OUR BOYS DISCOVER THE PAST
“Voilà,” said the old French general who sat opposite me in the
Bordeaux express, “behold the prettiest sight in France.” He pointed
through the open door of the compartment to two soldiers who were
standing in the corridor smoking their after-luncheon cigarettes.
One of the soldiers wore a horizon blue uniform, a little worn and
stained with hard usage, although the boy was barely twenty-one. The
other soldier’s uniform was brand new O. D. cloth, made in America. The
two stood beside the window, their arms entwined, looking at the lovely
valley of the Loire and teaching each other their respective languages.
“Sammee,” said the French soldier, “how you say ‘_donnes moi une
allumette_’?”
“You say ‘gimme a match.’ But listen here, Gaston, cut out the Sammie.
Forget it.”
“What you mean ‘forget it,’ Sammee?” persisted the _poilu_, accepting
the match. The lesson went on, and I agreed with the old general that
the sight of French and American youths associating on affectionate
terms and learning each other’s familiar argot was indeed agreeable.
One of the stock arguments of the pacifists in trying to make war
out an unmixed evil is that it sets back education. I am sure that
many American mothers have had misgivings on this point, and have
deplored the necessity of interrupting their sons’ college life. But I
want to assure them that their sons are learning more in France than
any college could have taught them. They are learning French, for
one thing, at least all the enterprising ones are. Not the foolish,
academic sort of thing they study in high school and college, the
object being to read Molière and the classics, but the living language.
A striking illustration of the difference in the two methods was
afforded me during a trip into the war zone. In the party was one of
our intelligence officers and a French woman writer of unusually broad
education. The American officer spoke very little French, the woman
writer spoke only a few broken sentences of English, and they had to
be constantly interpreted to each other. One day, in the course of the
conversation, it transpired that the officer before joining the colors
had been a high-school professor of French, and that the woman had for
five years drawn a good salary as a teacher of English.
The American soldier in a few months can, if he wants to, gets a
practical knowledge of the French language that will be a business
asset to him all his life. Most of the soldiers appreciate this, and
the free classes offered in all the Y. M. C. A. centers are well
attended. They learn in the classes, and they learn even more by
association with French soldiers and civilians.
My soldier son knew not a word of the language when he enlisted, but
when I saw him in France he was using it fairly well. I congratulated
him on his new acquisition, and he laughed and said: “There’s an
awfully pretty girl in a café the fellows up our way patronize, and she
doesn’t know any English.”
It is not only the French language that our soldiers are learning,
but French history as well. The part of central France occupied by
our army is a storied treasure house of history. No part of France is
more French. It abounds in castles, châteaux, museums, pointed towers,
dungeon cells and torture chambers, ancient churches and crumbling city
walls. Even the farms, centuries old, some of them, show the remains of
past defenses.
To our boys, fresh from the new prairies of Iowa and Dakota, or the
still virgin forests of Oregon and Washington, this past they are
surrounded by is the most romantic and wonderful thing that ever came
into their lives. They can hardly believe it is real.
Even to those soldiers who come from the older sections of the United
States the sight is thrilling. In the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace,
in Paris, built by Henry of Navarre for his second wife, Marie de
Medici, stands a stately marble fountain, moss-grown and mellow with
time. The date cut in the marble is 1620.
I had this pointed out to me by a soldier from Massachusetts. “Think
of it,” he exclaimed, “the very year when our oldest aristocracy, the
Pilgrim fathers, were cutting down trees for their first log huts and
their rude stockades, these French people were making beautiful things
like that fountain.”
Long before that they were building beautiful things. Down in the
southernmost part of our territory in France stand the ruins of
a magnificent castle, the one where Edward the Black Prince took
refuge when he was being pursued by that French king with whom he was
contesting the crown of France in thirteen hundred and something. With
two young naval officers I explored the place one warm spring day, and
we were actually awed by the achievement of those builders of olden
days.
The castle was not only strong, it was noble and fine in all its
masses. “It makes you proud of your Norman ancestors,” said one of the
American officers, a Virginian.
You can not go into one of the old Gothic churches or cathedrals on
Sunday or week-days without meeting American soldiers, caps in hand,
gazing silently at twelfth century Madonnas and saints, or tombs of
medieval bishops. The miracle and charm of Gothic architecture is not
all that draws our boys to the old churches. The sense of time and
antiquity possesses them. It is something entirely new and wonderful
to them to realize that the world went on, that people lived and loved
and thought about themselves as modern and up-to-date centuries before
Columbus discovered America.
In a certain French city, where I made friends with many American
soldiers, a group of university professors are making it their business
to escort our soldiers over the place, giving them historical talks.
This is a very old city, one in which the Romans had a considerable
occupation. The ruins of an immense circus built by them still stands
in the midst of modern houses and shops. Its masonry is so solid that a
ton of dynamite would be required to dislodge it.
At the time of the French revolution it was practically intact, but its
use as a fortress and the pounding of cannon against it turned it into
the picturesque ruin it is to-day. Our soldiers are exploring that old
circus and realizing the grandeur that was Rome more keenly than if
they were cramming Latin back home.
“You positively mustn’t miss the mummies,” I was told by my soldier
friends in this same city. So one day I went with two boys to see the
mummies. There is an ancient church built, centuries ago, outside the
city walls, when the town was just beginning to outgrow its walls. The
excuse for the walls had not disappeared, however, and local wars and
forays among the feudal gentry beat hard on that church. Several times
during the years the church was burned to the ground, but it was always
rebuilt according to its original plans.
The last time it was rebuilt was about a hundred and fifty years ago,
and it was when the excavations were being made that the famous mummies
were discovered. They were dug up out of one of the oldest corners of
the churchyard and must have passed from life in the fourteenth or the
fifteenth century. Something in the chalky nature of the soil preserved
them from disintegration, and they remain still rather disagreeable and
grewsome likenesses of their original selves.
To see them we descended a flight of worn stone steps into the inky
darkness of a crypt. An old, old crone of a woman, herself half a
mummy, led the way, a sort of a dark lantern in her hand. She has told
the story of the mummies several times a day for so many years that
she could probably recite it without troubling herself to wake out of
a nap. She can even recite it in a jargon which remotely resembles
English.
The mummies, about twenty of them, are hung up like so many old
clothes, around the walls of the crypt. Some are mere parchment shells
of bodies, others retain rags of clothing, and even rings. The old, old
crone turned her lantern on the mummies, one by one. Here was a priest,
she said, you could tell by his soutaine. Here was a woman who had died
in childbirth, her tiny baby buried with her. Here was a whole family,
mother and four children, who had died of poison, perhaps mushrooms.
This man was hanged. You could tell--“Ugh! Let’s look at the next one,
_ma mère_,” we implored. The next one was worse, a cataleptic, buried
alive.
“What in the world makes you want to look at such things?” I asked when
we emerged, in time to meet another group of soldiers bent on the same
errand.
“Why,” they said, “don’t you think it is terribly interesting to look
at people who actually lived five hundred years ago? Those mummies are
worth a franc any day.”
Two Sundays before I left France I spent the afternoon in the Hotel
des Invalides, where Napoleon lies in his granite tomb, now completely
buried in sandbags. In spite of that fact, however, the chapel was
filled with American soldiers gazing raptly at the tomb they could not
see, but which they knew held the ashes of the great conqueror.
More soldiers were in the large courtyard, now a museum of captured
Germans guns, cannon, “minnies” and shattered airplanes. There are
the burned and charred skeletons of several Zeppelins, and in the
very center of the collection, as if its captor, the remains, nearly
intact, of Guynemer’s favorite fighting plane, his “Old Charles” which
brought so many German flyers to earth. This plane, white, with a
scarlet symbolic bird in flight painted on its body, is decorated like
a shrine, with a constantly renewed tribute of fresh flowers.
The American boys who wandered through the courtyard and long galleries
of the Invalides that day were on their way to the front, and were
spending every precious minute of their stay in Paris storing up
impressions. I watched them studying with intent faces the marvelous
collection of armor, some of it restoration work, but most of it the
actual harness of kings and knights of old. Soldiers of all the ages,
Greek, Roman, Gaul, Frenchmen of the age of chivalry, are represented
in the collection. The whole history of warfare.
“When they are giving us tin hats why didn’t they give us things like
these?” sagely remarked one soldier. “These protect the eyes.”
“But, gee!” exclaimed another, pausing in front of a “tin hat” the size
of a garbage bucket and several times as heavy, “wouldn’t you like to
catch a Hun with one of them things on?”
Where the American soldiers lingered longest that day was in the
gallery sacred to the relics of Napoleon. His camp bed is there, and
they exclaimed at the smallness of the great soldier. There were
also his camp chair, his writing table and books, scores of personal
belongings, uniforms and decorations. The walls are covered with
paintings of his battles and the stirring events of his life.
You’ll never get those soldiers to agree that war sets education back.
Our soldiers are learning at first-hand in France what they would never
have learned so well at home, the great, big thing we are fighting for
in this war, what in all ages the flower of manhood have fought and
died for--better life, and more freedom for the generations next to
come.