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A.E.F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

<h2>CHAPTER VI SUNNY FRANCE</h2> LATER on "Sunny France" became a mocking byword uttered by wet and muddy men, but during the early days in the training area no one had any just complaint about the weather. Come to think of it there wasn't anything very wrong with those early days in rural France. Five o'clock was pretty early for getting up but the sun could do it and keep cheerful. It was glorious country with hills and forests and plowed fields and red roofed villages and smooth white roads. The country people didn't throw their hats in the air like Parisians, but they were kindly though calm. "Down in ——," said a little doughboy who came from an Indiana farm, "everybody you meet says 'bon jour' to you whether they know you or not. That means 'good morning.' I was in Chicago once and they don't do it there." It wasn't Eden though. There was the tobacco situation against that theory. To a good many soldiers, pleasant weather and kindly folk and ample rations meant nothing much. These were minor things. The quartermaster had no Bull Durham. When the supply of American tobacco and cigarettes ran out the men tried the French products but not for long. "So they call these Grenades," muttered a soldier as he examined a popular French brand of cigarettes, "I guess that's because you'd better throw 'em away right after you set 'em going." French matches were less popular than French tobacco. The kind they sold in our town and thereabouts were all tipped with sulphur and usually exploded with a blue flame maiming the smoker and amusing the spectators. Political economists and others interested in the law of supply and demand may be interested to know that when the tobacco famine was at its height a package of Bull Durham worth five cents in America was sold by one soldier to another for five francs. This shortage has since been relieved from several sources, but there has never been more tobacco than the soldiers could smoke. Reading matter was also ardently desired during the early months in the Vosges. An enterprising storekeeper in one town sent a hurry call to Paris for English books and a week later she proudly displayed the following volumes on her shelves: "The Life of Dean Stanley," "Sermons by the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon," "The Jubilee Book of Cricket," "The Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins (Lord of Brampton)," and "The Recollections of the Rt. Hon. Sir Algernon West." A few companies had libraries of their own. I wonder who made the selection of titles. The volumes I picked out at random in one village were: "The Family Life of Heinrich Heine," "Fourteen Weeks in Astronomy," "Recollections and Letters of Renan," "Education and the Higher Life," "Bible Stories for the Young," and "Henry the Eighth and His Six Wives." The librarian said that the last was the most popular book in the collection although several readers admitted that it did not come up to expectations. Just as I was going out the top sergeant came in to return a book. I asked him what it was. He said, "It's a book called 'When Patty Went to College.'" Our town was big and had moving pictures twice a week, but up the line in the little villages there was no such source of amusement. After the men had been in training for a week or more, a French Red Cross outfit stopped at one of the villages with a traveling movie outfit and announced that they would show a picture that night. According to the announcement the picture was "Charlot en 'Le Vagabond.'" It sounded foreign and forbidding. The doughboys anticipated trouble with the titles and the closeups of what the heroine wrote and all the various printed words which go to make a moving picture intelligible. Still they were patient when the title of the picture was flashed on the screen and they tried to look interested. The first scene was a road winding up to a distant hill and down the highway with eccentric gait there walked a little man strangely reminiscent. He drew nearer and nearer and as the figure came into full view the soldier in front of me could stand the strain no longer. He jumped to his feet. "I'm a son of a gun," he shouted, "if it isn't Charlie Chaplin." Recognition upon the part of the audience was instantaneous and enthusiasm unbounded. If the Americans go out tomorrow and capture Berlin they cannot possibly show more joy than they did at the sight of Charlie Chaplin in France. Never again will the French be able to fool them by disguising him as "Charlot." After a bit the soldiers learned to entertain themselves and several companies developed a number of talented performers. The first company show I attended mixed boxing and music. They began with boxing. There was a short intermission during which the first tenor fixed up a bloody nose. He had received a bit the worst of it in the heavyweight bout. The other members of the quartet gave him cotton and encouragement. Finally he put on his shirt and hitching up his voice, began, "Naught but a few faded roses can my sweet story tell." His comrades joined him at "My heart was ever light," and they finished the ballad in perfect alignment. Almost all the songs were sentimental and many were old. They had "Dearie," and "Where the River Shannon Flows," and that one about Ireland falling out of Heaven (just as if the devil himself had not done the very same thing). Later there were "Mother Machree" and "Old Kentucky Home." Patriotism was not neglected. "When I Get Back Home Again to the U.S.A." was the favorite among the recent war songs. The only savor of army life in the program on this particular evening was in a couple of Mexican songs brought up from the border by men who went to get Villa. They brought back "Cucaracha" with all its seventeen obscene Spanish verses. There was also one parody inspired by this war and sung to the tune of "My Little Girl, I'm Dreaming of You." It went something like this: <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">America, I'm dreaming of you</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And I long for you each day</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">America, I'm fighting for you</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Tho' you're many miles away</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">We'll knock the block right off the Kaiser</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And we'll drive them 'cross the Rhine—</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And then we'll sail back home to you, dear</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">To the tune of "Wacht am Rhein"!</td></tr> </table> The American soldier does not seem to be much of a song maker. Songs by soldiers and for soldiers are not common with us yet. We have nothing as close to the spirit of the trenches as the British ditty "I want to go home," which always leaves the auditor in doubt as to whether he should take it seriously and weep or humorously and laugh. Possibly there is something of both elements in the song. The mixture has been typical of the British attitude toward the war. Here is the song: <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="poetry"> <tr><td align="left">I want to go 'ome</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">I want to go 'ome</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">The Maxims they spit</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">And the Johnsons they roar</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">I don't want to go to the front any more</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Oh take me over the seas</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Where the Alley-mans can't get at me</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">Oh my; I don't want to die,</td></tr> <tr><td align="left">I want to go 'ome.</td></tr> </table> The American army is still looking for a song. None of the new ones has achieved universal popularity. However the many who heard the quartet of Company L sing on this particular evening seemed to have no objection to the old songs. In fact they were new to many in the audience for as the concert went on French soldiers joined the audience and townspeople hung about the edges of the crowd. They listened politely and applauded, though indeed one must get a strange impression of America if his introduction is through our popular songs. Such a foreigner is in danger of believing that ours is a June land in which the moon is always shining upon a young person known as "little girl." Yet the French expressed no astonishment at the songs. Only one feature puzzled them profoundly. At the end of a particularly effective song the captain said, "Those men sang that very well. Bring 'em each a glass of water." No villager could quite understand why a man who had committed no more palpable crime than tenor singing should be forced to partake of a drink which is cold, tasteless and watery. Most the villages in our part of France had only one dimension. They consisted of a line of houses on either side of the roadway and they were always huddled together. Land is too valuable in France to waste it on lawns and suchlike. Some of the villages were tiny and shabby, but none was too small or too mean to be without its little café. It took the doughboys some little time to get over their interest in the startling fact that champagne was within the reach of the working man, but they went back to beer in due course and now champagne is among the things which shopkeepers must not sell to American soldiers. The prohibition of the sale of cognac and champagne is all that the army needs. Beer and light wines are not a menace to the health or behavior of our army. Beer is by far the most popular drink and it would be an ambitious man indeed who would seek the slightest deviation from sobriety in the thin war beer of France. He might drown. Absolute prohibition for the army in France would be well nigh impossible. It would mean that every inn and shop and railroad station and farmhouse would have to be classed as out of bounds. In fact prohibition could not be enforced unless our soldiers were ordered never to venture within four walls. Wine is to be had under every roof in France and you can get it also in not a few places where the roof has been shot to pieces. The French are interested in temperance just now. On many walls posters are exhibited showing a German soldier and a black bottle with the caption, "They are both the enemies of France," but when a Frenchman talks of temperance or prohibition or the abolition of the liquor traffic he never thinks of including wine or beer. The civil authorities of France would not be much use in helping the American army enforce a bone-dry order. They simply wouldn't understand it. There was some excessive drinking when the army first came to France but it has been checked. A number of influences have made for discretion. One of the most potent is the opportunity for promotion in an army in the field. Officers have been quick to point this out to their men. One captain called his company together in the early days and said, "Some of the men in this company are going out and getting pinko, stinko, sloppy drunk. Any man who gets drunk goes in the guard house of course and more than that he will get no promotion from me. I'm going to pick my sergeants from the fellows that have got sense. You may notice that some of the men who drink are old soldiers. Don't take an example from that. Remember that's why they're old soldiers. There isn't any sense in blowing all your money in for booze. Now if I took my pay in a lump at the end of a month I could buy every café in this town and I could stay drunk for a year. That would be fine business, wouldn't it?" "I guess maybe I exaggerated a little about the length of time I could stay drunk," the captain told me afterwards, "but do you know that talk seems to have done the trick." One factor which worked for temperance was the French fashion of making drinking deliberate and social. When an American can be induced to sit down to his potion he is comparatively safe. These little village cafés did no harm after the first brief period when the American soldier had his fling and they served the good purpose of encouraging fraternization between doughboy and poilu. The contact with French soldiers brought no great vocabulary to our men but if they learned few words they did get the hang of making their wants understood. In a week or two innkeepers or women in shops had no trouble at all in attending to the wants of Americans. Probably the French people made somewhat faster linguistic progress than the soldiers. The Americans were willing to be met at least halfway. When I asked one doughboy, "How do you get along with the French? Can you make them understand you?" he said, "Why, they're coming along pretty well. I think most of 'em will pick it up in time." But there was one French word the soldiers had to learn. That was "fineesh." The children forced that word upon them. They were always at the heels of the American soldiers. They galloped the doughboys up and down the village streets in furious piggyback charges. They borrowed jam from company cooks and rode in the supply trucks. Of course there had to be an end to the rides, sometimes, and even to the jam and the only way to convince the children of France that an absolute unshakable limit had been reached was to thrust two hands aloft and cry "fineesh." The old women liked the doughboys too because they would draw water from the wells for them and occasionally lend a hand in moving wood or wheat or fodder. Nor do I mean to imply that the younger women of the little villages did not esteem the doughboys. "Tell 'em back home that there aren't any good looking women in France," was the message that ever so many soldiers asked me to convey to anxious individuals in America. I hand the message on but must refuse to pass upon its sincerity. American officers got along well with the French but they never reached the same degree of chumminess that the men did. They met French officers at more or less formal luncheons and had to go through a routine of speeches largely concerned with Lafayette and Rochambeau and Washington. Poilus and doughboys did not go so far back for their subjects of conversation. The American enlisted man had a great advantage over his officer in the matter of language. He might know less French, but he was much more ready to experiment. An officer did not like to make mistakes. His was defensive French, a weapon to be used guardedly in cases of extreme need. When a visiting officer hurled a compliment at him he replied, but he seldom took the initiative. After all he was an American officer and he feared to make himself ridiculous by poor pronunciation and worse grammar. The soldier had no such scruples. He saw no reason why he should be any more abashed by French grammar than by English and as for pronunciation he followed the advice of a little pamphlet called "The American in France" which was rushed out by some French firm for sale to the American army. In the matter of pronunciation the book said, "Since pronunciation is the most difficult part of any language the publishers of this book have decided to omit it." The soldiers were ready to adopt this method and only wished that it could be extended to other things. To trench digging for instance. The most daring man in the use of an unfamiliar language was not a soldier but a second lieutenant. He took great pride in his talent for pantomime and asserted that his vocabulary of some thirty words and his gestures filled all his needs. He was somewhat startled though on an afternoon when he went into a shop to purchase "B.V.D.'s" and found the store in charge of the young daughter of the proprietor. Pantomime seemed hardly the thing and so he paused long to think up a word for the garment he wanted or some approximation. At last he smiled and exclaimed brightly, "Chemise pour jambes, s'il vous plait." Stores were not the strong point of our bit of France. We soon came to regard our town as a metropolis because people journeyed there to make "shopping tours." One afternoon I marked fifteen visiting soldiers with their eyes glued against a shop window which displayed half a dozen electric flashlights, two quarts of champagne, a French-English dictionary and a limited assortment of postcards. These, of course, were barred from the mail by censorship but the soldiers collected them to be taken home after the war. "These French postcards aren't exactly what some of the boys back home are going to expect," one soldier admitted. "I went to three shops now but the others have been ahead of me and all I could get was these two. One's a picture called 'l'eglise' and the other's 'la maison de Jeanne d'Arc.'" The shops had hard work in keeping up with more commodities than picture postcards. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for canned peaches and sardines. Somehow or other men who have been on a long march simply crave either sardines or canned peaches. The doughboys did a good deal of eating at their own expense. Army food was plentiful and moderately varied. Beans and corned beef hash were served a good many times perhaps, but there was no lack of fresh meat and there was plenty of jam and of carrots and onions and heavy gravy. Food, however, was an outlet for spending money and in some villages the men got so eager that they would buy anything. Little traveling shops in wagons came through the smaller villages in the northern part of the training area loaded with all sorts of gimcracks intended for the peasant trade. The peddlers had no time to put in a special line for the soldiers. They found that it was not necessary. Desperate men with pockets full of money would purchase even the imitation tortoise shell sidecombs which the itinerant merchants had to sell. The purchasing capacity of the soldier was not limited to his pay alone. The villagers were wildly excited about the white bread issued to the American army. It was the first they had seen since the second year of the war. One old lady seized a loaf which was presented to her and crying "il est beau," sat down upon a doorstep and began to eat the bread as if it were cake. The rate of exchange fluctuated somewhat but there were days when a loaf of white bread could be exchanged for a whole roast chicken. The eagerness of the American soldier to spend his money had the result of tempting French storekeepers to raise their prices and as the cost of living mounted the civilian population began to complain. Even the soldiers had suspicions at last that they were being charged too much in some stores and the American officers took over price control as another of their many responsibilities. "I went to the mayor," one town major explained, "and I said, 'Look here, Bill, I don't mind 'the shopkeepers putting a little something over. All I ask is that they just act reasonable. They'll get all the money in time anyhow, and so I wish you'd tip them off not to be in so much of a hurry.' He couldn't talk any English, that mayor couldn't, but the interpreter told him about it and he went right to the front for us. From that day to this we've had only one complaint about anything in our village. That came from an old lady who had some doughboys billeted in a barn next to the shed where she kept her sheep. She came to me and said the soldiers talked so much at night that the sheep couldn't sleep." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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