WHAT THEY LIVED IN
The American training-camp area spread over many miles and through many
villages. It had boundaries only in theory, because all its sides were
ready to swing farther north, east, south, and west at a day's notice,
whenever the Expeditionary Force should become army enough to require
it.
But its focus was in the Vosges, in the six or seven villages set apart
from the beginning for the Americans, and as such, overhauled by those
first marines and quartermaster's assistants who left the coast in early
July and moved campward.
This overhauling brought the end of the Franco-American honeymoon.
Later, amity was to be re-established, but when the first marine ordered
the first manure-pile out of the first front yard, a breach began which
it took long months to heal.
There were few barracks in the Vosges. The soldiers were to be billeted
with the peasants. And the marines said the peasants had to clean up and
air, and the peasants said the marines were insane.
Those first days at training-camp, before the body of the troops
arrived, were circus enough for anybody.
Six villages were to be got ready, the officers to have the pick of
places, and the privates to have next best. And the choice of
assignments for officers was still so far from ideal as to make the
house-cleaning a thorough job all around.
The marines had a village to themselves, the farthest from the
inspection-grounds. The correspondents had a village to themselves, too,
though it wasn't because there was any excess of regard for the
importance of the correspondents among the men who laid out the grounds.
They were put where they could do the least harm, and where their
confusing appearance, in Sam Brown belts and other officer-like
insignia, would not exact too many wasted salutes.
General Headquarters was still in Paris at this time, but General
Sibert had Field Headquarters at camp, and though his assignment was
relatively stylish, it could not have been said to offend him with its
luxury.
He lived and worked in a little frame building in the main street of the
central village, which had probably once been a hotel.
It was to be recognized by the four soldiers always at attention outside
it, whenever motors or pedestrians passed that way. Two of the soldiers
were American and two were French.
Although all the American training-camp area became America as to
jurisdiction, as soon as the troops moved there, the French soldiers
were always present around headquarters, partly to help and partly to
register politeness.
Inside Field Headquarters, the little bare wooden rooms were stripped of
their few battered vases and old chromos, and plain wooden tables and
chairs were set about. The marines opened the windows, and scrubbed up
the floors, and hung out the sign of "Business as usual," and General
Sibert moved in.
The rest was not so easy. The various kitchens came in first for
attention. For many days French and American motor-lorries had been
trundling across France, storing the warehouses with heaping piles of
food-supplies. The procession practically never stopped. Trains brought
what could be put aboard them, but it was to motors that most of the
real work fell. So the thin, long line of loaded cars stretched
endlessly from coast to camp, and finally everything was attended to but
where to put the food and where to cook it.
The houses with the good back sheds were picked for kitchens, and the
big army soup-kettles were bricked into place, and what passed for ovens
were provided for the bakers.
For bathing facilities, there were neat paths marked to the river. That
is, the French called it a river. Every American who rides through
France for the first time has the same experience: he looks out of his
train-window and remarks to his companion, who knows France well: "Isn't
that a pretty little creek? Are there many springs about here?" And the
companion replies scornfully: "That isn't a creek--that's the Marne
River," or "That's the Aisne," or "That's the Meuse." The American
always wonders what the French would call the Hudson.
It was one of these storied streams that ran through the American
training-camp, in which the Americans did their bathing. Whenever a
soldier wanted to get his head wet he waded across.
Later, when the camps were filled, these river-banks were to offer a
remarkable sight to the French peasants, who thought all Americans were
bathing-mad anyway. Hundreds of soldiers, in the assorted postures of
men scrubbing backs and knees and elbows, disported with soap and
wash-cloth along the banks. Hundreds of others, swimming their suds off,
flashed here an arm and there a leg in the stream itself. It did not
take much distance to make them look like figures on a frieze, a new
Olympic group. Modesty knew them not, but there were not supposed to be
women about, and the peasants had a nice Japanese point of view in the
matter. At any rate, there was the training-camp bathtub, and they used
it at least once a day, to the unending stupefaction of the French.
Where they slept was another matter, suggesting neither Corot nor
Phidias.
The privates had houses first, then barns. The barns were freed of the
live stock, which was turned into meadows to graze, and the floors were
dug down to clean earth, and vast quantities of formaldehyde were
sprayed around. Then the cots were carried up to the second floors of
the barns and put along in tidy rows. At the foot of each soldier's bed
was whatever manner of small wooden box he could corral from the
quartermaster, and there he kept all he owned. His pack unfolded its
contents into the box, and his comfort-kit perched on the top. And there
he kept the little mess of treasures he bought from the gypsy wagons
that rode all day around the outskirts of the camp.
Windows were knocked out, just under the eaves, for the fresh air that
seemed, so inexplicably to the French, so essential to the Americans.
Even with the First Division, acknowledged to be about the smallest
expeditionary force known to the Great War, the soldiers averaged a
little over two thousand to the village, and since not one of the
villages had more than four or five hundred population in peace-times,
the troubles of the man who arranged the billets were far from light.
Fortunately, the First Division did not ask for luxuries. Even the
officers spent more time in simplifying their quarters than in trimming
them up. The colonel of one regiment--one of those who became
major-generals soon after the arrival in France--had his quarters in an
aristocratic old house, set back in a long yard, where plum-trees
dropped their red fruit in the vivid green grass and roses overgrew
their confines--it was the sort of house before which the pre-war motor
tourists used to stop and breathe long "ohs" of satisfaction.
The entrance was by a low, arched doorway. The hall was built of
beautifully grained woods, old and mellow of tone. The stairway was
broad and easy to climb. The colonel had the second floor front, just
level with the tree-tops.
In the room there were rich woods and tapestried walls, and at the back
was a four-poster mahogany bed with heavy satin hangings, brocaded with
fleur-de-lis. The Pompadour would have been entirely happy there. But
the American colonel had done things to it--things that would have
popped the eyes out of the Pompadour's head. He pinned up the
four-poster hangings with a safety-pin, that being the only way he could
convey to his amiable little French servant-girl that he didn't want
that bed turned down for him of nights. And he had taken all the satin
hangings down from the windows. Under these windows he had drawn up a
little board table and an army cot. Beside the table was his little army
trunk. The space he used did not measure more than ten feet in any
direction, and his luxuries waited unmolested for some more sybaritic
soul than he.
A major in that same village who had had a cavalry command before the
cavalry, as he put it, became "mere messengers," picked his quarters out
himself, on the strength of all he had heard about "Sunny France." His
house was nothing much, but behind it was a garden--a long garden,
filled with vegetables, decorated with roses, shaded by fruit-trees. At
the far end of the garden was a summer-house, in a circle of trees. Here
the major took his first guests and showed how he intended to do his
work in the open air, while the famous French sunshine flooded his
garden and warmed his little refuge.
The one thing it will never be safe to say to any veteran of the First
Division is "Sunny France." The summer of 1917, after a blazing start in
June, settled down to drizzle and mist, cold and fog, rain that soaked
to the marrow.
The major with the garden sloshed around the whole summer, visiting men
who had settled indoors and had fireplaces. By the time the warmth had
come back to his summer-house it was time for him to go up to the
battle-line, and the man who writes a history of the billets in France
will get a lot of help from him.
Some of the makeshifts of this first invasion were excusable and
inevitable. Some were not. After the first two or three weeks of
settling in, General Pershing made a tour of inspection, and some of the
things he said about what he saw didn't make good listening. But after
that visit all possible defects were overcome, and the men slept well,
ate well, were as well clothed as possible, and were admirably
sanitated.
The drinking-water was a matter for the greatest strictness. The French
never drink water on any provocation, so that water provisions began
from the ground up.
It was drawn into great skins and hung on tripods in the shaded parts of
the billets, and it was then treated with a germicide, tasteless
fortunately, carried in little glass capsules. This was a legacy from
experiences in Panama.
Each man had his own tin cup, and when he got thirsty he went down and
turned the faucet in the hanging skin tank. If he drank any other water
he repented in the guard-house.
So, though the billets were rude and sometimes uncomfortable, the
soldiers did stay in them and out of the hospitals.
And there were compensations.
Half of these were in play-times, and half in work-times. The training,
slow at first, speeded up afterward and, with the help of the "Blue
Devils" who trained with the Americans, took on all the exhilaration of
war with none of its dangers. But how they trained doesn't belong in a
chapter on billets. How they played is more suitable.
Three-fourths of their playing they did with the French children. The
insurmountable French language, which kept doughboys and poilus at arm's
length in spite of their best intentions, broke down with the
youngsters.
It was one of the finest sights around the camp to see the big soldiers
collecting around the mess-tent after supper, in the daylight-saving
long twilight, to hear the band and play in pantomime with the hundreds
of children who tagged constantly after them.
The band concerts were a regular evening affair, though musically they
didn't come to much. Those were the days before anybody had thought to
supply the army bands with new music, so "She's My Daisy" and "The
Washington Post" made a daily appearance.
But the concerts did not want for attendance. The soldiers stood around
by the hundreds, and listened and looked off over the hills to where the
guns were rumbling, whenever the children were not exacting too much
attention.
This child-soldier combination had just two words. The child said
"Hello," which was all his English, and the party lasted till the
soldier, billet-bound, said "Fee-neesh," which was all his French. But
nobody could deny that both of them had a good time.
Letter-writing was another favorite sport with the First Division, to
the great dole of the censors. Of course the men were homesick. That was
one reason. The other was that they had left home as heroes, and they
didn't intend to let the glory lapse merely because they had come across
to France and been slapped into school. The censors were astounded by
what they read ... gory battles of the day before, terrific air-raids,
bombardments of camp, etc. Some of the men told how they had slaughtered
Germans with their bare hands. Most of the letters were adjudged
harmless, and of little aid or comfort to the enemy, so they were passed
through. But some of the families of the First Division must have
thought that the War Department was holding out an awful lot on the
American public.
Mid-July saw the camp in fair working order. The First Division had word
that it was presently to be joined by the New England Division and
the Rainbow Division, both National Guardsmen, and representative of
every State.
[Illustration: _Copyright by the Committee on Public Information._
Buglers of the Alpine Chasseurs, assisted by their military band,
entertaining American soldiers of the First Division.]
American participation began to take shape as a real factor, a stern and
sombre business, and all the lighter, easier sides of the expedition
began to fall back, and work and grimness came on together.
The French Alpine Chasseurs--whom the Americans promptly called
"chasers"--had a party with the Americans on July 14, when the whole day
was given over to a picnic, with boxing, wrestling, track sports, and a
lot of food. That was the last party in the training-camp till
Christmas.
The work that began then had no let-up till the first three battalions
went into the trenches late in October. The steadily increasing number
of men widened the area of the training-camp, but they made no
difference in the contents of the working-day, nor in the system by
which it proceeded.
Within the three weeks after the First Division had landed, the work of
army-building began.