A SOLDIER’S MOTHER
IN FRANCE

By
RHETA CHILDE DORR
Author of Inside the Russian Revolution

INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright 1918
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.

To the other mothers;
I dedicate this book.
Rheta Childe Dorr.
September, 1918

CONTENTS

A Soldier’s Mother in France

CHAPTER I
WHERE THE LONG TRAIL LED

On the lapel of my coat I wear a little pin, a pin with a single star, ruby red on a bar of white. My only son is a member of the American Expeditionary Force in France. More than a million American women wear pins like mine. Some have two stars, three, even four, and every one covers a heart heavy with anxiety and foreboding. That little service pin which mothers wear, fathers, too; sisters, sweethearts, wives, is a symbol of sacrifice. It should be something more than that.

My star has come to mean love of country far surpassing the mild patriotism of other days. It means confidence and courage for whatever in these tragic times I shall need courage. It means pride in the young manhood of America and hope unbounded for the future of America, which lies in their hands. Before I went to France I wore my service pin for one soldier—my son. I wear it now for the American army. If I can, by writing of that army as I have just seen it in France, lessen a little for other women the burden of anxiety and dread I shall count my journey worth while.

I went to France as a correspondent, a reporter, to write about the war. I was sent, not because I am a woman, but in spite of the fact, and merely because my editors believed that I could handle that particular job. My letter of credentials to the French Foreign Office said that I had reported the Russian revolution for my paper and that I was now assigned to France with the view of informing readers in the United States as to participation of United States troops in war and the political situations of the allied countries in the war.

I hope that my editors’ confidence in me was not entirely misplaced and that I did not quite fall down on my job. But what I experienced in France and what I brought out with me were not exactly what I had expected. I went to France as a correspondent, deeply interested in my work, but very soon after I arrived and almost with my first contact with our marvelous new army I forgot all about my work. I forgot that I was in France after military and political facts.

I forgot that I was a correspondent. I was conscious only that I was a mother. The mother of a boy in France. I was one in heart with a million other American women I have never seen and will never see; one with every woman in the land who wears a service pin.

I discovered that try as I might to think of armies, strategies and diplomacies, the only thing that vitally concerned me in France was to find out how my son was faring, and in doing so I was finding out the things that other mothers wanted to know about their boys.

Where they are, how they live, who their comrades are, how they work and play, what they are learning, how they get along with their strange new neighbors, the French people, and what the war is doing to their minds and souls, as well as their bodies. I wanted, fervently, to know all this about one soldier, and I believed that the other women would like to know about their own.

Our soldiers are more than three thousand miles away from home, and they have gone on a terrible errand. We know less about war than any other women in the world, but we know that it is a brutal, pitiless, bloodthirsty business. We know that bodies perish in war, and sometimes souls, which is worse. Going over in the steamer a horrible story was told me, a story which turned out to be quite untrue, but which when I heard it cost me a sleepless night. It was to the effect that vice was so rampant in all the armies that a whole shipload of hopelessly diseased Australian soldiers had recently sailed from England. The hospitals had salvaged many, it was said, but these men, who had left home clean, wholesome, decent boys, were now being sent back to die, physical and moral wrecks. Some, it was certain, would commit suicide during the voyage.

That tale filled me with such terror that I went to some lengths to investigate it. It was quite untrue, and I repeat it here only because it is representative of stories that are current everywhere and add greatly to the sufferings of the women at home. The first thing I want to say about our army is that the men are morally as safe in France as they could possibly be at home. I made it my particular business to know it.

I spent three months in France, traveling over most of the considerable territory occupied by the American forces. I visited something like twenty-five camps, small ones, large ones and immense ones, where the men are training, where they are being made into experts in special lines of fighting; where they are at work building miles of wharves, warehouses, cold storage plants, barracks and hospitals; where they are laying railroads and dredging rivers; where they are performing marvels of constructive work necessary to the life of an army far removed from its base.

I met and talked with thousands of soldiers in their camps, in the Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross canteens, in many ancient towns of central France. I saw our men disembarking from their transports, and I saw them tramping through ice-cold mud to the front-line trenches. I talked with them in their billets in lonely little villages of the north, and in vacation cities of the azure south. I have visited American soldiers in hospitals and I have knelt beside their graves. Our soldiers have only one enemy, and that is the Germans. That enemy they must fight and conquer, and we over here must steel our hearts to the sacrifices of life, the suffering and maiming that are absolutely inevitable and will have to be borne. The casualty lists, every day growing a little longer, are bound to grow even longer. What English mothers and French mothers, what all the people of all the warring nations have endured, we shall have to endure. It is the world’s pain and we can not escape it.

What we Americans have to help us bear what is coming in the next few months is the knowledge that our losses are going to be as few as possible. Life is to be safeguarded as far as human agencies can devise. Our army is organized for that. Men are not to be sacrificed unnecessarily. The best science in the world is being mobilized to save suffering and to heal wounds. Sickness and accident are being guarded against. Drunkenness and immorality are under strictest ban.

Some of this I was privileged to hear from the man who perhaps more than any other individual is responsible for the lives and the souls of our men in France, General Pershing. I saw him twice, once briefly in Paris, where he talked to me five minutes before leaving for an allied war council at Versailles, and once at length in his headquarters in a quaint old town which is the general headquarters of the staff of our army in France.

General Pershing is the least formal of any great officer I have ever seen, with the notable exception of “Papa” Joffre, but generals are all very important personages and have to be addressed with circumspection. I wanted very much to say to General Pershing, but of course I didn’t, that after seeing him I felt a whole lot easier about my especial soldier. A more human commanding officer, one more concerned about the last detail of the life of the enlisted man, I am sure never lived. He spoke of the soldiers as a father speaks of his sons, with pride and passionate concern.

“They are the best in the world,” he said, and he added that although our talk was private and that he could not be quoted, I was at liberty to repeat those words: “Our soldiers are fine men, clean, strong, intelligent, and they will make magnificent fighters. Tell the people at home, especially the mothers, that they can be proud of their men. Tell them that almost without exception their behavior is beyond criticism. Tell them that for me.”

Proud of their commander also may the American people be, and over and above all, proud of the cause for which the American soldiers fight and for which they are ready to die. Not in the whole history of the world has a more righteous war been fought. I do not think the majority of Americans yet dream of the depth of depravity contemplated by the men who brought about the war. We have heard of German atrocities and we have shuddered at the recital.

But the plan and object of this war on the part of those Prussians who are responsible for it constitute the worst atrocity of all, for the plan was the murder of Christian civilization and the object was the enslavement of mankind.

I have seen some of the effects of a partial success of the German war lords’ plan, and I, the mother of a soldier on the French front, say to the mothers of other soldiers that I would be ashamed to have him anywhere else. Not long before leaving France I saw him for a short hour, a simple enlisted man in a humble post of duty. The spring wind blowing over the devastated and ravished plains bore the roaring of artillery plainly to our ears. Every day since then those guns have roared nearer, and now that part of France is closed to civilians.

The next message that came out of the sector where the Americans hold the line brought mourning and tears to many women. And yet I can truthfully say that I would be happier to have my son dead in France, sleeping in a soldier’s grave beyond the sea, than to have him alive and safe, shirking his duty in a bullet-proof job at home.

I do not believe that in the years to come there is going to be much happiness for the men who are shirking, nor for the women who may be encouraging them to shirk. The shirkers are going to play a very pitiful part in the national life of this country after the war. The men who come home will be the rulers of America’s future destiny. They will be the strong builders of our greatness. They are learning in this war how to build.

CHAPTER II
I ADOPT THE AMERICAN ARMY

Looking back over my three months in France, most of the time spent in visiting American military camps, some experiences stand out above all others. One, a precious personal experience, gave me my first insight into the splendid idealism and individual worth of the enlisted men of our army. I had gone to France a newspaper correspondent, without a single plan, without even a hope of seeing my soldier son. I had no intention of using my privileged position to seek him out. I did not know where he was, nor did I ask.

The American soldier abroad is theoretically still in America. He gets his letters through an American branch post-office in Paris, and they are sent to him in care of his regiment and his company, with no more definite address than “American Expeditionary Force.” My son knew my Paris address, but he could not, even had he wished to do so, tell me his.

With a few thousand more impatient youngsters my boy had enlisted before the draft, fearing that he might draw a late number. He signed up on the day when I sailed for Russia, and he was in France nearly two months before I returned to the United States. Thus our separation had been a longer one than was usual in this war. So when he wrote me in February that he had been given a week’s leave and hoped to be sent to Aix-les-Bains, I hoped so too most fervently, because I had been ordered to Aix-les-Bains to write the story of the first vacation of our soldiers.

I arrived two days after the first contingent of men, the dried mud of the trenches caking their uniforms and their worn boots, had marched to music and cheers through the flag-draped streets of Aix. I drove directly from the station to the headquarters of the provost marshal, and asked if a certain private soldier was in town, and if so where. He was there, and a sympathetic young man in uniform of the military police searched the lists for the record of his hotel. It is part of the intelligent care taken of our soldiers overseas that even on their permissions, or leaves from duty, the highest authorities know exactly where they live and how. No mother need worry lest her son get lost in France. He can’t get lost.

In two minutes I had my son’s address and was on my way to the hotel. He was not there, but the black-eyed little patronne, also sympathetic, found me a room on his floor. It was near the luncheon hour and I sat down at the window nearest the street, eagerly scrutinizing every soldier who passed, especially those who turned in at the hotel gate. Finally a soldier came swinging down the street, and it seemed to me that he looked familiar. Yet I was not sure. Could nine months make such a difference in a boy of twenty? This one, with the absurd little tooth-brush mustache and the cap on the side of his head, was taller, broader, straighter than my son. He was more intensely alive. Yet he walked like my Julian.

I waited for him to come up-stairs, but he did not come. I decided that he had gone directly to the dining-room, so I went down-stairs and into the big room, every table of which was filled with uniformed men, eating, laughing and talking.

It was the boy. I was so overwhelmed at the sight of him that I could not take more than a step into the room. I could not speak. Something of my intense emotion must have reached him, for he looked up, saw me, and in one bound was beside me with his arms wide, just as when I used to visit him unexpectedly at school. “Mother, mother!” he cried. Instantly at the word the noisy talk and laughter stopped dead, and every man in the room sprang to his feet. It was not a tribute to me, but to their own mothers at home. Right there I adopted the American army.

I am proud to say that a small section of the American army, all of it in that hotel, adopted me. Some were too shy to come up and be introduced, but I had broad smiles whenever I met any of them, and always, when I entered the dining-room, the same chivalric greeting.

I talked with hundreds of soldiers during that week in Aix-les-Bains, and in the little town of Chambéry, two miles distant, also a vacation center for our men. It is not mere boasting to say that they are, man for man, the most amazingly fine-looking soldiers in the world. They average rather larger than the English, and broader and more muscular than either English or French.

“Regardez donc, les épaules!” Look at the shoulders, I have heard dozens of Frenchmen exclaim. And they might as well exclaim, look at their pink and healthy skins, their clear eyes and splendid teeth. A generation ago we were known as a nation of dyspeptics. No one in France or England will ever call us that again. Our soldiers are as nearly perfect physical specimens as any men alive.

They are remarkably intelligent. Their eyes and ears are wide open to learn all they can of the wonderful land of France, and especially of the historic past which lives in old châteaus, ruined castles and Roman remains all over France. Aix-les-Bains, as every one probably knows, is in Savoy, which was once an Italian state, but which voted itself French sometime in the eighteen-fifties. In Chambéry is an ancient château which was the seat of the former dukes of Savoy. It is a picturesque old pile, built in the thirteenth century and still habitable.

Those American soldiers overran the château, climbed the corkscrew stone staircase to the top of the tallest watch tower, swarming over the ivy-clad walls, exploring every corner of the place. They speculated on probable methods of warfare and defense in the thirteenth century, and quarreled cheerfully as to how long their regiment could have held the château against the assaults of the other fellows’ regiment. They had more fun with that château than any of its original owners ever had.

They climbed mountains around Aix, taking delight in all-day hikes above the early spring snow line. They seemed thrilled at the thought that they, fresh from Iowa, North Dakota, Georgia, Texas, were actually looking across the valleys and hills at Mont Blanc and the Alps. Bicycles could be rented for about fifteen cents an hour, and hundreds of men spent their time exploring the country around. In the late afternoons and evenings they gathered in the big magnificent casino, now under lease to the Y. M. C. A., and delightfully swapped experiences.

During the entire week I never once saw a drunken or a disorderly soldier. One day at luncheon one youth who had imbibed a little too freely of vin ordinaire, perfectly accessible to all, and very cheap, suddenly became inspired to sing. The only thing he could think of was the doxology, and he sang one whole line of it before he was pulled back into his seat and his vocal efforts extinguished in a roar of laughter. That was the sole and only approach to rough-house I witnessed in Aix.

The healthy enjoyment and the consistent good behavior of the Americans seemed to impress the French as miraculous. Half a dozen French officers on leave in the famous watering place spent hours in the Y. M. C. A. headquarters, and townspeople brought their families to see the Americans, hear them sing Over There, and Joan of Arc, and stag dance to the music of Lieutenant Europe’s famous regimental band. Europe, who used to play for idle New York to tango, has a band of colored soldiers who are going to be known all over the continent before the war ends. The men all sing as well as play, and their music is really remarkable. Whenever a colored soldier appeared on the street the French children followed him in a rapt procession. They followed all the Americans, but Europe’s men had them hypnotized.

In Aix I saw the beginning of what I believe is going to be a never-ending friendship and understanding between the American people and the French. You have heard, no doubt, about how the French double the prices of everything as soon as an American soldier enters a town. Some French shopkeepers have done this, of course. The American soldier seems to be rolling in wealth, and he rarely even counts his change. The temptation to overcharge a man who throws down a fifty franc note in payment for an apple, carelessly inquiring “Is that enough,” must be pretty strong. But let me tell you that avarice is not the ruling passion of the French, and their dealings with the American soldier are often marked with consideration most extraordinary.

Vacations do not come cheaply to the American soldier in France, at least the stay at Aix-les-Bains was not cheap. Every man who went there was supposed to have a minimum of one hundred and fifty francs, or twenty-seven dollars, in his possession. When he registered at the office of the provost marshal he drew a slip of paper with the name of a hotel on it. To that hotel he was obliged to go. The tariff varied from ninety-three to one hundred and twenty-eight francs for the week, and this sum, seventeen dollars and sixty-four cents to twenty-three dollars and four cents, had to be paid in advance.

A few of the soldiers failed to get this into their heads before coming, and there was considerable borrowing in the first few days. Lucky were they who had friends from whom to borrow. One tall shy youth from Georgia, I think it was Georgia, came to the Y. M. C. A. with a pathetic tale of tragedy based on the fact that he had arrived in Aix with only eighty francs in his pocket. He had probably never been twenty miles from his home village before he went to France with his regiment, and here he found himself shut out from his hotel in a strange European town, with thirteen dollars and sixty cents less than he needed to support existence.

The Y. M. C. A. secretary suggested that he go back and ask permission to stay as long as his money lasted, but the boy was too frightened and forlorn to make the venture. Besides, he spoke no French and could never explain himself to that terrible patronne. In France it is always the women who hold the cash-box and manage the business end of hotel keeping.

The Y. M. C. A. secretary put on his hat and went back with the drooping Georgian to plead with the patronne. She had not previously understood the case, and now was all kindness and sympathy.

“The poor infant!” she exclaimed. “So far away from home and only eighty francs. Wait, monsieur, until I consult my husband.”

Soon she came back smiling. “It is all right, monsieur,” she said. “The big infant may stay the week for eighty francs. We also have a son under the colors. May some one be a little kind to him when he needs it.”

This story, I believe, is more truly typical of the spirit of the French people toward our men than any tale of extortion, however true.

CHAPTER III
SEEING AMERICA OVER THERE

Vacation days are always swift flying, but that vacation week I spent in Aix-les-Bains with my soldier son broke all the records for brevity. The day of departure came almost before I realized that we had been fortunate enough to meet. We left Aix within a few hours of each other, my train first. I had a last glimpse of the boy standing on the station platform waving his cap and smiling. How is it that we can smile at such moments? Perhaps only because we are a little something more than dust, because we have aspirations, dim and dreaming though they may be, beyond mortal life and love. So we went our ways toward our separate duties, he to the front, I to the rear. His task was to fight, mine to write. If he could go to his work with a smile, then I could too. And I did.

I want to visualize to the American people who have sons and brothers and husbands in this war the immensity of the work the men have undertaken. Not only the work of fighting, but of building and preparation. Fighting furnishes the most spectacular and tragic aspect of war. But that is not all there is to the great game. War is a stupendous business enterprise. It is a feat of engineering beside which the building of the Panama Canal looks like a mere pastime. When I started out to see America, as it had established itself in France, I did not dream of the greatness I was to encounter, a greatness which has fairly staggered and inspired those of our allies who have seen it.

The first anniversary of the American entrance into the world war was the occasion of what almost might be called special American editions of most of the large English and French newspapers. Columns of space in these papers were devoted to encomiums of praise of our enterprise, our ingenuity, our manifold and miraculous accomplishments in the space of twelve short months. Miraculous was a word most frequently used, miraculous and astounding.

It is too bad that the people of the United States can not at present be told all of the amazing feats of building, engineering, transportation and railroad construction which have so impressed the allies abroad. It would inspire and encourage them to know it, but unfortunately it is necessary to keep as many of the details as possible a secret from Germany. Before the fateful August day in 1914, when the vast German army started on its march across doomed Belgium, the war lords knew the French railroad system as well as they knew their own. They had maps of every foot of railroad in the French republic. They had an accurate catalogue of French rolling stock, and they knew exactly the number and capacity of railroad manufacturing and repair shops. They probably knew the railroad men of the country down to the last patch on an engineer’s overalls.

But the Germans do not know what has happened to the French railroad system since April 6, 1917, the date of our entrance into the war. Of course we do not want them to know, but I don’t mind telling them that what has happened deserves the adjectives lavished on us by the English and French newspapers. I have been over hundreds of miles of that part of the French railroad system which moves our men and their supplies from ocean ports to the fighting front, and I agree with Secretary Baker when he said, on his departure from France, that what had been accomplished was inspiring to behold.

I shall never forget a Sunday that I spent at a railroad station in a town in central France. The town, which can not be named, is a small and not very important manufacturing city, but it is now one of the important junctions in the chain of railroads leading from the southwestern and northwestern seaports to the battle-front of the northeast.

The day was Sunday, just three days after the great push of March twenty-first began. I was returning to Paris after a visit to certain large aviation fields in the neighborhood, and got off at this junction for luncheon and a change of cars. Few French trains now carry restaurant wagons, and travelers, except on express trains, have to carry luncheon baskets or depend on station buffets.

I arrived at the junction at eleven o’clock, but I did not take the two o’clock Paris express, as I had planned. I stayed in the station all day and all evening watching the breath-taking procession of trains tearing northward to the fight, and the equally amazing procession of trains rolling southward and bearing the flotsam and jetsam of battle—wounded and dying men, despairing refugees, damaged guns, broken airplanes. French trains, including our own over there, move methodically in blocks called marches. They never have any traffic tie-ups, because all the trains move at exactly the same speed, and every train has its prescribed place in the marche, just so far ahead or behind the next train. It is an excellent system. But it seemed to me that day that the trains would certainly telescope one another, they came on and on so unceasingly and so close together.

The trains moving northward were laden with soldiers, horses, guns, airplanes, ammunition wagons, food, supplies of every conceivable description. Trainload after trainload of horses, eight to a car with four men, generally asleep on the hay in the middle space of the car. The horses, beautiful, tragic creatures, going to almost certain destruction wrung the heart to see. They gazed out at the flying landscape and the cheering station crowds with big, soft, uncomprehending eyes. How I wish we did not have to use horses in war. Of course the lives of men are far more valuable, but the men at least know why they fight and die.

Trainloads of men, so many that within an hour I had ceased to count them, rolled through that junction. Men from England, Frenchmen hurriedly recalled from leave in their southern homes. All ages. I saw French boys who must have been eighteen, but who looked younger by two years, and I saw men who might have been grandfathers. These older men do not often fight. They serve meals in the trenches and perform other non-combatant services. All France—all—is mobilized for some kind of service.

Sometimes these troop trains made brief stops at our station. Of course, there was a Red Cross canteen there, and I worked with the fine French women who were in charge of it, ladling hot coffee into mugs, and handing thick sandwiches to the crowding, hungry poilus. Some of the trains had their own kitchens, portable affairs on flat cars, and when the train stopped the men fairly boiled out of the carriages, pails and bowls in hand, to get the delicious soup prepared by the cooks. The Red Cross women supplemented the meal with sandwiches and coffee, at least when time permitted, which was not often. Those troop trains were on their way north with no unnecessary stops.

More often than not the trains did not stop. Once as a train was rolling through the station a soldier called to me asking for the newspaper I held in my hand. Of course I gave it to him, sprinting along the platform at a lively rate. The next time I saw a train coming I ran to the newsstand and bought three francs’ worth of papers, about as many as I could carry, and had them ready for rapid distribution to the effusive and laughing soldiers.

But right in the middle of that exciting procession of trains came something that brought my heart to my throat. It was an immensely long train of all new cars, painted olive drab, with U. S. A. in white letters on the side. And the cars, dozens and dozens of them, were loaded with railroad building material. Portable tracks, switches, signals, exactly like the expensive and fascinating toy railroads which children delight in. Steel rails, wooden ties, machinery for laying them, flat cars, wheels, tools and nails, and last of all tiny little locomotives, two of them to a flat car, all American, going up to the front with the French and the English soldiers.

Right behind that train of cars came another, a shorter one, and this was full of brown-clad American engineers, going up to the front with the allied soldiers, to lay those tracks and operate that little narrow-gauge railroad under gun-fire. Our own sons.

That was not all. In the middle of the afternoon another train went northward, olive drab, with U. S. A. in white letters. This was a hospital train of entirely new cars, the finest and most complete I had ever seen. It was a palace on wheels, with every conceivable appliance for the comfort of wounded soldiers. There were kitchen cars, operating cars, X-ray compartments, cars with beds, cars with couches for the sitting cases. Cars for doctors and nurses as well as patients. Nothing I had seen, not even men going into the trenches, brought home to me so sharply the fact that we were in the war and were fully determined to hold our end up.

We could not have done it so well had we not, in the last fifty years, developed such extraordinary railroad builders and operators. The French had a railroad system adequate for peace-time uses, but when war came, and especially after the tide of Americans began to pour into the country, the system had to be enormously enlarged. It had to be planned and organized also, in order not to disturb unduly the life of the country. And it had to be done quickly.

It is not going beyond the permissible line to say that our railroad experts have worked out a wonderful system for the transportation of men and supplies. Several big seaports in the northwest now receive most of the men who in larger and larger units are being transported to France. One very large port in the southwest is the receiving station of most of the supplies sent over. A network of railroads, some of which we have double-tracked, convey these men and the supplies eastward and northward to their destinations. There is never any confusion of freight and passenger trains, because they do not start from the same ports, and most of the time they are not even on the same lines.

All through central France along this railroad system the Americans have taken over old towns and cities as bases for war work. Outside of the towns are great camps, with army bakeries, quartermasters’ depots, hospitals, shops and factories. In one of these camps, near a railroad junction, is a supply station which is preparing to feed a million men at the front. At another camp I saw a distribution depot for medical and surgical supplies for the whole army. At both of these camps railroad building was going on at a lively rate, miles and miles of spurs and switches.

At a lovely old town which was once the stronghold of feudal barons, whose hoary old château rises over the place like a watch tower, I saw an immense factory for repairing locomotives and rolling stock. It was no flimsy wooden structure built for a few months, but an enormous mass of brick and concrete such as we build in Pittsburgh and Gary. I saw in the woods outside this town gangs of American foresters. I saw American sawmills. I saw logging trains manned by Americans.

I have seen American workmen making wagons, portable houses, trucks, locomotives. I have seen them building cold storage warehouses and ice-making plants. Building them substantially, as though we had moved to Europe to stay, as indeed we have until we put the war out of the world, together with the militarism that made it.

Do the Germans know it? Their leaders do, of course, but I doubt very much whether the mass of the people do. Working under guard in many of our camps in France are gangs of German prisoners. Watching several hundred of these men, in fierce green uniforms and shapeless boots, I asked the young officer who was my escort what they thought of the American activities.

“I was curious about that, too,” he replied, “and I took pains to find out. Would you believe it, that most of the prisoners refuse to credit the fact that we are here at all? They say, ‘Before we were taken prisoner our officers told us that we would see soldiers who would claim to be Americans, but they aren’t. They are Canadians or English. The Americans can not get over here. Our kaiser has said so.’”

In another camp I asked the same question. What did the Germans think about us? They say, I was told, that they didn’t mind building railroads in France. The kaiser would be glad to have them when he came. What will happen to the kaiser when the German people learn the truth?

CHAPTER IV
PIONEERS, OH, PIONEERS

The man on sentry duty on that section of the huge unfinished wharf was in a bad humor. He was in a very bad humor. If a stray cat or dog had appeared on the wharf at that moment he would probably have kicked it. As it was a woman in the khaki-colored uniform of a war correspondent, the sentry contented himself with roaring a challenge that brought her up standing. Having produced her pass, he stood aside with a scowl, shouldered the rifle which had been pointed at her most menacingly, and made a gesture with his head which meant, “Well, then, move on.”

But the correspondent—I was the correspondent—did not move on. I stopped and said, mildly: “You don’t seem to be enjoying yourself to-day. What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” he repeated furiously. “Every darn thing is the matter. What did I leave my business for, what did I leave my wife and kids for? Why, to come over here and fight the boche. And what am I doing? Roustabout work on a blasted line of docks, miles away from the front. Been here five months in this hole, working like a subway digger.

“Look at the town back there where we go for a bit of amusement when the day’s over. Worse than any slum back home. Talk about the horrors of the trenches. I’d swap the mud we live in for any trench. Talk about Fritz’s poison gas. When the wind’s right the fumes from that picric acid factory up the river blow down and choke the lungs out of us.”

“Do you get these spells often?” I asked. Whereupon he grinned a little and relaxed his scowl. I asked him where he lived and he named a thriving town in western Kansas. He had a real estate business in town, but his folks still lived on the big farm which his father had proved up on forty years ago. It was a fine place, yielding a big income, enough to keep the old people in comfort for the rest of their lives, and to support his young family while he was at the war.

I came from the prairies myself, and I could just see that farm and the old folks who had gone out to Kansas in their lusty youth to take up government land. They had built a sod house, turned up the tough prairie grass, plowed and sowed and cultivated under the burning sun, performed the terrible labor to get their first meager corn crops.

They had fought drought and grasshoppers, lived through blizzards and cyclones, endured poverty and privations untold. They were pioneers. Of such is the greatness and the virtue of our America.

I sat down on a nail keg and talked to that lonely, homesick, aggrieved soldier about the pioneers. From England first, and later from every other country in the world they had come, moved by the divine unrest of ambitious spirits, to the United States.

They had crossed the plains in rough wagons, daring weather, starvation and thirst, hostile Indians. They had leveled forests, they had built homes with no tools but axes and hand saws. They had farmed arid lands. They had lived in caves and dugouts. They had raised corn that some years they had been forced to burn for fuel because there was no market for it. But they lived, and won out, and built homes for their children.

And now, once more the Americans are pioneering. They are pioneering in France. They are building an army and doing it, as their fathers before them, from the ground up. “If you were not building these miles of docks and warehouses, if we didn’t have hundreds of thousands of men constructing ice plants, storage warehouses, railroads, barracks, bakeries, hangars, hospitals, how would the men in the trenches get food and ammunition and clothes and medical supplies and everything else they have to have before they can win the war?” I put it to him straight, and he turned an uncomfortable pink.

“Of course, you are right,” he said. “But we have to blow off once in a while. You see we didn’t know anything about it before we came. We drew our numbers in the draft, and most of us were mighty glad of it. We had the time of our lives in training camp, and we thought we were going right into the big show.

“We thought the engineers would be right up at the front building railroads for the artillery. Instead of that we are kept down here, hundreds of miles from the fighting, doing the kind of hard labor some of us have money enough to hire done at home.

“Why, do you know,” he continued, “that in——,” naming a near-by engineering camp, where immense seaplane hangars were being built, “there is one company of two hundred and fifty men, every one a graduate of a university or a technical school? All of those men are in overalls, doing day labor.”

I did know those men. I had seen them, or some of them, the day before at the noon hour smoking short pipes and cigarettes, sitting or sprawling on their backs beside the road. And a fine, husky, happy lot they were, too. Nothing in their university careers ever did for them what this rough job of pioneering was doing.

There was one man there who had put in a magnificent water system in his home town. When he went to France the newspapers gave him a great send-off, described his work, and said that no doubt he would be called on to take charge of the water system in one of the large French cities. When I met him he was acting as water boy to a railroad tie carrying squad.

The engineers in this part of France publish a monthly magazine called The Spiker. They love to get hold of these newspapers notices and to publish them with comments. From a San Francisco paper they gleaned that “Willie ——, the cotillion leader of last season’s younger set, leaves for France shortly with the Blankth Engineers to take charge, it is understood, of the construction of a telephone system contemplated by the government to facilitate the hauling of troops to the front.”

The comment records that the erstwhile cotillion leader, Private ——, is now on the business end of a No. 2 shovel.

Well, what of it? The shovel work has to be done just as the prairie sod had to be turned. The men growl about it sometimes, but mostly they grin. They chalk “P. G.” on the backs of their jumpers, the same letters appearing in white on the vivid green uniforms of the German captives at work in many camps.

They mean Prisonnier de Guerre, war prisoner, and when the weather is cold and rainy and letters from home are delayed, and spirits sink, you can hardly blame the men from feeling at times a little like prisoners. They had expected excitement and perhaps some glory, and hard work and isolation is their lot.

But what they are doing, tedious enough day by day, is in the aggregate splendid and invaluable to the success of our army. The like of it was never done before by any army in the world. When the Germans see it, as they will some day through their newspapers, they will be aghast at the hugeness of it.

They had sneered at the idea of the Americans sending a large army to France. How could they send an army? An army can’t swim, nor can it fly, and the Americans had no ships. Even if they found ships and sent men enough, how could they feed, clothe and equip them? How could they keep up their supplies?

The Americans could and did perform all these miracles because they had in them the blood of pioneers, of men and women whom no difficulties could afright, no obstacles turn back. Our soldiers have proved themselves in countless army camps abroad to be worthy sons of the breed.

I remember one big aviation camp which was built in a few months out of short lengths of boards because the colonel and his staff couldn’t get any better lumber. They were told that they couldn’t buy any lumber at all, that there was none available in that part of France. But they did get it, and they built the camp. The men lived in tents during the coldest weeks of winter with icy winds blowing over the barren plain. All aviation camps are built on big plains.

In spite of the cold the men had no stoves furnished them. No doubt stoves were contemplated, but they did not reach the camp. But you can’t freeze pioneers. Those boys just went to work and built stoves, built them out of mud, brick and stones, oil cans and biscuit tins and any other old junk they could find lying around. They made stovepipes out of condensed milk cans, and they kept warm.

I met and talked with half a dozen of those engineers who were caught in that German counter-drive near Cambrai in November, 1917. The men, it will be remembered, were engaged in peaceful labor behind the British front, linking up railroad communications and forwarding supplies needed by the English soldiers farther up the line. No one supposed that the engineers were in any danger, and the squads went out without any firearms.

But unexpectedly the Germans swept over the British lines and the American engineers suddenly found themselves in the middle of a battle. Some of them seized arms from fallen men and sailed in to the fight like seasoned soldiers. Others had no chance to get hold of guns, but did they retreat? Not so that you could notice it. They went for the Germans with their picks and shovels, and what they did to them was epic. In describing their work the British general in command said it was futile to bestow praise on the Americans. What they did was beyond praise.

When I met these men they were just finishing up a piece of construction work at a camp in central France. It was not an especially interesting work, just day labor. But when the big push began in March these men, being free to move, were sent up to the front to build more railroads.

“Aren’t they the lucky stiffs?” groaned a man in another labor group. “But our turn will come, I’ll bet you.”

The lucky stiffs agreed that they were lucky, but they refrained out of politeness from saying too much about it. Of course, every man hopes to get up into the big show. But the work behind the lines has to be done. That is the spirit of the army, except on occasions when the men have to blow off steam.

Bidding the lucky ones good-by, I expressed a hope that they would be allowed to carry weapons when next they went near a fighting line. They said that they were going to carry side arms, but one man said:

“What’s the matter with a good sharp pick when you meet up with Heinie? He knows what a gun will do to him and he is game. But a Yankee guy with a pick has got him backed off of the map. Jim here killed two and chased two more with nothing in his hands but a shovel. I had a pick and I was better off than him.”

Which was his modest way of telling that he and his pick had accounted for three German soldiers armed with rifles and bayonets. Thus had his grandfather fought wolves in some western forest, or killed rattlers in prairie grass. Pioneers! You can’t beat them.

CHAPTER V
WE FINISH WHAT CÆSAR BEGAN

A standard joke, used with several variations in French music-halls, is to the effect that “the English only leased their trenches for three years, but the Americans have bought theirs.” This witticism is a tribute to the amount of solid preparation the Americans have made and are making and to the marvelous feats of engineering which are progressing rapidly from southern and western France clear up to the battle lines.

We own, temporarily at least, seven miles of docks and wharves in one great seaport alone. Most of these we have built, and the work is still going on. For forty miles around this seaport the sound of hammer and ax rings day after day as one after another camp and cantonment is established. Some of these camps are really small cities. In one, for example, a hospital camp will house thirty-five thousand people. Provision for twenty thousand beds is being made. It will be, when completed, the largest hospital in the world.

A few months ago that hospital site was a barren waste of prairie. As for water, there was one solitary well. Sewers there were none, and, of course, no streets. Now there is a model drainage and sewer system. There are a dozen miles of paved streets. There is a good water supply, electric lights and telephones. When I visited this camp some fifty hospital buildings were wholly or partially completed, and since then many more must have been built.

Most of the materials used in this vast piece of construction came overseas from the United States, but no small amount of lumber was purchased in France. Now France is very short of lumber and sells as little of it as she can. I asked the colonel in command of the work where he got his building material, and he replied with a broad smile: “Well, I really stole it. I had to have the lumber, so when I found out where it was, I went over there and just insisted. You see,” he added, “over here no excuses are ever accepted from anybody. You simply have to make good on any job they assign you to. If for any reason you don’t make good, you get sent home.”

If we could make up our minds to apply this inexorable method to some of the people who are doing war work on this side of the water we might get better results. At one of the camps in the neighborhood of this same seaport in France they are building a naval aviation station. When it is complete there will be provision for one thousand to fifteen hundred giant seaplanes, great white birds that can sail three days out to sea, that will possess power to sink more submarines than any armed vessels. The submarine is visible from the air at a much greater depth than it is from a ship’s deck, and the seaplanes will carry plenty of deadly depth bombs. Moreover, they will fly safely. The submarine can not fight back at them.

When this camp is completed and equipped—don’t forget that it has to be equipped—those planes will do more than convoy vessels into the harbor, they will be used to train flyers for a dozen other ports into which our ships and our allies’ ships now steal precariously. There were no seaplanes there when I saw the place. The hangars were soon to be ready, though, and so were the big repair shops, the bunkhouses for the men, the ammunition warehouses, and all the other necessary buildings. There is absolutely no inefficiency over there.

The man who is in charge of most of the mammoth undertaking in and around this seaport now bears the title of colonel. Before he entered his country’s service for the duration of the war he was known as one of the greatest engineers in America. His largest feat was the canal which connects Lake Washington with Puget Sound. To build this canal, which flows through the heart of the city of Seattle, the waters of the big lake, which is nearly twenty miles long, had to be lowered nine feet. To a man who could do that without difficulty or serious accident the work undertaken by our army forces in France was a mere matter of taking one step after another. The first step was getting men, and there was no difficulty about that. The draft furnished the men, or at least the mass of them. Voluntary enlistment furnished experts in various lines. And splendid men they are, those American builders in France. Of one regiment of engineers working for the most part as day laborers there fully sixty per cent. are college graduates.

This seaport lies at one end of a vast railroad system which is carrying our men and all the army supplies from the ocean to the fighting front. It is a good harbor and a famous one from the time of the Romans and even further back than the Romans. But for present-day war needs it is not good enough. It has sandbars and shallows, so one of the engineering feats our men are doing is the deepening of that harbor to admit the largest ships.

Another feat is the enlarging of docking facilities so that supplies for an army of three or four million men may be quickly unloaded. Another still is the building of a five-track spur from the docks to the main line of railroad. It would take many chapters to describe adequately all the construction work that is being done in and around this one city in southern France.

Perhaps it is nobody’s fault on this side of the Atlantic that a great deal of the work has been delayed for lack of tools and machinery, but delayed it has been. For example, pile drivers that were urgently needed came slowly, and when they came were found to be relics of the past and practically useless. Locomotives of the vintage of 1868 were grudgingly furnished, and important work was held up while they were put into shape. Steam shovels came a piece at a time. But no matter. The engineers hustled while they waited and built with what material they had on hand.

If Germany has spies in those camps, and if they have contrived to make reports on what is happening there, the knowledge will bring no comfort to Emperor William and his junkers. The Potsdam fire department which was to dispose of all the army that the United States could send to Europe will be assigned to a simpler task. The mere personnel of that working force of engineers in southern France is enough to make the Germans turn pale.

The man in charge of repairs and equipment of naval aviation, with headquarters in this southern port made a fortune in the automobile manufacturing business and just before the war he retired from business. He is still young, but he had all the money he needed and he wanted to enjoy life in other ways than business. Now he draws the pay of a lieutenant-commander in the navy and devotes what time he has free from his duties to inducing other successful business men to enter army service. This man was on the boat with me coming home from France. He was going back to get three thousand more expert mechanics, and incidentally to persuade one of the biggest millionaire railroad men in the country to put on a uniform.

A captain of engineers who is bossing part of the work of building warehouses was drawing a salary of fifteen thousand a year in the contracting business in New York. Working under him in overalls are master mechanics, machinists, bridge carpenters, skilled men of many trades. They may seem to be wasted on these laboring jobs, but the work has to be done, and there are not enough men of lesser skill to go around. Later these men will be found and the skilled ones will be overseers.

To this end the world is being scoured for laborers. We have Chinese coolies working for us, Japanese, Spaniards, Dutch, Scandinavians. In one camp I saw a large detachment of Africans from Algeria, Mohammedans. They were under the command of French non-commissioned officers, men who had spent years in North Africa and know the language. The colonel in command took me to their quarters and into the cook house, where the noon meal was in preparation. A giant African in a white cotton robe and turban, the sweat running in streams down his face, was making soup in a great copper caldron. Other men, similarly attired and equally hot, were slicing vegetables, cutting bread into big chunks, opening cans of tomatoes and pouring the contents into the stew which formed the basis of the meal.

“I can’t get used to this job of mine,” said the colonel. “A year ago I filled a little army department job at home and was getting old and fat. Now I am responsible for a regiment of engineers and nine hundred workmen, most of whom can’t speak a word of English.

“These Africans, for instance. I have to leave them to their French sergeants, and look how they manage them.” I looked. The squad that was laying bricks for a drain outside the cook house had apparently committed a slight breach of discipline, for the lithe little French sergeant in charge was administering punishment. He was bounding around in a series of catlike jumps, at each jump landing an amazing kick on exactly the same portion of each man’s anatomy. He never said a word, he just leaped and kicked.

“Now, what ought I to do about that?” demanded the colonel. “It’s against every rule and procedure of the American army.”

I suggested that the American army was in process of upheaval in a good many directions, and he agreed with me.

I ought not to leave the Africans without paying a tribute to the American negroes who by thousands are helping to build camps and railroads and docks in southern France. And in many other parts of France as well. They are doing splendid work and behaving wonderfully well. France is bewildering to these men, and one of the most bewildering things is the fact that it has a dark-skinned population which does not speak United States. It is enough to rattle any good-natured black man from a Louisiana rice field to speak to a brother laborer and have him answer back in French or Arabic.

“Go ’way with tha’ talk,” he exclaims. “You ain’t no real colored man nohow. Cain’t speak your own language.”

But if the colored American is short on language in a foreign land he is all there when it comes to imagination. Some of the men from the far South are illiterate, but the majority can read and write, and according to the regimental censors some of the letters they write home to the folks must keep Georgia and Mississippi neighborhoods keyed up to the boiling point of excitement. Hundreds of miles removed from the fighting lines does not prevent the letters from dripping gore.

“Just back from a hard day in the trenches,” writes a man whose job is working on a slag heap. “I tell you we done some bloody work. I tell you. We killed a hundred Germans in one trench and cut um up like sausage meat. I cut a officer’s head clean off with my bayonet. I cuts Germans ears off when I kills um. I got a whole string of ears in my bunkhouse. Write soon, ’cause I might get hit with one of them big guns and killed.”

These lurid recitals emanate from the gentlest and most childlike of all our enlisted forces. They sit around evenings in the Y. M. C. A. huts reserved for them, eat candy, look at illustrated papers and sing their plantation and campmeeting songs in voices sweet and lonely. The French children creep up to the doors and windows of the huts to look and listen in wonder. Of all the queer and fascinating Americans in their land the colored men are the queerest and most fascinating. If it were not for the children and their shy friendliness I don’t know what the colored fellow would do, for he is very, very far from home.

CHAPTER VI
GOING TO SCHOOL IN THE ARMY

Ridiculing and belittling the American army in France is no longer the great indoor sport of the German government. It was the last one the government has left and until lately it was played desperately with the view of diverting the minds of the people, and keeping hope alive in their sinking hearts.

The German newspapers, of course, are rigidly censored. Not a word of war news is ever published except that which emanates from headquarters. Nevertheless, the German people, who are not fools, now know full well that the kaiser’s war promises are not being fulfilled. He promised in the beginning that their victorious troops would be home by Christmas of 1914. They know now that Christmas, 1918, will see the world still at war.

The kaiser promised his people Verdun, but he could not deliver Verdun. He promised them the annihilation of the British army before this year’s summer. But the British army still fights on and even the German newspapers dare not claim that the British show signs of weakness or surrender.

The German people were promised, above all, that their commander-in-chief would end the war victoriously before the Americans could raise and transport overseas any army worthy of the name. This supreme promise the government, until Pershing annihilated the St. Michiel salient, tried to make the people believe was being kept. Because they knew that unless the war was won before the Americans come in in great numbers, it never could be won.

Secretary of War Baker, quoting from the semi-official Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of Berlin, gives a sample of the sedative stuff with which the German authorities kept the people’s nerves quiet. Admitting that a country of one hundred million population might conceivably raise an army of one million five hundred thousand men, the article goes to great pains to prove that such an army will never cross the seas. “The American political situation” is such that the greater part of the army will have to be kept at home. At best only four to five hundred thousand men can be put into the European battle-field.

“There is an American army in France,” concedes the article, with an air of being quite candid on the subject, “but it consists entirely of woodcutters, railroad men and doctors, except two or three divisions whose precious lives are being spared in quiet places far behind the front.”

When I read those words I laughed. Because I have been in a good many of those quiet places behind the front, and I know that what was being done there was not coddling American soldiers, nor yet keeping them safe from battle. What was and is being done there is making them one hundred per cent. efficient fighters. Not mass fighters alone, not men who at the word of command go forward to be mown down by machine-gun fire. But individual fighters, men who can move together in a mass, yes, but men who also know how to fight alone, who have initiative, resourcefulness, responsibility. Men who know every trick in the game.

While we were building ships; while we were drafting and drilling men over here; while the despised woodcutters and railroad men and the vigorous young engineers were laying the basis for a long war if necessary, but a clean victory in the end, our soldiers, waiting in scores of camps to take their places in the lines, were being given an intensive training, which I think would astonish even the war-efficient Germans.

We have also special schools for officers, and they are still in full blast, and will be continued as long as they are needed. Our supply of officers will never run short, for the schools will continue to turn them out. The schools give the superior enlisted men a chance to earn commissions. Officers in every regiment are on a constant watch for men who show signs of leadership and military intelligence. Such men are officer material, and on the recommendation of their superiors they are sent to one or another of the schools which have been established over there.

When our men go to France from the cantonments here their training is by no means complete. They have been licked into soldier shape, they are in good physical and mental condition, they have learned to march, to drill, and to shoot. They can use the bayonet, they know something about artillery, about grenades and bombs. But they still have much to learn. They begin to learn soon after they arrive in France. They learn in camps and schools, but the German government doesn’t tell its people about that.

It was a cold, drizzly day in March that I visited a school where infantry, artillery, sanitary and gas lore was being instilled into the intelligence of nearly two thousand hot-blooded young Americans. Some of them were being trained for non-commissioned officers who would be in direct command of squads of soldiers in battle. There were also large classes for lieutenants and captains of infantry, artillery, engineering and aviation.

I can not in one chapter or in two give anything more than an outline of the courses studied. The schedules announcing the classes lie on my desk as I write. They cover eighteen closely typewritten pages.

Take a class of enlisted infantry men who were expected to command squads. These are some of the things they did in school the week of March 4 to March 9, 1918: On Monday and Tuesday they had inspection and drill from 7:50 to 8:45. From 9 until 11:45 they had instruction in musketry, grenade and bayonet work. They went to their noon dinner, and from 1:15 to 4:30 they had more of the same kind of drill.

They repeated this during the rest of the week, and on Wednesday they had besides a lecture on some theoretical problem of their work by a veteran colonel, a West Point man. They also studied a map problem, and in the evening they saw in the engineers’ school a night demonstration of wiring in the field. They finished on Saturday afternoon with a “tactical walk.” Quite a busy week.

It was just as busy with the class in automatic weapons. On Monday they had close order drill, barrage drill, a lecture on direct fire, another on indirect fire, practise in range firing and the use of range finders. Finally they had an hour’s pistol practise.

They had a great deal of artillery target practise that week, also a lecture on trench routing, a conference on indirect fire tables, whatever they may be, and two days’ hard work in the gas school. You can not, you know, just pick up a gas mask, put it on and successfully fight. You have to learn how. I tried on a gas mask and couldn’t breath in it five minutes. So the soldiers have to learn how to wear their masks, and a great deal besides before they can safely face a gas attack.

They hear lectures on how gas is used, preparation for the attacks, on the mechanics of the box respirator used by our army, and on the effects of gas. They learn the history of gas warfare and the German orders and reports concerning it. They learn what to do during and after an attack. They drill in actual gas chambers.

The officers in this school had much more technical work. A tactical course for field officers interested me greatly. The men studied the technique of grenade, trench mortar and one pound cannon firing. Trench fighting, when I visited the school, was being vigorously studied, and I heard part of an intensely interesting lecture on “The Attack in Trench Warfare,” from a lieutenant-colonel of the British army who had led many such attacks himself since 1915.

It seems odd to hear of seminars in war wisdom, but they have them there, officers who had experienced trench fighting sitting around a table and discussing nice questions of tactics, just as a short time ago some of them were sitting around university tables and discussing political economy or English literature.

They had a course for signal men which was very valuable. Field telegraphs and telephones play an exciting part in modern battles, and the students in this course devoted much time to buzzer telegraph work. They learned how to string field telephones, and to use them. They had lectures on ciphers and signals, endless and intricate. They learned to read maps.

In the aero school they were training aerial photographers and teaching them how to interpret photographs taken in the skies. The flyers were being taught to signal troops from above and to read army signals thousands of feet below. What the soldiers on the ground seemed to be doing was spreading freshly washed towels and sheets on the grass, but what they were really doing, it appeared, was asking questions of the aviators about the enemy’s maneuvers.

A little later I visited another army school, or rather an army college, for there line and staff officers of superior rank were under instruction. Our army authorities do not intend to repeat the mistakes of the Civil War in regard to superior officers. It has been said that it took only a year to teach the rank and file of our men to fight, but that we fought for two years to train lieutenants and captains, and three years to train generals. The war was ended in one more year.

This war college in France, where some great general may now be in training, perhaps for the highest command of all, is located in a medieval town which must have seen a lot of fighting in the distant past. Its stout city walls still stand, and it is plain that a long battle would have to be fought before the besieging army reached the walls. The town stands on a rocky height little accessible in the old days. Below stretches a level plain where all the enemy’s movements would have been visible for miles.

It is an appropriate place in which to train future American generals, for this war is being fought, not only with all modern weapons, but with many of the weapons of the past. One can easily fancy the ghosts of the great Charlemagne, Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard Lion Heart, Sir John Chandos, hovering in the shadows of the classrooms, and listening delightedly to familiar things, talk of liquid fire, hand grenades, storming positions with bayonets and long knives.

But the ghostly warriors would hear other talk, and when final examination time came, I imagine that they might thank their stars that they were safely dead, for this war makes demands on the intelligence of commanding officers that the middle ages wotted nothing of.

I took a brief survey of one examination paper in which it was put up to a commander to move several divisions of men from one district in France to the fighting front. He had a railroad map of France before him and he was required to state at length and in detail exactly how and when and where he would entrain his one hundred and twenty-five thousand men; when and where he would stop each unit for meals; what he would do with his men when they left the railroad; what villages and towns he would occupy; where he would billet the soldiers; how and with what he would feed and supply them; how he would move supplies. It made my head swim, but it also made my heart swell with proud confidence in our army.

Efficiency! There is only one real and permanent efficiency. It is not possible to achieve it under a slave system. It can only be achieved by freemen, willing to follow their chosen leaders into the valley of the shadow of death if that is the road through which more freedom, freedom of all the world, is to be gained.

CHAPTER VII
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.

CHAPTER VIII
THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY

There is one thing our soldier sons are learning in France that is more valuable than the French language or history or any mere knowledge acquisition. Our men are learning the true meaning of nationalism, love of country and the flag.

Of late years we have had in the United States such a deluge of talk about “internationalism” that our young men had almost reached the point of being ashamed to feel patriotism. An insidious propaganda of pacifism, beginning in elementary schools all over the country, had undermined the old American pride in the flag. The children went through the motions of saluting the flag, true, but in too many schoolrooms the poisonous suggestion was given them that it was much nobler to love all flags and all countries equally with their own.

A young Jewish soldier from the east side of New York told me that, when he learned that he had been drafted, he actually contemplated suicide. It seemed to him a crime for him to become a soldier. His parents had fled from Russia to escape death at the hands of soldiers, but that was not why he was opposed to all war. It was because in his school, and afterward in the city college, he had imbibed what is miscalled internationalism.

“I went to training camp because I was afraid to resist,” said this young man. “I stayed and I worked hard because I liked it, liked my officers, and because, being assigned to the aviation service as a ground man, I knew I would not be obliged to kill Germans. I still believed that it was my duty to be international at heart.”

And then he told me how the conviction came to him that men can not love all countries unless they love their own first and best. “You see that work gang over there,” he said. “Those fellows are Russians. They are part of the Russian division that was sent to fight in France two or three years ago. You remember what a fine impression they made then. Well, after the revolution in Russia, or rather after the Bolshevist soldiers began running away from the fight, murdering their officers and clamoring for a separate peace, there was the question what to do with the Russian regiments in France.

“Some of the Russians it was impossible to trust. Some, at least, I don’t know how many, were bitten with the German propaganda. They did what they could to demoralize the French soldiers. Nobody knew but that they might betray the allies in the middle of a battle. The upshot of the whole thing was that they sent the Russian troops back from the front, and now they work in labor gangs. They don’t want to go back to their own country. Things are too bad there.

“Among our flyers was a young lieutenant who was born a Russian. Not a Jew, a Russian. He was finishing his training in this camp. It was partly the monotony and the lack of work that made him melancholy. You know we haven’t enough practise planes and the flying men are idle half the time. But mainly it was the sight of those Russian laborers that got on his nerves. He used sometimes to talk to them, and they were pathetically glad to have him, because nobody else spoke their language and they were lonesome.

“He said to me once: ‘When those poor devils landed in France the houses were decked with flags to greet them. The streets were full of cheering crowds and children threw flowers in their path. Now nobody trusts them to fight. They are outcasts. They have no country, and no country wants to adopt them.’ I tried to tell him that he was wrong, that the allies wanted to help Russia to get back, but it was no good.

“By and by this man took it into his head that he was distrusted because he had been born a Russian. It wasn’t true. But he thought it was. He said so. One day he went up in an altitude test with an observer. He was acting as pilot, but the machine had a double control and the man with him was a cool and capable flyer. Otherwise the thing might have been even worse than it was. For when they were six thousand feet up and still climbing, the Russian suddenly unbuckled the belt that secured him in his seat, and before the observer could even guess what he was about to do, he stepped over the side of the machine into space.

“That settled me. I said to myself that I would rather be dead than be a man without a country. That’s what that poor fellow figured that he was, and all other Russians. But I’m not a Russian, nor an internationalist, nor anything else but a one hundred per cent. American, and if they want me to kill boches, I’m ready to begin any minute.”

A man without a country. Is there any sentence in the language, any combination of words more dreadful? Yet what the German propagandists, which is the real name of many of the pacifists and “internationalists,” have been trying to do to American youth is to take their country away from them. They nearly succeeded, and the proof of that was the three years of indifference we loitered through before we woke up to the fact that this war was ours, as well as England’s, France’s and Belgium’s.

We failed to realize that our country was in immediate peril, because we had almost forgotten that we had a country. Are we all awake to the fact yet? No, because, if we were, there would not be left anywhere from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific one single disloyal citizen, one single copperhead or so-called internationalist. No community would tolerate them. There would be no corner where they could hide.

Some of the Socialist party leaders are beginning to see a great light on the subject of loyalty to the government, and are advocating a new policy toward the war. Their last party platform read like one of Trotzky’s messages to the Petrograd Soviet, but now even the late Socialist candidate for mayor of New York, who appealed for the pacifist vote, and got it, is beginning to talk about revising the platform.

Unless it is revised, the Socialists are going to lose their adherents at present serving in France. The Jewish boys who, a little over a year ago, were orating from soap boxes against the draft and against what they called “this profiteers’ war,” are among the hottest young patriots and keenest fighters in the American army.

I saw some of those boys at Camp Upton last autumn. I saw one who was sitting in a corner blubbering like a small child because he was being sent to Spartanburg. He was being transferred because he was continually begging to be allowed to go home. His captain told me that the only thing to do with him was to send him so far away from New York that week-end visits home would be impossible.

I saw other Jewish boys who were unwilling soldiers then, but every one I saw in France was enthusiastic about his work, and as little of an internationalist as the young man in the aviation camp. The Jewish soldier has made good. I was told so by many officers, and I saw it for myself.

Our soldiers have not been taught to hate the Germans, and I don’t think they do hate them. It is certain that the French people with whom our men associate do not. But they scorn and loathe the Hindenburg method of making war, and this attitude our men share. They regard the Germans with horror rather than hatred, and so must all Americans who even faintly realize what is going on every day and hour in the invaded districts of Belgium and France.

Our soldiers, many of them, have seen this terrible thing, and it has made their blood run hot in their arteries, it has set their jaws hard, and caused their eyes to blaze. What theories they have ever had about internationalism have been dissipated by the facts with which they are faced.

The submarine war has come home to our men, sometimes as a bitter personal experience.

In a Y. M. C. A. canteen I came upon a young corporal who had found a seat behind the piano, and he was sitting there weeping his heart out over a letter from home, a letter telling him how his brother had died when the Germans torpedoed the Tuscania. I sat down beside this soldier. He seemed to need somebody, and I was the only woman near. In a few minutes he was himself again, outwardly at least, and he read me the letter.

It was from his sister, because, she said, mother was taking it very hard and could not write yet. When the ship went down brother managed to get on a raft which was very much overcrowded. There were so many men on the raft that the brother’s chum, who was in bad shape with a broken leg, was pushed off into the water.

Brother was a good swimmer and he managed to rescue his chum and to get him back on the raft. But while he was in the water two more men, half drowned and desperate, had climbed aboard, and the raft was now several inches under seas. So this heroic young American soldier, unwilling to jeopardize his comrades’ life, gave up his own.

“Tell my mother and the family that I am sorry I didn’t have a chance to fight for America,” he said, and sank into the black and icy ocean.

“Well, I can fight,” said the soldier who read me that letter. “And every time I am allowed to go over the top I shall remember how they killed my kid brother in the dark.”

American men are accustomed from their childhood to see women treated with respect and children with tenderness. They see with horror-stricken eyes the women and children refugees from the war invaded districts flying before a foe that knows no pity, that treats combatant and non-combatant with equal cruelty and wrath.

I have told of a Sunday I spent in a railroad station in the first days of the great spring offensive, and of the southward bound trains bearing the wounded and the homeless. With me on that platform were several American soldiers, two or three members of the military police. They were there primarily to look after our soldiers passing up and down the line, but they worked hard to help the stricken refugees, hundreds of whom were fed and ministered to that day by the French Red Cross.

They were mostly women and children and old men, and their plight was pitiful. This was the second time that they had fled before the German hordes. Last November, after the “victorious retreat,” they had crept back to their ruined and desolated villages and farms, and with the aid of their government and the American societies for French reconstruction had begun life again.

In their shells of houses and in their shattered little farms they gladly took up the work of gaining a little bread. Then, without any warning, the awful flood of war swept over them again.

They fled, half clad, never pausing to collect their poor belongings. Without the blessed help of the Red Cross they would have died of starvation on the road. Everything they ever had was gone. They stumbled off the trains, dazed, with white blank faces and staring empty eyes.

I saw those American soldiers carrying old women and little children into the Red Cross canteen, feeding them, ministering to them, all the time muttering curses on the fiends who had brought them to this bitter pass.

“Oh, we have work to do over here,” one of these men said to me. “God help the kaiser when we get fairly into this war.” And then he exclaimed: “Are there really any pacifists left in America? If there are I wish they could see what we have seen to-day.”

I wish so, too. I wish I could show the theorists, the “internationalists,” what I saw of those French refugees, the poor, despoiled working people and farmers who fled, as the hordes of old fled before Attila, another scourge of God, but one not less tigerish or void of soul.

CHAPTER IX
OUR FOREIGN LEGION

“Do they really call you Sammies?” I asked one of the first soldiers I met in France.

“They call us the foreign legion,” he laughed. “I don’t blame them, either. They expected American soldiers to be American, and we handed them an army made up of forty different nationalities. Come to think of it, that is America.”

“I never realized it before,” joined in a young sergeant sitting near. “My family has lived in Massachusetts for nearly three hundred years, and I always thought of myself and others like me as the only real Americans. The Italians, Greeks, Russians, and even the Irish, seemed to me to be grafted stock. But I am in charge of a bunch of fellows, not one of whom was born in the U. S. A., and I would back them as straight Americans against any man in the ‘Descendants of John and Priscilla Alden’ society.

“I’ve got two Czechs who ran away from their native land to avoid army service in Austria. That was five years before we got into the war, before there was a war. These boys hated army life and wouldn’t stay in a country that had compulsory military service. But along comes a chance to fight for the U. S. A. and these same fellows just pant for it.”

The first soldier spoke again. “But what do you think of a Russian who ran away from Russia during the war, and yet wanted to join the American army? By the way, he wants to meet you. May I introduce him?”

“Yes, indeed,” I replied, whereupon the youth stood up and called out: “Oh, Trotzky! Come on over, Trotzky!” And the Russian soldier thus libeled came rather diffidently from an adjoining room. We were sitting before an open fire in a Y. M. C. A. headquarters.

“Trotzky,” whose other name was Jeff Bramfford, turned out to be a typical Russian in spite of his English name. His father, he said, was English, but he had lived many years in Russia, first as an engineer in an English-owned munitions factory in Petrograd, and later in Riga. Jeff’s mother was a Russian.

The strange adventures of this young man began when he was twenty-one years old, a date which corresponds with the outbreak of the world war. Jeff was counted as a Russian citizen and was forced to join the army. He saw service in the tragic campaign which ended in the Masurian Lakes catastrophe. He escaped drowning in the swamps and also lived through the disastrous retreat across East Prussia.

The Russians, he told me, fought well, their cavalry, one hundred thousand strong, breaking the German line and taking many prisoners. But the supporting artillery failed them; never came up at all. Mutiny broke out, many of the men charging that their higher officers had sold them out to the Germans. If this was so, then the Germans behaved toward their friends with their customary treachery. At one halt these Russian officers took possession of a German country house, obligingly left open and well furnished. Very soon after they were installed, the house blew up and killed every man in it. The place had been mined by the Germans.

In the Russian retreat, Jeff was taken prisoner, and with many others was sent first to Germany, where he was forced to slave at menial labor. Later he was sent to Belgium.

“I never let them know that I was a skilled mechanic,” said he. “I didn’t want to be set at munitions work, or to help them in any other way to win the war.”

In Antwerp, Jeff, because he has a strong personality, was placed over a gang of Russians who were repairing streets. This was at a time when the British flyers were bombing Antwerp, and on one of their visits some of the bombs fell in a quarter of the town where this labor group was at work.

The German guards, to quote Jeff’s exact words, “beat it to hell” for the nearest cellar, yelling to the prisoners to do the same. But Jeff and fifteen other Russians seized their chance and beat it to the water front. In the terror and excitement of the raid they were not stopped anywhere, and they managed to get hold of a fishing boat and beat it some more for the English Channel.

They had no food or water, but they thought they might be picked up, and after twelve anxious hours they were picked up by a Norwegian steamer. They were taken to London, and for a week or ten days were lionized and made much of. But of course they were Russian soldiers and had to be returned to their army. Jeff showed me the “paper” given him by the Russian consul in London, a safe conduct to the port where he was to embark for Norway and go from thence by rail to Russia.

Jeff kept the paper as a souvenir, but he had no intention of going home. Instead, with the aid of a Russian whom he had met in London, he went to quite another port and got a job as a stoker on a British merchant vessel bound for Marseilles, and from there to New York. By the time he reached New York he had eighty-five dollars in wages in his pocket.

He knew some English, and with true Russian facility, soon picked up more. He went to Coney Island one day, and there he scraped up an acquaintance with two soldiers of our regular army.

“Why not enlist?” they suggested, and Jeff, who was tired enough by this time to be tempted by an easy life and plenty to eat, consented. This was before we entered the war.

When the war came, however, Jeff was quite rested and perfectly game. He went to France with one of the first divisions, and is now in the artillery, which is showing the Huns something new and interesting, and is thereby earning the admiration of France and England.

As a matter of fact, when I met him he was acting as instructor in one of our big artillery camps. But he ached to get to the front, and by this time he must be there.

“Why were you willing to fight for America when you were not ready to go on fighting for Russia?” I asked him.

“In Russia the soldiers never get a square deal. In the American army they do,” was the reply. “But that is not the only reason. There’s something about America that makes you willing to do anything that is necessary. I guess it’s because everybody feels free.”

“But our army was drafted,” I suggested. “Some people think that was an offense against individual freedom.”

“Drafted, yes,” said this real American, “but drafted to defend their individual freedom. Can’t they see that?”

Jeff would be perfectly happy fighting for freedom if he only knew what fate had befallen his father and mother since the Russian upheaval. He has had no word from them since then, and he fears they have fallen victims to the bloody-handed Bolsheviki. His fine gray eyes filled with tears when he spoke of his mother, whom he left when he was little more than a boy. The chances are that he will never see her again.

We have thousands of Italian youths in our army. I talked with a handsome Italian sergeant, a well educated young man who had been a teller in an Italian bank in New York.

“You know what would make me the happiest man in the world?” he asked me. “It would be to be transferred to the Italian front with my whole company. I am a great admirer of the French and English, but of course I love Italy, and it would be great if we could go there, and in American uniforms, under the American flag, help to win back our Italia Irredenta, our Alsace-Lorraine.

“There are only four men in my company who were not born in Italy. Some of them were born in the lost provinces, and were naturalized as Austrians. But they hate Austria even more than they hate Germany. Think what it would mean to Italy to see her sons, who left her because they were poor, come back with the American army to fight for freedom on her soil.”

I sincerely hope that these soldiers will be given a chance to fight in the land of their birth, under the flag that means freedom wherever it waves. Nothing would put more enthusiasm into the Italian army, in my opinion. Rightly or wrongly, the Italians, or some of them, have felt that the allies have neglected them a bit. Of course, German propaganda has worked overtime to make them feel that way, but there was, at one time, a slight basis for the feeling. I want to see American troops in Italy.

I want to see American troops on every front, and I particularly want to see the Czechs, the Bohemians, of whom we have great numbers in our army, fighting the Austrians. I saw some of these men, and they were magnificent soldiers.

I think the most uproariously happy men I saw in France were the Poles in our army. On the night I embarked at “a port in France” an American transport came in carrying, besides our khaki clad men, the Polish regiment recruited here last winter. They looked like the chorus of a musical comedy, but if they can fight as well as they can yell, they will add a chapter to the history of the war. They began to howl for joy when the ship came into the harbor, and they streamed down the gangplank singing and cheering like mad. I suppose their blue and scarlet uniforms have been put in moth balls by now.

We have often called America the melting pot, but, seeing this great multitude of foreign-born American soldiers, it occurred to me that we had not, in former years, kept a good enough fire burning under that pot. We didn’t try hard enough to melt that mass, to amalgamate it with our Mayflower and Puritan descendants. Why is it that so many naturalized American citizens, fighting under the Stars and Stripes, speak no English, or very little? What have our public schools been doing all these years? Why haven’t they extended their night school work to include these young men?

Russians, Austrians, Greeks, Italians, Chinese, Syrians, Turks, Africans (the American negro is just another immigrant), we have no right to keep America away from them. We do wrong to consider them only as “labor.” They are American citizens, and for many of them the draft was the first time Uncle Sam ever called them son. The training camp was the real melting pot for them. In coin more precious than gold, those immigrant sons of America are paying us for our indifference. They are giving their lives for American ideals.

Read the names in the casualty lists: Killed in action, Private Alexandro Cassealeno, Private Mike Grba, Private Ole K. Arneson; severely wounded, Constantine Poniaros, Tony Kaczor, Alexander Mashewsky.

Many of these men were alone in America at the time of the draft. Their families were behind in the old home, and from some of those villages, those in the Austrian empire especially, no letters have come for more than a year. When the rest of the regiment gets letters and packages from home they get nothing. Remember that the next time they ask you to subscribe to the Red Cross, the Library War Service or the Salvation Army. You may think you haven’t anybody in the war, no near relatives. But you are wrong, you have our foreign legion and you owe them everything you can possibly afford to give.

CHAPTER X
THE GENERAL HIMSELF

If you talk with the American soldiers, as I did both in their rest billets and their camps, you will find they have the clearest and most definite understanding as to their business in Europe. It is to win the war. I never met a man who had the slightest doubt or hesitation about it. They know it will happen. They say to you: “Why, the general himself says so. ‘Germany can and must be beaten.’ The general himself said that.”

“The general himself,” of course, means General Pershing. He is to the American soldier what Foch is to the French poilu, the supreme authority who can not be mistaken. And to the French poilu, and to the French public at large, General Pershing, perhaps next to General Foch, is the commanding figure of the war. This in spite of the fact that they know nothing whatever of him as a fighting man. They believe in him, and in my opinion their faith is going to be justified.

“Character,” said General Pershing, “other things being equal, will decide the last battle.”

The basis of my confidence in General Pershing is that he has character, strong, original, dynamic. Every word and gesture reveals personality. He is absolutely straightforward and sincere, and his manner is simple and natural. Yet underneath that quiet simplicity you can easily perceive a will of steel and a capacity for great sternness. His first appearance won Paris completely, and before he has had time to fight a battle he has become a military hero in the eyes of the French.

I saw General Pershing first in the reception room of the beautiful Louis XVI mansion in the Rue de Varennes which has been loaned him for a town house when he goes to Paris. That is seldom. Most of the time he lives in a picturesque town in eastern France, which is the general headquarters of our army. The name of the town is almost never spoken. It is simply alluded to as G. H. Q. (General headquarters.)

Since the advent of the American forces in France there has been a much closer co-operation among the allies, a co-operation which reached its natural climax in the appointment of General Foch as generalissimo of the allied armies. France has long desired this arrangement, President Wilson desired it and so did Premier Lloyd George. General Pershing, in his swift, clear-minded judgment, declared it inevitable. But difficulties stood in the way of its accomplishment, and it was not until after several meetings of the allied war council at Versailles that the thing began to seem remotely possible.

In the interest of stronger co-operation and as commander-in-chief of the American army, General Pershing has been a constant attendant of the allied war councils. In a ten-minute interval between luncheon and departure for an afternoon session of the council, I had my first conversation with him. As he came into the room it occurred to me instantly that here was the very embodiment of the American army. The composite, the perfect type. No wonder the French like him. He looks right.

No Greek of old Sparta was ever a more perfect physical specimen. At fifty-four, General Pershing is as straight and slender of waist as when he left West Point. He is tall, powerful of frame, without an ounce of fat anywhere on his body, and as hard as bronze. His eyes are keen and young, although his hair is gray. His face is marked with a few deep, scar-like lines, for tragedy has entered his life, as all the world knows. The lines do not suggest age, however. General Pershing looks younger than his years, much younger than most of his published photographs. His voice is that of a young man, and he speaks crisply, without ever hesitating for a word.

There is not a particle of pose about Pershing. He has been called cold, but I did not find him so. When I told him that I had a son in the army he became decidedly cordial. What was the boy’s name? His regiment? When did he reach France? Had I seen him? The commander-in-chief of the American army, on his way to an allied council with men who have the fate of civilization in their hands, had time to ask questions about an enlisted man. Lincoln used to do things like that.

Weeks later I was the guest, with several other correspondents, of the intelligence department of the army in a motor journey into our war zone. Our passes were for three days only and three districts were to be visited. One stopping place was the town alluded to as G. H. Q., the heart of the American expeditionary force in France. We were to meet the commander-in-chief informally, but there was to be no interview. The prospect was pleasing, but not particularly exciting, and in that it matched up pretty well with the rest of the trip. When the intelligence department invites correspondents, especially women correspondents, to a party you can be sure that it is a very staid and conservative affair.

We traveled by train from Paris to our first point, a big camp where our engineers had done some wonders of construction, and which was now a completely equipped school, where thousands of soldiers were being trained in bombing, trench mortar work and other skilled branches. At the station we were met by a handsome and diplomatic young intelligence officer in a big limousine. Under his chaperonage we were to see as much of the war zone as was considered good for us. The second day brought us to G. H. Q. and General Pershing.

Then was I glad that I had seen him in the palace in the Rue de Varennes. Because now I knew something about him. I knew he liked candor and straight talk. I knew also that with an inflexible will he possessed a reasonable mind. You can argue with a man like that. I did argue with General Pershing on the subject of what women correspondents ought to be permitted to see and to know. I told him what I wanted to take back to the mothers of American soldiers.

I can not repeat our conversation, because it was confidential. I will simply say that General Pershing proved the reasonableness of his mind by greatly extending our facilities on that trip, and turning our prim little party into an experience wholly worth while from the reporter’s point of view. Later I shall go into details about that trip up the line. This chapter is concerned with General Pershing.

In the plain bare room, which is the commander’s private headquarters, and in which the great campaigns which our men will fight are being planned, General Pershing appears even more dynamic and forceful than in his luxurious Parisian home. I have seen generals who wore their uniforms as if they were business clothes, but not so General Pershing. If he wore business clothes he would contrive to make them look like a uniform. His uniform is the most immaculate, the most correct, the most military thing in the way of garments that I have ever beheld. His boots look as though he never wore the same pair a second time. Yet there is nothing stiff or rigid in his appearance. He puts his clothes on a perfect masculine figure, that is all. He holds himself like an absolutely fit and athletic man.

General Pershing exalts health. He takes daily cold baths, one of his young aides told me, and often in the dead of winter runs and exercises in the open air clad only in a thin bathrobe. To bring every man in the army up to his physical standard is the commander’s expressed ambition. To make them supremely healthy, efficient fighting men, and to return them to their mothers morally as well as physically sound, is General Pershing’s conception of his responsibility as head of the American army.

It is always interesting to know how we appear in the eyes of strangers, and an article published in a well-known French magazine shows the strong appeal that General Pershing has made to the imagination of our allies. According to the French writer, there are two men in the American commander-in-chief, one of them Anglo-Saxon, the other a Frenchman. In 1749 the ancestors of General Pershing emigrated from Alsace to America, and Alsace in the eyes of all Frenchmen is and always will be France.

If by rare favor you are received by General Pershing in his Paris home you meet the Anglo-Saxon, says the reporter. There his coldness is positively British. “Tall, slender as a sublieutenant, well set up in his khaki brown uniform, four stars on the shoulders and on the collar the golden eagle of his supreme rank. General Pershing receives you in a manner courteous but glacial. He is entirely the official, conscious of his great responsibilities, and determined to keep silence concerning official matters. His blue eyes are clear and cold, even hard. Above his strong jaw, indicative of implacable energy, his lips, saber-straight, wear no smile.

“Do not attempt to get from him any details of his mission in France, or try to induce him to give you any personal souvenirs or anecdotes of his tour of the French front. His aide-de-camp and interpreter has an invariable reply to all such questions: ‘The general has nothing to say.’ Above all, never venture to ask a question concerning his private life, his joys or sorrows. Immediately the look in his cold eyes becomes hostile. Before the question is fairly out the answer comes: ‘The general does not think that would interest the public.’

“But if by happy circumstance you are privileged to enter the small circle of General Pershing’s friends, what a delightful metamorphosis! The man reveals himself simple, charming, pliant, spontaneous. He is the Frenchman, cordial and communicative, ready to lend himself to that juvenile gaiety which so much amuses the Anglo-Saxon. The blue eyes that we have seen flash so coldly are now at once mischievous and tender. His features are animated, his smile ready.

“Everything interests him, science, art, literature. Music he loves almost as well as paintings, and he tells you with what new pleasure every time he visited the Paris of pre-war days he went each day to the Louvre galleries. Above all, he tells you how profoundly happy he is to be in the war on our side. Certainly that joy is rooted in the satisfaction of a soldier fulfilling his duty, but General Pershing is more than a soldier. He is an idealist called to accomplish a high mission, to serve an unselfish cause, to help humanity to a secure and happy future.”

General Pershing never appeared a bigger man than when he offered to brigade the American forces in with the English and the French, and himself take the subordinate position of a commander without a real command. The offer was made and accepted in the dark and panic-ridden early days of the March German offensive, when it looked as though the allied lines might be broken, and all the man power available had to be mobilized.

That danger is happily past. The Germans have struck and the blow has proved utterly futile. The Americans are to be allowed to fight under their own flag and their own officers. They will get full credit for what they do. But the French and English will never forget that General Pershing was unselfishly willing, when necessary, to forego both for himself and the American army every particle of credit, letting the honors go to the allies. From a man of that character great fighting, splendid victories may be expected. Under such a commander our sons are well secured.

CHAPTER XI
GENERAL ALLAIRE’S FINEST

“I know that my boy is being well cared for in his regiment, and I’m not afraid of what may happen to him as long as he is on duty. But what about his off hours? What is to prevent him from falling into bad company?”

I know that this thought has troubled the minds of many mothers of soldiers now in France. And no wonder. Ever since the first training camps were set up in this country the most lurid tales have been spread abroad about the alleged immorality of the soldiers’ off hours. Some of these tales were spread by pro-Germans, pacifists and cowards who hoped to defeat the draft laws. Others were the result of a certain kind of imagination. The vast majority of them were untrue.

But even if any of them were true, if boys of twenty-one, away from the restraining influences of home, found unusual opportunities for immorality right here in the United States, what must it be in France? Many American women have it firmly fixed in their minds that France is a shocking immoral country. It isn’t, but I do not hope to be able to unsettle the conviction.

I will content myself with saying that even if France were a second Sodom or Gomorrah, our soldiers would be safe there. As safe, or safer, than they would be at home. The reason is that they are under military discipline and military supervision every hour of their lives. In their off hours they are supervised by the most efficient and powerful police force in the world, the military police of the American army.

Military police is what we call them for short. They are really assistant provost marshals. They are everywhere in France where there are American soldiers. They police Paris and all other cities, towns and villages in our zone. They are found sitting at a little table in all the railroad stations, and every traveling American soldier, be he officer, non-com or private, has to report the minute he arrives to the station marshal. This applies to all holders of military passes, Red Cross and Y. M. C. A. workers, and war correspondents.

The marshal examines the papers of the traveling officer or soldier, stamps them and enters the name and destination of the traveler in his book. This happens when the soldier leaves his base and when he returns. They keep track of our men on all their travels.

They also keep track of our soldiers in their daily walks abroad, whether on duty or pleasure bent. There are certain rules in our expeditionary force which apply to all alike, from General Pershing down to Bill Smith, private, just arrived from Camp Funston or Camp Upton. One of these rules is that no member of the expeditionary force may associate with women of the submerged class.

If a military policeman sees an officer or a soldier in such company it is his duty immediately and without any delay to separate the two, and gather the offending man in. If he fails to do so, and the fact is established, the policeman is punished. But he doesn’t fail.

Some of our younger officers, only a few, I was assured, didn’t believe at first that a simple private soldier would dare arrest them for the offense of having a “good time.” Two of these very new lieutenants tested it out in Paris once. They annexed a pair of women of the underworld and started out to find whatever may be left of the night life of the French capital.

What was their indignation when a slim youth of about twenty-three, wearing the uniform of a private, with the sole addition of a brassard marked A. P. M., walked up to them, saluted and stepped politely between them and the open door of the taxi-cab.