Part 6 (1/2)
It was a sad blow to Henry and me, who thought our calling was a torch-bearer of civilization. Indeed, one may digress and say that we found the whole estate of the press in France rather disenchanting.
For advertising is not regarded as entirely ”ethical” in France.
The big stores sometimes do not advertise at all; because people look with the same suspicion on advertising drygoods and clothing merchants as we in America look upon advertising lawyers and doctors.
So newspapers too often have to sell their editorial opinions, and the press has small influence in France, compared with the influence of the press in what we call the Anglo-Saxon countries.
But in that French village of twenty-five thousand people without a newspaper we found a civilization that compared favourably with the civilization in any American town. While the tire was going on it developed that a cog had slipped in the transgression of the car--or something of the sort, so we were laid up for an hour, and we piled out of our seats and took in the town. We found four good bookstores there--rather larger than our bookstores at home.
We found two or three big co-operative stores largely patronized by industrial workers and farmers, and they were better stores by half than any cooperative stores we had seen in America. For with us the co-operative store is generally a sad failure. Our farmers talk big about cooperation, but they sneak around and patronize the stores that offer the best bargains, and our industrial workers haven't begun to realize how co-operative buying will help them. We found no big stores, in the American sense, but we found many bright, well-kept shops. In electrical supplies we found the show windows up to the American average, which is high indeed; but in plumbing there was a sag. We discovered that the town had comparatively few sewers. The big, white-tiled bathroom with its carload of modern fixtures which adorns the show window of at least one plumber's shop in every American town--we missed. The bathtub is not a household need in France. Yet some way we surmised that if our towns could have better bookstores and fewer bathtubs we might have felt easier in our minds for the palladiums of our liberties. And it can't be laid to the picture shows--this slump in the American book reading average; for the French towns are just as full of picture shows as American towns. That superiority in bookstores which lies with the French over the Americans, should give us pause. It more than overbalances our superiority in country newspapers. And then as we walked about the town that evening in the sunset pondering upon these things we came to the town park.
It was not a large park; but it lay close down to the main street--”right in the heart of the city,” we would say at home. Everyone in town who moved about, to the stores from the residential streets, had to pa.s.s through that park. In it were certain long rows of grey-barked trees--trees with trunks that s.h.i.+mmered like the trunks of sycamores, but that rose sheer from the ground forty feet before branching, and then spread widely and calmly into mighty sprays of foliage.
One could not walk under those trees day after day and year after year through life and not feel their spell upon his heart. ”From the old grey trunks that mingled their mighty boughs high in the heaven,” to those whose lives lay underneath, in busy and perhaps more or less sordid routine, must inevitably come ”the thought of boundless power and inaccessible majesty!” And that is a good thought to keep in the heart. That grove in the midst of that little French town was worth more to it than sewers, more than a daily newspaper, more than a trolley line or a convention hall. For it called incessantly to men a mute inexorable summons to the things outside ourselves that make for righteousness in this earth. We in America, we in the everlasting Wichitas and Emporias, are p.r.o.ne to feel that we can make for righteousness what or when we will by calling an election, by holding a public meeting, by getting a president, a secretary and a committee on ways and means, by voting the bonds! But they who walk daily through groves like this, must in very spite of themselves give some thought to the hand that ”reared these venerable columns and that thatched the verdant roof!” Now in every French town, we did not find a grove like this.
But in every French town we did find something to take its place, a historic spot marked with a beautiful stone or bronze; a gently flowing river, whose beauty was sacredly guarded; a group of old, old buildings that recalled the past, a cathedral that had grown almost like the woods themselves, out of the visions of men into the dreams of men. And these dumb teachers of men have put into the soul of France a fine and exquisite spirit. It rose at the Marne and made a miracle.
And ever since the Marne that spirit has ruled France. Essentially it is altruistic. Men are not living for themselves. They are living for something outside themselves; beyond themselves, even beyond the objects of their personal affection. Men are living and dying today not for any immediate hope of gain for their friends or families, but for that organized political unit which is a spiritual thing called France. We Americans who go to France are agreed that we have never in our lives seen anything like the French in this season of their anguish. They are treading the winepress as no other modern nation has trodden it, pressing their hearts' blood into the bitter wine of war. They grumble, of course, as they do their hard stint. The French proverbially are a nation of grumblers.
Napoleon took them grumbling for fifteen years to glory. He took them grumbling to Moscow, and brought them grumbling back. They grumbled under the Second Empire and into the Republic. In 1916 they all but grumbled themselves into revolution. One heard revolt whispered in a thousand places. But they did not revolt. They will not revolt. Grumbling is a mere outer mannerism. In their hearts they are brave.
Over and over again as we went about France were we impressed with the courage and the tenacity of the French. By very contrast with their eternal grumbling did these traits seem to loom large and definite and certain. We met Dorothy Canfield in Paris, one of the best of the younger American novelists. She told us a most illuminating story. She has been two years in France working with the blind, and later superintending the commissary department of a training camp for men in the American Field Ambulance service.
She is a shrewd and wise observer, with a real sense of humour, and Heaven knows a sense of humour is necessary if one gets the truth out of the veneer of tragedy that surfaces the situation. [Footnote: This story appeared in Everybody's Magazine in Dorothy Canfield's own words.] It seems that she was riding into Paris from her training camp recently, and being tired went to sleep in her compartment, in which were two civilians, too old for military service. She was awakened by a wrangle and then--but let her tell it:
”Then I saw a couple of poilus sticking their heads in our window shaking a beret and asking for contributions to help them enjoy their week's leave of absence in Paris. My two elderly Frenchmen had given a little, under protest, saying (what was perfectly true) that it would go for drink and wouldn't do the poilus any good.
And one of the soldiers was declaiming about the fat bourgeois who stayed at home and let himself be defended and then wouldn't give a helping hand to the poor soldier on rest leave! To get rid of them, I put a franc in the beret. This was received with acclamations, and they inquired to whom should they drink a toast with the money.
I said, 'Oh, give a good Vive l'Amerique. That'll suit me best!'
They both shouted, 'Oh, is Madame an American?' And to the dismay of the two bourgeois, put first one long leg and then another through the window and came in noisily to sit down (they were standing on the running-board all this time with the train going forty miles an hour...a thing which was simply unheard-of in France before the war...one of the 'privileges' which the poilu take!). Well, they shook hands with me two or three times over and a.s.sured me they had never seen an American before...and indeed the two bourgeois looked at me curiously. Then one of them began to talk boisterously, expressing himself with great fluency and occasionally with a liberty of phrase which wasn't conventional at all, another poilu privilege! They sat down, evidently for a long visit. They were typical specimens: one was noisy, fluent, slangy, coa.r.s.e, quite eloquent at times, a real Parisian of the lower cla.s.ses, the kind which leaves its s.h.i.+rt open at the neck over a hairy chest and calls itself proudly 'the proletariat.' The other was a fresh-faced, vigorous country man from Bourgogne, the type that corresponds to the middle western American, a kind of Emporian! He hadn't much to say, but when he did speak, spoke to the purpose. They both, through all their roughness and coa.r.s.eness and evident excitement over starting on their 'permission,' had that French instinctive social tact and amenity (of a sort) which keeps decent women from being afraid of them or from hesitating to talk with them; and they were both very sincere, and desperately trying to express something of the strange confusion that is in everybody's mind ever since the war...what are we all doing anyhow!”
[Ill.u.s.tration: They were standing on the running board all this time with the train going forty miles an hour]
”Here are some of the things the fluent Paris 'c.o.c.kney' said...for the type corresponds in Paris to the lower-cla.s.s c.o.c.kney of London.
”'See here, you know, we've had enough of it...WE CAN'T STAND IT ANY MORE! I'm just back from the Chemin des Dames...you know what that's been for the last month'...then he gave me a terrible description of that battle...'how do you expect men to go back to that...do you know what happens to you when you live for twenty-thirty days like that?...you go mad! Yes, THAT'S what happens to you...that's what's the trouble with me now...I know I sound wild. I am wild...I CAN'T stand any more...it's more than flesh and blood can endure to go back into that! Why don't the Americans GET in it if they are going to? Oh, yes, I know they can't any sooner...but why didn't they get IN, before! Oh, yes, I know why. I know...but when you are mad you can't stop to reason. We look at it this way...When we're not mad, from having been too many days under fire...we say, as we talk it over...There are the English...they've done splendidly...they've taken two years, it is true, to get their army really in shape...but they didn't have anything to begin with...they're fine...all that we could expect. But all the same, during the two years, Frenchmen were dying like flies...just watering the whole North with blood...yes, I've seen a brook run red just like the silly poems that n.o.body believed. And the Americans...yes...suppose this man and I should get to quarrelling. Of course you can't jump right in and decide which is to blame, if you don't know much about the beginning. You HAVE to stand off and watch, and see which fights fair, and all the rest...BUT WHILE YOU ARE DECIDING, ALL FRANCE IS DYING. It is time the weight of the defence is taken off France...there won't be any Frenchmen left alive in France...and here she is with all these foreigners over-running her! Do you suppose they are going to leave after the war? Not much. All these Algerians and Senegals and Anamites--not to speak of the Belgians and English and Americans...there won't be any Frenchmen left alive, and France will be populated by foreigners...THAT'S what we have to look forward to for all the reward of our blood. They keep promising help, but they don't bring it. WE have to go back and go back! I tell you, Ma'ame, THREE YEARS IS TOO LONG A TIME! No man can stand three years of war! It makes you into somebody else... you've died so many times you're like a walking corpse...isn't that just how you feel?' he appealed to his companion, who said impa.s.sively,
”'No, d.a.m.n you, that isn't a bit how I feel. I just say to myself, ”IT'S WAR” and ”THAT'S THE WAY WAR IS,” and I don't TRY to make anything out of it the way you do. That's silly! You just have to stick it out. Understanding it hasn't anything to do with it.'
”The first one went off on another tack...still wilder and more incoherent. 'It's the capitalists...that's what it is...they saw that the people...the proletariat...that's ME,' with a thump of his fist on his chest, 'had begun to see too clearly how things were going and so they stirred up this hornet's nest to blind everybody...for in war even more than in peace (and that's saying a good deal)...it's the proletariat that bears the burdens. Who do you think is in the trenches now...is the bourgeois cla.s.s? NO!
It's the labouring cla.s.s. One by one, the bourgeois have slipped out of it. Got themselves the fat jobs at the rear, work in hospitals... anything but to stay out in the front-line trenches with us poor rats of working-people! Isn't that so?'
”He appealed to his companion, who answered again very calmly (it was extraordinary how they didn't seem to mind differing diametrically from each other. I suppose they had the long habit of arguing together). 'No, it's not so! In my company there are as many bourgeois as labouring men.'
”The first man never paid the least attention to these brief denials of everything he was saying. 'It's the proletariat that always pays...isn't it so, Ma'ame! Peace or war, old times or new, it's always the poor who pay all the debts! And they're doing it to such a tune now in France that there won't be any left, when the war is over... oh, it's got to stop. There's no use talking about it...and it WILL, too, one of these days...who CARES how it stops! Life...any sort of life...is better than anything else.'
”At this the other soldier said, 'Don't pay any attention to him, Madame, he always goes on so...but he'll stick it out just the same. We all will. That's the nature of the Frenchman, Madame. He must have his grievance. He must grumble and grumble but when it's necessary, he goes forward just the same...Only he has to talk such a lot before!'
”'Oh, yes, we'll HOLD them, fast enough!' agreed the first one.
'We'll never let them get past us!' (This type of declaring poilu is much given to contradicting himself flatly!) 'But never, never, NEVER an offensive again, from the French...you SEE, Madame--Never again an offensive from the French! They've done their share!
They've done more than their share. Never an offensive. We'll hold till the Americans get here, but not more!'
”We were pulling into the station at Meaux by this time, and as the train stood there waiting, I heard a sound that brought my heart up into my mouth...the sound of a lot of young men's voices singing an American College song! Everybody sprang to the windows and there was a group of American boys, in their nice new uniforms, singing at the tops of their voices, and putting their heads together like a college glee-club. Their clear young voices completely filled that great smoky station and rang out with the most indescribably confident inspiriting effect! 'Good G.o.d!' cried the dingy, battered soldier at my elbow, 'how little they know what they are going into!'
The soldier from Bourgogne said nothing, but looked very stern and sad. The contrast between those two men, one so rebellious, the other so grimly enduring, both so shabby and war-worn, and those splendidly fresh boys outside, seemed to me the most utterly symbolic episode imaginable. There was America--there was France.
”It changed the current of the talk. After that we talked all together, the two bourgeois joining in...sober talk enough, of probabilities and hopes and fears.
”As I walked home at one o'clock in the morning through the silent black streets of Paris, turning over and over what that poor disinherited slum-dweller had said as we parted, quite as earnestly and simply as he had poured out all his disgust and revolt, 'Good-bye, Ma'ame, I never met an American before. I hope I'll meet many more.