The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me Part 5

There we made preparations to go to the headquarters of the American Army. In Paris also we got into our new regulation Red Cross uniforms. Ever since man first pinned a buffalo tail to the back of his belt, and stuck a rooster feather in his matted hair, he has been proud of his uniform. s.e.x vanity expresses itself most gorgeously in a uniform, and when they put Henry and me into uniforms, even carefully repressed Red Cross uniforms, open at the neck and with blue dabs on our coat lapels to distinguish us from the "first cla.s.s fighting man," we were so proud that often five or six consecutive minutes pa.s.sed when we weren't afraid of what our wives would say about the $124 each had spent for the togs. At times our att.i.tude toward our wives was not unlike that of drunken rabbits hunting brazenly for the dogs! But when we slipped into citizen clothes, sobriety and remorse covered us, and we shook sad heads. We wore the uniforms little about Paris; for our Sam Browne belts kept us returning salutes until our arms hurt. They couldn't break me of the habit of saluting with a newspaper or a package or a pencil in my hand. And my return of the interminable round of salutes from French, British, and Italian soldiers who throng Paris, probably insulted--all unbeknownst to me--hundreds of our allies, and made them sneer at our flag. So it seemed best for us to wear these uniforms only where soldiers congregated who would know us for the gawks that we were and forgive us our military trespa.s.ses.

Then a real day came when our Red Cross duties took us to General Pers.h.i.+ng's headquarters.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He was a rare bird; this American going on a big drunk on water]

For Americans during the year 1918, "Somewhere in France," will mean the Joan of Arc country. It is not in the war zone, but lies among the hills of Central France, a four or five hours' auto ride from Paris. To reach the American "Somewhere in France" from Paris, one crosses the battle-field of the Marne, and we pa.s.sed it the day after the third anniversary, when all the hundreds of roadside graves that marked the French advance were a-bloom and a-flutter with the tri-colour. Great doings were afoot the day before on that battle-field. Bands had played triumphant songs, and orators had spoken and the leaders of France--soldier and civilian--had come out and wept and France had released her emotions and was better for it. We pa.s.sed through Meaux and hurried on east to St. Dizier, where we stopped for the night. We put up at a dingy little inn, filled to overflowing with as curious a company as ever gathered under one roof. Of course there were French soldiers--scores of them, mostly officers in full dress, going to the line or coming from it. Then there were fathers and mothers of soldiers and sisters and sweethearts of soldiers and wives of soldiers bound for the front or coming home. And there we were, the only Americans in the house, with just enough French to order "des oeufs" and coffee "au lait" and "ros bif and jambon and pain" and to ask how much and then make them say it slowly and stick the sum up on their fingers. We were having engine trouble. And our car was groaning and coughing and muttering in the gloomy little court of the inn. Around the court ran the sleeping rooms, and under one end, forty feet from the diningroom, was what was once the stable, and what now is the garage. Frenchmen wandered up, looked at our chauffeur (from Utica, N. Y.) tried to diagnose the case, found we did not understand and then moved away. But it was a twelve-cylinder American machine and the Frenchmen, discovering that, kept coming back to it. As we sat on the cement platform of the tavern, kicking our heels against it and bemoaning the follies of youth which had corrupted our Freshman and Soph.o.m.ore French, there came and sat beside us a pretty woman.

She had black snappy eyes, fresh dark skin, and jet black hair, so curly that it was almost frowsy. She listened to us for a moment, then hopped aboard our talk like a boy flipping a street car: "Kansas--eh? I once lived in Oklahoma City. My father ran the Bee Hive!"

"Angels of mercy, angels of light!" This from me. "Say, will you interpret for us?"

"Sure mike! sir," she said. And then added: "And if it's engine trouble my husband upstairs is a chauffeur. Shall I get him?"

And when she returned with him, he fell to, glad enough to get a look into a twelve-cylinder American car. Henry stood by him, and with the woman acting as interlocutor, between our driver and her husband we soon had the trouble located and the dissimulator--Henry maintains that all engine trouble is connected in some way with a dissimulator--rectified, and while the job was going on, he expounded the twelve cylinders to the French, puffed on his dreadnaught pipe, and left the lady from Oklahoma City to me. She was keen for talk.

Between her official communiques to her husband and our driver, she got in this:

"Yes, I know Frank Wickoff in Oklahoma City--knew him when he was poor as Job's turkey, and then my folks used to borrow money at his bank. Before we came to Oklahoma City we lived in Austin. We ran the Good Luck, or was it the Fair; no, we ran the Fair in Dallas."

At a quick look at her face from me she laughed and said: "Oh, yes, I'm Jew all right. No," she returned to a query, "I never was in Wichita. But when we moved to Blackwell we used to take the Beacon!"

"Henry, come here," came the call from me. "Here is old Subscriber and Constant Reader!" Then Henry came up and the subsequent proceedings interested me no more. For Henry took the witness. And the three of us, kicking our heels on the cement wall below us, sat swapping yarns about mutual friends in the Southwest. It seems that in France the lady is a pedlar who goes from town to town on market day with notions and runs a little notion wagon through the country between times. She told us of an air raid of the night before on St. Dizier where eleven people had been killed and urged us to stay for the funeral the next day. It was to be a sight worth seeing. Most of the dead were women and children. There was nothing military in the little town but the two hotels that housed soldiers and their friends and relatives going to the front and coming back. Yet the Germans had come, dropped a score of bombs on the town, then had flown away for another town, dropping their hateful eggs across country as they went. Luneville had lost half a dozen, Fismes half a score, and other towns of the neighbourhood, accordingly--all civilians, mostly women and children; and not a town raided had any military works or if it had a munition factory, the bombs had hit miles from the plants.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Henry puffed on his dreadnaught pipe and left the lady from Oklahoma City to me]

We were beginning to realize slowly what a h.e.l.l of torture and disease and suffering this war means to France. Half a million tuberculars in her homes, spreading poison there; two million homeless refugees quartered beyond the war zone; millions of soldiers living in the homes fifty miles back from the line, every month bringing new men to these homes left by their comrades returning to the battle front; air raids by night slaying women and babies; commerce choked with the offering to the war G.o.d; soldiers filling the highways; food, clothing and munitions taking all the s.p.a.ce upon the railroads; fuel almost prohibitively high; food scarce; and always talk of the war--of nothing, absolutely nothing but the war and its horrors. That France has held so long under this curse proves the miracle of her divine courage! As we sat under the shrouded torches in the inn courtyard and considered what life really means to the men and women of St. Dizier, once more we wondered how we at home would react under the terrific punishment which these people are taking; what would Wichita do with her houses bombed, her homes crowded with refugees; her parks and schools and public buildings turned into barracks, her stores filled with gaping empty shelves, her railroad yards clogged with munitions, and ever the mourners going about the street and man to his long home. How would Emporia act with the pestilence that stalketh in darkness for ever near her; with her women and children slaughtered, merely to break the morale of the people and cause them to plead for peace; with cripples from the war hidden away in a hundred sad homes, with fatherless children and children born out of wedlock among the things that one had to face daily? Perhaps our young Jewish friend thought we were wearying of her. For she rose and said, "Well, good-night, gents--pleasant dreams!"

Pleasant dreams--indeed!

But in the morning we arose refreshed and hurried along a misty plain, forty miles or so from the American troops. Always in the background were great bushy trees, and lush green gra.s.s, and the thing was composed. How the French manage to compose their landscape is too much for me. But at any of a thousand points the scene might have been photographed for a Corot, by getting a few good-looking girls in nighties to dance on the gra.s.s of the middle distance!

American landscape has to be picked apart to have its picture taken; a tree selected here, a hill there, a brook yonder, and if ladies in nighties are needed, they are brought from afar! They are not indigenous to the soil. But one feels that in France they might come sidling out from behind any willow clump with their toes rouged ready for the dance!

The road that morning seemed traversing a great picture gallery, unwinding into life as from a dream within a dream! And then, after two hours of joyous landscape, we waked and saw America! Now America was not a vision; it was substantial, if not beautiful. As we switched around a bend in the road we came upon America full-sized and blood raw--a farmer boy--bronzed, milk-eyed, good-natured, with the Middle West written all over him. He wore a service hat at a forward pitch over his eyes; in his hands, conched to tremulo the sound, he held an harmonica; his eyes were aslit in the ecstasy of his own music; from the crook of his arm dangled a bridle, and he sat cross-legged high up on the quarter deck of a great four-story, full-rigged Missouri mule. He didn't salute us but called "Hi" as we pa.s.sed, and then we knew that "our flag was still there" and that we were near our troops.

The boys must be popular in the neighbourhood. For in the next village, which by the way was a town of ten thousand, our American Red Cross uniforms were treated with distinguished courtesy. Henry wanted a match. He could talk no French but a little boy at the inn, seeing him fumbling through his clothes with an unlighted pipe, came running to us with a little blue box of matches. Henry gave the boy a franc--more to be amiable than anything else. The boy flashed home to his mother proud as Punch! And just as we were pulling out of the village the boy came running to us with another little blue box of matches. We thought the boy had discovered that matches would bring a franc a box from Americans and was preparing to make his fortune. So Henry took the box, and as the car was moving handed the boy another franc. We noticed him waving his hands and shaking his head. And when we were a mile out of the village Henry opened his second box and found his original franc in it. The boy's mother was ashamed that he should have taken any money for a box of matches, and had made him bring back the money with another box to show how much the French appreciate the Americans coming to France.

We met many instances like that.

Soon the road was cluttered up with American soldiers. They were driving motors, whacking mules, stringing along the by-paths and sweating copiously under the autumn sun. We wondered in pa.s.sing what an American farmer boy and his self-respecting mule thought of the two-wheeled French carts they were using. Then we turned the corner and came into a new view; we saw our first troop of American soldiers quartered in a French village. They were busy building barracks. We stopped and visited them, and they showed us their quarters: In barns, in lofts of houses, in cellars, in vacant stores--everywhere that human beings could slip in, the American soldiers had installed themselves. The Y.M.C.A. hut was finished, and in it a score of boys were writing letters, playing rag-time on the pianos, and jollying the handsome, wise-looking American women at the counter across one end of the room. An Irish Catholic padre in a major's uniform was in charge of the sports of the camp and he literally permeated the Y.M.C.A. hut. He was the leader of the men. The little village where this troop lived faded into the plain and we rode again for five miles or so, and then came to another and another and still another. At that time thirteen villages in an arc of forty miles or so contained most of our American troops.

We stopped many times on our long day's journey. Once we stopped for mid-day dinner and there came to Henry and me our first estrangement. It is curious, as the poet sings, "how light a thing may move dissension between hearts that love--hearts that the world in vain has tried and sorrow but more closely tied." Well--the thing that came between us was cooking--cooking that has parted more soul mates than any other one thing in the world! For two weeks more or less we had been eating in the French mess, or eating at country hotels or country homes in France, eating good French country cooking, and it was excellent. A mid-day meal typically was a melon, or a clear soup, or onion soup, brown and strong; a small bit of rare steak or chop, or a thin sliced roast in the juice with browned potatoes or carrots, a vegetable entree--peas, spinach, served dry and minced, or string beans; then raw fruit, and cheese.

The bread, of course, was black war bread, but crusty and fine. That was my idea of a lunch for the G.o.ds. What we got at the American mess was this: a thick, frowsy, greasy soup--a kind of larded dishwater; thin steak fried hard as nails, boiled beans with fried bacon laid on the beans--not pork and beans, but called pork and beans--with the beans slithery and hard and underdone; lettuce, cabbage, and onions soused in vinegar, white bread cut an inch thick, soft and spongy, boiled potatoes that had stood in the water after they were cooked done, and then bread pudding, made by pouring water on bread, sticking in some raisins, stirring in an egg, and serving a floury syrup over it for sauce! There was enough, of course, to keep soul and body together. But the cooking had spoiled a lot of mighty good food. And Henry liked it! There were two preachers with us, and they bragged about the "good old American cooking!"

And when they heard me roar they said, "He is insulting the star-spangled banner," and Henry threatened to take my pajamas out of his black valise!

[Ill.u.s.tration: And he sat cross legged]

After pa.s.sing through many villages crowded with our troops we came to the headquarters of the American Expeditionary forces. We found General Pers.h.i.+ng in a long brick building--two or three stories high, facing a wide white parade ground. The place had been used evidently as a barracks for French soldiers in peace times, and was fitted to the uses of our army. We met a member of his staff, a sort of outer guard, and with scarcely a preliminary halt were taken to the general. He seems easy of access, which is a sign that he plays no favourites and has no court. Anyone with business can see him. He met us in a plain bare room with a square new American-looking desk in the midst of it. He sat behind the desk, cordial enough but with the air of one who will be pleased to have business start, and politenesses stop. So we plunged straight to the business in hand. We were from the American Red Cross in Paris, and our leader had come to get a definite idea of what part the Red Cross was to play in the recreation activities of the army. The Y.

M. C. A. was spending millions upon recreation problems. The Red Cross had millions to spend.

Recreation in Paris, of course, means soldier hostels, homes, clubs, houses where American soldiers can go while in Paris on leave of absence. The Red Cross had one single donation of one million dollars to be devoted to a club for American soldiers in Paris.

The Y. M. C. A had started to equip two or three great Parisian hotels as clubs. The Red Cross had money donated for certain other recreation purposes in camp. The Y. M. C. A. believed it should control the camp and Parisian recreation activities of the American troops.

We stated our case about as briefly as it is here written, and in three minutes. In two minutes more General Pers.h.i.+ng had a.s.sured us that there would be no need to spend money for hotels or clubs in Paris, that few soldiers would be given leave to go to Paris, and that the lavish expenditure of American money in Paris would be bad for America's standing in France.

And then he allotted the recreation problems of men in the hospitals to the Red Cross, and the recreation enterprises for men outside of hospitals to the Y. M. C. A.

He was brief, exact, candid and final. He stood for the most part, as he talked; spoke low, fumbled for no word, and looked into his hearers' eyes. The politician looks over their shoulders. We spoke for two or three minutes with him about the work of our troops this winter, and were impressed with the decision of the man. He seemed--perhaps subconsciously--afraid that public opinion at home would demand that he put our men into the trenches to hold their own sector too early. He evidently believed that during our first winter the men should go in by squads and perhaps companies or later in regimental units for educational purposes, working with the English and the French learning the trench game. But we felt clearly that he believed strongly that it would be spring before we should occupy any portion of the line ourselves. There was a firmness about him, not expressed in words. No one could say that he had said what we thought he had conveyed to us. Yet each of us was sure that the General would not be moved from his decision.

He breathes confidence in him into people's hearts. He never seems confidential; though he is entirely candid. Again one feels sure that there is no court around him. He seems wise with his own wisdom, which is constantly in touch with the wisdom of everyone who may have business with him. He will not be knocked off his feet; he will do no military stunts. The American soldiers will not go into action until we have enough troops to hold our part of the line and we will not start an offensive until we can back it up.

This all came glowing out of the firm, kind, wise, soldierly face of General Pers.h.i.+ng, and it needed no words to verify it. Superfluous words might have contradicted the message of his mien; for they might have added boast to simple statement.

It is all so orderly, so organized, so American, this thing we are doing in France. It is like the effective manipulation of a great trust. The leaders.h.i.+p of the American forces in France in the army and in the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. is made up of men known all over the United States; the names of those leaders who are soldiers may not be mentioned. They have dropped out of American civilian life so quietly that they are scarcely missed. Yet for weeks we lived in the hotel with one of the prominent figures in American finance who is working eighteen hours a day buying supplies, a.s.sembling war material--food, fuel, clothing--putting up scores of miles of barracks, building a railroad from tidewater to the American headquarters, equipping it with American engines, freight cars, and pa.s.senger coaches; sinking piles for the first time in a harbour which has been occupied for two thousand years, and unloading great s.h.i.+ps there which were supposed to be too big for that port.

He is the marvel of the French. Hundreds like him are over there lending a hand. They are about to handle in a year an army half as large as the other allies have been three years building. Houses, furniture, fuel, food, guns, ammunition, clothing, transportation, communication, medicine, surgeons, recreation--the whole routine of life for a million men and more must be provided in advance by these organizing men. This work, so far as these men consider it, is purely altruistic. They are sacrificing comforts at home, money-making opportunities at home, and they are working practically for nothing, paying their own expenses, and under the censor's wise rules these men can have not even the empty husks of pa.s.sing fame. For their names may not be mentioned in the news of what the Americans are doing in Europe. Yet wherever one goes in Europe he is running across these first-cla.s.s men. Their sincerity and patriotism may not be questioned.

But they are getting something real out of it all. The renewal of youth in their faces through unstinted giving is beautiful to see.

They are going into a new adventure--a high and splendid adventure, and while many of them may snap back after the war to the old egoistic individualistic way of looking at life, their examples will persist, and their lives, when they go back to the old rut, will never be the same lives that they were before.

But here is a story, an American story which has in it the makings of a hero tale. It came to us in Paris, bit by bit. We saw it and no one told it to us. Yet here it is, and it should begin in form.

Once upon a time in America when the people were changing their G.o.ds, a certain major G.o.d of finance named James Hazen Hyde, head of a great insurance company, fell into disfavour; and the people, changing their G.o.ds, cast him away. If men had been serving the old G.o.ds they would have said, "Go it while you're young," to the youth, but instead they said unpleasant things. So he went to France and vanished from the map, but he did not entirely understand why he was banished. He had done nothing that other young G.o.ds did not do and he was amazed, but he faded. He lived in Paris as an exile, not as a G.o.d, and he couldn't for the life of him tell why. But when the war came he had a mighty human desire to serve his country; just to serve, mind you, not to be exalted. He was fifty years old, too old to pack a rifle; too old to mount an airs.h.i.+p; too old to stop a bullet without taking two or three other good men and true, younger than he, to watch him. So he had hard work to find service.

Then along came the American Red Cross and it wanted servants--not major generals, not even captains; but just chauffeurs and interpreters and errand boys and things. And young Jimmy Hyde, who had been the Prince of Wales of the younger G.o.ds of fas.h.i.+onable finance, and who was cast out when the people changed their G.o.ds, came to Red Cross headquarters with his two cars, and offered them and himself to serve. And they put him in a uniform, with a Sam Browne belt, and a Red Cross on his cap; and it was after all his country's uniform, and he was a servant of his country. And men say that even in the days of his young G.o.dhood he was not so happy, nor did his face s.h.i.+ne in such pride as it s.h.i.+nes today. For he is a man. He serves.

After our visit to the American troops we went down to Domremy, the birth place of Joan of Arc. It was good to view her from the aspect of her Old Home Town. There is a church, restored, where she wors.h.i.+pped, and the home where she was born and lived. It was a better house than one is led to suppose she lived in, and indicates that her people were rather of more consequence than common. We visited the home, went into the church, and walked in the garden where she met the angel; but we met postcard vendors instead. Yet it is a fair garden, back from the road, half hidden by a wall, and in it is a lovely drooping tree. A fair place it was indeed for an angel to choose. Some way Joan leaves me without much enthusiasm.

Perhaps it is because she has had two good friends who have done her bad turns. The Pope, who made her a saint, and Mark Twain, who made her human. It is difficult to say, off-hand, which did her the worse service. Some way, it seems to me, she could live in our hearts more beautifully in the remote and n.o.ble company of myths like the lesser G.o.ds, made by men to express their deepest yearnings for the beautiful in life. The pleasant land in which she lived, the gentle hills whereon she watched her flocks, and the tender sky of France, all made me happy, and if Joan did not get to me, perhaps it was because one can take away from a place only what he brings there.

When we left Domremy, the hills--soft green hills, high but never rugged, stretched away in the misty purple distance and we dropped into those vales where Joan watched her sheep and heard the voices.

It did not seem impossible, nor even difficult to hear voices amid such beauty. So we fell to discussing the voices that reach this world. And Henry said: "Always there are voices in this earth--always they come in youth, calling us forward and upward. And if we follow them, though they lead to long marches and hard bivouacs, and to humiliation and sorrow, yet are we happy and triumphant."

"But Germany?" insisted someone. "Where were her voices?"

"Her voices came when Heine sang, and Beethoven made music, and Goethe and Schiller wrote and Schopenhauer thought! If ever a land had the philosophy and the poetry of democracy Germany had it.

Democracy tried to bloom in the revolutionary days of the forties, but Germany strangled her voices. And now--"

"And now there are no voices in the world!" sighed one of our party; but even as he spoke from out of the purple distance came the thin faint sound of a bugle trembling among the hills. It was an American bugle. And Henry caught its significance, and cried: "There is the new voice--the voice that the world must follow if we find the old peace again on earth."

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH WE DISCERN THINGS "BY THE DAWN'S EARLY LIGHT"

At the close of one fair autumn day our car developed tire trouble, in a village "Somewhere in France," not far from the headquarters of the American Army. There are four excellent reasons for deleting the name of the town. First, the censor might not like to have it printed; second, because the name of the place has escaped my memory; third, because there is a munition factory there and it should not be mentioned, and fourth, because even if the name of the place returned to me, its spelling would get lost in transit.

In pa.s.sing it should be said in this connection that it seemed to Henry and me that the one thing France really needed was a p.r.o.nounceable language and phonetic spelling. The village where we stopped really was not a village in the Kansas sense; it was twice as big as Emporia and nearly half as big as Wichita, which is 70,000. But the thing that made the place seem like a village to us was the town crier. As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum and crying the official news of the sugar ration; he was telling the people where they could get sugar, how much they should pay for it and how much they should use for each member of a family a month.

"Why," asked Henry of an English speaking bystander, "don't you put that in your daily newspaper; why keep up the old custom?"

"We have no daily newspaper," answered the inhabitant.

"All right, then, is there any reason why the news won't wait for the weekly?" asked Henry.

"And we have no weekly and no monthly and no annual. We have no newspaper in this town."

That stumped us both. In America every town of five thousand has its daily newspaper, and frequently two dailies, and in the West every town of five hundred people has its weekly newspaper. With us the newspaper crystallizes public sentiment, promotes local pride, and tries to be the social and intellectual centre of the community. A community of twenty-five thousand without a newspaper--and we found that this community never had supported a newspaper--was unthinkable to us in terms of any civilization that we knew. How do they know about the births, deaths, and marriages, we asked; and they told us that the churches recorded those things. How do they know about the scandal? And we remembered that scandal was older than the press; it was the father of the press, as the devil is the father of lies. How do they know how to vote? And they told us that newspapers hindered rather than helped that function. How did they record local history? And in our hearts, we knew who had recorded so much local history, that most of it is not worth recording and that tradition takes care of what is left. But how did they manage to create a town spirit, to vote the bonds for the city waterworks, to establish the public library, to enforce the laws, to organize the Chamber of Commerce, to get up subscriptions for this, that or the other public benevolence? And men shook their heads and said: Water has run down hill many years; perhaps it will keep on running, even without a newspaper.

[Ill.u.s.tration: As we sat in the car he came down the street beating a snare drum and crying official news of the sugar ration]