There were the women in the little out-of-the-way canteens who struggled with coal which "acted like coagulated granite," to quote the words of one of them, and refused to ignite, save by patience and real toil. There were long hours on station platforms feeding men by passing food through car windows because there was not even time for the men to alight and enter the canteens. Moreover, the soldiers had a habit at times of leaving their savings for a canteen girl to send to the folks at home, and although this was not a recognized official part of their jobs, and, in fact, involved a tremendous amount of work, the trust was not refused. The women workers fussed with these and many other errands while the coffee brewed and the chocolate boiled.
In such canteens as those which at first catered to all of the Allies, the menus were arranged in favor of the heaviest patronage. For the visiting poilus there was specialization in French dishes. When the Italians were expected, macaroni was quite sure to become the pièce de résistance. But for the Yankee boy there has apparently never been anything to excel or even to equal good white bread, good ham, and good coffee. French coffee may be good for the French—far be it from me to decide upon its merits—but to the American doughboy give a cup of Yankee coffee, cooked, if you please, in Yankee style. On such a beverage he can live and work and fight. And perhaps some of the marvelous quality of our American fighting has been due in no small measure to the good quality of our American coffee.
Birds will sometimes revisit a country torn and swept bare by war—even as Picardy and Flanders have been torn—and so do the flowers creep back gently to cling to the earth's torn wounds—the shell holes, the trenches, the gaping walls, seeking to cover the hurts with their soft camouflage of green and glowing color. The tenderest sight I saw in bruised Péronne—Péronne which seemed so terribly hurt, even when one came to compare it with Cambrai, or St. Quentin, or Noyon—was a little new vine climbing up over the ruins of the parish church; and I thought of the centuries that the vines had been growing over the gothic traceries of Melrose Abbey. Flowers gathered by the American Army served to decorate the waysides of France. The folk of that land have no monopoly of sentiment. Indeed I have often wondered if ours might not also have been called the sentimental army as well as the amazing army.
"I know why I am here," said a doughboy who was passing through Paris on his way toward leave in the south of France, and when some one asked him the reason, he replied:
"Because I am fighting for an idea. Our President says so."
I have disgressed—purposely. We were speaking of the flowers of France, which grow in such abundance in her moist and gentle climate. The very flowers that the boys of the A. E. F. picked when their trains were halted at the stations—or sometimes between them—were ofttimes given out by the Red Cross canteeners to other A. E. F. boys in far greater need of them. For these were the little costless, priceless tributes which were handed to the wounded men in the hospital trains that came rolling softly by the junction stations of the United States Military Railroad. And great, hulking men, who perhaps had given little thought at other times to the flowers underfoot, then tucked them in their shirts. Men blinded by gas held them to their faces.
"Wayside!"
The very word holds within its seven letters the suggestion of great and little adventures. It really is the traveler's own word. Is it not, after all, the special property of the wanderer, who reckons the beauty of the world not by beaten paths alone but by nooks and bypaths? To the vocabularies of stay-at-homes or such routine folk as commuters, for instance, it must remain unknown—in its real significance. The troops which journeyed across France from the ports where our gray ships put them down—the laborers, the poets, the farmers, the business men who found themselves welded into a great undertaking and a supreme cause—will never forget the waysides of France. I mean the waysides that bore over their hospitable doors the emblem of the Red Cross and the emblem of the Stars and Stripes side by side. Sheltered in the hustle and bustle of railroad stations, in the quiet of château gardens beneath century-old trees and within Roman walls, they offered rare adventures in friendliness, in tenderness, in Americanism.