WHEN THE BOYS COME HOME
Should you happen to be in Paris or in any other French city in the
early spring, you will witness an amusing and at the same time an
inspiring sight; the carnival of the military class of the year before
going into training camps.
France has lived next door to a burglar nation for nearly half a
century. Ever since Alsace-Lorraine was stolen from her in 1871, France
has known this, and she has therefore retained the system of compulsory
military service.
Every year, on the eighteenth of April, all able-bodied young Frenchmen
who have reached the age of twenty go up for a two years’ military
training. Just before the war the term was lengthened to three years.
Their term completed, they are placed in the reserves, ready at any
time to be mobilized and fight.
The world well remembers how in late July, 1914, the tocsin sounded
all over France, calling from field and factory, counting room and
office the glorious citizen army that rushed out against the barbarian
invasion, turned it at the Marne, and saved the life of civilization.
I believe that after this war some form of compulsory military service
will be enacted in this country. Let us rather call it required
military service, since in a democracy such service is agreed upon as a
wise policy and is not forced on the people without their consent. The
American form might well be something like that of France.
Proof that military service there is not in the least oppressive is
the gaiety with which the young cadets greet their term of training.
It has long been the custom for the year’s class to make a carnival of
its going. Beginning two or three weeks before the date set for their
encampment, groups of these lads, fantastically arrayed and decorated,
would parade through the streets, singing their favorite choruses,
making a great deal of noise between songs, shouting and chaffing the
passers-by.
No youth considered himself properly dressed without a huge
_boutonnière_, sometimes of flowers but oftener a paper monstrosity as
big as a cabbage. Sometimes a lad appeared with a buttonhole bouquet of
vegetables. Anything for a joke. Thus dressed, furnished with a guitar
or an accordion, “the bunch,” as our slang would call them, fared forth
to have a last good time before going under discipline. For the time
being they owned the town, and nobody complained of their noise or
their pranks.
I had seen this before the war, but I was unprepared to see the custom
retained. Yet this April in Paris, in Bordeaux, and several other
cities I saw the same singing groups, the same absurd decorations, the
same fun-making. The class of 1918 was younger than the class of 1914,
but it was every bit as exuberant. Four years of war and desolation, of
sickening anxiety and cruel bereavement, were powerless to depress the
spirit of young France.
Early on the morning of April eighteenth I started on a journey from
the Orleans station, and there, filling the place with laughter and
excited conversation, I saw about a hundred of the class of 1918 leave
for their cantonment.
Their mothers and fathers and sweethearts were there seeing them off,
just as we have been seeing our boys off to training camps this year.
But these French fathers and mothers have suffered bitter losses.
Hardly a family in France that has not known bereavement. Most of the
women I saw that April morning wore deep mourning.
Even though they wept in their hearts, they sent their boys away with
laughter and brave cheer. With bantering words on their lips, their
hearts were saying: “O France, loved Mother, take one more of my sons.
Like those who have died he was mine only until you needed him more.”
Their train left the station ahead of mine, and until it was far down
the line these great fathers and mothers continued to wave and cheer.
Then they clasped hands and silently went home.
After four years of war. It made me ashamed of every wavering moment I
have allowed myself since we entered this conflict.
This is a time when the women of America must take stock of themselves,
when they must consider whether or not they have grown up to the
stature of the women overseas; whether they can keep step with the
men who have gone over to fight beside the French, English, Belgian
and Italian soldiers. For those women of the world war are very great
in mind and spirit. Those young Americans are growing fast. They will
never be the same again.
We sing about keeping the home fires burning, “Till the boys come
home.” But we have got to face one big fact. When the boys come home
they will have become men, and men of a totally different type than any
to which we have been accustomed. They will be bigger, broader, finer,
in body and mind. They will be better educated. They will expect more
of their women.
In the first place our men, when they come home, will be such perfect
physical specimens that they will be astonished to see women who are
flat chested, or fat, sallow skinned or heavy-eyed. They won’t have
much patience with indigestion and headaches. That kind of thing goes
with slacking over there.
There ought to be a great big, earnest health movement among women in
this country during the rest of the war. We see signs of it in the
farmerettes, the campers, the women police.
The men in France are learning new things every day. They have
traveled. They have had a chance to compare their country with others,
their compatriots with other people.
We have been called a nation of boasters. We boasted of our
achievements because most of us never had a chance to see anything of
the achievements of other nations. These men have.
They know now that French cities are often far more beautiful than
American cities. If they lack skyscrapers they have ancient castles and
châteaux. What the French build they build beautifully and for the ages.
You never hear any boasting from Americans in France. Our men are
learning humility. They know that we do some things well, but they know
that we have much to learn from the older civilizations, and they are
out to learn.
A young engineer over there told me how when the Americans began to
double track the French railways and to build the miles on miles of
switches necessary to handle trainloads of supplies for the armies, the
French were shocked at the shoddy work done.
“You know how it is with us,” he said. “When we are doing a hurry job
in laying rails we drive spikes in every other tie. The French drive
them twice in every tie, and they rivet them after they are driven
through. We do that now, over here. The French won’t stand for anything
else. They say they won’t risk railroad accidents for their troops.”
Our men are getting a wonderful education, not only through their
army experience and their faculties of observation, but through the Y.
M. C. A. department of lectures and entertainment. At first the idea
was simply to entertain the men in their leisure hours, to furnish
music and moving pictures and vaudeville. But the men themselves soon
called for better things, and the Y. M. C. A. is preparing to give what
amounts almost to university extension courses in the camps. Books in
unlimited quantities are being shipped overseas by the American Public
Library Association. Text-books, reference books for every branch of
study.
This spring Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary of Yale University, went to
France, and was made head of the committee on education in the Y. M. C.
A. in the field. Mr. Stokes made a thorough canvass of the situation,
visiting many camps, consulting with army authorities and with the men
themselves. He visited the camps and canteens of the English Y. M. C.
A. in order to compare their work with ours.
The programme of education was not complete when I left, but I saw a
tentative plan which by this time must have been worked into something
truly admirable. The men of our army are going to be given a real
practical education. Those behind the lines who wish to continue a
college or technical course, dropped when the draft law went into
effect, will be able to do so. Those whose early education was
neglected will have a chance to go back to elementary school.
Men who do not care to take up any serious studies will hear lectures,
if they choose, in which they will learn a great deal about French and
English history. In the very region, perhaps the very town, where great
events of history took place, they will hear the story told. The past
will become real. It will help our men to understand the present.
I know that our soldiers are thirsty for this kind of an education.
I was asked by the Y. M. C. A. to lecture in some of the camps on
what I saw of the Russian revolution. It was with great reluctance
that I agreed to try one lecture. It did not seem possible to me that
soldiers, tired with the day’s labor, would care to listen to such a
subject.
“I will try it once or even twice, if you like,” I told the secretary,
“but I’m afraid it won’t get across.”
It did. I spoke something like thirty times, and every time to crowded
rooms. I spoke in sheds, tents, theaters, town halls, and even in the
open. I never had such audiences. Their eyes were keen and bright
and they drank in every word. Afterward they crowded around asking
questions.
These men are not going to be interested in women who never read
anything but novels and the cheap magazines, who know nothing about
geography or history or politics. They will want to talk over their
experiences with their mothers and sisters and wives, and if they can
not listen intelligently the men are going to be disappointed.
Hundreds of soldiers with whom I talked showed me pictures of their
women at home. They said loving things, proud things, but the women
they were proudest of were those who were doing some kind of real war
service. “My sister Elizabeth is the head of the Red Cross canteen at
the union station in my town. They feed hundreds of men every time a
troop train goes through.”
“My wife is pretty busy these days, with the children and her surgical
dressings classes.”
These are the things the men like to think of their women doing while
they are away. They see the women workers in the canteens of the
Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. in France. They see nurses and women
ambulance drivers working regardless of weariness, careless of danger.
They see all around them unselfish, courageous service. The spirit is
in the air over there, and the men like to feel that their women at
home are like that, too.
When the boys come home they want to come back to women who have been
born again into high and noble patriotism. “Not only hats off to the
flag. Sleeves up for the flag.” That slogan, adopted by the men in the
steel industries who are speeding up the building of ships, ships, and
more ships, is the patriotism our men are living every day in France,
and it is the kind they have a right to expect of the women at home.