A SOLDIER’S MOTHER
IN FRANCE
_By_
RHETA CHILDE DORR
Author of _Inside the Russian Revolution_
[Illustration]
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT 1918
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
_To the other mothers; I dedicate this book._
_Rheta Childe Dorr._
_September, 1918_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. WHERE THE LONG TRAIL LED 1
II. I ADOPT THE AMERICAN ARMY 8
III. SEEING AMERICA OVER THERE 16
IV. PIONEERS, OH, PIONEERS 25
V. WE FINISH WHAT CÆSAR BEGAN 33
VI. GOING TO SCHOOL IN THE ARMY 41
VII. OUR BOYS DISCOVER THE PAST 49
VIII. THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY 57
IX. OUR FOREIGN LEGION 66
X. THE GENERAL HIMSELF 74
XI. GENERAL ALLAIRE’S FINEST 82
XII. INTO THE TRENCHES 89
XIII. WRITE TO HIM OFTEN--BUT 100
XIV. WHEN THEY WIN WOUND STRIPES 108
XV. FIGHTING WOUND SHOCK 116
XVI. HOW THE WAR AGAINST TRENCH FEVER WAS WON 125
XVII. THE GREATEST MOTHER IN THE WORLD 132
XVIII. FRANCE APPROVES THE EGREC EM SAY AH 140
XIX. BEAUTY AS USUAL 148
XX. BLED WHITE 156
XXI. THE REPATRIATES 164
XXII. FRENCHMEN, NEVER FORGET 172
XXIII. THE NEW WOMAN IN FRANCE 180
XXIV. POUR LA PATRIE 188
XXV. BY WAY OF DIVERSION 196
XXVI. WHEN THE BOYS COME HOME 203
XXVII. WHAT KIND OF WAR WORK 211
XXVIII. THE DARK OCEAN LANES 219
XXIX. CLEMENCEAU THE TIGER 227
XXX. FROM ALL FOES, FOREIGN OR DOMESTIC 237
XXXI. LAFAYETTE, WE’RE HERE 246
A Soldier’s Mother in France
CHAPTER I
WHERE THE LONG TRAIL LED
On the lapel of my coat I wear a little pin, a pin with a single star,
ruby red on a bar of white. My only son is a member of the American
Expeditionary Force in France. More than a million American women wear
pins like mine. Some have two stars, three, even four, and every one
covers a heart heavy with anxiety and foreboding. That little service
pin which mothers wear, fathers, too; sisters, sweethearts, wives, is a
symbol of sacrifice. It should be something more than that.
My star has come to mean love of country far surpassing the mild
patriotism of other days. It means confidence and courage for whatever
in these tragic times I shall need courage. It means pride in the young
manhood of America and hope unbounded for the future of America, which
lies in their hands. Before I went to France I wore my service pin for
one soldier--my son. I wear it now for the American army. If I can,
by writing of that army as I have just seen it in France, lessen a
little for other women the burden of anxiety and dread I shall count my
journey worth while.
I went to France as a correspondent, a reporter, to write about the
war. I was sent, not because I am a woman, but in spite of the fact,
and merely because my editors believed that I could handle that
particular job. My letter of credentials to the French Foreign Office
said that I had reported the Russian revolution for my paper and that
I was now assigned to France with the view of informing readers in the
United States as to participation of United States troops in war and
the political situations of the allied countries in the war.
I hope that my editors’ confidence in me was not entirely misplaced
and that I did not quite fall down on my job. But what I experienced
in France and what I brought out with me were not exactly what I had
expected. I went to France as a correspondent, deeply interested in my
work, but very soon after I arrived and almost with my first contact
with our marvelous new army I forgot all about my work. I forgot that I
was in France after military and political facts.
I forgot that I was a correspondent. I was conscious only that I was
a mother. The mother of a boy in France. I was one in heart with a
million other American women I have never seen and will never see; one
with every woman in the land who wears a service pin.
_I discovered that try as I might to think of armies, strategies and
diplomacies, the only thing that vitally concerned me in France was to
find out how my son was faring, and in doing so I was finding out the
things that other mothers wanted to know about their boys._
Where they are, how they live, who their comrades are, how they work
and play, what they are learning, how they get along with their strange
new neighbors, the French people, and what the war is doing to their
minds and souls, as well as their bodies. I wanted, fervently, to know
all this about one soldier, and I believed that the other women would
like to know about their own.
Our soldiers are more than three thousand miles away from home, and
they have gone on a terrible errand. We know less about war than any
other women in the world, but we know that it is a brutal, pitiless,
bloodthirsty business. We know that bodies perish in war, and sometimes
souls, which is worse. Going over in the steamer a horrible story was
told me, a story which turned out to be quite untrue, but which when
I heard it cost me a sleepless night. It was to the effect that vice
was so rampant in all the armies that a whole shipload of hopelessly
diseased Australian soldiers had recently sailed from England. The
hospitals had salvaged many, it was said, but these men, who had left
home clean, wholesome, decent boys, were now being sent back to die,
physical and moral wrecks. Some, it was certain, would commit suicide
during the voyage.
That tale filled me with such terror that I went to some lengths to
investigate it. It was quite untrue, and I repeat it here only because
it is representative of stories that are current everywhere and add
greatly to the sufferings of the women at home. _The first thing I want
to say about our army is that the men are morally as safe in France as
they could possibly be at home. I made it my particular business to
know it._
I spent three months in France, traveling over most of the considerable
territory occupied by the American forces. I visited something like
twenty-five camps, small ones, large ones and immense ones, where the
men are training, where they are being made into experts in special
lines of fighting; where they are at work building miles of wharves,
warehouses, cold storage plants, barracks and hospitals; where they are
laying railroads and dredging rivers; where they are performing marvels
of constructive work necessary to the life of an army far removed from
its base.
I met and talked with thousands of soldiers in their camps, in the
Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross canteens, in many ancient towns of central
France. I saw our men disembarking from their transports, and I saw
them tramping through ice-cold mud to the front-line trenches. I talked
with them in their billets in lonely little villages of the north, and
in vacation cities of the azure south. I have visited American soldiers
in hospitals and I have knelt beside their graves. _Our soldiers have
only one enemy, and that is the Germans._ That enemy they must fight
and conquer, and we over here must steel our hearts to the sacrifices
of life, the suffering and maiming that are absolutely inevitable and
will have to be borne. The casualty lists, every day growing a little
longer, are bound to grow even longer. What English mothers and French
mothers, what all the people of all the warring nations have endured,
we shall have to endure. It is the world’s pain and we can not escape
it.
What we Americans have to help us bear what is coming in the next
few months is the knowledge that our losses are going to be as few
as possible. Life is to be safeguarded as far as human agencies can
devise. Our army is organized for that. Men are not to be sacrificed
unnecessarily. The best science in the world is being mobilized to save
suffering and to heal wounds. Sickness and accident are being guarded
against. Drunkenness and immorality are under strictest ban.
Some of this I was privileged to hear from the man who perhaps more
than any other individual is responsible for the lives and the souls of
our men in France, General Pershing. I saw him twice, once briefly in
Paris, where he talked to me five minutes before leaving for an allied
war council at Versailles, and once at length in his headquarters in a
quaint old town which is the general headquarters of the staff of our
army in France.
General Pershing is the least formal of any great officer I have ever
seen, with the notable exception of “Papa” Joffre, but generals are all
very important personages and have to be addressed with circumspection.
I wanted very much to say to General Pershing, but of course I didn’t,
that after seeing him I felt a whole lot easier about my especial
soldier. A more human commanding officer, one more concerned about the
last detail of the life of the enlisted man, I am sure never lived. He
spoke of the soldiers as a father speaks of his sons, with pride and
passionate concern.
_“They are the best in the world,” he said, and he added that although
our talk was private and that he could not be quoted, I was at liberty
to repeat those words: “Our soldiers are fine men, clean, strong,
intelligent, and they will make magnificent fighters. Tell the people
at home, especially the mothers, that they can be proud of their men.
Tell them that almost without exception their behavior is beyond
criticism. Tell them that for me.”_
Proud of their commander also may the American people be, and over and
above all, proud of the cause for which the American soldiers fight and
for which they are ready to die. Not in the whole history of the world
has a more righteous war been fought. I do not think the majority of
Americans yet dream of the depth of depravity contemplated by the men
who brought about the war. We have heard of German atrocities and we
have shuddered at the recital.
But the plan and object of this war on the part of those Prussians who
are responsible for it constitute the worst atrocity of all, for the
plan was the murder of Christian civilization and the object was the
enslavement of mankind.
I have seen some of the effects of a partial success of the German war
lords’ plan, and I, the mother of a soldier on the French front, say
to the mothers of other soldiers that I would be ashamed to have him
anywhere else. Not long before leaving France I saw him for a short
hour, a simple enlisted man in a humble post of duty. The spring wind
blowing over the devastated and ravished plains bore the roaring of
artillery plainly to our ears. Every day since then those guns have
roared nearer, and now that part of France is closed to civilians.
The next message that came out of the sector where the Americans hold
the line brought mourning and tears to many women. And yet I can
truthfully say that I would be happier to have my son dead in France,
sleeping in a soldier’s grave beyond the sea, than to have him alive
and safe, shirking his duty in a bullet-proof job at home.
I do not believe that in the years to come there is going to be much
happiness for the men who are shirking, nor for the women who may
be encouraging them to shirk. The shirkers are going to play a very
pitiful part in the national life of this country after the war. The
men who come home will be the rulers of America’s future destiny. They
will be the strong builders of our greatness. They are learning in this
war how to build.