IV—AMERICAN SOLDIERS CELEBRATE FOURTH OF JULY IN PARIS
Paris, July 4, 1917.
All France celebrated the Fourth of July. Paris turned out a crowd that no American city ever surpassed for size, enthusiasm and profusion of Stars and Stripes. A battalion of the first American expeditionary force about to leave for training behind the battle front had its first official review in France and was the centre of the celebration. Everywhere the American flag was flying from public buildings, hotels and residences and from automobiles, cabs and carts, horses' bridles—even the lapels of pedestrians' coats displayed it.
The crowds began early to gather at vantage points. Rue de Varenne was choked long before 8 o'clock this morning, when the Republican Guards Band carried out a field reveille under Gen. Pershing's windows. All routes toward the Hotel des Invalides were thronged even before Pershing's men turned out. About the Court of Honor where the Americans were drawn up with a detachment of French Territorials, the buildings overflowed with crowded humanity to the roofs. All around the khaki-clad men from the United States were trophies and souvenirs of war—German cannon, airplanes, machine guns and many appliances for burning suffocating gas. Behind them in the chapel separating the Court of Honor from Napoleon's tomb were German battle flags, trophies of the Marne and Alsace, beside Prussian banners of 1870.
In the chapel before the tomb of Napoleon, Gen. Pershing received American flags and banners from the hands of President Poincaré. Almost the entire history of the struggles of the French against the Germans looked down upon the scene from paintings portraying heroic incidents in French battles from Charlemagne to Napoleon. There was a sharp contrast between the khaki and plain wide brimmed hats of Pershing's men and the gay dress of d'Artagnan's plumed musketeers and Napoleon's grenadiers.
The enthusiasm of the vast crowd reached its highest pitch when Gen. Pershing, escorted by President Poincaré, Marshal Joffre and other high French dignitaries, passed along reviewing the lines of the Americans drawn up in square formations. Cheering broke out anew when the American band struck up "The Marseillaise," and again when the French band played "The Star-Spangled Banner" and Pershing received the flags from the President.
"Vive les Americains!" "Vive Pershing!" "Vive les Etats-Unis!" shouted over and over by the crowd greeted the American standard bearers as they advanced.
The crowd that had waited three hours to witness the ceremony that was over in fifteen minutes, surged toward the exit cheering frantically after the departing Americans and trying to break through a cordon of police troops. Outside a greater crowd that covered the entire Esplanade des Invalides took up the cheers as Pershing's men marched away. The crowd in the Court of Honor tried to follow the soldiers, but the throng outside was so dense, and the exits so small that it was half an hour before the people could get out. The Cours de la Reine from Alexander Bridge to the Place de la Concorde was black with people all of whom seemed to want to rush up to the men and embrace them as they marched by. When the last man had passed great crowds surged from both sides to the middle of the street, breaking through the police military guards and blocking traffic for a long time behind the marching column.
More people were massed in the Tuileries Gardens than on the Esplanade des Invalides. Few of them could get a glimpse of the parade but all joined in a tremendous outburst of cheering when music from the Republican Guard Band announced the approach of the troops, and the cheering did not diminish in volume until the last man in the line had disappeared from view of the Gardens down the Rue de Rivoli.