occasion toward the Family Chaput, the household
having been increased over night by the arrival of the married daughter
and her small boy and girl. After various projects had been considered
and abandoned, we finally took the little stand from our room, dressed
it with evergreen and tinsel, then heaped it with nuts, candies,
chocolate bars, and little jars of jam all from the canteen, together
with a few small toys, and carried it in and placed it in front of the
hearth. The family appeared delighted. We observed, however, that after
the first toot, baby Max’s whistle was swiftly and silently confiscated.
Later when _La Petite_, the little maid-of-all-work who takes care of
our rooms, came in, we had a few trinkets dug from the depths of our
trunks to bestow on her. Later still I carried chocolates and
_confiture_ to my little old ladies of the Rue Dieu.
This Christmas day I fancy will be long remembered by the inhabitants of
this part of France; for in every one of the villages about, our
soldiers have given the French children a Christmas tree. I went to see
the tree at Saint Thiebault. The ancient church, its chill interior
ablaze with light, was crowded with villagers all dressed in their fête
day best. The old people were just as excited and eager as the children;
not one had ever seen a Christmas tree before. They stood on the pews in
order to get a better view. The tree which was very large and beautiful
stood just outside the altar rail. It bore a gift for every child in
Saint Thiebault. While the tree was slowly being unburdened of its load,
the band-master’s choir, high up in the choir-loft, sang an
accompaniment. Some of the selections were of a sacred character, others
frankly secular, such as Drink To Me Only With Thine Eyes; but as one of
the choristers remarked;
“As long as we sing them slow and solemn the Frenchies won’t know the
difference.”
After the Christmas tree I went around to the little local hospital to
take some gifts to the patients. There were half a dozen of them lying
on cots in the bare barracks room, a dreary set in a drearier setting.
In one corner lay a boy who muttered incoherently. He had just been
brought in, they told me, and was very ill: the doctors were puzzled to
know what was the matter with him. I left some little gifts for him when
he should be better.
It was half-past four when I reached the hut. Suddenly it popped into my
head that we ought to have a Santa Claus. At half-past six Santa walked
in through the door. It was Pat in a big red nose, a red peaked cap,
much white cotton-batting beard and whiskers, rubber boots, the Chief’s
fur coat, covered over for the night with turkey-red bunting, and a fat
pack slung over one shoulder. I had just dressed him in the mess hall,
and for an impromptu Santa Claus, I flatter myself he was quite
effective. The boys whooped. When they discovered who it was behind that
nose, they yelped like terriers.
“Ain’t he the beauty! Oh you whiskers! Say Pat, kiss me quick!”
We got Santa safely behind the counter and then opened the pack. It was
full of foolish little things; tricks, puzzles, games, mottoes,
whistles, tin trumpets, paper “hummers”. The boys went wild. It was the
musical instruments that made the hit. For two hours that hut shrieked
pandemonium. Every last man in the company tootled and squawked as if
his life depended on it, and every last one of them was tootling a
different tune.
“_C’est des grands gosses!_” Truly, as Madame Chaput says, they’re
nothing after all but so many big little boys.
After the stuff was distributed the Secretary and I invited the boys to
partake of hot chocolate and sandwiches. But to our disappointment they
only took a languid interest in the treat. Instead of the five and six
cups apiece which many often swallow, not one of them consumed more than
a cup and three-quarters. Too late we realized; they had already gorged
themselves on the contents of their Christmas boxes from home.
Reports coming in from the village stated that one American Christmas
custom had made a strong appeal to the feminine portion at least of the
population. Quantities of mistletoe grow hereabouts. The French,
although averring that it brings good-luck, consider it a pest and let
it go at that. It took the American doughboys to enlighten the
_Mademoiselles_ as to its Anglo-Saxon significance. It would be curious,
I have been thinking, if the adoption of this ancient privilege should
prove one of the lasting evidences of the American troops in France!
As I left the canteen I learned that the boy who had been so sick at the
hospital was dead.
Bourmont, December 26.
Last night was a wild night in the barracks. This morning the hut was
full of echoes of it. Company A indeed wore a jaded look. They had had
very little sleep it was explained. And it was all on account of the
Christmas hummers.
“I ain’t got nothin’ against you people, but I shore don’t think you
gave A Company a square deal,” remarked my friend the Tall Kentuckian as
he lit his cigarette at the counter.
“Why, didn’t you like the present that Santa Claus brought you?” I
teased.
“Huh! I would shore have singed the ol’ gentleman’s whiskers for him
last night if I could have caught him!” He went on to explain; “We’d
just get settled down good to sleep when some guy or other would start
up a-squawkin’ on one of them things. An’ Sergeant ——, well he’d had
just enough to make him fightin’ mad, an’ he shore would rare around
that there barracks tryin’ to find them fellers. Why, half the corporals
in the outfit was marchin’ up and down the place most all the night
long, shyin’ hob-nailed shoes in what they guessed was the direction of
them noises.”
I began to discern what a night of terror it had been.
“Yes suh!” declared the Kentuckian. “There was one feller with a hummer
we couldn’t get. He kept blowin’ Tipperary. He must have blowed it for
two hours steady, on an’ off. I guess he had every last hob-nailed shoe
in the hull barracks throwed at him.”
Nor is this all. It seems I have committed a ghastly _faux pas_. I have
gotten the Y. in dreadfully dutch with the officers. It is all along of
the Christmas calendars. The Christmas calendars arrived at the canteen
just the day before Christmas. They were designed to be sold to the boys
for five cents apiece in order that they might have something to send to
the folks at home as a Christmas greeting. But since they reached us so
very late the Secretary and I decided we didn’t have the face to put
them on sale.
“Let’s give them away,” I suggested, and on his agreeing, laid them in
heaps on the counter and invited the boys to help themselves. The boys
weren’t bashful. They helped themselves with enthusiasm and zeal. They
came back for more and more. For the rest of the day no one did a thing
at the hut but sit at the tables and address envelopes. One boy, I
learned later, sent off as many as thirty-five. I was awfully pleased to
have the boys appreciate the calendars so. And I never once for a moment
thought of the censors; but presently I heard from them. The company
censors, two of the younger lieutenants, had been looking forward, it
seems, to some leisurely care-free hours at Christmas. When the stacks
of calendars started coming in they saw their holiday vanish into thin
air, nay more, they saw themselves sitting up nights for weeks to come
censoring those precious calendars. And they were swearing, raving mad.
They were going to run the Y. out of the town! They were going to shut
down the hut! Finally they compromised the matter with their consciences
by censoring half and chucking the other half into the stove. But even
then they couldn’t stop fussing and fuming over it. Tonight just to top
the matter off, we received a sharp reprimand from the Business Manager
at Bourmont for being so extravagant as to give the calendars away,
unauthorized. Was there ever such a tragedy of good intentions?
Bourmont, December 27.
Today we buried the lad who died on Christmas night. I had never seen a
military funeral before and I had never dreamed that such a ceremony
could be so thrillingly beautiful.
The company formed at three o’clock in the road in front of the canteen,
then filed slowly through the streets of the little grey age-old
village. The band marching at the head of the procession played the
_Marche Funèbre_ of Chopin. After the band came the officers of the
company and then the firing squad of eight sharp-shooters, followed by
an ambulance carrying the boy’s coffin covered with a great flag.
Behind, marched the whole of Company A and after them crowded a throng
of villagers. All the men in town, with the innate respect that the
French have for death, stood uncovered as we passed, while many of the
women watched with tears streaming down their faces.
We passed through the village and down the road to the little
grey-walled cemetery, ringed around with evergreens and now deep in
freshly fallen snow. All about stretched virgin shining snowfields and
over them to the east rose Bourmont like a dream city, etched as
delicately as by a silver-point against the soft dove-colored sky.
The majestic phrases of the Catholic burial service rang out clearly on
the frosty air:
Eternal rest grant him, O Lord,
And let perpetual light shine upon him!
The coffin with the great flag burning in blue and scarlet was lowered
into the grave. Slowly, with perfect expression, a bugler blew the
poignant, unforgettable notes of Taps. The rifles of the firing squad
cracked sharply; three volleys, it was over.
“Will they leave him there?” An old Frenchwoman asked one of the boys
afterwards.
“’Till the war is over, then likely they will send him home.”
“But why? He won’t be lonely here. There will always be some one to put
flowers on his grave.”
Tonight I was talking to the Supply Sergeant about the lad.
“I think he died of a broken heart as much as anything,” he told me.
“They wouldn’t let his mother see him at the dock when we sailed. She
came to say good-bye but it was against the rules. He never could get
over that; he kept brooding all the time and fretting for her. I read
some of her letters to him. They seemed more like a sweetheart’s than a
mother’s.”
The doctors, however, diagnosed his disease as spinal meningitis. They
have ordered the barracks in which he slept to be quarantined. Already a
half a dozen boys in quarantine have taken to their beds, but this we
hope is largely due to over-stimulated imaginations. Even if the disease
doesn’t spread, however, I am wondering what will become of ninety-seven
lively boys bottled up for two weeks in one barracks. Already various
ones have eluded the guard and come sneaking furtively into the canteen
to buy their cigarettes and chocolates. Whenever one of these
unfortunates is recognized a regular howl goes up all over the hut.
“Outside! You’re one of the crumby ones!” they jeer, or; “Convict! Get
back to your cell!”
Bourmont, December 28.
The worst of my job is playing dragon to the French children. In view of
the fact that if allowed in the hut at all they swarm in, in such
numbers as to fairly overrun it, and pester the boys with their
insatiable appeals for “goom” and chocolate, it has seemed best to make
a strict rule against their admission. (Besides which I don’t approve of
giving them gum, for in the face of anything one can do or say they will
insist on swallowing it, which is, I’m sure, not at all good for their
tummies!) But in spite of this prohibition the place holds an
irresistible attraction for them. At night one can often see their faces
pressed flat against the isinglass windows as they peer inside; while
chiefly on Saturday and Sunday afternoons they will slip slyly in, and
then if the dragon isn’t on the jump to explain to each and every one in
her very best French, that she is so sorry but it really is forbidden,
why in a twinkling the hut becomes full of them. And they are so
picturesque, so appealing, so full of shy wonder at the gramophone with
the wheel that “marches by itself” that it is very hard to turn them
out.
Since Christmas I have been kept busy by a tiny tad of a ragamuffin with
a funny round cropped black head and a face as solemnly expressionless
as a little carved Buddha. He slips in among the tables and he is
positively too small to be seen. The Christmas tree with its shining
ornaments is his stealthy objective. In vain I explain matters politely
to him; without a sound, without the hint of a flicker in his little
beady black eyes, he turns and clumps out in his ridiculous _sabots_,
only to presently slip in again. And now it seems he has lain low and
sagaciously observed my habits; for returning to the hut after mess this
noon, I met him trudging along the Rue Dieu, his eyes encountering mine
blandly without embarrassment, his absurd little figure bulging all over
with purloined Christmas tree ornaments. In the hut I found our poor
tree stripped to a height of four feet from the floor of all its finery.
These last few evenings the hut has been given over to writing Christmas
thank-you letters home. The official writer of love letters for the
company has been working overtime; not that his clients cannot write
themselves, but because they feel he is more able to do justice to the
subject. Every night now I see him sitting out in front of the counter,
his Jewish profile bent low over the table as he covers sheet after
sheet with his fine and fanciful handwriting, while next him perches
anxiously the interested party, watching developments and occasionally
proffering a suggestion. When it is done they must bring it to me for my
approval.
“That’s a real classy letter, ain’t it?” the lover will query proudly
and I assure him that it is indeed.
“When she gets that, I bet she’ll come across with that sweater she told
me she was makin’ for me, all right!”
“Say do you think that ought to be good for a _cartoon_ of cigarettes?”
another one inquires.
Of course there are many who, no matter what the effort, prefer to write
their own. Sometimes when cleaning up the canteen tables I come upon
specimens of such, first drafts discarded on account of blots. One such
love letter, classic in its brevity, picked up the other day, ran:
Dear Sweetheart,
I am writing you a few interesting lines which I hope will be
the same to you wishing you a merry Xmas and a happy New Year
Your loving friend
Pvt. ——
Of late I have been moved to speculate wonderingly on the mental
processes of the American public. I have been going through the stacks
of magazines in the warehouse sent from the States for one cent per to
provide amusement for the doughboys’ leisure moments. Among the rest I
found the Upholsterer’s Monthly, The Hardware Dealer’s Journal, The
Mother’s Magazine, Fancy Work and The Modern Needleworker. I showed some
of these prizes to one of the boys; “Gee, but that’s the kind of snappy
stuff to send a feller over the top!” was his comment. That numbers of
the Undertaker’s Journal have also been discovered among the donations
from home I have heard asserted on excellent authority, but as yet I
have not personally come across any.
Just as we were closing tonight, Pat came up to the counter, solemnly
leaned across it:
“Have you seen the new shoes they’re issuin’? he demanded. “They’ve got
pitchers on them so a feller can’t see his own feet!”
Bourmont, January 2, 1918.
Once a week our peripatetic movie-machine makes its appearance among us.
Louis, the sixteen year old French operator, unpacks the big cases, sets
up the apparatus, and, if our luck holds, we have a show. Owing to the
short range of the little machine the screen must be hung in the middle
of the hut. This means that half the audience must view the pictures
from the back, the essential difference being that the lettering is then
reversed; “The Jewish Picture Show,” the boys call this. But then as
half of us can’t read anyway, why should we mind?
The joy of the show lies in the audience. Just as soon as the lights are
put out the fun begins: “Everbody watch their pocketbooks!” goes up the
shout and from that moment we are never still.
The curly-headed heroine makes her coquettish entrance.
“Ooo la la! Oooo la la!” rises the enthusiastic welcome.
A bottle is displayed; “Cognac!” the yell shakes the roof.
The neglected wife begins to waver in response to the tempter’s wiles;
“Now don’t forget your general orders, little lady!” admonishes an
earnest voice.
Lovers indulge in a prolonged embrace; “Aw quit! Quit it! Yer make me
homesick!” goes up the agonized appeal.
The enraptured lover stands registering ecstasy; “Hit him again, he’s
coming to!” comes the derisive shout.
And so it goes. The actors aren’t on the screen, they’re in the house,
and truly there isn’t a dull moment on the programme!
Last night, however, instead of the joyous chorus of running comment a
subdued and decorous silence reigned, broken only by a few half-hearted
sallies. What was the matter? I racked my brain to find the cause. All
the joy had gone from the show. The evening was stale, flat and
unprofitable. When the lights were lit again the mystery was immediately
made plain. At one end of the counter stood an officer. I wonder if he
dreamed what a spoil-sport he had been?
Once a week also a lady comes from the Bourmont office to give us a
French lesson; not that Company A betrays any burning desire to learn to
_parlez-vous_, but just that it seems obviously the proper thing to do
under the circumstances, so French they must be taught willy-nilly.
There were two lessons to be sure in which they took a degree of
interest; the lesson about buying and counting money, and the lesson
about food and drink. But when they had once learned to ask the price of
things and to understand the answer, and had learned the words for eggs,
bread, butter, beer, ham, beefsteak, chicken and French fried potatoes,
their interest lapsed until it became positive boredom. Of late it has
seemed to me that it was only the boys with French blood that learned
anything and they, of course, knew it all already.
For entertainment Company A can upon occasion furnish its own show. This
was demonstrated by an impromptu programme staged in the hut the other
night; there’s no use we have discovered in planning things beforehand,
if one does, as sure as fate, all the star performers “catch guard” that
day! Pat by request acted as stage-manager and master of ceremonies. To
stimulate the artists we announced prizes.
Private Dostal opened the programme; a large red-faced lad with a bland
and simple cast of countenance, he is the comic balladist of the
company. His first contribution was a selection popularly known among us
as _Beside the dyin’ boxcar, the empty hobo lay_, a piece with a vast
number of verses in which the dying hobo repents an ill-spent life,
only, in the last line, to “jump up and hop the train.” For an encore we
had _Papa Eating Noodle Soup_ which could best be described as a
“gleesome, gluesome” recitative, the chorus of each of numerous verses
consisting of a realistic imitation of Papa partaking of the Soup. Mr.
Gatts gave us a jig. Then Bruno who, as the boys say; “Could sing pretty
good, only he don’t sing nothin’ but wop,” favored us with _Oh Maria_,
prefacing his performance with the earnest admonition, “No laffin!
nobody!” and after that with an Italian folk dance in which he looked
more like a grotesque little punchinello than ever. Our light-weight
boxing champion then gave us _Love’s Old Sweet Song_ and the
heavy-weight champion popularly known as _Magulligan_, together with Mr.
Bruno rendered _Bye low my Baby_, antiphonal fashion. The last number
was furnished by a poilu who had wandered in, in company with one of the
boys. He sang a long dramatic ballad, entitled _The Last Cuirassier_,
depicting some incident in the Franco-Prussian War. Just what the boys
made of it I don’t know, but to me it was intensely thrilling, not on
account of the words for I couldn’t catch them, but on account of the
fervor, the imaginative sympathy, the martial spirit which that old
fellow in his faded trench coat threw into his tones.
When the show was over Pat stood up on the counter and announced that as
long as all the performances had been of such superlative merit, it was
impossible for the judges to decide between them. So we handed out a
couple of packages of “smoking” to each one of the artists, and
everybody was satisfied.
Once too we had a party, an athletic stunt party. There were
potato-races and sack-races, string-eating contests, three-legged and
obstacle-races; but the sensational, the crowning event was, of course,
the pie-race. The pies which were of French manufacture had only been
arranged after difficulties: consulting the _boulangère_ at Bourmont I
had discovered that the calendar now only allows two pie-days per week,
Sunday and Wednesday; since the party was to be Friday, pie was
unlawful, unless—and here the law, like all good laws allowed a
loop-hole—unless the pie be made with commissary flour! The pie-race was
the “dark horse” on the programme. Fearing that if the boys learned
beforehand of the prospective pie not only would we be mobbed by
would-be contestants but also that their interest in the rest of the
programme would suffer, we had kept the pie-race a profound secret.
Smuggled in when the hut was empty those pies had reposed serenely under
the counter all afternoon and contrary to my fears not a boy had sniffed
them! When the proper moment came the pies were placed on a board in the
middle of the floor, the contestants, of whom Pat was one, knelt with
their hands tied behind them. At the word _go!_ they fell to. The hut
howled. Then it was discovered that Corporal G. laboured under a cruel
handicap; _his_ pie was a cherry pie and every cherry had a stone in it.
Half-way through his pie, Pat, jerking one hand loose, seized a large
piece, plastered it on the head of his opponent opposite; the race ended
in a riot. Strangely enough, when peace was restored not a trace of pie
could be found anywhere,—nowhere, that is, except in the back hair of
the contestants.
Bourmont, January 6.
Now I know how the prince in the fairy tale felt when he was bidden to
climb the mountain of glass. For Bourmont Hill is sheeted with ice, and
it is fairly as much as one’s life is worth to attempt to go up or down.
Every morning I stand and look at that dizzying slide aghast, and wonder
if I may possibly reach the foot alive; then assistance comes, sometimes
in the shape of a French lad in _sabots_, sometimes as a stalwart
doughboy with a sharp-pointed staff, and together the two of us go
slipping, slithering down the hill-side. In the middle of the road
yelling doughboys, seated on cakes of ice, whiz by at a mad rate of
speed; long before they reach the bottom of the slope, the ice-cake
splinters into bits, but the doughboy shoots on downward, sprawling,
spinning like a top, while you hold your breath and gape to see that his
neck isn’t broken. For the French people all this supplies the sensation
of a life-time; they crowd their front doors and their front yards
laughing, shrieking warning or encouragement, as they watch the progress
of the mad Americans up and down the hill.
“If one could only have a movie of Bourmont Hill on a day like this!”
sighs the Gendarme.
The other day I encountered a sergeant of engineers on the hill-side.
“You ought to have a sled, Little Girl,” he told me.
“Well why don’t the engineers make me one?” I unthinkingly retorted.
“Sure and they will!” he answered.
Since then I have gone in terror. If the sergeant should have that sled
made for me, as he likely will, why I shall have to use it. And as for
starting down Bourmont Hill on a sled, I would just as soon attempt
Niagara in a barrel.
Ever since Christmas it has been cold, bitter cold. At the canteen I
wash my chocolate cups with the dishpan on the stove in order to keep
the water fluid; hanging the dish-cloth up to dry at the corner of the
counter, in a few minutes I find it stiff with ice. At night the
ink-bottles freeze and then burst, spreading black ruin all around them.
What to do with the still unfrozen ones is a vexing problem; I might I
suppose take them home each night with me and sleep with them underneath
my pillow. In the little umbrella-stand stoves the green wood, which
comes in so freshly cut, that the logs have ivy still unwithered twined
around them, simply will not burn, and the stoves will smoke, _mon
Dieu_, how they will smoke! Every time the wind blows, the stove-pipes,
secured shakily by the canvas walls, become disjointed, parting company
with the stoves, and then the clouds pour forth as if we housed a
captive Etna.
In the barracks the boys tell me their shoes freeze to the floor over
night. They have taken to sleeping two in one bunk for the sake of
warmth. Blanket-stealing has been elevated to the rank of a deadly
crime. Even the problem of keeping warm by day is an acute one. The boys
who have money to burn are spending it to purchase extravagantly priced
fur-lined gloves. The boys who can’t afford them, wait until they see
somebody lay a pair down.
The taking of baths has become an act of heroism.
“Took a bath today,” growls a lad. “Think I ought to get a service
stripe for that.”
While another boy grins; “Gee but I’m feelin’ rich! Took a bath today
and found two pair o’socks and three shirts I didn’t know I had!”
“Now ain’t you sorry you cut off the bottom of your coat!” a long-coated
doughboy taunts an abbreviated one. “I told you not to. First, you’re
out of luck at Reveille ’cause the Top Kick can see you ain’t got no
leggin’s on. An’ now before you know it, you’ll be havin’ chilblains in
your knees.”
“You should worry,” growls back the short-coated one. “I couldn’t stand
that thing flappin’ ’round my feet no longer. An’ most of the other guys
done it too.”
Which is true. Before this cold spell set in, half the boys in the
company had taken a slice off the bottom of their overcoats, a procedure
which leads to an odd effect _en masse_ as each has chosen his own
length which means everything from knees to ankles, and drives the
exasparated Loots to demanding; “D’you want to know what you look like?
Well, you look like _hell_!”
In the village streets snow-ball fights are in order. As soon as the
boys start an offensive, all the inhabitants of the _Faubourg de France_
run out and put up their shutters. Better to sit in the dark while the
battle rages than to risk a pane of precious window-glass! Yesterday out
at Iloud the boys caught the Y Secretary, a meek and mild little man, in
the road and started to give him a thorough pelting. He ran for the hut,
they chased him, he gained his refuge, locked the door after him; they
proceeded to heap about half a ton of snow against it, making it
immovable. The unhappy man had to remove a window frame and crawl out
through the opening, then spend the rest of the afternoon digging out
his hut door.
Here at our billet our little pea-green porcelain stove with the
lavender thistles growing over it has proved to be more ornamental then
useful. Since the Gendarme is one of your naturally efficient souls, I
feel that such practical details as building fires belong to her. If she
wishes to coax and cozen the wretched thing for an hour on end, well and
good. As for me I prefer to go and hug the cook stove in Madame’s
parlor. French fires don’t burn the way American fires do, I tell
Madame. But to her the matter is quite simple. The stove, she says,
doesn’t understand English.
Today I met the sergeant of engineers. Some imp impelled me to question
jovially;
“Where’s that sled you promised me?”
“It’s almost done.” My knees went weak beneath me.
Tonight I confided my apprehensions to the Gendarme. She looked at me
with an unpitying eye.
“The more goose you, for encouraging him,” was her cold comfort. “What
are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to pray for a thaw,” I told her.
Bourmont, January 8.
Life at the Maison Chaput doesn’t flow quite so peacefully these days as
it did before Christmas. The disturbing factor is four-year old Max,
left by his mother to visit his grandparents. Max is a spoiled child
according to the Chaput point of view. He is expected to walk a chalk
line with his little red felt toes, and failing this, he is spanked
early and often. It is unlucky for him that the fagots by the hearth
afford a continual supply of handy switches.
“The little Jesus will never bring you anything again at Christmas,”
warns Grandmamma; “never again! And neither will the _Père Nicolas_!”
Then she appeals to me; “All the little children in America are always
well-behaved, are they not?”
“But yes, certainly!” I reply, avoiding Max’s eye.
Coming home in the evening I often stop on my way back to the chilly
_Salle des Assiettes_, in response to an urgent invitation, to warm
myself at the fireplace. Old Monsieur will be sitting on one side of the
hearth and I on the other, while Baby Max toasts his toes in their
scarlet slippers on a stool between us. Sometimes they will sing for me.
Monsieur had a fine voice when he was young and even now he sings with a
delightful air, a sort of indescribable old gallantry that is a joy to
me. When he and Max sing together the effect is irresistible.
“Now we will sing _Le Drapeau de la France_,” cries Monsieur. “We must
stand for this!” And Monsieur in his gay red neck cloth and little Max
in his blue checked pinafore stand up before the fire and sing with
their hearts in the words “_Saluons le drapeau de la France._” When they
come to that line, Monsieur le Commandant veteran of 1870 and baby Max
salute together.
Then, “_Vive la France!_” I cry, and “_Vive la France!_” they echo.
When new troops pass through town Max must always run to the door to cry
“_Bonjour les Américans!_” a salutation which is often followed I fear
by a request for cigarettes, for Max, baby that he is, enjoys a smoke,
much to his grandparents’ amusement.
Among the china-ware at the Maison Chaput there is a funny little jug
which the Gendarme and I use for fetching hot water. It is made in the
shape of a fat frog with a blue waistcoat and a pipe in one of his
webbed feet. I had thought it was the famous frog who would a-wooing go,
but Monsieur has his own explanation. It is the original St. Thiebault
toad he declares, to tease me. Every time I come to draw a little hot
water from the stove he must crack the self-same joke.
“_C’est le crapaud de Saint Thiebault_,” he cries and baby Max pipes up;
“_Il a soif!_”
Yesterday as I was passing through the front room on my way to the
canteen Monsieur stopped me to draw me into conversation. There were
several neighbors present. They gathered in a ring around me. I could
see they had some weighty question to put to me. After a moment’s
hesitation it came out:
“_Pourquoi_,” they demanded, “_pourquoi_, does the American soldier blow
his nose with his fingers?”
I stared, taken aback. In order to make their meaning quite clear they
illustrated with expressive gestures.
“Why,” I stammered, “does the poilu never do such a thing?”
“But never!” they declared in chorus. “The poilu always uses his
handkerchief!” And again they illustrated in pantomime.
I labored to explain; the French climate had given the boys colds, and
the question of laundry and clean handkerchiefs presented
difficulties....
“But,” declared old Monsieur sagely, “in America I have heard it is the
custom. There all the _haut monde_, it is said, lawyers, doctors,
ministers, statesmen, blow their noses in that manner!”
This was too much. I hurried from the room.
This morning Monsieur accused me of being a coquette. Hotly I denied the
charge. But why then, he rejoined triumphantly, had I asked for a
looking-glass in my bed-room?
Bourmont, January 9.
Company A is going to China! Somebody heard somebody say that somebody
told him that the Chaplain had said so. The boys are all excitement over
the idea.
“Won’t that be jolly! You’ll all be coming home with little shiny
pigtails hanging down your backs!” I tease them.
“Yes sir! an’ we’ll learn to eat our chow with chopsticks!” I have
solemnly promised the boys that if Company A goes to China I will go
too. What’s more I will learn to make Chop Suey for them. I have always
wanted to visit China.
Thus does the army rumor make sport of us. Reports of this sort
incessantly spring up among us, flourish for a day, to be forgotten on
the morrow. It is just a sign I suppose of the restlessness that is rife
among the boys, the nostalgia, the rebellion at the grinding monotony of
their lives. Half the men in the company, it seems, have gone to their
officers begging to be transferred into one of the two divisions that
have already been in the lines.
“I’m sick o’ this kind o’ life; what I came over here for was to fight,”
they growl.
In the canteen they look at the French National Loan poster which has
the Statue of Liberty on it, and speculate as to their chances of ever
seeing her again.
“Oh boy! but I bet there’ll be some noise on board ship when we catch
sight o’ that ol’ gal again!”
“They wouldn’t be breakin’ my heart if they gave out orders tonight to
start for home termorrer.” The chorus groans assent. “No sir!” speaks up
Private Gatts, “I don’t want to go home until I’ve killed some of them
Germans.”
“Aw, come off,” rises the incredulous jeer; “you know, if they’d let
you, you’d start out to walk to Saint Nazaire tonight if you had to
carry your full pack an’ your rife an’ your extra shoes.”
To beguile the tedium they indulge in what appears to be, next to
crap-shooting, the most popular indoor sport of the A. E. F.—mustache
raising. I don’t believe there’s a man in the company outside of
Cummings and Maggioni who hasn’t tried his luck at it. Sometimes it
seems as though an epidemic of young mustaches will break out overnight
as it were. The second lieutenants jeer and witticize in vain. There is
one squad who have solemnly pledged themselves to remain mustachioed
until they “can the Kaiser;” but for the most part, the little
“Charlies” are fleeting affairs that come and go according to their
owner’s whim. This makes it quite confusing for me, because no sooner
have I got to know a lad with a mustache by sight, than he shaves it off
and alters his appearance so that I have to learn him all over again.
But even the excitement of raising a mustache and having your picture
taken and sending it back home to your best girl and then waiting to
hear what she will say about it, affords only a brief diversion. And
when that is done, we are face to face again with the stark sheer
stupidity of drilling and hiking, hiking and drilling, day after day,
week in and week out, in the slush, the mud, and the rain.
“Another day, another dollar,” remarks my friend Mr. Brady with
philosophic resignation as he comes in from walking post at night,
“Betsy the Toad-sticker,” as he familiarly terms his rifle, over his
shoulder.
“I sure was strong on the patriotic stuff when I enlisted,” mourns a lad
cast in a less stoic mould, “but since I got over here I’ll tell the
world my patriotism is all shot to pieces.”
“Who called this here land _Sunny France_, I’d like to know?” is the
indignant question which someone is bound to propose at least once a
day.
“I’ve only seen the sun twice since I’ve been here,” complained one lad,
“and then it was kind of mildewed.”
“It stopped raining for three hours the other day,” remarked another,
“an’ I wrote home to my folks an’ told ’em what a long dry spell we’d
been having.”
Altogether we are inclined to take a very pessimistic view at present of
our surroundings.
“This land is a thousand years behind the times,” is the reiterated
comment, and who can blame them, having seen nothing of France but these
tiny primitive mud-and-muck villages? “It ain’t worth fightin’ for. Why
if I owned this country I’d give it to the Germans and apologize to
’em.”
“It ain’t the country, it’s the people in it,” asserted another lad
darkly.
While the Tall Kentuckian declared, “When I came to France, the height
of my ambition was to kill a German. Now the height of my ambition is to
kill a Frenchman.”
What can one say to them? I try fatuously to comfort by reminding them
of the good time coming when we all get home again. I paint rosy
pictures of a grand parade of the division up Fifth Avenue, but they are
sceptical.
“Huh! That won’t be for us! All the fuss will be for the National Guard
and the draft guys. The reg’lars don’t never get no credit.”
Then someone will start to hum the song which goes;
“O why didn’t I wait to be drafted?
Why didn’t I wait to be cheered?”
“Well I’ll tell the world that you deserve the credit!”
Anyway Company A has settled one point: if they ever march up Fifth
Avenue I am to march with them.
Bourmont, January 11.
The “convicts” are out of quarantine, and none the worse it seems for
the experience. Yet my family is still depleted. Forty boys from the
company have been sent out on a wood-chopping detail. Detachments from
each of the four companies in rotation are being sent out into the
forest to cut fuel for the use of the First Battalion and now it is our
turn.
The boys, we learn, are billeted in a twelfth century fortress in a tiny
village at the forest’s edge. From time to time some of them hike the
four miles in to Saint Thiebault after the day’s work is done, in order
to get a cup of hot chocolate and to tease a candle out of me. For the
chateau boasts none of the modern luxuries of heat and light.
“What do you do in the evenings?” I asked Mr. Gatts.
“Sit in the _café_. It’s the only place there is to go.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well you needn’t worry about the boys drinkin’. They ain’t none of them
got no money. All they can do is to sit and watch the Frenchies.”
Indeed such a long time has passed since our last payday that the whole
company is feeling the pinch of poverty. Canteen sales have narrowed
down to the three essentials; chocolate, cigarettes and chewing gum. I
am running accounts on my personal responsibility, giving them “jawbone”
as the boys say, a proceeding at which our Secretary looks with a
disapproving eye. To be sure the air is full of rumours of impending
payday but meanwhile there is no disguising the fact that the great
majority is “dead broke.”
Says Sergeant X to Sergeant Z, a boy with a curious cast of countenance;
“Say, Bill, do you remember the time I paid ten cents to see you in a
cage at Barnum’s? Well I want that dime back now.”
Another lad in answer to the appeal of “got a cent?” replies with
feeling; “One cent? Why man, if I had a cent I’d go to Paris!”
They have court-martialed the lieutenant who beat Malotzzi. His
punishment is to be transferred to another regiment.
Bourmont, January 14.
Madame is sick and I am worried. It isn’t so much that she is
dangerously ill as that she is dangerously old. She lies in the big blue
room upstairs, looking like a patient aged Madonna, without a fire, and
with no one to look after her. Monsieur it seems has made up his mind to
her demise and piously resigned himself. I called in an army doctor.
“She’s pretty low,” he said, “but it isn’t medicine she needs so much as
nursing.”
I informed Monsieur. He must get a woman to come in and take care of
her. But there was no such woman. He must try to find one. But no, it
was impossible! “Well at least, you can make a fire in her room,” I told
him. As for _La Petite_, she has proved herself a broken reed. Lacking
Madame’s rigid eyes upon her, she has become lazy and negligent.
Moreover she is indubitably in love with some doughty doughboy, the
proof being that she spends the time when she should be gathering the
harvest of dust from the _Salle des Assiettes_ in copying English
phrases from our books on to the Gendarme’s pink blotting-paper.
Yesterday we found “Welcome Americans” scrawled all over it. Meanwhile
Monsieur seems to consider himself as qualifying for a martyr’s crown
because he gets his own meals and washes his own dishes. “_Mais,
regardez Mademoiselle!_” he calls to me as I pass through the
living-room, and flourishes the dish-cloth at me with a tragic air. So
between excursions to the canteen I am trying to play nurse to Madame,
and a pretty poor one I make, I fear. Worse still, I must act as
interpreter for the Doctor, whose French is absolutely nil, at every
visit and since my scanty stock of French phrases hardly includes a
sick-room vocabulary I am often absolutely at a loss. But we muddle
through somehow and the Doctor gets his reward when we stop to speak to
Monsieur in the front-room afterwards, for then Monsieur must bring out
a bottle of champagne and together they sit in front of the fire and
toast each other.
Yesterday the Doctor prescribed fresh eggs. I told Monsieur. But there
were none in Bourmont he declared.
“Very well,” I said, “then I’ll get them.”
I started out to search. I knew of course that eggs in France these days
were difficult. In some places the Americans have been forbidden, on
account of the scarcity, to buy either eggs or chickens; a ruling which
officers have been known to evade by the simple expedient of renting
laying hens. But no such prohibition exists at present in Saint
Thiebault. Just the other day a lad told me he had consumed twelve fried
eggs at one sitting.
“Yes and Corporal G. ate more than I did.”
“How many did he eat?”
“Oh, just thirteen.”
“No wonder,” I observed, “that the French talk about _la famine_!” I
started a house-to-house canvas of Saint Thiebault only to be met by a
shake of the head and “_Pas des oeufs_” everywhere I went. Finally back
at the canteen I put the question in despair to the boys. “Have you been
to the tobacco shop?” they inquired. So to the tobacco shop I hurried
and sure enough there they were, all one wanted at the rate of seven
francs a dozen.
Last night Madame had an egg-nogg and this morning an omelette. Now the
Doctor says that she is better.
Bourmont, January 17.
If my fairy god-mother should lend me her magic wand, the very first
thing I would wish for would be a dinner, a real dinner just like Mother
used to cook, for Company A. It would start with turkey and cranberry
sauce and end with several kinds of pie, ice-cream and chocolate layer
cake. There would be no soup on the menu. Such a meal I am sure would do
more to raise the morale of Company A than the news of a smashing allied
victory. It is the everlasting sameness, the perpetual reiteration of a
certain few articles of food, I suppose, that makes the boys’ “chow” so
depressing.
“I’ve eaten so much bacon since I’ve been in the army,” remarked one boy
mournfully,” that I’m ashamed to look a pig in the face.”
There is one question which the whole A. E. F. would like to have
answered. They’ve “got the bacon,” but what became of the ham?
Far more hated than the bacon, however, is the “slum,” a word which Pat
informs me is derived from the “slumgullion” of the hobo. It is this
“slum” that gives the doughboy his horror of anything like soup.
“When I get back to New York,” said a lad to me the other day, “I’m
going to go into a real swell hotel and order a big dish o’ slum. Then
I’m going to order a regular dinner, beefsteak and oysters and all the
fixings, and then I’m going to sit and laugh at the slum.”
Pat came in with a whoop after dinner yesterday. “We had a change
today,” he sang out, “they put a pickle in the beans!” This noon he
bounced in again. “We had a change today,” he shouted, “they cut the
beans lengthwise instead of cuttin’ them acrosst.”
I made a fatal error. “Don’t you like beans?” I asked. “Why I’m very
fond of them. I wish they’d give them to us at our mess once in a
while.”
Pat looked at me with his sharp eyes narrowing. “D’you mean it?”
“Why of course I do!”
He turned and walked out of the hut. Two minutes later he returned with
a hunk of bread and a mess-kit brimfull of beans; he laid them on the
counter in front of me. I gasped but did my best to rise to the
occasion. I was delighted to see those beans, I assured him. I had just
been starting out to go to mess; a little bird had told me they were to
have roast pork, French fries, and peach pie for dinner, but now I would
stay at the hut and eat beans instead. Then I tasted the beans. They
were as hard as bullets, they stuck in my throat; I had never known
anything could be quite so awful. But Pat’s eyes were upon me. There was
nothing for it but to swallow those beans. So swallow them I did, every
last one, and there were positively at least a thousand. Then I washed
the mess-kit and returned it to friend Pat with effusive thanks. At
least, I complimented myself, I had been game. Tonight, just as I was
starting out for my supper of toast and chocolate with the little old
ladies of the Rue Dieu, Pat suddenly appeared on the other side of the
counter.
“We had ’em again tonight,” he announced joyfully, “and I thought since
you were so fond of ’em,”—he pushed another mess-kit full of beans
across the counter. I glared at him. I had vainly been trying to recover
from the dinner beans all afternoon.
“Take those things away,” I snapped, “I don’t want to lay eyes on
another bean as long as ever I live!” Pat had called my bluff.
For the last week Company A has had guests in the mess-hall. Several
French soldiers have been sent here to instruct the boys in some special
drill; it was arranged that they eat and sleep with the Americans.
Dreary as the boys find their chow, it proved a treat to the poilus who
evidently spread the news of their good fortune among their friends in
the vicinity, for day by day the number of Frenchmen messing with
Company A was mysteriously increased.
“Yes sir!” the indignant Mess Sergeant declared to me. “They started in
with five and now they’ve grown to be fifteen. I can’t tell one from
t’other because all these frogs look alike to me, and they know as how I
can’t sling their lingo. That’s a nice thing for them to be putting over
on me!”
But yesterday he got his chance to get even. He caught one of the
Frenchmen putting a piece of bread in his pocket. It is of course a
military offense to carry food out of the mess-hall.
“I just sailed right into that guy”—the Mess Sergeant is a large and
husky specimen—“and I sure did wipe up the floor some with him. And
since then the whole gang of ’em has been scared stiff. Those frogs just
watch me all the time. There ain’t a minute when I’m in the mess-hall
that one of ’em takes his eyes off me.”
The other day, they tell me, one of the boys in the company, possessed
of a practical turn, employed his newly-issued “tin derby” as a kettle
in which to boil some eggs. The delicacy proved dear. Betrayed by the
blackened helmet, he was tried and fined twenty dollars.
Bourmont, January 20.
I’m off for Paris! My eyes have been in a horrid state for the last
week. I have had all the doctors in the neighborhood treating them and
they only get worse and worse. The Chief is going up to Paris tomorrow
and has decided that the best thing to do is to take me along to see a
specialist.
Madame is so much better that I don’t feel uneasy at leaving her. But I
hate to desert the boys, especially as the hut is in such a state.
Yesterday we had a storm and the wind almost wrecked our tent. There was
one moment while I was out at dinner, when such a gust hit it, that, as
the boys said, “She sure seemed a goner.” At that moment there was a
stampede for the door, the boys shooting out of the tent “just like
seeds from an orange when you squeeze it.” But thanks to the Secretary
and a crowd of boys who got out and hung for dear life on to the guy
ropes, the tent came through damaged but still standing. When I returned
after mess I found our hut with two great gaping rents torn in the outer
walls and the inner lining all ripped loose and hanging down from the
ceiling, so that one felt exactly as if one were inside a punctured
zeppelin.
Reports coming in this morning from other points on the division state
that two tents actually did collapse during the tempest, and that one
man, caught beneath the wreckage, had his collarbone broken. So we can
count ourselves lucky.
Tonight I said _au ’voir_ to Company A, telling them that if payday
should occur during my absence, I hoped they all would be very, very
good. Some of the boys lugubriously predicted that I would never return,
while others darkly insinuated that they suspected I was “goin’ to Paris
to git married.” To show them what my intentions honestly were, I
inquired if there were any errands I could do for them in the city.
Corporal G. looked at me, stammered, hesitated. There was something he
would like, only he didn’t want to bother me. What was it? He paused,
grew red, then blurted it out.
“If it ain’t too much trouble, could you send me a picture post-card
while you’re away? I ain’t never had a post-card from Paris.”
Hôpital Claude-Bernard, Porte D’Aubervilliers
Paris, January 25.
This is a hideous hospital. They wake you up in the middle of the night
to wrap you in a mustard poultice. They wake you up in the wee sma’
hours and order you to brush your teeth. And nobody in the whole
establishment from head-doctor to scrub-lady knows a word of English;
except the night-nurse and she knows “mumpsss!” like that she says it,
“MUMPSSSSS!” Not that I have them; I have the measles. I don’t know
where I got them. They were, so far as I am aware, almost the only known
malady which we didn’t have at Bourmont. Probably some lad who was
passing through the town and stopped in at the canteen gave them to me.
It was undoubtedly the measles that were affecting my eyes; sometimes it
seems they act that way.
They sent me to this hospital because it was the only hospital in Paris
admitting women that had room for me: known officially as the city
hospital for contagious diseases, among Americans it passes as “the
pest-house.”
They think I’m a weird one here, because I want my window open.
Twenty-nine times a day at least an _infirmière_ will come hurrying in
and bang it shut and twenty-nine times a day I crawl out of bed and open
it again.
The nursing here is all done by _infirmières_, or untrained women under
the direction of two real nurses, one in charge of this wing during the
day, the other during the night. Some of these _infirmières_ go about in
curl papers, others wear sabots. They mean well enough, but they are
overworked, and frankly peasant types, with little education and almost
no notion of cleanliness or of much else that is supposed to pertain to
nursing. Last night a fat old soul without many teeth came waddling into
my room to have a look at that interesting curiosity, _la pauvre petite
Dame Américaine_. When she saw my open window she was so overcome with
astonishment that she hurried out and fetched a companion to regard the
phenomenon. The two of them stood and stared at it and discussed the
matter between themselves for quite a while, then the fat one turned to
me and remarked with a toothless but engaging smile; it was very warm in
America where I lived, was it not? When I replied that, instead, it was
much colder in winter there than here in Paris, they looked aghast and
flatly incredulous. Their only explanation of the matter had been, it
seemed, that I was accustomed to living in the tropics and just didn’t
have sense enough to suit my habits to the atmosphere.
Just outside the hospital there is a munitions factory. At night the
light over the front door shines into my room and day and night the
machinery keeps up an incessant thudding hum that says as plain as words
over and over and over: _Kill the Boches. Kill the Boches. Kill the
Boches._ Once in a long while the machines stop for a few moments in
order, I suppose, to catch their breath and then I grow dreadfully
worried, for I know that if someone doesn’t keep on killing the Boches
every second, they will be breaking through the lines and pouring in
over France in great drowning grey waves.
January 27. I haven’t got the measles after all; I have the German
measles, only they don’t call it that in French I am glad to say. At
first I was so very red and speckled that they thought I had the
_rougeole_, but now they have decided it is only the _rubeole_ after
all. A concourse of doctors considered me yesterday morning and
pronounced the verdict. “But then,” I demanded, “if it’s only the
_rubeole_ can’t I be leaving _tout de suite_?” For the French do not
consider quarantine necessary for the rubeole. “Eight days,” they
answered, and when I expostulated they turned on their collective heels
and marched callously out the door, each one holding up eight fingers
apiece as a parting rejoinder.
Last night I resisted a great temptation. This place is full of doors
with little glass panes in them. As I lay awake in bed in the middle of
the night, a wild desire grew on me to seize my big green bottle of
mineral water by the neck and see how many panes of glass I could
account for before they nabbed me. I had a perfect vision of myself,
flying down the hall in my little flour-sack chemise of a night-gown,
long legs stretching out beneath, going zip, bang, right and left into
those window panes. I have seldom wanted to do anything quite so badly.
And then just to top off with I was going to wring the interne’s neck.
He is a little shrimp of a man—that interne, with no chin and a sort of
scrawny picked-chicken neck, a neck that gets on one’s nerves.
When they sent me to this hospital I comforted myself with the thought
that I would at least learn a little French while staying here, but the
only thing I have learned so far is that _gargariser_ means gargle and
any goose might have guessed that.
* * * * *
January 28. The Chief has sent me a rose-pink cyclamen. It is a lovely
thing and very elaborately done up with pink crêpe paper and a large bow
of shell-pink ribbon. Now I am no longer an object of any interest.
Every last doctor, nurse, interne and _infirmière_ who comes into my
room to take a look at _la petite Mees_, immediately turns his or her
back on me and admires the cyclamen instead. I gather such objects are
rare in French hospitals, for they examine and discuss it at the
greatest length, always winding up with the remark that it must have
“cost very dear.”
Not having anything else to do I lie with my eyes shut and think. And of
course I have been thinking chiefly about Company A. I have thought
among other things of a play, or rather a dramatic charade in three
acts, which we might give in the hut. It is to be entitled _Slum_. In
the first act,—_Bill_— three doughboys hit on a plan to encompass the
Kaiser’s death and so become rich by gaining the proffered reward:—they
will send him a dish of slum! The second act,—_et_—shows a room in the
Potsdam palace with Kaiser Bill and His Side Whiskers, the Lord High
Chancellor, discussing the food situation. The slum appears; the Kaiser
partakes of it and falls writhing to the floor. The last act shows a
typical barn-loft billet, with rats squeaking, chickens clucking et
cetera, where the Soldiers Three of the first act have their lodging.
They receive the tidings of the Kaiser’s death; wild rejoicings ensue,
as in fancy they spend their fortunes; only to be cut short by the
discovery that the cook who made the slum has already claimed the
reward. I think we can stage it successfully, though the costumes for
the Kaiser and His Side Whiskers present some difficulties. One thing
only troubles me; will it hurt the Mess Sergeant’s feelings?
* * * * *
January 30. They have relented. They have shortened my stay. I am to be
let out tomorrow, but I must _reposer_ a few days before going back to
work. Bother! I haven’t heard anything from Bourmont for ten days and I
am full of uneasy apprehensions. Since I have been in the hospital the
cyclamen has been the only word I have had from the outside world. I
have been cut off as completely as if I were in a tomb. Ah well, some
day I’ll get back to the hut again I suppose, and when I do, if those
boys aren’t almost half as glad to see me as I am to see them, why I’ll
know that some other canteen lady has been surreptitiously stealing
their affections, and I shall put poison in her soup.
Hôpital Claude-Bernard
Paris, January 31.
I have been in a big air raid; this is just how it all happened:
It was a white night in the hospital for me. I had lain for hours, it
seemed, in the little blue room watching through the glass panes of my
door the coiffed head of a young _infirmière_ bent over her embroidery.
She sat outside my door because there was a light in the hall just
there. Suddenly my drowsy ears were pierced by a long weird hoot. In an
instant the girl had leaped to her feet and switched off the light, then
she turned and ran down the hall. A moment later and the building was in
darkness. I jumped from my bed and ran to the window. The light in front
of the munitions factory was out, there seemed an uncanny silence, the
machinery had been stopped. I hurried to the door. The corridor was full
of hastening forms, _infirmières_, their loose white robes showing dimly
in the grey light.
“_Qu’est ce qui arrive?_” I demanded.
“_Les Boches!_”
The night nurse was peering from my window.
“It’s the first warning,” she whispered. “See! the lights of Paris still
shine.”
But even as we looked, the light across the sky that was Paris
flickered, dimmed, flashed out. At the same moment two great golden
stars rose over the munitions factory.
“_Les avions!_” cried the night nurse.
And all the time the sirens kept up their ghostly wailing, like nothing
one could imagine except a vast host of lost souls. Then the guns began.
A moment later a crashing thud told that a bomb had fallen in our
neighborhood. The night nurse drew me hurriedly into the hall.
“Lie down against the wall,—close—like this,” she ordered.
Up and down the corridor every space by the wall was occupied by the
huddled form of an _infirmière_ buried beneath a mattress. The night
nurse, who had a whole heap of mattresses to herself, pushed one across
to me. I lay on the top, finding it more comfortable that way.
The bombs were falling nearer. A child in one of the wards woke up and
began to wail fretfully. No one heeded her. There was a flash and then a
tearing thud that shook the hospital. I had one ghastly moment, a thrill
of panic terror at our utter helplessness as we lay there awaiting what
seemed the inevitable coming of destruction. The moment passed. I got up
and slipped down the side corridor to the glass door. The sky was full
of moving lights; some burned with a steady brilliancy, some flickered
and went out like fireflies, a few flashed red. There was no telling
which was friend or foe. They seemed to be proceeding in all directions
without plan or purpose. The air pulsated with the humming drone of
their motors. They were like a swarm of angry hornets I thought. Across
the road, standing on the top of a high wall, in sharp silhouette
against the sky, three poilus stood to watch. Every now and then an
_infirmière_, curiosity outweighing caution, would leave her
hiding-place and creep to the door beside me only to burrow like a bug,
a moment later, underneath her mattress once more.
“_Mees! N’avez-vous pas peur?_”
“_Mais non!_”
“_Ah, vous êtes un soldat!_”
I went back to my room and climbed out on the window-sill. At first I
thought the lights of Paris had been turned on again, but this time they
were color of rose. As I looked the pink flush deepened, grew ruddy,
flamed across the sky. I called the night nurse.
“_C’est une incendie_,” she wailed staccato. “_Quel malheur!_”
So Paris was on fire.
As we watched two big puffs of white smoke rose over the munitions
factory, spread into a cloud, drifted slowly toward us. The night nurse
sniffed, then shut the window hurriedly.
“_La gaz_,” she whispered. I questioned it but left the window shut.
An aeroplane swung low over the munitions factory, so near that it
looked like a great lazy fish with the rose light from below shining on
its belly. Was it friend or enemy?
The bombs were dropping close again. One could see the flashes and feel
the jar of the explosions which made the windows rattle.
“_Oh les sales Boches!_”
“_Oh la la!_”
The agonized wails sounded half stifled from beneath the mattresses.
“_Taisez! Écoutez!_” It was the night nurse’s voice.
The front door slammed. A fat _infirmière_ in a badly shattered state of
nerves stumbled down the hall weeping out unintelligible woes. At my
mattress she came to a standstill, then ducked and tried to crawl
beneath it; failing, she sat down on top of me. I ventured a polite
protest,—in vain. The night nurse heard me. She emerged from beneath her
heap. Followed a scene dramatic, unforgettable. Mattresses scattered to
each side of her, heedless of the falling bombs, with Gallic passion she
proceeded to point out to the sobbing _infirmière_ the shortcomings of
her behaviour. But the fat lady proved unrepentant, her terror at the
bombs superseding even her awe of the night nurse. She sat tight,
holding her ground. She even ventured to answer back. The scene grew
more intense. After I had heard the night nurse discharge the
_infirmière_ some six times over, feeling a trifle out of place, I
managed to crawl from beneath and made my way back to the window. No
more bombs were falling but the guns still barked. As I watched, a
burning plane looking like a great tinsel ball seared its way through
the sky, falling just to the right of Paris.
“Pray God it is a Boche!” I thought.
A round-eyed _infirmière_ peered in at the door, staring curiously at
me.
“_Mees! Vous allez retourner en Amerique?_”
“_Mais oui! A près la guerre!_”
The red glare over Paris was fading out. The machines in the munitions
factory began to throb once more. In the grey light at the window I
looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes past one. I turned to crawl
into bed feeling cold and very sleepy. Some one touched my sleeve; it
was the night nurse. She was staring out the window with eyes that saw
nothing.
“And how many little children will be dead in the morning do you think?”
she asked.
Bourmont, February 5.
The blow that I somehow dimly apprehended while I was in the hospital
has fallen. Last night late I arrived from Paris. The first thing I
learned was, that with the addition of some new workers a general
shuffle of the women at Headquarters was to take place. This morning the
Chief called us together and gave us our new assignments. The Gendarme
and I are to leave Bourmont. Since I have been away regimental
Headquarters have been moved from Saint Thiebault to Goncourt, a town
about two miles to the south, and the whole regiment with the exception
of the First Battalion concentrated there. The Y. at Goncourt has had a
hard time of it. Originally it occupied a barracks; then the regimental
machine-gun company moved in and the Y. must move out. So the Y. settled
itself in an old stone mill by the Meuse, only to have the military
authorities decide that they needed that mill for a guard-house. So once
more the Y. moved, this time to a little old house in the centre of the
village; and here according to last reports it still is, for the simple
reason that nobody else has any use for the little old house. Meanwhile,
however, they are putting up a Big Hut which is to be ready in from one
to three weeks, all according to who is making the estimate. It is to
Goncourt that the Gendarme and I have been assigned. According to the
Chief this is a “promotion.”
“It’s the largest, the most important place on the division now,” he
declared; “I’m sending you there because you made good at Saint
Thiebault.”
But this little piece of taffy doesn’t seem to help matters a bit. The
only way to look at it is that it’s a case of the greatest good for the
greatest number, and of course numerically Goncourt is about ten times
as important as Saint Thiebault. And anyway it wouldn’t do the least
good to kick against the pricks because when all is said and done one is
under orders like a soldier. After all it isn’t as if I were going to
Greenland or to Timbuctoo. And yet at even only two miles distance, so
tied to the work one must be, one might almost as well be in a different
planet.
As for Saint Thiebault, they are going to have to do with just a man
secretary there. The place is too small, the Chief says, to be allowed
more than one worker.
We won’t be moving for several days yet. I’m not going to say a word
about it to Company A until the very last moment. I hate partings.