The shops had hard work in keeping up with more commodities than picture postcards. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for canned peaches and sardines. Somehow or other men who have been on a long march simply crave either sardines or canned peaches. The doughboys did a good deal of eating at their own expense. Army food was plentiful and moderately varied. Beans and corned beef hash were served a good many times perhaps, but there was no lack of fresh meat and there was plenty of jam and of carrots and onions and heavy gravy. Food, however, was an outlet for spending money and in some villages the men got so eager that they would buy anything. Little traveling shops in wagons came through the smaller villages in the northern part of the training area loaded with all sorts of gimcracks intended for the peasant trade. The peddlers had no time to put in a special line for the soldiers. They found that it was not necessary. Desperate men with pockets full of money would purchase even the imitation tortoise shell sidecombs which the itinerant merchants had to sell.
The purchasing capacity of the soldier was not limited to his pay alone. The villagers were wildly excited about the white bread issued to the American army. It was the first they had seen since the second year of the war. One old lady seized a loaf which was presented to her and crying "il est beau," sat down upon a doorstep and began to eat the bread as if it were cake. The rate of exchange fluctuated somewhat but there were days when a loaf of white bread could be exchanged for a whole roast chicken.
The eagerness of the American soldier to spend his money had the result of tempting French storekeepers to raise their prices and as the cost of living mounted the civilian population began to complain. Even the soldiers had suspicions at last that they were being charged too much in some stores and the American officers took over price control as another of their many responsibilities.
"I went to the mayor," one town major explained, "and I said, 'Look here, Bill, I don't mind 'the shopkeepers putting a little something over. All I ask is that they just act reasonable. They'll get all the money in time anyhow, and so I wish you'd tip them off not to be in so much of a hurry.' He couldn't talk any English, that mayor couldn't, but the interpreter told him about it and he went right to the front for us. From that day to this we've had only one complaint about anything in our village. That came from an old lady who had some doughboys billeted in a barn next to the shed where she kept her sheep. She came to me and said the soldiers talked so much at night that the sheep couldn't sleep."
CHAPTER VII
PERSHING
NOBODY will ever call him "Papa" Pershing. He is a stepfather to the inefficient and even when he is pleased he says little. In the matter of giving praise the General is a homeopath. For that reason he can gain enormous effect in the rare moments when he chooses to compliment a man or an organization. Pershing believes that discipline is the foundation of an army.
"I think," said one young American officer, "that his favorite military leader is Joshua because he made the sun and the moon stand at attention." In other words Pershing is a soldiers' soldier. No man can strike such hard blows as he does and leave no scars. There are men here and there in the army who do not love him but their criticism almost invariably ends, "but I guess I'll have to admit that he's a good soldier."
Pershing is not a disciplinarian merely for the sake of discipline but he believes that it is the gauge of the temper of any military organization. His interest in detail is insatiable. He can read a man's soul through his boots or his buttons. Next to the Kaiser, Pershing hates nothing so much as rust and dust and dirt. Perhaps round shoulders should go in the list as well, and pockets. Certainly he makes good the things he preaches. There is no finer figure in any army in Europe. The General is fit from the tip of his glistening boots to his hat top. We saw him once after he had walked through a front line trench on a rainy day. There were sections of that trench where the mud was over a man's shoetops and the back area which had to be crossed before the trench system was reached was a great lake of casual water fed at its fringes by roaring rain torrents. And yet the general came out of the trench without a speck of mud on his boots in spite of the fact that he had plunged along with no apparent regard for his footing.
There was dust behind him, though, on the afternoon he first came to the training area to see his men. News reached our town that the general was up in the northern end of the training zone and moving fast. An officer passing by gave me a lift in his car and when we arrived at the next village half a dozen soldiers who were sitting on a bench jumped up for dear life and jarred themselves to the very heels with the stiffest of military salutes.
The officer grinned. "Pershing's in town," he said and so he was.