The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl

by Katharine Duncan Morse

CHAPTER VIII: CONFLANS—PIONEERS, M.P.’s AND OTHERS

Jarny, March 2.

I am living in a hospital. Being in the occupied territory, the hospital has been for the last four years, of course, a German hospital. Over the doorways are painted such pious mottoes as “Gruss Gott!” and the theatre, for there is an amusement hall in the building, is adorned with a back-drop on which a Siegfried-esque hero overlooks an ideal German landscape wherein a picture-book castle perches on the top of an impossible mountain. At the other end of the hall is painted an enormous iron cross. The masterpiece of the collection, though, is on the wall of the basketball court and is, naturally, a portrait of His Late Imperial Majesty, although one indentifies him rather by inference than recognition, for the countenance having recently served for a pistol target is battered almost out of human semblance. The main part of the hospital is occupied by the Y.; in the wings some two hundred ordnance boys are quartered; we ladies find comfortable lodging in the operating room. There are five of us here at present, two American girls, besides myself, and two Englishwomen. These latter are ladies of high degree, I gather, being related to bishops and other such personages. They go under the unvarying title of the “British Army, First and Second Battalions.” According to report they were sent over here from England to do propaganda work, that is, to create a pleasant impression on young America and thus help to forge another link between the two nations etc., but this they indignantly deny. However that may be, the boys derive a rather wicked joy from teasing and arguing with the good ladies, and particularly from filling them full of amazing tales about “The States.” Even the Secretary can’t resist the temptation to “rag” them, and though they are usually very patient under his plaguing, today at dinner we received a shock. In response to one of his more daring sallies, the Bishop’s sister, fixing the Secretary with an icy eye, lifted one patrician hand to her august nose, and thumbed it! Which only goes to show that even an English Lady of Quality has human moments. And if we on our side must laugh a bit at them, it is plain to see that they, in their turn, find us infinitely amusing. In fact I half suspect, since they spend hours every day covering sheets of paper with close, fine handwriting, that the good ladies are engaged upon writing a book concerning the peculiarities of their American cousins when seen at close range. And in view of all the wonderful material the boys have furnished them, that book should make rich reading.

There are three Y.s here in a little triangle each a mile apart, all under the same management; Jamy, Conflans and Labry. Within this triangle, besides the ordnance detachment, there is a regiment of engineers, two companies of pioneer infantry, a telegraph battalion and a detachment of negro labor troops.

When the Americans came here last November, the town, they tell us, was an indescribable mess, the roads choked with abandoned military material and litter of all sorts. To the Americans as usual fell the pleasant task of cleaning up. Sometimes I think that if France doesn’t come out of this war as clean as the classic Spotless Town it will only be because the Americans weren’t here long enough. And yet, funnily enough, France being cleaned up by America has often provided a spectacle analogous to a little boy having his face washed against his will. At Bourmont, when the Americans sought to make the town sanitary by a liberal use of disinfectants, a frantic protest went up from the inhabitants: their wells, they claimed, had all been ruined! At Gondrecourt the Mayor presented a formal complaint; the Americans were wearing away the streets, he said, by too much cleaning! And on the other hand this sort of work proves none too pleasant a pill for American pride to swallow. Today a young New York Jew came into the canteen. He was a handsome fellow and in civilian life evidently something of a dandy. He belonged to the pioneers and he had been engaged all day, I gathered, in following about at the tail of a dump cart, picking up tin cans and rubbish.

“My God!” he suddenly burst out. “If my wife could see me now! My God! if she could see me!”

One day last fall going down a street I passed a boy who was engaged in a particularly dirty sort of cleaning. He looked up, caught my eye, stood grinning sheepishly at me a moment. Then he drawled, half humourously, half-bitterly:

“And my mother thinks I’m in the trenches!”

Conflans, March 10.

After so many weeks of wandering, I have settled down to a job again. The last six “huts” in which I have been were in a barracks, a casino, a private house, a convent, a college and a hospital. This “hut” is in a hotel. The hotel is situated directly back of the Conflans-Jamy railroad station. Before the war the hotel was a prosperous and pleasant place, judging from the photograph which Madame showed us; its windows filled with real lace curtains all matching! as she pointed out; the broad terrace in front on sunny days filled with little tables and crowded with well-dressed people. Now, after four years of German occupation, it is a melancholy spectacle; ragged, dingy, half the panes gone from the windows, its front painted over with staring German signs. There are two entrances, one into the hall leading to the rooms given over to the Y. the other into what we call the “Annex,” a little café kept by Madame and Monsieur, the proprietors of the place. Next to our red triangle sign stares a board announcing brazenly in red and yellow Vin et Bière; but the irony of the juxtaposition is quite lost on the French; indeed yesterday Madame asked me if I couldn’t get her the loan of a truck to go to Nancy for a load of beer!

Madame and Monsieur have been here all through the German occupation. The Germans weren’t bad, Madame told me, if one were very meek and never said a word, but did just exactly as they said,—she had had some difficulty to be sure, reducing her more temperish spouse to the proper attitude of meek submission!—but they had made a clean sweep of everything of value; all her linen that she had carefully hidden, her copper utensils, everything.

The Y. consists of a canteen room, a reading and writing room, store-room, kitchen and office. When I first saw the place it was as uninviting as anything could well be; dark, dirty, ill-smelling, the walls covered with soiled ragged paper. But now it is very nice; the dirty cloth in the window frames has been replaced by vitex, the windows hung with pretty curtains, new electric lights have been added, and best of all, the walls entirely covered with German camouflage cloth and decorated with bright posters. This camouflage cloth is a Godsend; woven of finely twisted strands of paper, it comes in three colors, a soft brown, a yellowish green and a dark blue, resembling, when on the walls, a loosely woven burlap. It was used by the Germans to conceal and disguise military objects and was left here in large quantities when they evacuated. The Americans hereabouts use it for every imaginable purpose; for covering unsightly walls, for curtains, for officers’ mess table-cloths. Then there are the ammunition bags made of paper cloth which the boys use for laundry bags. “When in doubt, camouflage,” is the motto. I chose brown for my canteen and now it is on the walls I feel that no millionaire could ask for anything prettier. Only I wonder; will they ask me to join the paper-hangers’ union when I get home?

Besides running the dry canteen, we serve hot chocolate free every night for all comers here, filling up their canteens so the boys can take it away with them, and run a free lodging-house. Every day we have boys coming into the canteen asking for a bed. So after nine-fifteen we stack all the chairs and tables at one end of the writing-room, and bring out canvas-cots and blankets from the store-room for our lodgers. There is only one unfortunate feature of this scheme; the lodgers become so attached to their blankets that they are all too apt to carry them away with them the next morning!

A man secretary and I are to run the hut together; a minister in the states, here he answers to the unvarying title of “Chief.” The “Chief” I find at present chiefly remarkable for his trousers. These are garments with a past apparently and a present of such a sort that in the company of ladies he is only rendered at ease by assuming a sitting posture. If compelled to rise he backs out of your presence as if you were royalty or goes with the gesture of the little boy who has been chastised. Outside the house, no matter how fine the day may be, he goes discreetly clad in a raincoat.

“I must,” declares the Chief at least six times a day, “go to Toul and get a new uniform.”

“Amen,” say I under my breath.

Besides the outfits stationed in town there are some twenty more in the neighborhood which draw their rations here at the railhead and then there are the leave trains on their way to or from Germany, whose passing, like a visitation of locusts, leaves the canteen stripped and bare. The negro labor troops in the vicinity supply quite a new element. Sometimes this takes the form of a bit of humour. Last night I had drawn several cups of cocoa ahead of the demand when a darky lad came shyly up to the counter and pointed to one.

“Please ma’am,” he asked, “am dat cup occupied?”

There is one fat and genial little darky who is a constant customer, always he comes in munching a sandwich or an orange or some other edible bought from a street-vendor.

“Eating again, Jo?” asked the Chief today.

“Why Boss,” expostulated Jo, “I only eats one meal a day! But dat,” he grinned, “am all de time!”

“Shines” the boys invariably call them.

Tonight we were amused to see a negro corporal, who, not content with the chevrons on his sleeve, had sewed an additional pair on his overseas cap!

Conflans, March 14.

My family at the hut consists of the Chief, Harry, Jerry and Slim. Harry and Jerry are as nice lads as one could find anywhere, but Slim is the bird that hatched out of the cuckoo’s egg. Lean, uncouth, according to his own claim, “the tallest man that Uncle Sam’s got in his army,” with an inordinately long neck and an Adam’s apple so prominent as to give him the appearance of an ostrich in the act of swallowing a perpetual orange, “Slim Old Horse” as the boys call him, seems to me at times more like an animated caricature of the middle west “Long Boy” than a being of flesh and blood and bone. How he ever became attached to the Y. is a point on which nobody seems certain, but here he is and here he sticks in spite of every effort to dislodge him. I fancy his “Top Kick” was only too glad to get rid of him and when he discovered Slim’s inclination toward the Y. simply let him go and washed his hands of him. Slim’s health is uncertain. Most of the time he only feels well enough to sit in the office and eat or “chaw.”

“I started in ter chaw terbaccer,”—he talks with a nasal twang which is impossible to reproduce,—“when I was a kid four years old; when my daddy an’ my mammy found it out, they sure did start ter raise hell with me, but I says to ’em; ‘All right, have it your way, but then it will be whisky and rum fer mine, when I’m twenty-one!’ So my mammy says ‘Let ’im chaw.’ An’ I’ve chawed ever sence.”

“I’ve only got one lung,” he remarked the other day, “and that’s a little one.”

“Slim,” I urged, “I’m worried about you. You oughtn’t to be here. You ought to be in the hospital where you could be properly cared for. Go to your medical officer and tell him from me that he must send you to the hospital.”

Slim reluctantly departed. I dared to hope we had seen the last of him. But before the afternoon was over he was back on his old perch. He had brought some little pills back with him. Just wait, I thought, until I meet that medical officer!

Slim seldom feels attracted to the meals at the mess-hall. So he sits in the office and lives chiefly upon cheese, Y. M. C. A. cheese purchased to make sandwiches for the canteen at a cost of a dollar and a quarter a pound. Sometimes he fries himself eggs, taking whatever mess-kit, Harry’s or Jerry’s or mine, happens to be handy and never, in spite of anything I can say, will he wash it up after him! Sometimes Harry and Jerry and I decide that instead of going to mess we would like to have a supper-party at the canteen ourselves, and then the question is, how to get rid of Slim?

“Slim, it’s getting near chow-time,” we say, “I’ll bet they’re going to have mashed potatoes and brown gravy tonight. Isn’t that ‘Soupy’ I hear going now?”

But Slim refuses to budge any more than a bump on a log, so we usually have to end by inviting him. But if I find Slim a burden, how must the Chief feel toward him? For Slim has appropriated the extra cot in the office, which also serves as the Chief’s bed-room, and so has fairly camped down on him. And the Chief is a gentleman of nerves and delicate perceptions.

“He gets up in the middle of the night,” confided the Chief to me today in an almost awe-struck voice, “and he goes for the water-bucket and drinks a half a pail without stopping. He makes a noise just like a horse swallowing it.”

I have given up trying to do anything with Slim. Nothing that I can say seems to make the least impression on him. Slim is a married man, yet yesterday I caught him embracing Louise, Madame’s cross-eyed maid of all work, in the passage-way. I undertook to reprove him.

“Why that ain’t nawthin!” he turned a blameless and unabashed eye upon me. “That’s jest a man’s nature.”

This is the first time that I have eaten regularly from a mess-kit and I am learning things. I have learned that the aluminum mess-cup draws the heat from the hot coffee so that it is impossible to drink out of one until the liquid has become half-way cold, and that it is most unappetizing to have to wash one’s mess-kit afterwards in a pail of greasy soap suds in which a hundred odd other mess-kits have already been bathed. I used to tease the boys with their mess-cups in the chocolate line by telling them that I could tell just how recently they had had inspection by the shine on their mess-cups, but now whenever I look at the state of my own cup I think I won’t have the face to ever tease them that way again! I have also learned that cold “gold fish” or “sewer carp,” as the boys call their canned salmon, is just as bad as they say it is, and that slum made of hunks of bacon, potatoes, onions and unlimited water is no easy thing to swallow. But this sounds ungrateful and I don’t mean to be, for the cooks are nice as can be and never say a word no matter how late I may be. While as for the boys, they put on all their company manners for me.

Here at the hut we are busy building an addition in order to enlarge our restaurant business. This is in the shape of a room on the terrace. The Germans had kindly built a roof over one end, a detail from the ordnance detachment at Jarny is enclosing the sides; we are to have three real glass windows looking out onto the street and a door connecting the terrace-room with the present canteen. This afternoon the detail ran out of lumber; the Chief managed to get the loan of a truck to fetch some more. He asked Slim to go with the truck. The afternoon wore away, neither Slim nor the truck appeared, the detail, disgusted, sat and twiddled their thumbs. Nobody could understand what had happened as the lumber yard was just around the corner! Jerry went out to search. There was no trace of Slim or the truck to be found. About five o’clock he turned up. He had gone to Mars-la-Tour he told us coolly. We had been talking of going to the commissary at Mars-la-Tour for canteen supplies, and that great goose had gotten into his head that the lumber was to be obtained there! At least that is his explanation. But Harry and Jerry insinuate darker things:

“We didn’t know you had a girl in Mars-la-Tour before,” they tease. “Oh Slim, you old devil, you!”

I wonder now, just what was he up to in Mars-la-Tour all afternoon?

Conflans, March 19.

Why is it that all the world loves a rascal? What is the secret of the fascination that outlaw and free-booter have exercised from Robin Hood down to Captain Kidd? Is it because each one of us, in our secret hearts, would like to go and do likewise, if we only dared? Of all the minor piracies committed by the A. E. F. in France, none, I think, are so picturesque as those of the — Engineers.

The — Engineers are a railroad regiment. My first acquaintance with them was last summer. A company of these engineers was located at a station on the Paris line just north of us. It was a point at which supplies for the American front were transferred from the standard gauge to the American narrow gauge; in order to effect these transfers the — Engineers had a switch of their own. Now freight trains in France are quite unguarded and so at the mercy of marauders. Indeed the losses in transit have been so serious that since the armistice it has been the custom to have cars containing American goods “convoyed” to their destination by soldier guards. Last summer of course the men could not be spared for convoy duty. So it was the easiest thing in the world for the — Engineers to “cut out” a Y. or a Red Cross car, side-track it, and lighten the load at their leisure.

“I went through their company store-house while I was there,” a Q. M. sergeant told me, “and it was as well stocked with delicacies as the store-rooms of a big hotel back in the States.”

No wonder there was such a dearth of supplies at Abainville last summer!

But it was after the — Engineers moved into the occupied area here following the armistice that they performed their most notorious exploits. Assigned to run a stretch of railway in cooperation with the French, a certain amount of friction was inevitable from the start, the red tape in the French railway system exasperating the Americans as much as our more direct methods scandalized the French. Finally the French protests at the Americans’ disregard for the formalities of railroading moved the engineer officers to stricter discipline. “I’ll hang the next man of you who runs a train out of the yards without a pilot!” declared one captain. After that things went more smoothly,—on the surface. Then came the Dance.

Now unfortunately for the — Engineers there is an extra large M. P. force here at Conflans under a Major whose greatest delight in life is the detection and punishment of both major and minor infractions of the law.

The Dance was quite an affair over which the — Engineers had spread themselves and to which the French fair sex was generally invited. When the party was about to begin, however, it became evident that the feminine partners afforded locally were all too few. Some bold soul had a bright idea; a train-crew forthwith hurried down to the yards, commandeered an engine and a couple of cars, and, in spite of the horrified protests of the French railroad men, ran it to a nearby town. Here they filled up the train with girls from the village and were about to start back again when a detachment of M. P.s, rushed up in autos from Conflans, broke in upon the scene. A sanguine scrimmage ensued, resulting in a victory for law and order.

In the meanwhile, back at the dance hall the engineers were waiting in impatient expectation for partners. Among the invited guests were two friendly M. P.s, old soldiers, with genial dispositions and several wound stripes to their credit. When word reached the party that the M. P.s had prevented the arrival of the “Mademoiselles” the engineers were furious. “Kill the M. P.s!” went up the cry. Catching sight of the red-arm bands on their two innocent guests the crowd started for them with the evident intention of making a beginning then and there. Heaven only knows what would have happened if the two M. P.s, by affecting an exit at the double-quick, hadn’t immediately made their escape, unharmed but badly scared.

The most notable exploit of the — Engineers occurred not long afterwards. It is referred to as the Affair of the Serge Uniforms. One fine day, not very long ago, it was noised abroad that a car full of tailored serge uniforms, consigned to and paid for by officers of the Army of Occupation in Luxembourg, was standing down in the yards. The idea of going home in an officer’s serge uniform from which, of course, the braid on the cuffs had been discreetly ripped, made a strong appeal to the boys’ imaginations. When the time came for that car to be sent to Luxembourg it was found to be quite empty. But for once the Engineers had gone too far. The M. P. Major took the war-path. Word flew around the camp that a strict search was being conducted. The possessors of the incriminating uniforms must get rid of them and get rid of them quick. Some hid them in out-of-the-way places, between the floors and ceilings in the half-ruined houses; others frantically ripped the uniforms to pieces and burned them in the barracks stoves. The camp, they tell me, was full of the stench of scorching woolen. Still others got rid of them by planting them among the possessions of their innocent neighbors. One company postal clerk, a most upright and blameless lad, to his horror discovered one of the fatal uniforms stuffed in a mail-bag lying at his feet. Before the search party had made its rounds most of those serge uniforms had been safely disposed of; a few, a very few were found.

But now, having been baulked in his attempt to bring the culprits to justice, it is common rumour, that the M. P. Major is lying low, waiting to “fix” the — Engineers.

Conflans, March 23.

The — Engineers have left. They are on their way to Le Mans, presumably the first stage of their journey home. Their departure was not unmarked by incident. At the last moment, when they had all entrained and were ready to pull out of the station, the M. P. Major sallied forth, court-martials in his eye, to search the trains for contraband. But he had reckoned without the Colonel of the engineers who flatly refused to allow any such procedure. Being outranked by the Colonel, the M. P. Major was seemingly helpless. Then, however, the Colonel made a bad mistake. There were two train loads. The Colonel left with the first. The second, being left without any protector of sufficiently high rank, fell an easy prey to the Major. He searched to his heart’s content, discovering several articles of unlawful loot and, one unfortunate clad in one of the notorious serge uniforms! The train was held in the yards while the M. P. Major indulged in an orgy of court-martials.

On the morning of the departure the captain of the motor unit where we had messed stopped in to speak to me. He came by request of the boys to bring an apology for any careless language which might have been uttered unwittingly in my hearing! Then the captain of another unit called to tell us, sub rosa, that, forced by shortage of transportation, he was leaving behind an over supply of rations which would be ours for the fetching. We fetched accordingly and found that we had fallen heir to dozens of loaves of bread, sugar, coffee, canned meat, canned tomatoes, hard bread, soap and unlimited beans. What to do with these surreptitious stores is now the embarrassing question. One simply can’t offer the boys hard bread, tomatoes plain or scalloped, in the canteen, no matter if one should dress them with all the sauces of Epicurus and serve them on gold-plate. Yet they mustn’t be wasted. What’s more, the fact that they are in our possession must be kept absolutely dark, lest we get the kind captain into trouble. I feel something like the man who was presented with a million dollar check and then found he couldn’t cash it.

With the — Engineers went Harry, Jerry, and Slim. I couldn’t believe until the last moment that Slim was actually going. His departure almost compensated for the loss of Harry and Jerry. But though gone, he is not forgotten. This morning a lad came into the canteen. He would like his watch please, he said. I looked blankly at him. He explained; several days ago, just as he was leaving on a long truck-trip, he had broken the strap of his wrist watch. Happening to be in front of the Y. just then, he had brought it in and left it for safe-keeping “with the Y. man in the office.” The Chief knew nothing of it.

“What did the Y. man look like?” I questioned.

He described him. It was Slim. We have searched every nook and cranny of that office, hoping to come upon the missing watch, in vain.

“I’ll come in again,” said the boy. “Perhaps by that time you will have found it.”

But personally I am sure that that watch is now on its way to Le Mans, en route for the States. Was there ever anything more wretchedly embarrassing?

Conflans, March 27.

This is a curious world. Six “Relief Trains” pass through here every day bound east, loaded with food for Germany. Meanwhile in the little half-ruined hamlets within a stone’s throw of the tracks the French villagers, for whom no provision has been made, are famine-stricken.

Lieutenant A. came in from the little town of Pierrefond which lies between Conflans and Verdun yesterday.

“They have nothing to eat there,” he told me, “but the weeds they dig up in the fields for salade and the frogs they catch in the marshes. When the days are cold the frogs bury themselves so deep in the mud that they can’t be caught. There is one old gentleman who told me today that he had existed for weeks entirely on a diet of turnips. They come to me and beg pitifully for a bite of something from the mess-kitchen, but I don’t dare let them have it, as that would be, of course, strictly against regulations.”

I thought of those bushels of beans in the store-house. It was taking a chance of course, because after all it was government property and nothing else, but I told the Lieutenant that if he was willing to run the risk, I was; then I put it up to the Chief.

This morning the Lieutenant came in with a flivver. We drove over to the store-house and loaded it up with army beans, issue coffee, sugar, rice, onions, potatoes and soap. Then we filled a special sack with canned soup, “gold fish,” corn meal, canned tomatoes and corn syrup for the old gentleman who had lived on turnips. I felt he had a special claim on our sympathy.

We reached Pierrefond after a long drive in a stinging rain. It was a quaint pathetic village with a pretty little church whose tower had been sliced off as neatly as by a knife. Was it a German or a French shell which had done it, I wondered. We drew up in front of the Mayor’s house. He came out to greet us, showed me a list of the seventy-three inhabitants of the town; men, women and infants in arms. All the supplies were to be duly weighed and measured and distributed, so much per capita. While they were unloading the flivver we stopped in at Madame C.’s for coffee and compliments, and to dry out by her hospitable fire. Everyone made pretty speeches, of course, and Madame bestowed on me a delectable bouquet of wall-flowers and daffodils. Poor things! It’s little enough one can do for them. This will keep the wolf from the door for a short while perhaps, but after that, what then?

Pierrefond, like Conflans, was occupied by the Germans for four years. Now there is a young half-German population growing up, even as many as three to one family. The villagers accept the situation with tolerant humour; “Souvenirs Boches,” they call the children.

As for the rest of the rations, I made jam sandwiches with the bread and bestowed them together with hot chocolate on a hungry leave train. What to do with the “Charlie Horse,” as the boys call the canned roast beef, was a puzzle. Finally I made a paste of it mixed with bread crumbs, tomato soup, a few weenies and some ham scraps, pickles, parsley, onion and an egg,—we had six assistants in the kitchen and each added an ingredient,—put it between slices of bread and christened the result “Liberty Sandwiches. Guaranteed to contain neither Gold Fish nor Corn Willy.” The boys ate and wondered and came back for more.

Conflans, March 30.

In our back yard a detail of German prisoners is busy cleaning up; already they have made quite a transformation. Madame must have a garden. I wonder, as I watch them, what their state of mind may be; their phlegmatic faces give no hint. Did some of these very ones, perhaps, make merry in this self same café, only six months ago, when they were conquerors?

Madame tells me how, when the German officers were living here at the hotel, they ate off priceless old French plates, which, apparently quite ignorant of their value, they had carried off as loot. Madame, coveting these treasures, tried to arrange an exchange with the mess orderly, offering a number of modern dishes in return for one antique; but the mess orderly, fearing that some officer might notice the substitution, hesitated and before they could come to an agreement the precious plates, with the rough handling accorded them, had all been broken to bits.

Some of the boys seem to think that the French don’t give their prisoners enough to eat. The Germans, they say, when they get the chance, will wait outside the mess-hall door and seize eagerly the leavings in the mess-kits that the boys are about to throw away.

“Maybe it’s just because they’re greedy,” I say. “Surely they look fat enough!” And then a picture comes back to my mind, the picture of a Red Cross train seen while waiting at Pagny on my way to Paris last January, a train full of French prisoners who were being brought back from Germany, so weak from starvation that they lay on stretchers or sat pressing against the windows faces as wan and white as spectres.

The German prisoners, according to the boys’ repeated stories, are by no means a humble or repentant lot. They’re not beaten for good, the prisoners invariably declare. Just as soon as the Americans have gone and things have calmed down a bit, they are coming back to France again, they say, and this time they will settle matters with the French for good and all!

Last night a train load of German prisoners in box cars pulled into town. When the doors of the cars were opened it was found that one of the prisoners had died on the way. The dead man was wrapped in a blanket and left lying on the freight station platform. A “shine” from the labor battalion happened along in the dark, tripped and fell flat over the body. He came into the canteen in a state of nerves, quite prepared, evidently, to see a ghost in every corner.

Conflans, April 2.

The latest member of our household is something quite new in the way of details. He is a Salvation Army man and a very nice fellow indeed. A year or so ago he was beating a big drum in front of Gimbel’s Store; then he was drafted to come to France with the pioneers; now he has applied for a discharge in order to join his organization over here; and while waiting for his release he is proving himself an invaluable aid in the canteen. Now more than ever, since The Salvation Army, as everybody calls him, has joined our force, I have been longing to realize a dream which I have cherished ever since I came to France,—to make doughnuts for the A. E. F. I have the recipe, I can get the materials, the stove is the sticking-point. At present our cooking equipment consists of a hot water boiler and a wretched German range which is really fit for nothing but the scrap-heap. As the boys say, I have lost more religion than I ever thought I had over that stove! So while we hope and hunt for a doughnut-stove we are specializing in sandwiches and puddings. The puddings are my special pride as I worked out the ideas for them myself and, as far as I know, they are served in no other canteen. There are four of them; Coffee Jelly, Raspberry Jelly (made with the “pink-lemonade” fruit juice) Chocolate Bread Pudding, and Blackberry Bread Pudding. The bread-puddings are baked for us, by kindness of the cooks, at a nearby mess-kitchen. The only trouble with the puddings is, that there never is enough! But lest anyone should think that I take this as a compliment to my culinary skill, I must explain that the boys would eat anything you offered them, I believe, just as long as it was sweet and was a change. And then there is perhaps a quaint psychological factor too.

“A man don’t like to eat food that’s cooked by a man,” a lad confided to me the other day. “Anything that’s cooked by a woman tastes better.”

So if a boy does leave any scraps of pudding on his plate it bothers me unreasonably.

“Somebody didn’t like his pudding,” I remark mournfully to the S. A. as I pick up the dishes. This amuses him. Last night as we were clearing up before we closed he marched up to the counter, deposited a tiny wad found on one of the tables in front of me.

“Somebody,” he declared in a tragic tone, “didn’t like his chewing-gum!”

Nor can I boast, as a cook, of a record of unvarying success. On more than one occasion I must admit to having scorched the cocoa, and once, not many days ago—to my shame be it said!—I ruined a ten gallon can by putting in salt instead of sugar!

Here at Conflans we have an unusual amount of competition in the light lunch line. The other day a French fried potato booth, like a hot-dog booth at a country fair at home, established itself on the terrace just outside our door. Now a hungry doughboy can take the edge off his appetite with a paper full of hot French fries in return for a franc at any hour of the day.

Also in the street below the terrace are many little stands where oranges and sandwiches made of rolls and slices of sausage are on sale. The rivalry between these stands, it appears, is acute. Yesterday, hearing a hubbub, I looked out to see a comic battle in progress, the proprietors of two neighboring stands, a fat frowsy old woman and a little ragged man like a weasel, pelting each other for all they were worth with rotten oranges while half the A. E. F., it seemed, stood around and cheered. Nor did matters settle down to calm until a gendarme and intervention appeared on the scene.

This morning I stopped in at the little French store around the corner to buy half a dozen eggs to make a custard sauce for my chocolate bread pudding. When the man gave me my change I noticed he had overcharged me by twenty-five centimes.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“That,” returned the shopkeeper, “is because you picked them out by hand.”

Some canteen ladies can cook and wait on the counter and open milk-cans and wash the chocolate cups and yet keep spotlessly and specklessly clean. But I have come to the conclusion that as long as I live in Conflans, with its air full of smoke and soot from the train yards, and its water so hard that it curdles the soap,—and sometimes the milk in the cocoa too, that I will have to content myself with being godly and leave the cleanliness till a happier day. We have been having a regular plague of inspectors and investigators of late. Last night just as I had my final bout with the last chocolate container, a major and a lieutenant colonel wandered in, evidently in search of scandal. The lieutenant colonel fixed a piercing eye on me.

“So you are the only ‘white woman’ in this part of the world at present?”

“Well,” I said looking at my fingers smudged with cocoa, “tonight I should say that I was a pale chocolate-colored woman.”

“I noticed that your face was dirty,” coolly returned the gentleman. I hurriedly excused myself in order to consult a looking-glass. Sure enough, there on my nose was a large smudge of soot! I must have got it the last time I stoked the chocolate-stove.

Conflans, April 7.

The M. P.s live in the hotel next door. Naturally we see a good deal of them. I try to treat them extra nicely because I feel sorry for them. They can’t help being M. P.s any more than they can help being unpopular. And though many of them go about with a chip on their shoulders and an attitude of I-don’t-give-a-tinker’s-damn, still to know that you are anathema to the major portion of the A. E. F., to be publicly referred to as Misery Providers, Mademoiselle Promenades, and Military Pests, besides being made the subject of songs such as; Mother take down your service flag, Your son is only an M. P., must be galling to the most insensitive.

Just as soon as the armistice was signed the doughboys started in to pester the M. P.s with the classic taunt:

“Who won the war?—The M. P.s!”

For a long while the M. P.s could think of no more crushing rejoinder than the time-honored;

“Aw, go to hell!”

But lately some bright soul has hit upon a bit of repartee that goes far to salve the M. P.s’ self-respect. Now if a soldier is so rash as to jeer; “Who won the war? The M. P.s!” the response comes instantly:

“Yep! They chased the doughboys up front!”

There are two M. P.s from the detachment next door who have lately joined themselves to our family. Like Slim, they came unsolicited, and like Slim, they stick. They are known respectively as the Littlest M. P. and the Fattest M. P.

The Littlest M. P. is a pest. I feel sorry for him because he is so young and has no mother; otherwise there would be no tolerating him. He hangs about the canteen from morning until late at night under pretence of assisting us, and eats and eats and eats and eats. The other day I heard him proudly averring that he hadn’t taken a meal in the mess-hall for two weeks, and I believed him. Yet when you ask him to do any particular piece of work, like filling up the wood box or fetching a pail of water, in return for his board, he always has some perfectly good reason for not doing it. Besides which, he has no morals. The other day he confided to me triumphantly that the reason that they didn’t put him on guard work was that they knew he would take money to let men into cafés at prohibited hours. He went on to tell me about the town of S.

“That was a good place, you could get twenty-five francs for lettin’ a feller into a café out of hours there.”

I have tried to find out what he does in return for Uncle Sam’s dollar a day and have discovered that his job is sweeping out the halls in the M. P. Hotel.

“But I skip about twenty feet at each end every time, so it don’t take me more’n ten minutes.”

Yesterday morning he came in with an air of righteousness rewarded.

“I told ’em I’d got to have help on that job,” he announced, “so they put another feller on too.”

This morning I got so exasperated with him that I told him in unmistakable terms that we could dispense with his company. He disappeared, and I congratulated myself that we were rid of him. But at supper-time he bobbed serenely up again.

“Some fellers would have got sore if you’d spoke like that to them,” he told me with a magnanimous air, “but I just took it as a joke.”

Now what is one to do with anybody like that?

The Fattest M. P. is the most unleavened lump of good-nature I have ever known. He is, I understand, a notorious poker-player and his breath, to my embarrassment, betrays the fact that he has a weakness for Conflans beer. Besides which, he really takes up quite too much room behind the counter. Yet in spite of all this, he is such a simple soul and is so anxious to help that one hasn’t the heart to send him away.

Yesterday I thought I was going to be arrested by an M. P. I had gone over to Verdun in an army flivver to get some stock. Turning the corner into Conflans on our way home we were halted by the upraised billy of the M. P. on duty.

“Sorry, Buddy!” he called to the driver, “but you can’t do that!”

Then, approaching, he got a closer view, turned red as fire and stammered;

“Beg your pardon, Miss. Made a mistake. That’s all right, driver, you can go on.”

Later he sent apologies to me at the canteen. It is, of course, against regulations to allow civilian women to use army transportation. The M. P., catching sight of a skirt, had taken me for a Mademoiselle on a joy-ride.

Conflans, April 7.

We must start an Orphans’ Annex here, the boys tell me. Three nights ago as it was drawing on toward closing time the Chief called me into the office. By the table stood two young boys, about fourteen and sixteen I judged them; each carried on his shoulder a little sack which evidently contained all his worldly possessions. They were German boys from Metz; they had just come in on the train. Why had they come? we asked them. They had come to join the American army. But they were too young! He was eighteen, declared the elder. He dug into his pockets and produced documents. I looked at two of the papers, they appeared to be the birth certificates of his father and mother. Had his parents given their consent? He nodded. “And you really are eighteen?”, “Ja! Ja wohl!” It was hard to believe,—he was so small. We stared at them a bit helplessly. Then, finding our German not quite adequate to the occasion, we called an interpreter. But to all the interpreter’s questioning the boy returned the same unvarying answer. He had come to join the American army! As for the younger one, he merely stood and smiled and looked as guileless as a young angel. Whatever the elder one’s intention might be, I was sure I could divine the younger’s. He, I am certain, had set his heart on being an American “mascot.” And he, for all his innocent and engaging air, had most patently run away from home!

We told the boys that we would put them up for the night. I busied myself in getting them some supper and then—another waif appeared! A little French lad of thirteen, with a peg-leg and a crutch, he came shyly hobbling into the office, and the face he lifted to us was one of the sweetest, the most sensitive and appealing that I have ever seen. Silently he tendered us a letter. It had been written by an American lieutenant; the bearer, it stated, was an orphan of the war; he had been shot by German machine-gunners near Verdun; his right leg had been amputated at the thigh. I looked at the crippled child in apprehension. How would he take the presence of the Germans? But my question was already answered. The little German lad and the French mutilé had drawn close together, seemingly drawn instantly to each other by a bond of childish understanding. Although neither could speak the other’s speech they appeared to be communicating in some shy wordless way. Later, as we were getting the cots ready for the lodgers, passing the empty canteen room, I glanced inside. Somebody had started the victrola on the counter to playing a waltz, and to its music the German boys were dancing while the little French lad gaily kept time with his crutch!

We fed the three of them and put them up for the night. The next morning the French lad took his leave. Later he came back to see us dressed in a little American uniform; he had been adopted by one of the companies here. The German lads stayed with us, or rather, they slept and ate with the M. P.s next door and spent the rest of the day with us in the canteen. They loved to help about the counter; they were quick and deft and willing. The only trouble with the arrangement was that I fairly went distracted trying to talk three languages at once!

Two days afterwards, the M. P.s having taken the matter in hand, the German boys were sent back to Metz. But the French lad comes in often to visit us. We see him playing ball with the soldiers in the street in front of the hotel. This morning the S. A. and I stood watching him.

“I wouldn’t mind it so much somehow,” the S. A. remarked, “if he didn’t have that wrap-legging wound so tight around that pitiful little peg-stick!”

The tenderness toward little children which the war has shown forth so vividly has been a revelation of an inherent sweetness in the boys’ natures; this fondness for children other than their own, being, I believe a distinctive characteristic of our American men. Any number of companies have mascots, little French boys, orphans usually, whom they dress in miniature uniforms, take about from place to place with them, and, of course, spoil quite shamelessly. And in every unit that possesses a mascot you find boys whose dearest wish is to adopt the little fellow as his own and take him back home; but this the French law forbids.

“That’s the best part of France, the little kids,” remarked a boy to me as we passed a group of little tots by the roadside.

Unfortunately though, this petting has another side. Spoiled by the soft-hearted soldiers, the French gamins have developed into a brood of brazen little beggars. They have come to regard all Americans, it seems, as perambulating slot machines for “goom” and chocolate with whom, however, the purchasing penny is quite superfluous. I shall never forget being held up, as I was walking with a doughboy through the streets of Lourdes, by a tiny lad who demanded pathetically;

“Une cigarette pour moi, et une pour Papa, et une pour Maman qui est malade!”

Nor the fifteen year old conductor on a suburban tram line near Paris, who took up our tickets with a forbidding scowl, and then, his rounds made, hurried back down the car to confront us with the wistful childish plea: “’Ave you goom?”

For some while there has been a red-headed urchin of perhaps thirteen years hanging about the hut. As he was dressed in an O. D. blouse, breeches and leggings, I concluded that he was somebody’s mascot. He kept coming into the canteen to buy gum and cigarettes; presently I discovered he was purchaser for a little gang of ragamuffins who would wait for him just outside the door. I asked the boys in the canteen if they knew anything about the red-head, but no one seemed to know who he was or to what outfit he belonged. The boy himself seemed stupid and sullen when I questioned him. Finally I told him that I could sell him nothing more. Tonight my friend the M. P. Sergeant asked casually;

“Do you remember that red-headed kid that used to hang around? Well we’ve got him and eight others.”

“Why, what for?”

“They’re Propaganda Kids. They came over here from Germany; they’ve been stealing American uniforms and smuggling them to the German prisoners so they could escape in them.”

Conflans, April 15.

Of all the roads over which I have ever passed, the road from Conflans to Verdun will remain, I think, most sharply etched upon my memory.

Leaving Conflans, as one passes through the occupied territory, the predominant impression made upon one’s mind is of signs. German military signs. These are everywhere, painted in great staring letters on the sides of buildings, covering bill-boards set at the road’s edge, or hung suspended from the branches of trees over the truck drivers’ heads. Here in this German sector behind the lines every movement was timed, ordered and regulated. No one could possibly go astray, no one could lose a moment in hesitation as to where he should go, in what manner and at what rate. Half-way between Conflans and the lines you come upon two great bill-boards at the highway’s edge, one duplicating the other, in order that, marching past, what might have been missed on the first board, could be supplied by the second. They are headed “Under Enemy Observation!” and give in strict detail the order of procedure from that point forward, both by day and night, just what strength the marching groups should be and how many metres should intervene between them. The German thoroughness, the German system! Everything has been thought of, everything provided for, everything possible done to reduce the individual to an automaton, a mere senseless cog in a vast machine. And yet among all these signs there is one that lacks, a sign that is notable by its absence; it is the sign that should read Nach Verdun.

Once across the lines on the French side you are struck by the startling difference; here the only signs that one sees are two, poignant in their simplicity and directness. They are Poste de Secours and Blessés à Pied.

Every time I approach Verdun by this road I thrill when I think of the enormous energy that poured along it, directed, it must have seemed, irresistibly, over-poweringly against the city in the hills; a thrill only surpassed by the emotion that one must feel when he traverses the Sacra Via on the other side of Verdun, the “Holy Way” over which men and munitions flowed incessantly to the defense of the beleaguered city.

Everywhere one sees the ineffaceable scars of struggle, the aftermath of destruction. The stately trees bordering the roadside, the trees that Napoleon ordered planted along the highways of France, are barked with great ugly gashes where mines had been placed, the exploding of which would have felled the great trees across the road, blocking the pursuer’s way. Others bear platforms high up in the branches where machine-guns were placed. Rotting camouflages of every sort, paper strips woven like lattice, curtains of branches woven through wire which once screened the road for miles from the enemy’s observation, now lie disintegrating in the ditches. Shell holes pit the fields, concrete “pill-boxes” lurk in unsuspected places, every mound is shelter for a dugout, walls are riddled with ragged holes cut for machine-guns. Further on, one comes to the trenches zigzagging in what seems erratic and aimless patterns and the interminable barbed-wire entanglements, like the devil’s brier patches.

Half across the open plain that lies before the hills of Verdun you come upon a German tank defence, a long line of heavy concrete pillars with enormous cables, once highly electrified, looped between. A little farther and the road crosses an impromptu bridge thrown hastily over the great gaping crater torn by an exploding mine. And always here and there over the plain, little heaps of glimmering whitish stones which mark the places where once were villages. Starting to ascend the hills, one looks down upon a ghost city, a city where many of the walls still stand, making you think of nothing but a huddled host of tombstones, a city chalk-white, naked, as if the flesh were all picked away from its dead bones; the most haunted, the most wraith-like, the most desolate of any.

Climbing the hills, sweeping around one slow curve after another, one beholds suddenly before him, a lesser hill ringed by higher ones, Verdun, scarred, wounded, but victorious, like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, mutilated yet triumphant!

When I first made the trip from Verdun to Conflans there were still good pickings for the souvenir-hunter by the way; shell-cases, helmets, gas masks lying along the roadside; but lately it has looked as if these trophies had been thoroughly gleaned. Nor does one wonder where they have gone when one sees the flivvers piled high with homeward bound souvenirs pulling in at the post office around the corner. But will they reach home, is the question? Ominous rumours are abroad that salvage plants have been established at the base ports for the particular purpose of confiscating shell-cases on their way to America, and thereby saving the Allies a fortune in brass. Some of the boys are inclined to try to carry their trophies with them rather than entrust them to Uncle Sam’s mail service, but this entails some trouble to prevent their seizure during inspections. Nowadays, passing by, one can tell when an inspection is in progress within, by all the junk which is hanging out of the barracks windows! Homeward-bound troops have already discovered a use for gas masks not mentioned in the Drill Manual: the cases provide an excellent receptacle in which surreptitiously one may carry photographs and post-cards! When I first came to Conflans, camouflaged German helmets were a prize so rare as to be much sought after by the souvenir enthusiast; but now camouflaged helmets may be had for the asking; an enterprising bugler possessed of a knack with a paint-brush has gone into the business of camouflaging them while you wait.

Yesterday, after having returned from Verdun, I noticed a post-card in a Jarny shop. It showed a black cat and a white cat silhouetted against the moon, perched on the skeleton beams of a half-demolished house, peering disconsolately about them. Underneath the sentence ran; Où est-il le toit de nos amours? Where is the roof of our love? Could any nation but the French thus make light of such tragedy?

Paris, April 21.

I am on my way home at last. I am waiting here for my sailing. This time I am really going all the way through. Now that I am on the brink of the retour au civil, as the French say, it seems very odd. For eighteen months I haven’t worn white gloves, or silk stockings, or a veil, no, nor even powdered my nose. And the worst of it is, these things don’t seem to matter any more. Even a uniform, and a homely uniform at that, has tremendous advantages as part of a working scheme of life. As one girl remarked;

“You don’t have to spend any time thinking: Shall I put on the pink or the blue tonight? The only question is, Do I or do I not need a clean collar?”

Somehow I feel a little unfitted to go back to a civilian existence once more. The same feeling one finds expressed continually among the boys.

“When I get back home, if I see a line anywhere I’ll go and stand in it just from force of habit,” remarked one boy, grinning ruefully.

But most often this feeling takes the form of a pathetic and wistful fear.

“I’m afraid I’ll shock Mother when I get home.”

“They won’t know what to make of us, back home, the way we’ll behave.”

“I reckon I’ve forgotten how to act civilized.”

And over and again they confess to a shame-faced apprehension lest they should unguardedly relapse into the language of the army and so frighten their women folk!

A famous French surgeon confided to my friend, the English Lady:

“In that first year of the war when we were allowed no permissions we became like savages. The first time that I returned home I was afraid. I was afraid all the while, afraid before my wife, before my children,—afraid that I would act the beast.”

If by coming to France, we women who have had this privilege have discovered the American doughboy, the American doughboy, by coming to France, has discovered America. I don’t know who first said; “After I get back, if the Statue of Liberty ever wants to see my face again, she’ll have to turn around,” but whoever did, uttered a sentiment which has been echoed and re-echoed all over France. The doughboy has been to Paris, “the City of Light,” he has amused himself in the playgrounds of princes along the Riviera, he has visited the châteaux and palaces of kings and queens. And though he admits it is all mighty fine, in the face of everything he holds staunchly to his declaration of loyalty; “I’ll tell the world the little old U. S. A. is good enough for me!”

At times perhaps his patriotic enthusiasm has outweighed his manners. Again and again a French villager, evidently echoing some doughboy’s dissertation, has asked me a little wistfully;

“America bon, goode! France pas bon, no goode! Hein?”

“Anyway the war has done one good thing,” I used to say to the lads in the canteens, “it has taught you to appreciate your homes.”

“I used to want to get away from home,” confided one boy to me, “but when I get back there again I’m just going to tie myself so tight to Mother’s apron-strings that she’ll never get the knot undone.”

“Say, when I get back,” declared another lad as he helped me wipe the dishes, “my mother’s going to find I’m just the best little K. P. she ever knew.”

“When I get home, I’m going to lock myself in the house and then I’m going to lose the key and stay right there for a month,” announced another.

“Who’s in your house?”

“Just Mother. She’s good enough for me.”

Sometimes I have thought that three things have stood as concrete symbols of all that was desirable to the American boy through his ordeal over here: a dollar-bill, the Statue of Liberty, his mother’s face. And only a shade less touching than the doughboy’s realization of all that is implied by “Mother;” is his attitude of chivalrous idealism toward the American girl. Once I ventured to say something in praise of the women of France.

“But they’re not as fine as our girls!” came the instant jealous rejoinder.

“No Mademoiselles françaises for me, thank you. I’ve got a little girl of my own back home!”

“Our American girls, they’re as different from these French girls,” declared a tall Virginian, “as day is from night!”

“I’ve laid off of lovin’ while I’ve been over here,” confided one little engineer, “but, oh boy! my girl’s goin’ to get an awful huggin’ when I get home!”

The most pitiful and hopeless cases that I have seen over here were boys who had taken to drink because their girls at home had proved inconstant. “That man never touched a drop,” confided the buddy of one of these to me, “until he got that letter from his girl telling him that she was married to a slacker.”

Not that the doughboy’s conduct has always been above reproach. “Single men in barracks,” as Kipling once remarked, “don’t grow into plaster saints;” and he has been sorely tempted. But in his heart he has kept an ideal. It has stood between him and utter darkness. In this ideal he has put all his faith. If he loses it, he loses everything. Those women back home, I wonder, do they really understand?