Two Colored women with the American Expeditionary Forces

by Addie W. Hunton; Kathryn M. Johnson

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* By permission of North American Review.

It is interesting to note the comment of an English paper upon the mutual rancor which so unfortunately developed, and which must have some bearing upon the future relationship between the French and the American people. The following significant excerpt is from the London Saturday Review of June 28, 1919:^*

“No one at this or any other time should write, or even say things likely to create international ill-feeling, but facts will not be ignored. There are indeed certain truths, which, like mushrooms, grow best in the dark. It is not only absurd, it is also in the long run contrary to international good will, to ignore the fact that Americans are not as popular in Paris to-day as they were twelve months ago. There can be surely no harm in discussing publicly what everyone privately knows....

“At the present moment the Americans are regarded by the ordinary Parisian as a barbarian nation, and the prospects of beholding them rejoice on July 4th, possibly on a large scale, already fills him with apprehension and disgust. The nation which a year ago was the most popular nation in Europe, has become in Paris a burden almost too grievous to be borne. The other evening we heard a lady whose profession brings her into rather close contact with the American soldiers and minor diplomatists in Paris, proclaim amid general assent, that the Americans are at the best children and that at the worst they are brutes. We are not subscribing to this opinion, we are merely recording that it was passed. The Americans could not avoid being unpopular in Paris. The mere fact that they came late into the war, and that the importance of their share in the peace negotiations is out of all proportion to their sacrifices, is in any event a difficult matter to discount or obscure....

“Socially the Americans in Paris are in the position of a man staying in the house of a friend, and forced to behave much as though the house were his own. It is even worse than that. We have to consider that the man who thus stays in the house of his friend, and behaves just as though it were his own, has in effect, a mortgage on the house. We are most of us the debtors of America, and France not least of all. The American army in Paris may almost be described as the man in possession, and there is no possibility of avoiding him. It was an unlucky decision to make Paris an American military headquarters. The wild west sprawls in the restaurants, and patrols the grand boulevards. The American army could no more be popular in Paris than the Canadians could be popular in Epsom. When on top of the military invasion of Paris there came an American delegation 1,400 strong, filling the air with principles and viewpoints, and amusing itself loudly and continuously, not the most civilized president in the world could quite cover with his professional mantle the nakedness of his countrymen.

“All of this would be of merely passing interest were it not for the peculiar position which America will occupy for the next thirty years. What is happening in Paris will happen on a large scale in Europe as soon as peace is signed. During the war America has become the creditor of the civilized world. Her chief problem will be how to spend the money she has made. She is so rich that she has begun to be alarmed for her foreign trade, for it is impossible for Dives to trade with Lazarus unless Lazarus can be induced to borrow the necessary capital to set himself up in business. Whatever ultimate arrangements are made it is fairly clear that America will have more money than she knows what to do with, and that Europe will be, to an extent unknown before, an American playground and Europe will hate it to-morrow as Paris hates it to-day.”

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* By permission of The World’s Work.

For a period of time many of the colored fighting troops were brigaded with the French troops, which brought them into very close contact with the French life. As has been noted in another chapter, four regiments, those that were to have composed the 93rd Division, became a part of French Divisions of Infantry. It is interesting to note that by far the greatest majority of colored soldiers or organizations that were cited or decorated for bravery were these troops, and that the decorations were with few exceptions French and not American. It is also interesting to note that the regiment from Illinois, under command of colored officers, was awarded 30 Croix de Guerre decorations for officers, and 38 for non-commissioned officers and privates, while only 3 officers received the American Distinguished Service Cross, and 19 non-commissioned officers and privates. These colored officers have many happy recollections of the overflowing appreciation of the French people.

Certificates of good behavior secured by these troops show that the towns and villages through which they passed or in which they were billeted found no cause for complaint; that they came in an orderly manner and left in the same way. The same can be said of the thousands of labor troops and engineers who built the roads, unloaded the ships, laid telephone wires, built warehouses, and handled supplies.