Our Army at the Front

by Heywood Broun

The great ships came in slowly. Before long, the watchers could see lines of dull yellow banding the gray hulks, and then the yellow lines took on form and separateness, and were visible one soldier at a time.

Last, one ship steamed apart from the others and made direct for the quay, and the solemn business of landing American troops on French soil was about to begin.

There was to be a certain ceremony for the landing, but, like all the ceremonies conceded to these great occasions by the American Army, it was to be of extreme simplicity. When they were near enough to the quay to be heard, the transport band played "The Star-Spangled Banner," while all the soldiers stood at salute, and then they played the "Marseillaise," while everybody on ship and shore stood at salute. With that, they called it a morning, as far as celebration was concerned, and to the accompaniment of a great deal of talk and a volley of light-hearted questions, they began to disembark.

The first question, called from some distance away, was: "What place is this?" The next was, "Do they let the enlisted men drink in the saloons over here?" and there was a miscellany about apple pie and doughnuts, cigarettes, etc. And very briefly after the first soldiers were ashore nothing could be heard but "Don't they speak any English at all?"

The outstanding impression of that morning may be what it will to the French civilians, to the American newspaper correspondents, and to the officers both ashore and on board. To the privates of the First Division it will always be the incomprehensible nonsense that goes by the name of the French language, spoken with perfect assurance by people old enough to know better, who refuse to make one syllable of intelligible sound in answer to even the simplest requests.

The privates were prepared to hear the French speak their own language at mention of Alsace-Lorraine and war aims, or to propound their private philosophies that way. They granted the right of the French to talk how they pleased of their emotional pleasure at seeing the troops, or of any other subject above the timber-line.

What staggered them was the insane top-loftiness of using French to ask for ham and eggs, and beer, or the way to camp. For nothing, not volumes of warning before they left home, nor interminable hours of French-grammar instruction on board the troop-ships, had really got it deep inside the American private's head that French was not an accomplishment to be used as evidence of cosmopolitan culture, but a mere prosy necessity, without which daily existence was a nightmare and a frustration.

The French, on their side, were helpless enough, but not so bewildered. They had lived too long, in peace as well as war, across a narrow channel from that stanch English-speaking race who brought both their tea and their language with them to France and everywhere else, to be dumfounded that strangers should balk at their foreign tongue.

The inevitable result was that here, in their first contact with the French, as later, throughout the fighting areas, the American soldiers learned to understand French-English long before they could speak a decent word of French.

Fortunately for the First Division, it had had some able bilingual forerunners at the seaport town where they landed. The camps had been built by the French, a few miles back from the town, but a few of the housekeeping necessities had been installed by General Pershing's staff-officers, and signs in good, plain English showed the proper roads. And as the single files of soldiers began to descend the gang-plank of the first transport, and to form for marching to camp, their own officers were having some compact instruction from the staff-officers on how to get to camp and what to do when they got there.