Part 5 (1/2)
There we made preparations to go to the headquarters of the American Army. In Paris also we got into our new regulation Red Cross uniforms. Ever since man first pinned a buffalo tail to the back of his belt, and stuck a rooster feather in his matted hair, he has been proud of his uniform. s.e.x vanity expresses itself most gorgeously in a uniform, and when they put Henry and me into uniforms, even carefully repressed Red Cross uniforms, open at the neck and with blue dabs on our coat lapels to distinguish us from the ”first cla.s.s fighting man,” we were so proud that often five or six consecutive minutes pa.s.sed when we weren't afraid of what our wives would say about the $124 each had spent for the togs. At times our att.i.tude toward our wives was not unlike that of drunken rabbits hunting brazenly for the dogs! But when we slipped into citizen clothes, sobriety and remorse covered us, and we shook sad heads. We wore the uniforms little about Paris; for our Sam Browne belts kept us returning salutes until our arms hurt. They couldn't break me of the habit of saluting with a newspaper or a package or a pencil in my hand. And my return of the interminable round of salutes from French, British, and Italian soldiers who throng Paris, probably insulted--all unbeknownst to me--hundreds of our allies, and made them sneer at our flag. So it seemed best for us to wear these uniforms only where soldiers congregated who would know us for the gawks that we were and forgive us our military trespa.s.ses.
Then a real day came when our Red Cross duties took us to General Pers.h.i.+ng's headquarters.
[Ill.u.s.tration: He was a rare bird; this American going on a big drunk on water]
For Americans during the year 1918, ”Somewhere in France,” will mean the Joan of Arc country. It is not in the war zone, but lies among the hills of Central France, a four or five hours' auto ride from Paris. To reach the American ”Somewhere in France” from Paris, one crosses the battle-field of the Marne, and we pa.s.sed it the day after the third anniversary, when all the hundreds of roadside graves that marked the French advance were a-bloom and a-flutter with the tri-colour. Great doings were afoot the day before on that battle-field. Bands had played triumphant songs, and orators had spoken and the leaders of France--soldier and civilian--had come out and wept and France had released her emotions and was better for it. We pa.s.sed through Meaux and hurried on east to St. Dizier, where we stopped for the night. We put up at a dingy little inn, filled to overflowing with as curious a company as ever gathered under one roof. Of course there were French soldiers--scores of them, mostly officers in full dress, going to the line or coming from it. Then there were fathers and mothers of soldiers and sisters and sweethearts of soldiers and wives of soldiers bound for the front or coming home. And there we were, the only Americans in the house, with just enough French to order ”des oeufs” and coffee ”au lait” and ”ros bif and jambon and pain” and to ask how much and then make them say it slowly and stick the sum up on their fingers. We were having engine trouble. And our car was groaning and coughing and muttering in the gloomy little court of the inn. Around the court ran the sleeping rooms, and under one end, forty feet from the diningroom, was what was once the stable, and what now is the garage. Frenchmen wandered up, looked at our chauffeur (from Utica, N. Y.) tried to diagnose the case, found we did not understand and then moved away. But it was a twelve-cylinder American machine and the Frenchmen, discovering that, kept coming back to it. As we sat on the cement platform of the tavern, kicking our heels against it and bemoaning the follies of youth which had corrupted our Freshman and Soph.o.m.ore French, there came and sat beside us a pretty woman.
She had black snappy eyes, fresh dark skin, and jet black hair, so curly that it was almost frowsy. She listened to us for a moment, then hopped aboard our talk like a boy flipping a street car: ”Kansas--eh? I once lived in Oklahoma City. My father ran the Bee Hive!”
”Angels of mercy, angels of light!” This from me. ”Say, will you interpret for us?”
”Sure mike! sir,” she said. And then added: ”And if it's engine trouble my husband upstairs is a chauffeur. Shall I get him?”
And when she returned with him, he fell to, glad enough to get a look into a twelve-cylinder American car. Henry stood by him, and with the woman acting as interlocutor, between our driver and her husband we soon had the trouble located and the dissimulator--Henry maintains that all engine trouble is connected in some way with a dissimulator--rectified, and while the job was going on, he expounded the twelve cylinders to the French, puffed on his dreadnaught pipe, and left the lady from Oklahoma City to me. She was keen for talk.
Between her official communiques to her husband and our driver, she got in this:
”Yes, I know Frank Wickoff in Oklahoma City--knew him when he was poor as Job's turkey, and then my folks used to borrow money at his bank. Before we came to Oklahoma City we lived in Austin. We ran the Good Luck, or was it the Fair; no, we ran the Fair in Dallas.”
At a quick look at her face from me she laughed and said: ”Oh, yes, I'm Jew all right. No,” she returned to a query, ”I never was in Wichita. But when we moved to Blackwell we used to take the Beacon!”
”Henry, come here,” came the call from me. ”Here is old Subscriber and Constant Reader!” Then Henry came up and the subsequent proceedings interested me no more. For Henry took the witness. And the three of us, kicking our heels on the cement wall below us, sat swapping yarns about mutual friends in the Southwest. It seems that in France the lady is a pedlar who goes from town to town on market day with notions and runs a little notion wagon through the country between times. She told us of an air raid of the night before on St. Dizier where eleven people had been killed and urged us to stay for the funeral the next day. It was to be a sight worth seeing. Most of the dead were women and children. There was nothing military in the little town but the two hotels that housed soldiers and their friends and relatives going to the front and coming back. Yet the Germans had come, dropped a score of bombs on the town, then had flown away for another town, dropping their hateful eggs across country as they went. Luneville had lost half a dozen, Fismes half a score, and other towns of the neighbourhood, accordingly--all civilians, mostly women and children; and not a town raided had any military works or if it had a munition factory, the bombs had hit miles from the plants.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the lady from Oklahoma City to me]
We were beginning to realize slowly what a h.e.l.l of torture and disease and suffering this war means to France. Half a million tuberculars in her homes, spreading poison there; two million homeless refugees quartered beyond the war zone; millions of soldiers living in the homes fifty miles back from the line, every month bringing new men to these homes left by their comrades returning to the battle front; air raids by night slaying women and babies; commerce choked with the offering to the war G.o.d; soldiers filling the highways; food, clothing and munitions taking all the s.p.a.ce upon the railroads; fuel almost prohibitively high; food scarce; and always talk of the war--of nothing, absolutely nothing but the war and its horrors. That France has held so long under this curse proves the miracle of her divine courage! As we sat under the shrouded torches in the inn courtyard and considered what life really means to the men and women of St. Dizier, once more we wondered how we at home would react under the terrific punishment which these people are taking; what would Wichita do with her houses bombed, her homes crowded with refugees; her parks and schools and public buildings turned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever the mourners going about the street and man to his long home. How would Emporia act with the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever near her; with her women and children slaughtered, merely to break the morale of the people and cause them to plead for peace; with cripples from the war hidden away in a hundred sad homes, with fatherless children and children born out of wedlock among the things that one had to face daily? Perhaps our young Jewish friend thought we were wearying of her. For she rose and said, ”Well, good-night, gents--pleasant dreams!”
Pleasant dreams--indeed!
But in the morning we arose refreshed and hurried along a misty plain, forty miles or so from the American troops. Always in the background were great bushy trees, and lush green gra.s.s, and the thing was composed. How the French manage to compose their landscape is too much for me. But at any of a thousand points the scene might have been photographed for a Corot, by getting a few good-looking girls in nighties to dance on the gra.s.s of the middle distance!
American landscape has to be picked apart to have its picture taken; a tree selected here, a hill there, a brook yonder, and if ladies in nighties are needed, they are brought from afar! They are not indigenous to the soil. But one feels that in France they might come sidling out from behind any willow clump with their toes rouged ready for the dance!
The road that morning seemed traversing a great picture gallery, unwinding into life as from a dream within a dream! And then, after two hours of joyous landscape, we waked and saw America! Now America was not a vision; it was substantial, if not beautiful. As we switched around a bend in the road we came upon America full-sized and blood raw--a farmer boy--bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, with the Middle West written all over him. He wore a service hat at a forward pitch over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo the sound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy of his own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and he sat cross-legged high up on the quarter deck of a great four-story, full-rigged Missouri mule. He didn't salute us but called ”Hi” as we pa.s.sed, and then we knew that ”our flag was still there” and that we were near our troops.
The boys must be popular in the neighbourhood. For in the next village, which by the way was a town of ten thousand, our American Red Cross uniforms were treated with distinguished courtesy. Henry wanted a match. He could talk no French but a little boy at the inn, seeing him fumbling through his clothes with an unlighted pipe, came running to us with a little blue box of matches. Henry gave the boy a franc--more to be amiable than anything else. The boy flashed home to his mother proud as Punch! And just as we were pulling out of the village the boy came running to us with another little blue box of matches. We thought the boy had discovered that matches would bring a franc a box from Americans and was preparing to make his fortune. So Henry took the box, and as the car was moving handed the boy another franc. We noticed him waving his hands and shaking his head. And when we were a mile out of the village Henry opened his second box and found his original franc in it. The boy's mother was ashamed that he should have taken any money for a box of matches, and had made him bring back the money with another box to show how much the French appreciate the Americans coming to France.
We met many instances like that.
Soon the road was cluttered up with American soldiers. They were driving motors, whacking mules, stringing along the by-paths and sweating copiously under the autumn sun. We wondered in pa.s.sing what an American farmer boy and his self-respecting mule thought of the two-wheeled French carts they were using. Then we turned the corner and came into a new view; we saw our first troop of American soldiers quartered in a French village. They were busy building barracks. We stopped and visited them, and they showed us their quarters: In barns, in lofts of houses, in cellars, in vacant stores--everywhere that human beings could slip in, the American soldiers had installed themselves. The Y.M.C.A. hut was finished, and in it a score of boys were writing letters, playing rag-time on the pianos, and jollying the handsome, wise-looking American women at the counter across one end of the room. An Irish Catholic padre in a major's uniform was in charge of the sports of the camp and he literally permeated the Y.M.C.A. hut. He was the leader of the men. The little village where this troop lived faded into the plain and we rode again for five miles or so, and then came to another and another and still another. At that time thirteen villages in an arc of forty miles or so contained most of our American troops.
We stopped many times on our long day's journey. Once we stopped for mid-day dinner and there came to Henry and me our first estrangement. It is curious, as the poet sings, ”how light a thing may move dissension between hearts that love--hearts that the world in vain has tried and sorrow but more closely tied.” Well--the thing that came between us was cooking--cooking that has parted more soul mates than any other one thing in the world! For two weeks more or less we had been eating in the French mess, or eating at country hotels or country homes in France, eating good French country cooking, and it was excellent. A mid-day meal typically was a melon, or a clear soup, or onion soup, brown and strong; a small bit of rare steak or chop, or a thin sliced roast in the juice with browned potatoes or carrots, a vegetable entree--peas, spinach, served dry and minced, or string beans; then raw fruit, and cheese.
The bread, of course, was black war bread, but crusty and fine. That was my idea of a lunch for the G.o.ds. What we got at the American mess was this: a thick, frowsy, greasy soup--a kind of larded dishwater; thin steak fried hard as nails, boiled beans with fried bacon laid on the beans--not pork and beans, but called pork and beans--with the beans slithery and hard and underdone; lettuce, cabbage, and onions soused in vinegar, white bread cut an inch thick, soft and spongy, boiled potatoes that had stood in the water after they were cooked done, and then bread pudding, made by pouring water on bread, sticking in some raisins, stirring in an egg, and serving a floury syrup over it for sauce! There was enough, of course, to keep soul and body together. But the cooking had spoiled a lot of mighty good food. And Henry liked it! There were two preachers with us, and they bragged about the ”good old American cooking!”
And when they heard me roar they said, ”He is insulting the star-spangled banner,” and Henry threatened to take my pajamas out of his black valise!
[Ill.u.s.tration: And he sat cross legged]
After pa.s.sing through many villages crowded with our troops we came to the headquarters of the American Expeditionary forces. We found General Pers.h.i.+ng in a long brick building--two or three stories high, facing a wide white parade ground. The place had been used evidently as a barracks for French soldiers in peace times, and was fitted to the uses of our army. We met a member of his staff, a sort of outer guard, and with scarcely a preliminary halt were taken to the general. He seems easy of access, which is a sign that he plays no favourites and has no court. Anyone with business can see him. He met us in a plain bare room with a square new American-looking desk in the midst of it. He sat behind the desk, cordial enough but with the air of one who will be pleased to have business start, and politenesses stop. So we plunged straight to the business in hand. We were from the American Red Cross in Paris, and our leader had come to get a definite idea of what part the Red Cross was to play in the recreation activities of the army. The Y.
M. C. A. was spending millions upon recreation problems. The Red Cross had millions to spend.
Recreation in Paris, of course, means soldier hostels, homes, clubs, houses where American soldiers can go while in Paris on leave of absence. The Red Cross had one single donation of one million dollars to be devoted to a club for American soldiers in Paris.
The Y. M. C. A had started to equip two or three great Parisian hotels as clubs. The Red Cross had money donated for certain other recreation purposes in camp. The Y. M. C. A. believed it should control the camp and Parisian recreation activities of the American troops.
We stated our case about as briefly as it is here written, and in three minutes. In two minutes more General Pers.h.i.+ng had a.s.sured us that there would be no need to spend money for hotels or clubs in Paris, that few soldiers would be given leave to go to Paris, and that the lavish expenditure of American money in Paris would be bad for America's standing in France.