Paris, January 12.
It is fortunate that the world looks tolerantly on a certain instability
in the feminine mind. When I left Mauvages there was just one thought in
my head,—to go straight home. I have been twenty-four hours in Paris;
already my resolution is wavering. It’s all on account of what they said
to me at the Headquarters office.
Paris is truly a different city from the one I last saw in September on
my way back from Saint Malo; the streets thronged with people, and
brightly lighted at night, the shop windows gay and inviting, freed from
their patterned lattices of paper strips which formerly protected the
glass from the concussions caused by shells and bombs. In the Place de
la Concorde the statue representing the City of Strasbourg, divested of
the mourning wreaths which it has worn ever since 1870, now smiles
triumphantly above a mass of flags and flowers; and, most thrilling of
all, the crouched grey guns of Germany, like so many dumb impotent
monsters, throng the Place de la Concorde, stretch in a double line
along the Champs Elysées all the way to the Arc de Triomphe.
Everywhere the shop windows display a picture; a woman’s form, heroic,
bearing a great sword, with wide spread wings which are at the same time
wings and American flags; before her the bent and cowering form of the
Emperor; while beyond, a sea of khaki, illimitable hosts of warriors
melting away in waves against the horizon; and underneath the words:
“But what tremendous fleet could have brought hither such an army?”
“The _Lusitania_.”
The Patisserie shops are full of enticing little cakes once more; but,
sad to say, the quality one finds has depreciated while the prices have
gone sky-rocketing. I thought I would economise this noon and, instead
of eating a five franc luncheon at the hotel, substitute a cup of cocoa
and some little cakes at a tea-shop. When I came to pay my bill it was
seven francs fifty! While I was partaking of my frugal repast a French
Red Cross nurse came into the shop leading two blind poilus. She bought
them each some cakes as if they had been two little boys and they stood
there eating them. The poilu nearest me, a tall fine-looking fellow,
tasted his, “_Ah!_” he exclaimed, “_c’est une vrai Madeleine!_” He lied.
It was no more like a pre-war Madeleine than chalk is like cheese, but
if it had been made of India-rubber I suppose he would have said the
same thing, and said it with just the same grave and gracious courtesy.
Now that the war is over, one feels sorrier than ever for the French
officers who haven’t medals.
“The Frenchies are issuing the _croix de guerre_ with their rations
now,” the boys used to say. And indeed when one sees a French officer
without some sort of decoration one feels instinctively that something
must be the matter with him.
To go or not to go? I am thinking of a compromise. I will postpone my
sailing, take the furlough that is due to me. At the end of two weeks I
can calmly make up my mind.
Cauterets, January 20.
“There’s only one poor feature about this place;” declared a boy today,
“they won’t let you stay long enough.”
This is a representative but not a universal sentiment. Some of the boys
don’t like the snow, for Cauterets being high in the Pyrenees, is deep
in snow at present. A few complain that they don’t get enough to eat. It
is the breakfasts chiefly that fail to satisfy. The French having been
used, time out of mind, to a _petit déjeuner_ of rolls and coffee,
utterly fail to comprehend the American need for heartier sustenance.
When the contracts with the hotels were made it was carefully stipulated
that eggs, meat or fish should be served at breakfast in addition to the
continental menu, but the quantities were not stated and to a hearty
doughboy on a cold morning _one_ egg is a mere tantalization, if not an
insult. Every morning you may see them flocking in swarms to the Y. in
order to round out their unsatisfactory breakfasts with hot chocolate
and bread and jam. Yesterday I overheard some indignant splutterings
from a little crowd at one of the canteen tables.
“What’s the matter, boys?”
“They gave us fish this morning for breakfast!”
“They did?”
“Yep! One sardine to each man!”
Yet in spite of a few such inharmonious notes, Cauterets, like Saint
Malo and Aix-les-Bains, is instinct with the spirit of the American
soldier on leave. And the American soldier on leave is the Playboy of
the Western World. When the last doughboy has walked up the gang-plank
of the last west-bound transport, I think the railway officials,
gate-keepers, station agents, and train conductors all over France will
settle back in their chairs and draw a deep breath of relief.
The French poilu and the English Tommy have both questioned often and
bitterly why it was that while they must ride third class, the American
soldier habitually traveled second and first; the answer being that you
simply can’t keep the doughboys out! It is the idea of the social
distinction implied by the _classes_ I fancy that makes half the
trouble. However that may be, it is absolutely against the rules of the
game for any doughboy to ride third class if there are any second class
coaches, and equally disgraceful to ride second class if there is a
first. I myself have seen an American buck private with third class
transportation in his pocket stretching his legs in a luxurious first
class compartment seat, while a French general stood up outside in the
corridor! At another time I took a journey in a first class compartment
built for six, in which three English officers, an English titled Lady,
her companion, two muddy doughboys and myself were all crowded. This was
an anxious trip for me, for not only was I worried lest an indignant
conductor should eject the doughboys, but I was also guiltily conscious
of having paid only a second class fare myself!
One joyous company of eight lads on leave whom I encountered on the way
down here counted in their number one sergeant with a well-worn second
class pass. Things arranged themselves very simply. In the line-up at
the gate or in the car, the sergeant, heading the file, presented his
pass first, then, as it was handed back to him, slipped it behind his
back to the next man and so on down the line. Once in a second class
compartment it was usually an easy matter to transfer to first. This
same crowd related to me how, when locked out of an empty first class
compartment by an irate conductor they merely waited until the next
stop, then getting out climbed through the window on the off side of the
train into the forbidden seats.
“Golly, but that old frog got a shock when he looked in through the
glass door and saw us sitting there!”
They were overcome with chagrin because at the last change one member of
the party allowed himself to be bullied by a hard-boiled M. P. into
leaving the first class car.
“He’s broken our record,” they mourned; “he’s disgraced the family!” And
half their pleasure in the remainder of the trip was spoiled it was
evident.
Irrepressible, curious of all things, awed by nothing, the doughboy
cares not a snap of his fingers for the whole of French Officialdom. An
officer told me how, when standing on a station platform the other day,
an irate and husky doughboy sailed by him, headed for the baggage-room
in search of somebody’s luggage.
“If you hear a noise, Major,” he remarked in transit, “you’ll know that
I’m stepping on a frog.”
The French railway system affords him a never-failing topic for
amusement. And truly it has its quaint points. On the trip down we
passed over one line where the heating system for the cars consisted
entirely of long flat metal cans filled with hot water which were shoved
in under our feet, so that, no matter how chilly the rest of us might
be, our toes at least could travel in comfort; while on the walls of
each coach, we observed with glee, was an official notice requesting the
passengers to refrain from throwing objects such as _empty bottles_ out
the windows as numerous casualties among the employees had resulted from
this practice!
The doughboy passes everywhere by virtue of the magic words, “_no
compree_.” Traveling he develops a stupidity that is absolute and
unshakable.
“I never understand anything they say,” chuckled one youngster joyously,
“until they begin to talk about something to eat”.
Wonderful tales are told of escapades and adventures; such as the story
of the boy who started out to spend his leave at Aix-les-Bains and
traveled half over Italy before he came back, all on the the strength of
the pass-word “onion-stew” and an unidentified document that happened to
have a red seal attached. Common rumour has it that the official report
records sixty thousand A. W. O. L.s at the present date in the A. E. F.
in France. I don’t know whether this is correct, but I rather hope it
is. Now that the war is won I am glad that in spite of Provost Marshals
and M. P.s some of the boys at least are on the way to discovering that
there is something more to France than just “mud and kilometers.”
Paris, February 7.
I’m going to stay. If I went home now I would feel like a quitter all
the rest of my life. I don’t know where I’m going. They asked me if I
would like to go to Germany but I said no, I didn’t want to look at
Germans. I shall have to stay here in Paris for a week or so anyway in
order to get that wretched business of a broken tooth, which the
Christmas caramel at Mauvages began, straightened out. In the meantime,
I am doing what I can in a perfectly amateur and impromptu way to help
young America see Paris.
Paris is the lodestar of France for the A. E. F. From every part of the
country it draws them like a magnet. When on leave, no matter from what
portion of France they may have come or what corner they may be bound
for, they always contrive to get there by way of Paris. If the R. T. O.
instructs them to change to another line before they reach the city,
they arrive there just the same, to explain blandly to the M. P. that
they went to sleep on the train: “and when I woke up, why here I was in
Paris!” What dodges the doughboys haven’t worked in order to circumvent
the M. P.s and get into Paris without official permission, or once in
Paris to stay longer than the short time allotted them, would be beyond
human imagination. There is one story current, for whose truth though, I
cannot vouch, of an American private who passed a week in the forbidden
city in the uniform of his cousin, a lieutenant in the French Army. At
the time of the signing of the armistice, for several days the M. P.s’
vigilance was relaxed and boys from all over France swarmed to the city
to participate in the festivities, but since then the penalties for the
unlucky ones who are caught have grown more and more severe.
Yesterday by request I took two boys to the Louvre. We wandered through
the galleries of Greek and Roman sculptures. One boy, looking at the
yellowed and discolored surfaces, declared himself bitterly
disappointed. He had heard that the statues were all real marble here,
but it was perfectly plain that they were nothing but plaster
imitations! The other boy asked naïvely if the mutilated statues were
“meant to represent people who had had their heads chopped off.” After
about half an hour they consulted their watches, announced that we had
just time to get to a movie show, and wouldn’t I go with them?
But if the finer points of Greek art are lost on many, there are plenty
of other things which they do appreciate.
“Can you climb to the top of the Eiffel tower?”
“Where is the church that the shell struck on Good Friday?”
“What would you advise me to buy to send home to Mother?”
“How often does the Ferris Wheel go?”
“Is there any place in Paris where one can get ice-cream soda?”
These are some of the questions that they ask you. Some go to the Opera,
sitting invariably in the best seats to the amazement of the French
people. Yesterday I stopped at the box-office to buy some tickets. A boy
standing just inside the door spoke to me.
“I beg your pardon, were you going to buy a seat for this afternoon?”
“No,” I said; “for Saturday.”
“I have an extra ticket. I’d be glad to have you use it.”
He went on to tell me that he was taking the six o’clock train, that he
had bought tickets for himself and a friend for the matinee as a last
pleasure, but that his friend had failed him. I hesitated, uncertain.
“What’s the opera?” I asked, just because it was something to say.
“It’s La Bohème,” he said. I fell.
“I’m mighty glad,” he told me, “I was just about to go out and pick up a
chicken on the street, when you came in.”
The opera was a dream of loveliness. I felt as if I must have done
something very good indeed in some previous existence to be thus
rewarded.
Today I encountered two boys who told me how they had “done” Paris.
“We stopped at a store and bought a bunch of post cards, all the famous
buildings and everything. Then we got a taxi. After that all we’d do was
to show the chauffeur a post card and he’d drive us to it,—then we’d
show him another one, and so we kept a-goin’ until we’d seen most all of
Paris. But gee! That taxi bill was a fright!”
This afternoon, coming down the “Boulevard de Wop,” as the boys call the
Boulevard des Italiens, I paused beside a fiacre, attached to a
particularly wretched looking old nag, which was drawn up by the
sidewalk. Into it were piling merrily some eight or nine doughboys, the
cabman fairly dancing on his seat as he uttered frantic but perfectly
unheeded expostulations. Finally as the cabby appeared to be developing
apoplexy, I spoke up.
“Boys, you know that _really_ that broken-down old beast never _could_
pull all of you!”
Whereupon half of them immediately piled out again. One of the remaining
ones leaned out of the fiacre.
“Say Lady, can you talk French?” he demanded earnestly.
“Why a little.”
“Well tell that old guy for me, will you,” he indicated the still
disgruntled _cocher_ who, like the rest of his tribe, was crowned with
an ornamental “stove-pipe,” “that I want him to lend me his hat.”
Tonight I met a girl I know who is in the Hut Equipment Department. She
has just returned from an extended tour of inspection. I told her I
didn’t know where my next assignment was to be.
“Why don’t you go to Verdun?” she asked. “The conditions about there are
worse than any other place in France. Men are commiting suicide there
every day.”
So I wrote a note to the Office asking that I be sent to Verdun.
Bar-le-Duc, February 16.
Somewhere here in Bar-le-Duc there is an extraordinary thing. It is the
Mausoleum of René of Chalons, prince of Orange, and designed in
accordance with his wishes. Against an ermine mantle, under a rich
armorial crest, stands a skeleton or rather the rotting carcass of a
man, half bone and half disintegrating tissue, holding aloft in one
ghastly hand, his heart, an offering, so the story goes, to his lady
wife.
Every time I am in Bar-le-Duc, even if it is only an hour between
trains, I go hunting for that skeleton; but the nearest I have come so
far, is to find it on a picture post card. Once I thought I had surely
run it to earth when I came upon a strange old church built so as to
bridge a narrow moat-like canal, and so low that it seemed as if the
water must ooze up through the stone slabs of the floor, but no.
I am here at Bar-le-Duc for a few days because it seems that after all
it isn’t quite certain whether I had better go to Verdun or to Souilly.
While my fate is being decided, I am acting as a sort of errand-girl,
special messenger and Jack-of-all-jobs here at Headquarters.
This morning I went out in a flivver to do an errand. The driver told me
how, a few days ago, he had carried a young French girl all over the
country-side looking for her aviator-lover’s grave. Finally with the
help of a French officer they had found it. The girl had placed a wreath
on the grave, said a little prayer and turned away. He showed me the
place, three grey wooden crosses, one with a china wreath on it, marking
the field where a large aviation camp had once been and now quite the
loneliest and most deserted spot in the world.
Coming back, I was sent to the Provost Marshal’s office to telephone.
While I waited for my connection two M. P.s brought in a prisoner. He
belonged to the —— Division which reached France in September. Two days
after he landed he went A. W. O. L. and had been missing ever since. By
some unknown means he had managed to acquire a typewriter and all
winter, it appeared, he had been living in the woods supporting himself
by typing faked travel orders and selling them to the soldiers. He was a
heavy-set fellow, sullen and taciturn under their questioning. They went
through his pockets and turned out the collection on the table; chewing
gum, tobacco, a shaving-set, old newspapers, screws and nails, buttons
and string and matches and pins, pencils, and post cards, a knife and
three toothbrushes.
Bar-le-Duc I understand does a thriving business in A. W. O. L.s. One of
the M. P.s told me of a lad who, when asked for his papers, took to his
heels and was promptly pursued.
“I chased him all over town, and finally I ran him into the canal,” he
narrated joyfully. “He stood out there with the water up to his waist
while I stood on the bank and shied stones at him. And he had on a serge
uniform too.”
“How did it end?” I asked.
“Oh I let him go; I figured if he wanted to get away that bad he had a
right to.”
Up this same canal a few weeks ago came a flotilla of French submarines
bound for the Rhine, the sailors startling the inhabitants by their
sudden appearance in the streets in their naval uniforms and their
casual references to their ships close at hand. Somebody was unkind
enough to declare that the subs had started their journey from the coast
on Armistice Day, but I am sure this must be a libel.
This afternoon I asked if I might work in the canteen. This is in a
French house, a few doors beyond the beautiful Officers’ Club, the home
of one of the wealthy manufacturers of the _Confiture de Bar-le-Duc_,
lent by him, rent-free for the use of the Americans during the war. In
the course of the afternoon I became the possessor of a puppy-dog
presented me by a motor-truck driver, who, following some careless
remark of mine about wishing I had a puppy, dropped the scared little
black thing in my arms and fled. As soon as I could collect my senses I
flew around the counter and out the door after him, calling on him to
take his dog back. But when I reached the street, motor-truck and driver
both had vanished. I would have loved to keep the little beggar, but
here I am, a transient traveller bound for nobody knows where; what
could I do? I explained my dilemma to the grinning crowd in the canteen.
One of the boys spoke up.
“I’ll take him and give him to my French girl,” he said. I relinquished
the little fellow regretfully. I hope Mademoiselle makes him a good
foster-mother.
A little while later I noticed a boy at the counter who wore three
service stripes and two wound stripes. “What’s your division?” I asked.
He told me. He belonged to my old regiment! He had been in the Milk
Battalion at Goncourt, and he remembered me. He was a Class B man now
and in the post office at Bar-le-Duc.
“What of the rest?” I asked.
“They’re mostly dead,” he answered, and he told me how, after one
charge, out of the whole Company M six men and the captain had come
back.
I broke down and cried; I couldn’t help it. The boy, embarrassed, drew
away. He is the only man I have seen out of my regiment since last
March, and all he could say was, “They’re mostly dead!” Dead at
Château-Thierry, dead on the Marne, dead by Soissons, dead in honor,
dead with glory. America, will you ever forget?
Bar-le-Duc, February 18.
Everyone here is incensed this morning over the action of the French
troops in the matter of the theatre. It seems that the Americans had
arranged a schedule of movies and shows to be given at the local theatre
a month in advance. A soldier show was billed for tonight, the company
had reached town, the audience was beginning to gather from the nearby
villages, when the French troops who began to arrive in town yesterday
announced that they had their own exclusive and immediate uses for the
building. All efforts to arbitrate the matter have so far failed. And
now word comes that a French lieutenant in order to be ready to repel
any possible move on the part of the Americans to take possession of the
theatre for the night has had his bed made up in one of the boxes!
It is the greatest of pities that there should be this wretched element
of friction between the two allies. If every American could have been
miraculously whisked out of France the day after the armistice was
signed the doughboy would likely have been to this day a bit of a
popular French idol. It is this hanging about with no ostensible end in
view that frays nerves on both sides and leads to a mutual stepping on
each other’s toes. No two nationalities I am convinced could be thrown
into such an intimate and trying relationship and produce perfect
harmony. There must inevitably be a clash of temperaments. The case in
this instance, as I see it, is complicated to an extraordinary degree,
with human foibles and failings a-plenty on both sides.
We Americans have undoubtedly been guilty of bad manners. Quite openly
and persistently the doughboy has called the Frenchman “frog” to his
face and this the French have by no means enjoyed. The odd part of the
thing is that the doughboy can give no explanation of the nickname.
“But why do you call them frogs?” I ask the boys. Usually they look
quite blank.
“It’s ’cause they sound like frogs when they talk,” explained one lad.
“’Cause they jump around like frogs when they get excited,” offered
another.
Not one of them suspects that this nickname is a curious survival of the
old term of contempt “Frog-eaters” applied to the French by the English
in the days when they were enemies instead of allies!
Undoubtedly too the feminine factor, leading as it has to jealousy, has
played its share in arousing antagonism.
“The chief victories of the Americans in France,” declared a French
officer bitterly the other day, “are his conquests over the feminine
heart!”
Indeed from the start it has been an open secret that the
“Mademoiselles” have taken a prodigious fancy to the American soldier.
This is partly because he possesses the charm of novelty, partly because
he has money and can procure chocolate and cigarettes and partly just
because he is himself.
“There are three thousand men in this town and three girls,” ran a
postal addressed by a joyous youngster on leave to his lieutenant; “I’m
going with one of them and Abe has the other two.”
And who can blame the poilu for a certain amount of resentment, when,
coming back from the trenches he has discovered that a dashing American
stationed at an engineering camp in his home town has supplanted him in
the affections of his sweetheart?
On the American side there is of course the old grievance of the
overcharging.
“D’you know why you don’t see any Jews in France?” asked a lad of me the
other day, “It’s because they couldn’t make a living.”
In part, this sense of grievance, as I see it, is justifiable. An
officer told me not long ago that he had recently been left behind when
his outfit moved out from a village, as “Mop Up Officer” to settle the
claims of the townspeople for damage done by the soldiers during their
stay,—a pane of glass, a truss of straw, the tine of a pitchfork.
Hearing a commotion in the town square he looked out; the town crier was
announcing to the populace that now the Americans had gone the price of
wine would be cut from five francs a bottle to two. But in part this
sense of grievance is unjustifiable, for the American has in no small
measure brought this state of affairs upon himself. From the start the
doughboy’s disgust with the flimsy paper bills and the puzzling tricky
scheme of the francs, sous and centimes engendered a carelessness toward
French money which the tradespeople took as a delightful indication of
unlimited wealth. “But everyone is rich in America!” I have heard them
declare with childish conviction. So prices began to rise and presently,
with the prices, the doughboy’s resentment, and then the poilu’s; for
the rise automatically put all luxuries out of the French soldier’s
reach and this of course he in turn blamed bitterly on the “rich”
American. Indeed the sending of a large body of men paid at the rate of
a dollar a day into a country where the native troops were paid at the
rate of five cents a day was a social-economic error which somehow, say
by some system of reserve pay such as the Australians have, should have
been avoided.
Then too, the American won’t haggle. The Frenchman, as a rule, won’t buy
unless he can. Prices are fixed with the expectation of a compromise
after bargaining. Not easily shall I forget a dramatic scene witnessed
at the “Rag Fair” at the Porte Maillot in Paris between a prosperous
householder and a “rag” seller over a second-hand padlock. The seller
remained firm in demanding six cents for the padlock. The householder
was equally determined not to pay more than five. Finally the
householder with great dignity withdrew, only to be called back by a
despairing yelp from the seller. He had capitulated. To the American
such a performance seems both tedious and undignified; he either takes
the article at the first price asked or leaves it.
Nor can it be denied that the doughboy tends to be a bit of a prodigal.
Chief of his spendthrift weaknesses are two; he will pay almost any
price for sweets, sink almost any sum in a present for his girl. Then
too the universal custom of gambling in the army, leading to swollen
fortunes for the favoured ones, has helped to establish standards of
extravagance. An officer in charge of a company belonging to a negro
labor regiment told me of seeing two of his boys in a café sit down to a
twenty-five franc bottle of champagne and then, the taste for some
reason not quite suiting their fancies, walk out leaving the bottle
practically untouched behind!
In the light of such incidents as this, who can blame the French people
for regarding the American as a sort of gift from God beneficently
allowed them at the time of their greatest national impoverishment, for
the replenishing of their depleted pocketbooks?
Verdun, February 20.
The little narrow-gauge train pulled us in here from Bar-le-Duc at ten
o’clock last night, a thirty mile run and six hours to make it! When I
asked for a first class fare at the station I noticed an odd expression
on the ticket-seller’s face. “They’re all the same,” he said; “all
second class.” Arrived at the train I understood. The coaches were
filthy and furnished with straight-backed wooden benches; a heap of
rubbish surrounded the rickety stove in the centre. Shortly after we
crawled out of Bar-le-Duc it began to rain. Half the windows were
innocent of glass. The rain beat in through the empty sashes. Presently
it grew dark. Several of the passengers, American, reached in their
pockets and brought out a few grimy candle-ends. We made little
grease-spots on the benches and stuck the candles there, but the gusts
of wind from the empty windows kept blowing them out, so half the time
we jogged along in darkness.
Among the passengers was a little old Frenchman with one arm. He was
returning to his native village in the devastated area the other side of
Verdun, after an absence of four years. With him was his young son, an
immature lad of seventeen.
“_J’ai tine passion_,” declared the old man with startling fervour;
“_j’ai une passion véritable de revoir le village de ma naissance!_”
In all probability he was returning to nothing but a crumbled heap of
stones.
“You are very brave,” I told him.
Ah but it was for them, the old, to set an example for the young! It was
they who should lead the way! It was they who should rebuild France! His
frail old body fairly shook with the strength of his emotion. What a
strange, thrilling, tragic pilgrimage!
Verdun resembled nothing but a ruin mercifully wrapped in darkness as we
passed through the gate and made our way up the hill. We had found,
luckily, a guide who had a lantern; nowhere else in all the city was so
much as a gleam of light to be seen. In places, as we passed, the shells
of houses still stood, staring down with empty eyes at us, in other
places there were nothing but rubble mounds with here and there a narrow
jagged bit of wall or a naked chimney standing out like a lonely
monolith.
Headquarters offices are at the Château on the summit of the hill close
to the Cathedral, one of the few buildings left undamaged in this part
of town, a rambling, ungainly, rather gloomy structure. The second story
consists almost entirely of a series of great empty barren loft-like
store-rooms. In one of these, known as the Ladies, Cold Storage, I have
my habitation. Supposed to be a sort of one-night-stand dormitory for
female tourists,—nurses chiefly,—who are touring the battle-fields, the
Ladies, Cold Storage is a large dusty garret with grimy rough-plastered
walls, without a window or as much as a crack to let in any light or air
except for a few small slits in the roof where the rain leaks in. A
stove, a long row of cots and a tin basin on a shelf surmounted by a
broken piece of looking-glass are its only furnishings. However, the L.
C. S. boasts one luxury, it is equipped with electric lights. This
helps—when the current is turned on!—when it isn’t, we light a candle
stub and stick it in an old milk can. The electricity is generated
underground in the Citadel. When the Americans first came to Verdun some
enterprising electricians tapped the wires and had forty lights working
before the French knew anything about it. Upon discovery the French cut
off the Americans, only to find shortly afterwards that another
connection had been made. This absurd performance was repeated no less
than seven times. After the seventh time the French gave up.
We were fairly frightened out of bed this morning by a most horrible
hubbub,—a Klaxon gas-alarm which is used to call the guests to
breakfast. Having heard it I am quite convinced that if Gabriel wishes
to do the job efficiently on the last day, he will scrap his trumpet and
take a Klaxon.
After breakfast we newcomers hurried out to get a glimpse of the town.
There were plenty of others likewise occupied as Verdun is a veritable
magnet for A. E. F. tourists. The Cathedral is closed to visitors but we
happened upon two French officers who kindly took us through. The roof
is badly damaged and the stained glass of the windows shattered to bits,
but beyond that the Cathedral is comparatively unharmed. I was much
embarrassed when the officers informed me that the _sacrés pierres_, the
sacred stones from the altar, had been stolen and presumably sent as
souvenirs to America. At first I pretended not to understand, but they
took such pains to explain, finally taking me to the altar and showing
me where the little marble slabs had been dug out, that I finally had to
admit I understood. The two nurses who were with us were anxious to
climb the clock-tower, but this, we found, was strictly _défendu_. All
through the war, we learned afterwards, the clock in the tower had been
kept going by the faithful verger who refused to leave his post, and
what’s more, it had kept time. But a short while ago the clock had
started “skipping.” A party of American boys had just visited the tower.
Upon investigation it proved that one of the wheels was missing!
Sometimes I think the French are very patient with us.
Everywhere we went we came upon German prisoners engaged in the most
leisurely fashion in cleaning up. There are several thousands of them
here and more to come. Verdun is to rise from her ruins and live once
more. Yet she can never be in any sense the stately city that once she
was; for while the business and poorer portions of the city below the
hill are not irreparably damaged, the finer part with its stately
mansions and exquisite specimens of mediæval architecture is wrecked
beyond repair. The most serious obstacle in the way of making at least
some small portions of the city habitable at present lies in the great
difficulty of obtaining window-glass.
From the Cathedral we went to the Canteen-in-the-Convent. How the nuns
would stare, I thought, if they could see their virgin precincts in
possession of a mob of boys in khaki, white and black, interspersed with
the blue-coated poilus! Across the back of the building runs a wide
terrace, once worn by pious feet of patient sisters engaged in holy
meditations. Here among the lounging boys stand life-sized carved and
colored images of saints and angels. Their size of course prevents them
from traveling to America as souvenirs, but even so they must stand
witness to the irreverence of young America, for the Angel Gabriel is
hideous in a German gas-mask!
After dinner we went on a trip through the Citadel, that vast
underground soldier-city with its miles of corridors and rooms enough to
harbor a whole army, a little world deep underneath the earth. We saw
the bakery which bakes bread not only for the whole garrison but for all
the troops in the vicinity; the Foyer, a writing and recreation hall,
named in honor of President Wilson; the movie theatre; and the hospital
with its wards and operating room,—what a nightmare horror I thought to
be sick in those damp and dimly-lighted subterranean caverns! But we
were not allowed to see more than the outer door of the chapel which
they say is sumptuous, since it is enriched by all the costly
furnishings and precious images moved there for safety’s sake from the
Cathedral. Nor were we shown the underground café where, I have been
told, an unusually good brand of beer is sold.
From the Citadel, rumour has it, tunnels lead out to the circle of forts
that form the defences of Verdun, but if you ask a Frenchman if this is
so, he only looks wise and keeps mum.
Verdun, February 25.
I don’t believe there is another canteen quite like my canteen in the
whole of France. It is a canteen for French civilians. The one-time
inhabitants of Verdun and the devastated area beyond are allowed by the
government, it seems, just twenty-four hours in which to visit their
former homes, after which they must return as there is no food for them
here and very little shelter. In return for many favours the French
authorities asked the Y. to co-operate with them in running a sort of
rest-room for these refugees; they supplying a detail, and we supplying
the materials to make hot chocolate which is given away, and a secretary
to take charge. The canteen is in the Collège Buvignier at the foot of
the hill. There is a _dortoir_ in the building also, in charge of the
man who was once manager of the principal hotel in the city; two long
halls full of cots with straw mattresses where the refugees may pass the
night. My assignment to this canteen is only to be temporary.
The room where my canteen is must have once been quite beautiful,
high-ceilinged with wainscot panelling below and embossed leather
covering the walls above. Even now in its state of dingy disrepair, with
half the panes in the tall arched windows replaced by dirty cloth, it
keeps something of its old dignity and charm. Beyond the main room is
another smaller one, connected by two doors, in which the detail lives
and in which we make our chocolate.
When I took over the canteen from the man who had been in charge of it,
it was absolutely bare except for four tables and some backless wooden
benches. My first act on assuming charge was to clean house, my second
was to persuade the detail to make the very watery chocolate richer.
After that we proceeded to refurnish and adorn. We ran a frieze of
war-pictures in color, taken from a child’s pictorial _Histoire de la
Guerre_ around the top of the wainscoting, hung French and American
flags from the chandeliers, teased the French authorities into bringing
us some nice upholstered armchairs for the old ladies to sit in, and,
finally, put a little pot of primroses or snow-drops, dug with a broken
tile from a ruined garden, in the centre of each table. Then a kind
secretary bound for Bar-le-Duc was persuaded to go shopping for us and
brought back an array of French magazines, hand-picked, and an
assortment of toys to amuse the kiddies who must often wait here with
their families between trains, though so far, it must be confessed, it
is chiefly the detail who have been amused by them. And now I am
wondering what there is to do next.
Besides the hot chocolate, we carry on a trade in bread, a huge sackfull
of which is brought us fresh every day from the underground bakery on
the back of a little round-faced poilu; and we do a brisk business in
checking parcels, without checks. Yesterday a rabbit was left all day in
our care. I was sorry for the poor beast cooped up in the little box and
wanted to give it a drink of water, but the poilus insisted that this
would be fatal. Whether this might possibly be a zoölogical fact, or is
just part of the national prejudice against water, I can’t determine.
At first, remembering my difficulties with the French Army at Mauvages,
I was a little apprehensive as to how my two poilus, Emil and Guillaume
and I might get along. But though I am sure they think me the oddest
creature in the world, and my presence here unconventional beyond words,
yet their behaviour could not possibly be more courteous, considerate
and deferential. They won’t even allow me to wash the chocolate cups.
“Mademoiselle will soil her hands!”
And they are forever telling me that I am working too hard. “But
Mademoiselle will be fatigued!” Which is so absurd as to fairly
exasperate me.
Besides Emil and Guillaume we have four soldier friends-of-the-family,
as it were, who also frequent the back room. The canteen is supposed to
be a strictly civilian affair, but we make an exception in favour of the
four _camarades_, and they repay us by helping chop the stove-wood which
is stacked in a great pile outside the door and is nothing more or less
than the stakes to which were once fastened barbed-wire entanglements.
Each stake still bears two little rings of wire around it and every few
days one has to clear out the accumulation of barbed-wire entanglements
from the chocolate-stove. _Les défences de Verdun_ the poilus call the
wood-pile. The poilus are all artillerymen from a regiment of “75s.”
Guillaume has brought down three Boche planes, he tells me, and Emil
five. One of the poilus is a handsome brigadier, or corporal, who wears
wooden shoes. I said something about _sabots_ the other day. But don’t
they wear _sabots_ in America? The poilus were astonished to learn that
wooden shoes were unknown among us! There is also a sergeant who is the
aristocrat of our little circle, a dreamy looking lad, a student of
architecture at the Beaux Arts. Yesterday he shyly proffered me an
envelope; in it was a pretty pen-and-ink sketch of two little girls, one
in the costume of Alsace, the other of Lorraine, proffering bouquets,
and underneath was written, “Souvenir of a Frenchman who thanks America
for having given the victory more quickly.” Our poilu friends are
constantly straying into the back room in order to read the newspapers
here and to get a cup of hot chocolate. Every now and then they all get
together and hold a _vin rouge_ tea party. On these occasions it is
evidently a mystery to them why, though I join them in eating bread and
cheese, I always refuse the _vin rouge_!
The politeness of the poilus is equalled by that of the clientele. They
are extraordinarily grateful for what little we do for them. Today an
old lady, in spite of anything I could say, insisted on tipping me with
a two franc piece! I spent it buying chocolates and cigarettes for the
poilus at the Canteen-in-the-Convent. Every class of society flows into
my little canteen from gently bred ladies under the escort of immaculate
officers to old men who resemble nothing but the forlornest vagabonds.
The cheerfulness and courage of the refugees in general is astonishing.
One would think that a room full of people engaged in such a mournful
mission would be a gloomy place, but on the contrary, although
occasionally you see a woman quietly sobbing, at most times we fairly
buzz with pleasant sociability. The women come in with faces bright with
excitement. “Oh the poor Cathedral!” they cry.
“Did you find anything of your home?” I ask. For a moment the tears swim
in their brave eyes. “_Rien_” they answer shaking their heads.
“Nothing!”
Today an old man in a long white apron smock was the centre of attention
here. He was busy searching the ruins of his house for buried treasure.
Every little while he would come back to the canteen with the fruits of
his pathetic salvaging,—a few silver spoons, some paint brushes, a bolt
of black velvet ribbon,—place them in a basket and then return to look
for more. Two German prisoners were digging for him. Finally he came
back with six unbroken champagne glasses and a face scored with tragedy.
He had been hoping against hope to recover the treasures in his wine
cellar but he was too late, not a bottle was there left!
Verdun, February 28.
This morning I went out on a truck to Fort Douaumont. This is the fort
which was captured by the Germans, held by them for five months, and
then retaken by the French and marks the enemy’s nearest approach to the
city. Oddly enough the French were the gainers through this occupation
to the extent of a splendid electric lighting system introduced by the
Germans into the fort!
A modern fort does not resemble in the least the idea that one has of a
“fort.” Viewed from outside it is nothing more or less than a hole in
the ground. Once inside we had the sense of being in a monster ant-hill
as we followed our guide through a network of tunnelled corridors. We
saw the room of the Commandant with its wonderful relief maps both
French and German of the Verdun hills, we saw the war-museum, the Foyer,
the store-rooms and engine-rooms, the magazine rooms where the big
shells were stacked like cord wood, and we climbed up into the turrets
of the disappearing guns. In this strange fort which has been both
friend and enemy we looked through one empty doorway into a pit of ruins
open to the sky, under the wreckage sixteen Germans lay, they said; it
was here that a French shell had broken through. We passed by another
door which bore a sign on it announcing that this was the tomb of five
French mitrailleurs who had been killed by a German shell in the room
within; instead of burying the bodies they had simply sealed up the door
and left them. Then we ducked through a little low door and climbed up
over the hillock which forms the roof of the fort as it were. All about
us stretched the abomination of desolation of the battle-fields, wracked
tortured earth, seared and scarred into a yellow-grey desert waste. Here
and there lay bones, human bones, sometimes scattered loose, sometimes
gathered in a little heap with a rusty helmet and a broken rifle lying
close beside them. Only a few hundred feet from the road, the man who
guided the party told us, he came yesterday upon two unburied bodies.
To the northeast we could just discern a large wooden cross. A French
officer who was stationed at the fort pointed it out to us. Here, he
said, lay buried no less than twelve hundred French soldiers. They had
been given a line of trench to hold, the officers were taken from them,
they were to expect no reinforcements or relief. They were left there
knowing it was only a question of days or hours. When the French finally
reached the line again every man was dead. So they left them where they
lay and filled the trench in over them, but each man’s rifle they took
and planted upright in the earth beside him. There is a heroic theme for
a poet!
When I reached the canteen again I found a ragged disconsolate old soul
occupying one of the benches. On seeing me he began a sad recital of
sore feet, ending with the petition that I procure him a pair of rubber
boots and emphasizing the point by taking off his shoes then and there
and exhibiting his troubles,—which weren’t pretty,—to me. I was
perplexed, not knowing what to do, when the friendly M. P. on the beat
happened in; so I put the case up to him. He told me that there was a
salvage dump at the station. We set out together and succeeded in
finding an enormous pair of rubber overshoes, and, what’s more, in
getting away with them. The old man was pleased as Punch, put them on
and hobbled off in them. Tonight someone told me a melancholy tale. An
M. P. stationed upon the hill had spied an old Frenchman going by in a
pair of American overshoes and had straightway held him up and ordered
him to relinquish what was Government property. And the old man perforce
had to sit down in the street and take off his shoes.
Speaking of boots reminds me of the tale told me by a doughboy the other
day; a tale of a pair of tan shoes, handsome, shiny, new tan shoes which
was sold to every man in turn in his whole company only to be finally
purchased as a bargain at thirty-five francs by an unsuspecting
Frenchman. They were beautiful shoes, the boy assured me, the only
trouble was that they both happened to be for the left foot.