LATTER'S UN-FRENCH WAYS AMUSINGLY DEPICTED BY PARISIAN JOURNALIST
FOR HIS READERS.
The thousands of English soldiers now on French soil are, to
Frenchmen, strange, exotic creatures, the study of which is full of
delightful surprises. Recently a French journalist traveled to the
trenches, interviewed several specimens of the genus Tommy Atkins,
and published the results in a Paris newspaper.
One Tommy was "of the species crane," with thin legs and arms like
telegraph wires, by no means as taciturn as the Frenchman had
believed Englishmen to be. He told the Frenchman some tall yarns.
"In one fight our battalion lost five hundred men," he vouchsafed.
"One bullet, which just scratched my nose, killed my pal beside me."
Another Tommy dwelt on the awful fact that he had been "twenty-two
days on water without any tea in it." He, too, had been in the thick
of the fray and had killed several of the enemy with his own hand,
which, recounts the Frenchman, filled him with "a gentle joy."
"Are the inhabitants of this part of France hospitable?" the
journalist inquired of another Englishman.
"Awfully nice!" replied the soldier. These words the correspondent,
after giving them in English, to show how strange they look,
translates: "Terriblement aimable"--a combination which must appear
perfectly incomprehensible to Frenchmen, who do not see how a thing
can be "awful" and "nice" at the same time.
At a village in Northern France the newspaper man found some English
soldiers instructing a lot of village boys in the rudiments of
football.
"When the French team scored a point," he writes, "I said to one
of the Englishmen: 'But aren't you ashamed to let them beat you at
your own game?' To which the Briton replied: 'Ah, but we want to
encourage the people of France to take up sports!'"
Football was being played wherever there were Englishmen. Often the
games were between teams of English and French soldiers. Where a
ball was not to be had, the players were quite content to kick about
a bundle of clothes.
When not thus engaged, the English soldier finds time to enter the
lists of Cupid. The French writer tells of one Tommy whom he saw
"promenading proudly before the awe-struck glances of the villagers
with three girls on his arm!"
"The English? Oh, they're good fellows!" remarked a villager in
whose house a number of the allies of France were quartered.
"They're in bed snoring every night at eight. They get together
in my kitchen while I make their tea and sing sentimental songs.
They're all musical." The journalist adds, in corroboration of this
statement, that he himself heard Tommies "singing discordantly to
the accompaniment of the cannon."
Also he found that Tommy had a sense of humor. On one occasion, he
learned, a German officer came charging at the head of his men into
an English trench. Leaping over the edge of it, he fell headlong
into a sea of black mud, from which he picked himself up, black and
dripping, and exclaimed:
"What a confounded nuisance this old war is, isn't it?"
Whereupon a Tommy, about to run his bayonet through the intruder,
burst into roars of laughter, and made him a prisoner instead.
"And the Tommies are philosophers, too," writes the Frenchman. "I
heard one of them say solemnly to a comrade: 'If you have any money,
spend it all to-day. You may be dead to-morrow!'"