Our Army at the Front

by Heywood Broun

The little Frenchwoman who sat behind the desk was amiable to the best of her very considerable ability, but the questions she had to answer, whether she understood them or not, would have addled an older head than hers. She could run her hotel with the best of them, but when perfectly sane-looking young officers asked her where to buy five thousand cups and saucers, and paper napkins by the ton, she said in so many words that an American invasion was worse than bedlam.

The hotel's second floor was the favored place for conferences. There a fair welter of red plush was drawn up around a big table in the hallway, and livid red wall-paper added its warmth to a scene which against a plank wall would not have lacked color.

At this table General Pershing could have been found much of the time. The whole practical liaison of French and American Armies was contrived here, though the first rule for this consolidation laid down by a grizzled French general with but one arm left, was that "there was no longer anything that was French, or anything that was American, but merely all we had that was 'ours,'" so that the task was one of detail only.

Though the daytimes were packed with work, most of the officers called it a day at sunset. Then the little hotel took on its most engaging color. The little French piano tinkled out in the warm air with an accompaniment of many voices. Once a very blue young second lieutenant chose to express his mood by repetitions without number of the melancholy "Warum?"—probably the first German music that had been heard from that piano for many a moon. Possibly those of the French who knew what the tune was recognized also that America had turned a point in more ways than one in coming to France, not least among them being making good American soldiers out of erstwhile good Germans. Nobody seemed much astonished or put out when within the day a goodly number of American soldiers were speaking to German prisoners in their own language, though talking to the German prisoners, aside from the fact that it was not encouraged by the French, turned out to be indifferent fun, since the American soldiers had had their fill of German propaganda before they left home, and none of the prisoners was overmodest as to what Germany was or would do.

The cafés out-of-doors were overflowing with Americans, too. It was plenty of fun to hear the sailors scolding the French waitresses for calling lemons "limons," and trying to overhaul the French pronunciation of "bière" to something approaching a compromise.

An officer came along and broke up a crap-game. The soldiers forgave him, but the civilians did not. It was their first go at the game, and they wanted a lot of teaching.

The lone bookstore of the town made the only known effort to get the Americans what they asked for, instead of trying to prevail on them to adopt something French. They sent, perhaps to Paris, to get English books, and they piled their windows high with Macaulay's "History of England" and Bacon's "Essays."

The paper-buying habit is ingrown in the American male. He has three newspapers under his arm before any afternoon is what it should be. And so the soldiers bought the French papers, two and three at a time, and carried them around.

Any time of day or night, a look out into the town's main street descried a company or two of soldiers, on their way from camp for town-leave, or on their way back. They marched continually. The motor-cycle with the side-seat, which was later to be the distinguishing mark of the American Army in Paris, made its appearance in the seaport within a day or two of the first transport's landing, and eased the burdens of the French motor-lorries with which the American supplies had been taken to camp, owing to a delay of the First Division's own lorries, on a slow ship.

And most successful sensation of all, the army mule. The French knew him slightly, because their own army used him on occasion. But no Frenchman could speak to a mule in his own language as these big mule-tenders did.