SOME DISTINGUISHED VISITORS
So satisfactory to itself was the progress of the American Expeditionary
Force in becoming an army that by the end of its first month of training
it was ready for important visitors. True, the first to come was one who
would be certain to understand the force's initial difficulties, and who
would also be able to help as well as inspect. He was General Petain,
Commander-in-Chief of the French Army, and he came for inspection of
both French and American troops on August 19, three days after General
Sibert had had a family field-day to take account of his troops.
General Petain came down with General Pershing, and the first inspection
was of billets. Then the two generals reviewed the Alpine Chasseurs, and
General Petain awarded some medals which had been due since the month
before, when the Blue Devils were in the line.
After General Petain's visit with the American troops, he recommended
their training and their physique equally, and said: "I think the
American Army will be an admirable fighting force within a short time."
This was also General Pershing's day for learning--his first session
with one of his most difficult tasks. He had to follow the example of
General Petain, and kiss the children, and accept the bouquets thrust
upon both generals by all the little girls of the near-by Vosges towns.
General Pershing did better with the kissing as his day wore on, though
its foreignness to his experience was plain to the end. But with the
bouquets he was an outright failure. Graciously as he might accept them,
the holding of them was much as a doughboy might hold his first armful
of live grenades.
The camp's next distinguished visitor was Georges Clemenceau, the
veteran French statesman who was soon to be Premier of France.
Clemenceau saw American troops that day for the second time, the first
having been when, as a young French senator, he watched General Grant's
soldiers march into Richmond.
He recalled to the sons and grandsons of those dusty warriors how
inspired a sight it had been, and he added that he hoped to see the
present generation march into Berlin.
When Clemenceau talked to the doughboys, however, he had more than old
memories with which to stir them. He has a graceful, complete command of
the English language, in which he made the two or three addresses
interspersed in the full programme of his stay.
In one speech M. Clemenceau said: "I feel highly honored at the
privilege of addressing you. I know America well, having lived in your
country, which I have always admired, and I am deeply impressed by the
presence of an American army on French soil, in defense of liberty,
right, and civilization, against the barbarians. My mind compares this
event to the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed on Plymouth Rock, seeking
liberty and finding it. Now their children's children are returning to
fight for the liberty of France and the world.
"You men have come to France with disinterested motives. You came not
because you were compelled to come, but because you wished to come.
Your country always had love and friendship for France. Now you are at
home here, and every French house is open to you. You are not like the
people of other nations, because your motives are devoid of personal
interest, and because you are filled with ideals. You have heard of the
hardships before you, but the record of your countrymen proves that you
will acquit yourselves nobly, earning the gratitude of France and the
world."
At the end of this speech General Sibert said to the men who had heard
it: "You will henceforth be known as the Clemenceau Battalion." That was
the first unit of the American Army to have any designation other than
its number.
Another civilian visitor was next, though he was civilian only in the
sense that he had neither task nor uniform of the army. He was Raymond
Poincare, President of the French Republic, the leader of the French
"bitter-enders," and sometimes called the stoutest-hearted soldier
France has ever had.
President Poincare made a thorough inspection. He, too, began with the
billets, but he was not content to see them from the outside. In fact,
the first that one new major-general saw of him was the half from the
waist down, the other half being obscured by the floor of the barn attic
he was peering into.
President Poincare made cheering speeches to the men, for the force of
which they were obliged to rely upon his gestures and his intonations,
since he spoke no English. But his sense was not wholly lost to the
doughboys. At the peak of one of the President's most soaring flights
those who understood French interrupted to applaud him.
"What did he say?" asked a doughboy.
"He said to give 'em hell," said another.
Fourth, and last, of the great Frenchmen, and greatest, from the soldier
point of view, was Marshal Joffre, Marne hero, who came and spent a
night and a day at camp.
It was mid-October when he came, and weeks of driving rain had preceded
him. In spite of their gloom over the weather, the doughboys were
eagerly anticipating the visit of Joffre, and they were wondering if the
man of many battles would think them worth standing in the rain to
watch.
A detachment of French buglers--buglers whom the Americans could never
sufficiently admire or imitate, because they could twirl the bugles
between beats and take up their blasts with neither pitch nor time
lost--waited outside the quarters where the marshal was to spend the
night. Half an hour before his motor came up the sun broke through the
drizzle.
"He brings it with him," said a doughboy.
Marshal Joffre was accompanied by General Pershing, the Pershing
personal staff and Joffre's aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Fabry, who was
with the French Mission in America. There were ovations in all the
French villages through which they passed, and there were uproarious
cheers when the party reached the American officers who were to be
addressed by Marshal Joffre. In his short speech he said that America
had come to help deliver humanity from the yoke of German insolence, and
added: "Let us be united. Victory surely will be ours."
Later, after picked men had shown Joffre what they could do with
grenades and bayonets, the marshal made a short speech to them, telling
them of how his visit to America had cheered and strengthened him, and
how even greater was the stimulation he had had from seeing the
Americans train in France.
In a statement to the Associated Press he said: "I have been highly
gratified by what I have seen to-day. I am confident that when the time
comes for American troops to go into the trenches and meet the enemy
they will give the same excellent account of themselves in action as
they did to-day in practice."
Northcliffe came in December, with Colonel House and members of the
House Mission. He wrote a long impression of his visit for the English
at home, in which he said that the finest sight he saw was the American
rifle practice, in which the United States troops did exceptionally
well. Then he praised them for their mastery of the British type of
trench mortar, for their accuracy with grenades and, most significant of
all, for their able handling of themselves after the bombs were thrown,
so that they should have a maximum of safety in battle. The doughboys
had finally learned their hardest lesson.
Sir Walter Roper Lawrence, who was coming to America on a special war
mission, went to camp in early December to see how the doughboys fared,
so that he might report on them at home.
He had just inquired of General Sir Julian Byng, who had accidentally
had the assistance of some American engineers at Cambrai, what they
should be valued at, and Sir Julian had answered: "Very earnest, very
modest, and very helpful."
"I must say that is my opinion, too," said Sir Walter, when he came to
camp. "They are fine fellows to look at--as good-looking soldiers as any
man might wish to see. They have a wonderfully springy step, much more
springy than one sees in other soldiers. They are clean, well set up,
and they are always cheerful. They are splendidly fed and well
quartered, and they are desperately keen to learn, and as desperately
keen to get into the thick of things. If they seem to have any worries
it is that they are not getting in as quickly as they would like to.
"The American troops have everywhere made a decidedly favorable
impression. I am extremely proud of my British citizenship, I have been
all my life, but if I were an American I would be insufferably proud of
my citizenship. In all history there is nothing that approaches her
transporting such an enormous army so great a distance oversea to fight
for an ideal."
After the new year W. A. Appleton, secretary of the General Federation
of Trades Unions in England, made a visit to France, and described the
American camps for his own public through the Federation organ.
"I see everywhere," he wrote, "samples of the American armies that we
are expecting will enable the Allies to clear France of the Germans.
Most of the men are fine specimens of humanity, and those with whom I
spoke showed no signs of braggadocio, too frequently attributed to
America. They were quiet, well-spoken fellows, fully alive to the
seriousness of the task they have undertaken, and they apparently have
but one regret--that they had not come into the war soon enough. It was
pleasant to talk to these men and to derive encouragement from their
quiet, unobtrusive strength."
These were the things which were playing upon public opinion in France
and England, reinforcing the good-will with which the first American
soldiers were welcomed there.
When United States soldiers paraded again in the streets of London, late
in the spring of 1918, and when they marched down the new Avenue du
President Wilson in Paris, on July 4, 1918, the greetings to them had
lost in hysteria and grown in depth, till the magnitude of the
demonstrations and the quality of them drew amazement from the oldest of
the old stagers.