THERE was a transportload of newly made officers coming over for service
here in France. There was on board one gentleman in uniform who bore
himself, as the saying goes, with an air. By reason of that air and by
reason of a certain intangible atmospheric something about him difficult
to define in words he seemed intent upon establishing himself upon a
plane far remote from and inaccessible to these fellow voyagers of
his who were crossing the sea to serve in the line, or to act as
interpreters, or to go on staffs, or to work with the Red Cross or
the Y. M. C. A. or the K. of C. or what not. He had what is called the
superior manner, if you get what I mean--and you should get what I mean,
reader, if ever you had lived, as I have, for a period of years hard by
and adjacent to that particular stretch of the eastern seaboard of
North America where, as nowhere else along the Atlantic Ocean or in the
interior, are to be found in numbers those favoured beings who acquire
merit unutterable by belonging to, or by being distantly related to, or
by being socially acquainted with, the families that have nothing but.
Nevertheless, and to the contrary notwithstanding, divers of his brother
travellers failed to keep their distance. Toward this distinguished
gentleman they deported themselves with a familiarity and an
offhandedness that must have been acutely distasteful to one
unaccustomed to moving in a mixed and miscellaneous company.
Accordingly he took steps on the second day out to put them in their
proper places. A list was being circulated to get up a subscription for
something or other, and almost the very first person to whom this list
came in its rounds of the first cabin was the person in question. He
took out a gold-mounted fountain pen from his pocket and in a fair round
hand inscribed himself thus:
“Bejones of Tuxedo”
There were no initials--royalty hath not need for initials--but just the
family name and the name of the town so fortunate as to number among its
residents this notable--which names for good reasons I have purposely
changed. Otherwise the impressive incident occurred as here narrated.
But those others just naturally refused to be either abashed or abated.
They must have been an irreverent, sacrilegious lot, by all accounts.
The next man to whom the subscription was carried took note of the new
fashion in signatures and then gravely wrote himself down as “Spirits
of Niter”; and the next man called himself “Henri of Navarre”; and the
third, it developed, was no other than “Cream of Tartar”; and the next
was “Timon of Athens”; and the next “Mother of Vinegar”--and so on and
so forth, while waves of ribald and raucous laughter shook the good ship
from stem to stem.
However, the derisive ones reckoned without their host. For them the
superior mortal had a yet more formidable shot in the locker. On
the following day he approached three of the least impressed of his
temporary associates as they stood upon the promenade deck, and apropos
of nothing that was being said or done at the moment he, speaking in a
clear voice, delivered himself of the following crushing remark:
“When I was born there were only two houses in the city of New York that
had porte-cochères, and I--I was born in one of them.”
Inconceivable though it may appear, the fact is to be recorded that even
this disclosure failed to silence the tongues of ridicule aboard
that packet boat. Rather did it enhance them, seeming but to spur the
misguided vulgarians on and on to further evidences of disrespect. There
are reasons for believing that Bejones of Tuxedo, who had been born in
the drafty semipublicity of a porte-cochère, left the vessel upon its
arrival with some passing sense of relief, though it should be stated
that up until the moment of his debarkation he continued ever, while
under the eye of the plebes and commoners about him, to bear himself
after a mode and a port befitting the station to which Nature had called
him. He vanished into the hinterland of France and was gone to take up
his duties; but he left behind him, among those who had travelled hither
in his company, a recollection which neither time nor vicissitude can
efface. Presumably he is still in the service, unless it be that ere now
the service has found out what was the matter with it.
I have taken the little story concerning him as a text for this article,
not because Bejones of Tuxedo is in any way typical of any group or
subgroup of men in our new Army--indeed I am sure that he, like the
blooming of the century plant, is a thing which happens only once in a
hundred years, and not then unless all the conditions are salubrious. I
have chosen the little tale to keynote my narrative for the reason that
I believe it may serve in illustration; of a situation that has arisen
in Europe, and especially in France, these last few months--a condition
that does not affect our Army so much as it affects sundry side issues
connected more or less indirectly with the presence on European soil of
an army from the United States, like most of the nations having
representative forms of government that have gone into this war, we went
in as an amateur nation so far as knowledge of the actual business of
modern warfare was concerned. Like them, we have had to learn the same
hard lessons that they learned, in the same hard school of experience.
Our national amateurishness beforehand was not altogether to our
discredit; neither was it altogether to our credit. Nobody now denies
that we should have been better prepared for eventualities than we were.
On the other hand it was hardly to be expected that a peaceful
commercial country such as ours--which until lately had been politically
remote as it was geographically aloof upon its own hemisphere from the
political storm-centres of the Old World, and in which there was no
taint of the militarism that has been Germany's curse, and will yet be
her undoing--should in times of peace greatly concern itself with any
save the broad general details of the game of war, except as a
heart-moving spectacle enacted upon the stage of another continent and
viewed by us with sympathetic and sorrowing eyes across three or four
thousand miles of salt water. Prior to our advent into it the war had no
great appeal upon the popular conscience of the United States. Out of
the fulness of our hearts and out of the abundance of our prosperity we
gave our dollars, and gave and gave and kept on giving them for the
succour of the victims of the world catastrophe; but a sense of the
impending peril for our own institutions came home to but few among us.
Here and there were individuals who scented the danger; but they were as
prophets crying in the wilderness; the masses either could not oc would
not see it. They would not make ready against the evil days ahead.
So we went into this most highly specialised industry, which war has
become, as amateurs mainly. Our Navy was no amateur navy, as very
speedily developed, and before this year's fighting is over our enemy is
going to realise that our Army is not an amateur army. We may have been
greenhorns at the trade wherein Germans were experts by training and
education; still we fancy ourselves as a reasonably adaptable breed. But
if the truth is to be told it must be confessed that in certain of the
Allied branches of the business we are yet behaving like amateurs. After
more than a year of actual and potential participation in the conflict
we even now are doing things and suffering things to be done which would
make us the laughingstock of our allies if they had time or tempter
for laughing. I am not speaking of the conduct of our operations in the
field or in the camps or on the high seas. I am speaking with particular
reference to what might be called some of the by-products.
None of us is apt to forget, or cease to remember with pride, the flood
of patriotic sacrifice that swept our country in the spring of 1917. No
other self-governing people ever adopted a universal draft before their
shores had been invaded and before any of their manhood had fallen in
battle. No other self-governing people ever accepted the restrictions of
a food-rationing scheme before any of the actual provisions concerning
that food-rationing scheme had been embodied into the written laws.
Other countries did it under compulsion, after their resources showed
signs of exhaustion. We did it voluntarily; and it was all the more
wonderful that we should have done it voluntarily when all about us was
human provender in a prodigal fullness. There was plenty for our own
tables.
By self-imposed regulations we cut down our supplies so that our allies
might be fed with the surplus thus made available. Outside of a few
sorry creatures there was scarcely to be found in America an individual,
great or small, who did not give, and give freely, of the work of his or
her heart and hands to this or that phase of the mighty undertaking upon
which our Government had embarked and to which our President, speaking
for us all, had solemnly dedicated all that we were or had been or ever
should be.
All sorts of commissions, some useful and important beyond telling, some
unutterably unuseful and incredibly unimportant, sprang into being. And
to and fro in the land, in numbers amounting to a vast multitude, went
the woman who wanted to do her part, without having the least idea of
what that part would be or how she would go about doing it. She knew
nothing of nursing; kitchen work, a vulgar thing, was abhorrent to her
nature and to her manicured nails; she could not cook, neither could she
sew or sweep--but she must do her part.
She was not satisfied to stay on at home and by hard endeavour to fit
herself for helping in the task confronting every rational and willing
being between the two oceans. No, sir-ree, that would be too prosaic,
too commonplace an employment for her. Besides, the working classes
could attend to that job. She must do her part abroad--either in France
within sound of the guns or in racked and desolated Belgium. Of course
her intentions were good. The intentions of such persons are nearly
always good, because they change them before they have a chance to go
stale.
I think the average woman of this type had a mental conception of
herself wearing a wimple and a coif of purest white, in a frock that was
all crisp blue linen and big pearl buttons, with one red cross blazing
upon her sleeve and another on her cap, sitting at the side of a
spotless bed in a model hospital that was fragrant with flowers, and
ministering daintily to a splendid wounded hero with the face of a
demigod and the figure of a model for an underwear ad. Preferably this
youth would be a gallant aviator, and his wound would be in the head so
that from time to time she might adjust the spotless bandage about his
brow.
I used to wish sometimes when I met such a lady that I might have
drawn for her the picture of reality as I had seen it more times than
once--tired, earnest, competent women who slept, what sleep they got, in
lousy billets that were barren of the simplest comforts, sleeping with
gas masks under their pillows, and who for ten or twelve or fifteen or
eighteen hours on a stretch performed the most nauseating and the most
necessary offices for poor suffering befouled men lying on blankets upon
straw pallets in wrecked dirty houses or in half-ruined stables from
which the dung had hurriedly been shoveled out in order to make room for
suffering soldiers--stables that reeked with the smells of carbolic and
iodoform and with much worse smells. It is an extreme case that I
am describing, but then the picture is a true picture, whereas the
idealistic fancy painted by the lady who just must do her part at the
Front had no existence except in the movies or in her own imagination.
It never occurred to her that there would be slop jars to be emptied
or filthy bodies, alive with crawling vermin, to be cleansed. It never
occurred to her that she would take up room aboard ship that might
better be filled with horse collars or hardtack or insect powder; nor
that while over here she would consume food that otherwise would stay
the stomach of a fighting man or a working woman; nor that if ever
she reached the battle zone she would encounter living conditions
appallingly bare and primitive beyond anything she could conceive; nor
that she could not care for herself, and was fitted neither by training
nor instinct to help care for any one else.
When I left America last winter a great flow of national sanity
had already begun to rise above the remaining scourings of national
hysteria; and the lady whose portrait I have tried in the foregoing
paragraphs to sketch was not quite so numerous or so vociferous as
she had been in those first few exalted weeks and months following our
entrance into the war as a full partner in the greatest of enterprises.
My surprise was all the greater therefore to find that she had beaten me
across the water. She had pretty well disappeared at home.
One typical example of this strange species crossed in the same ship
with me. Heaven alone knows what political or social influence had
availed to secure her passport for her. But she had it, and with it
credentials from an organisation that should have known better. She was
a woman of independent wealth seemingly, and her motives undoubtedly
were of the best; but as somebody might have said: Good motives butter
no parsnips, and hell is paved with buttered parsnips. Her notion was to
drive a car at the Front--an ambulance or a motor truck or a general's
automobile or something. She had owned cars, but she had never driven
one, as she confessed; but that was a mere detail. She would learn
how, some day after she got to Europe, and then somebody or other would
provide her with a car and she would start driving it; such was her
intention. Unaided she could no more have wrested a busted tire off of
a rusted rim than she could have marcelled her own back hair; and so far
as her knowledge of practical mechanics went, I am sure no reasonably
prudent person would have trusted her with a nutpick; but she had the
serene confidence of an inspired and magnificent ignorance.
She had her uniform too. She had brought it with her and she wore it
constantly. She said she designed it herself, but I think she fibbed
there. No one but a Fifth Avenue mantuamaker of the sex which used to be
the gentler sex before it got the vote could have thought up a vestment
so ornate, so swagger and so complicated.
It was replete with shoulder straps and abounding in pleats and gores
and gussets and things. Just one touch was needed to make it a finished
confection: By rights it should have buttoned up the back.
The woman who had the cabin next to hers in confidence told a group of
us that she had it from the stewardess that it took the lady a full hour
each day to get herself properly harnessed into her caparisons. Still
I must say the effect, visually speaking, was worthy of the effort; and
besides, the woman who told us may have been exaggerating. She was
a registered and qualified nurse who knew her trade and wore
matter-of-fact garments and fiat-heeled, broad-soled shoes. She was not
very exciting to look at, but she radiated efficiency. She knew exactly
what she would do when she got over here and exactly how she would do
it. We agreed among ourselves that if we were in quest of the ornamental
we would search out the lady who meant to drive the car--provided there
was any car; but that if anything serious ailed any of us we would
rather have the services of one of the plain nursing sisterhood than a
whole skating-rinkful of the other kind round.
In the latter part of 1917 there landed in France a young woman hailing
from a Far Western city whose family is well known on the Pacific Slope.
She brought with her letters of introduction signed by imposing names
and a comfortable sum of money, which had been subscribed partly out of
her own pocket and partly out of the pockets of well-meaning persons in
her home state whom she had succeeded in interesting in her particular
scheme of wartime endeavour. She was very fair to see and her uniform,
by all accounts, was very sweet to look upon, it being a horizon-blue
in colour with much braiding upon the sleeves and collar. It has been
my observation since coming over that when in doubt regarding their
vocations and their intentions these unattached lady zealots go in very
strongly for striking effects in the matter of habiliments. Along the
boulevards and in the tearooms I have encountered a considerable number
who appeared to have nothing to do except to wear their uniforms.
However, this young person had no doubt whatever concerning her motives
and her purposes. The whole thing was all mapped out in her head, as
developed when she called upon a high official of our Expeditionary
Forces at his headquarters in the southern part of France. She told
him she had come hither for the express purpose of feeding our starving
aviators. He might have told her that so long as there continued to be
served fried potato chips free at the Crillon bar there was but little
danger of any airman going hungry, in Paris at least. What he did tell
her when he had rallied somewhat from the shock was that he saw no way
to gratify her in her benevolent desire unless he could catch a few
aviators and lock them up and starve them for two or three days, and he
rather feared the young men might object to such treatment. As a matter
of fact, I understand he so forgot himself as to laugh at the young
woman.
At any rate his attitude was so unsympathetic that he practically
spoiled the whole v war for her, and she gave him a piece of her mind
and went away. She had departed out of the country before I arrived
in it, and I learned of her and her uniform and her mission and her
disappointment at its unfulfillment by hearsay only; but I have no
doubt, in view of some of the things I have myself seen, that the
account which reached me was substantially correct. Along this line I am
now prepared to believe almost anything.
Here, on the other hand, is a case of which I have direct and first-hand
knowledge. I encountered a group of young women attached to one of the
larger American organisations engaged in systematised charities and
mercies on this side of the water. Now, plainly these young women were
inspired by the very highest ideals; that there was no discounting.
They were full of the spirit of service and sacrifice. Mainly they were
college graduates. Without exception they were well bred; almost without
exception they were well educated.
The particular tasks for which they had been detailed were to care for
pauperised repatriates returning to France through Switzerland from
areas of their country occupied by the enemy, and to aid these poor
folks in reestablishing their home life and to give them lessons in
domestic science. To the success of their ministrations there was just
one drawback: They were dealing with peasants mostly--furtive, shy,
secretive folks who under ordinary circumstances would be bitterly
resentful of any outside interference by aliens with their mode of life,
and who in these cases had been rendered doubly suspicious by reason of
the misfortunes they had endured while under the thumb of the Germans.
To understand them, to plumb diplomatically the underlying reasons for
their prejudices, to get upon a basis of helpful sympathy with them, it
was highly essential that those dealing with them not only should have
infinite tact and finesse but should be able to fathom the meaning of a
nod or a gesture, a sidelong glance of the eyes or the inflection of
a muttered word. And yet of those zealous young women who had been
assigned to this delicate task there was scarcely one in six who spoke
any French at all. It inevitably followed that the bulk of their patient
labours should go for naught; moreover, while they continued in this
employment they were merely occupying space in an already crowded
country and consuming food in an already needy country; the both of
which--space and food--were needed for people who could accomplish
effective things.
An American woman who is reputed to be a dietetic specialist came over
not long ago, backed by funds donated in the States. Her instructions
were to establish cafeterias at some of the larger French munition
works. Probably her chagrin was equalled only by her astonishment when
she learned that for reasons which seemed to it good and sufficient--and
which no doubt were--the French Government did not want any
American-plan cafeterias established at any of its munition works.
Apparently it had not seemed feasible and proper to the sponsors of the
diet specialist to find out before dispatching her overseas whether
the plan would be agreeable to the authorities here; or whether there
already were eating places suitable to the desires of the working people
at these munition plants; or how long it would take, given the most
favourable conditions, to cure the workers of their tenacious instinct
for eating the kind of midday meal they have been eating for some
hundreds of years and accustom them and their palates and their stomachs
to the Yankee quick lunch with its baked pork and beans, its buckwheat
cakes with maple sirup and its four kinds of pie. In their zeal the
promoters, it would seem, had entirely overlooked those essential
details. It is just such omissions as this one that the fine frenzy of
helping out in wartime appears to develop in a nation that is given to
boasting of its business efficiency and that vaunts itself that it knows
how to give generously without wasting foolishly.
The field manager of an organisation that is doing a great deal for the
comfort of our soldiers and the soldiers of our allies told me of one
of his experiences. He had a sense of humour and he could laugh over it,
but I think I noted a suggestion of resentment behind the laughter. He
said that some months before lie set up and assumed charge of a plant
well up toward the trenches in a sector that had been taken over by the
American troops. It was a large and elaborate concern, as these concerns
are rated in the field. The men were pleased with its accommodations and
facilities, and the field manager was proud of it.
One day there appeared a businesslike young woman who introduced herself
as belonging to a kindred organisation that was charged with the work of
decorating the interiors of such establishments as the one over which he
presided. Somewhat puzzled, he showed her, first of all, his canteen. It
was as most such places are: There were boxes of edibles upon counters,
in open boxes, so that the soldier customers might appraise the wares
before investing; upon the shelves there were soft drinks and smoking
materials and all manner of small articles of wearing apparel; likewise
baseballs and safety razors and soap, toilet kits and the rest of it.
Altogether the manager and his two assistants were rather pleased with
the arrangement.
The newly arrived young woman swept the scene with a cold professional
eye.
“On the whole this will do fairly well,” she said with a certain
briskness, in her tone. “Yes, I may say it will do very well
indeed--with certain changes, certain touches.”
“As for example, what, please?” inquired the superintendent.
“Well,” she said, “for one thing we must put up some bright curtains
at the windows; and to lighten up the background I think we'll run a
stenciled pattern in some cheerful colour round the walls at the top.”
It was not for the manager to inquire how the decorator meant to get her
curtains and her stencils and her wall paints up over a road that was
being alternately gassed and shelled at nights and on which the traffic
capacity was already taxed to the utmost by the business of bringing up
supplies, munitions and rations from the base some fifteen miles in
the rear. He merely bowed and awaited the lady's further commands. “And
now,” she said, “where is the rest room?”
“The rest room, did you say?”
“Certainly, the rest room--the recreation hall, the place where these
poor men may go for privacy and innocent amusement?”
“Well, you see, thus close up near the Front we haven't been able
to make provision for a regular rest room,” explained the manager.
“Besides, in case of a withdrawal or an attack we might have to pull out
in a hurry and leave behind everything that is not readily portable on
wagons or trucks. The nearest approach that we have to a rest room is
here at the rear.” He led the way to a room at the back. It contained
such plenishings as one generally finds in improvised quarters in the
field--that is to say, it contained a curious equipment made up partly
of crude bits of furniture collected on the spot out of villagers'
abandoned homes and partly of makeshift stools and tables coopered
together from barrels and boxes and stray bits of planking. Also it
contained at this time as many soldiers as could crowd into it. A
phonograph was grinding out popular airs, and divers games of checkers
and cards were in progress, each with its fringe of interested onlookers
ringing in the players.
“Oh, but this will never do--never!” stated the inspecting lady. “It
is too bare, too cheerless! It lacks atmosphere. It lacks coziness; it
lacks any appeal to the senses--in short it lacks everything! We must
have some immediate improvements here by all means.”
The man was beginning to lose his temper. By an effort he retained it.
“The men seem fairly well satisfied; at least I have heard no
complaint,” he said. “What would you suggest in the way of changes?”
As she answered, the visitor ticked off the items of her mental
inventory of essentials on her fingers.
“Well, to begin with we must clear all this litter out of here,” she
said. “Then we must install some really comfortable chairs and at least
two or three roomy sofas and some simple couches where the men may lie
down. I should also like to see a piano here. That, with the addition of
some curtains at the windows and some simple treatment of the walls and
a few appropriate pictures properly spaced and properly hung, will be
different, I think.”
“Yes,” demurred the manager, “but admitting that we could get the things
you have enumerated up here, another problem would arise: This
room, which, as you see, is not large, would be so crowded with the
furnishings that there would be room in it for very many less men than
usually come here. There are probably fifty men in it now. If it were
filled up with sofas and couches and a piano I doubt whether we could
crowd twenty men inside of it.”
“Very well, then,” stated the lady decorator calmly, “you must admit
only twenty men at a time.”
“Quite so; but how,” he demanded--“how am I going to select the twenty?”
The young woman considered the question for a moment. Then a solution
came to her.
“I should select the twenty neatest ones,” she said.
Whereupon the manager excused himself and went out to frame a dispatch
to headquarters embodying an ultimatum, which ultimatum was that the
lady decorator went away from there forthwith or his resignation must
take effect, coincident with his immediate departure from his present
post. The home office must have called the lady off, because when I saw
him he was still in harness, and swinging a man-size job in a competent
way.
I would not have the reader believe that I am casting discredit upon
either the patriotic impulses or the honest motives of the bulk of the
lay workers who have journeyed to Europe, paying their own way and their
own living expenses. Often they arrive, many of them, to strike hands
with the military authorities in the task which faces our nation on
Continental soil. There is room and a welcome in France, in Italy, in
England and in Flanders for every civilian recruit who really knows how
to do something helpful and who has the strength, the self-reliance and
the hardihood to perform that particular function under difficult and
complicated conditions, which nearly always are physically uncomfortable
and which may become physically dangerous.
Nor would I wish any one to assume that I am deprecating by inference or
by frontal attack the very fine things that are being accomplished every
day by fine American women and girls who answered the first call
for trained helpers, to serve in hospitals or canteens or huts, in
settlement work or at telephone exchanges. It will make any American
thrill with pride to enter a ward where the American Red Cross is in
charge, or where a medical unit from one of the great hospitals or one
of our great universities back home has control. The French and the
British are quick enough to speak in terms of highest praise of
the achievements of American surgeons, American nurses and American
ambulance drivers. They say, and with good reason for saying it, that
our people have pluck and that they have skill and that they above all
are amazingly resourceful.
Personally I know of no smarter exhibition of native wit and courage
that the war has produced than was shown by that group of Smith College
girls who had been organising and directing colonisation work among
the peasants in the reclaimed districts of Northern France and who were
driven out by the great spring advance of the Germans. I met some
of those young women. They were modest enough in describing their
adventure. It was by gathering a shred of a story there and a scrap of
an anecdote here that I was able to piece together a fairly accurate
estimate of the self-imposed discipline, the clean-strained grit and the
initiative which marked their conduct through three trying weeks.
Perhaps it was a mistake in their instance, as in the instances of
divers similar organisations, that the work of resettling the wasted
lands above the Aisne and the Oise should have been undertaken at points
that would be menaced in the event of a quick onslaught by the Prussian
high command. The British, I understand, privately objected to the
undertakings on the ground that the presence of American women In
villages which might fall again into the foe's hands--and which as it
turned out did fall again into his hands--entailed an added burden
and an added responsibility upon the fighting forces. The British were
right. Practically all of the repatriated peasants had to flee for
the second time, abandoning their rebuilt homes and their newly sowed
fields.
On the heels of these, improvements which represented many thousands of
American dollars and many months of painstaking labour on the part of
devoted American women went up in flames. The torch was applied rather
than that the little model houses and the tons of donated supplies on
hand should go into hostile hands.
Those Smith College girls did not run away, though, until the Germans
were almost upon them. Up to the very last minute they stayed at
their posts, feeding and housing not only refugees but many exhausted
soldiers, British and French, who staggered in, spent and sped after
alternately fighting and retreating through a period of days and nights.
When finally they did come away each one of them came driving her own
truck and bearing in it a load of worn-out and helpless natives. One
girl brought out a troop of frightened dwarfs from a stranded travelling
caravan. Another ministered day and night to a blind woman nearly ninety
years old and a family of orphaned babies. The passengers of a third
were four inmates of a little communal blind asylum that happened to be
in the invader's path.
On the way, in addition to tending their special charges, they cooked
and served hundreds of meals for hungry soldiers and hungry civilians.
They spent the nights in towns under shell fire, and when at length the
German drive had been checked they assembled their forces in Beauvais.
Thus and with characteristic adaptability some became drivers of
ambulances and supply trucks plying along the lines of communication,
and some opened a kitchen for the benefit of passing soldiers at the
local railway station. If the faculty and the students and the alumnæ
of Smith College did not hold a celebration when the true story of
what happened in March and April reached them they were lacking in
appreciation--that's all I have to say about it.
Right here seems a good-enough place for me to slip in a few words of
approbation for the work which another 'organisation has accomplished in
France since we put our men into the field. Nobody asked me to speak
in its favour because so far as I can find out it has no publicity
department. I am referring to the Salvation Army--may it live forever
for the service which, without price and without any boasting on the
part of its personnel, it is rendering to our boys in France!
A good many of us who hadn't enough religion, and a good many more of
us who mayhap had too much religion, look rather contemptuously upon the
methods of the Salvationists. Some have gone so far as to intimate that
the Salvation Army was vulgar in its methods and lacking in dignity and
even in reverence. Some have intimated that converting a sinner to the
tap of a bass drum or the tinkle of a tambourine was an improper process
altogether. Never again, though, shall I hear the blare of the cornet
as it cuts into the chorus of hallelujah whoops where a ring of
blue-bonneted women and blue-capped men stand exhorting on a city
street corner under the gas lights, without recalling what some of their
enrolled brethren--and sisters--have done and are doing in Europe.
The American Salvation Army in France is small, but, believe me, it is
powerfully busy! Its war delegation came over without any fanfare of
the trumpets of publicity. It has no paid press agents here and no
impressive headquarters. There are no well-known names, other than the
names of its executive heads, on its rosters or on its advisory boards.
None of its members is housed at an expensive hotel and none of them
has handsome automobiles in which to travel about from place to place.
No compaigns to raise nation-wide millions of dollars for the cost of
its ministrations overseas were ever held at home. I imagine it is the
pennies of the poor that mainly fill its war chest.
I imagine, too, that sometimes its finances are an uncertain quantity.
Incidentally I am assured that not one of its male workers here is
of draft age unless he holds exemption papers to prove his physical
unfitness for military service. The Salvationists are taking care to
purge themselves of any suspicion that potential slackers have joined
their ranks in order to avoid the possibility of having to perform
duties in khaki.
Among officers as well as among enlisted men one occasionally hears
criticism--which may or may not be based on a fair judgment--for certain
branches of certain activities of certain organisations. But I have yet
to meet any soldier, whether a brigadier or a private, who, if he
spoke at all of the Salvation Army, did not speak in terms of
fervent gratitude for the aid that the Salvationists are rendering so
unostentatiously and yet so very effectively. Let a sizable body of
troops move from one station to another, and hard on its heels there
came a squad of men and women of the Salvation Army. An army truck may
bring them, or it may be they have a battered jitney to move them and
their scanty outfits. Usually they do not ask for help from any one in
reaching their destinations. They find lodgment in a wrecked shell of a
house or in the corner of a barn. By main force and awkwardness they set
up their equipment, and very soon the word has spread among the troopers
that at such-and-such a place the Salvation Army is serving free hot
drinks and free doughnuts and free pies. It specialises in doughnuts,
the Salvation Army in the field does--the real old-fashioned homemade
ones that taste of home to a homesick soldier boy.
I did not see this, but one of my associates did. He saw it last
winter in a dismal place on the Toul sector. A file of our troops were
finishing a long hike through rain and snow over roads knee-deep in
half-thawed icy slush. Cold and wet and miserable, they came tramping
into a cheerless, half-empty town within sound and range of the German
guns. They found a reception committee awaiting them there--in the
person of two Salvation Army lassies and a Salvation Army captain. The
women had a fire going in the dilapidated oven of a vanished villager's
kitchen. One of them was rolling out the batter on a plank with an old
wine bottle for a rolling pin and using the top of a tin can to cut the
dough into circular strips. The other woman was cooking the doughnuts,
and as fast as they were cooked the man served them out, spitting hot,
to hungry wet boys clamouring about the door, and nobody was asked to
pay a cent.
At the risk of giving mortal affront to ultra-doctrinal practitioners of
applied theology I am firmly committed to the belief that by the grace
of God and the grease of doughnuts those three humble benefactors that
day strengthened their right to a place in the Heavenly Kingdom.
As I said a bit ago, there is in France room and to spare and the
heartiest sort of welcome for competent, sincere lay workers, both men
and women. But there is no room, and if truth be known, there is no
welcome for any other sort. These people over here long ago passed out
of the experimental period in the handling of industrial and special
problems that have grown up out of war. They have entirely emerged from
the amateur stage of endeavour and direction. If any man doubts the
truth of this he has only to see, as I have seen, the thousands of women
who have taken men's jobs in the cities in order that the men might go
to the colours; has only to see the overalled women in the big munition
plants; has only to see how the peasant women of France are labouring
in the fields and how the girls of the British auxiliary legions--the
members of the W. A. A. C. for a conspicuous example--are carrying their
share of the burden; has only to see women of high degree and low, each
doing her part sanely, systematically and unflinchingly--to appreciate
that, though Britain and France can find employment for every pair of
willing and able hands somewhere behind the lines, they have no use
whatsoever for the unorganised applicant or for the purely ornamental
variety of volunteer or yet for the mere notoriety seeker.
I make so bold as to suggest that it is time we were taking the same
lesson to heart; time to start the sifting process ourselves. I have
seen in Paris a considerable number of American women who appeared to
have no business here except to air their most becoming uniforms in
public places and to tell in a vague broad way of the things they hope
to do. The French, proverbially, are a polite race, and the French
Government will endure a great deal of this kind of infliction rather
than run the risk of engendering friction, even to the most minute
extent, with the people or the administration of an Allied nation. But
in wartime especially, too much patience becomes a dubious virtue, and
if practiced for overlong may become a fault.
As yet there has been no intimation from any official source that the
French would rather our State Department did not issue quite so many
passports to Americans who have no set and definite purpose in making
the journey to these shores, but even a superficial knowledge of the
French language and the most casual acquaintance with the French nature
enable one to get at what the French people are thinking. I am sure that
had the prevalent condition been reversed our papers would have voiced
the popular protest at the imposition long before now. Some of these
days, unless we apply the preventive measures on our own side of the
Atlantic, the perfectly justifiable resentment of the hard-pressed
French is going to find utterance; and then quite a number of
well-intentioned but utterly _inutile_ persons will be going back home
with their feelings all harrowed up.