It was exalting to watch the army on the march, to see the marines and the profusion of slim sailors. But the real crowd always gathered around the big negro stevedores in long navy-blue coats, scarlet-lined, with brass buttons all the way up the front, over and down the back—likely a thrifty hand-me-down from pre-khaki days—who marched with perfect knowledge of their magnificence.
The stevedores, for their part, were as amazed as the French, though on a different score. They accepted with due resignation the fact that the French spoke French. It was when they first saw a Senegalese in French uniform, triple-black with tropic suns, but to them a mere one of themselves, and when they hailed him gladly in their English tongue, to ask which road to take, that his indecipherable French answer broke them, heart and spirit alike.
"Dat one blame stuck-up nigger," said the spokesman, as they trudged their way onward, none the wiser if the Senegalese, in his turn, had been rebuking them in French for showing off their English.
So, in its several aspects, the First Division made its impact upon France, jostled itself a little and the French more, and finally settled down to its short wait at the coast before going inland, "within sound of the guns," to get its training.
And because the camps were to be used many times again by other divisions to come on the "bridge of ships," the first had to put in some extra licks to make their camp conveniences permanent.
They played a few baseball-games, and they were encouraged to do a lot of swimming, in the off afternoon hours. After a bit town-leave was heavily curtailed, but there was a dispensation now and then for a "movie." In the main they kept their noses to the grindstone.
After a little while the men who were to march in Paris on the Fourth of July were selected, and, preceded by a few sailors with fewer duties and longer indulgences, they entrained on the late afternoon of July 2. There was no measuring the disappointment of the ones who were left behind, for the prediction that there would be doings in Paris on the first French Fourth of July was to be fulfilled to the letter.
But the housekeepers of the army could not be spared for celebrations. As soon as the marines could be despatched from the seaport they were sent direct across France to the points behind the lines where their training-camps were in waiting, and there, within a few weeks, the First Division reassembled and fell to work.
Meanwhile, of the doings in Paris——