Pouillenay, France,
Monday, April 14th, 1919.
Just a line this morning before I get up, that being the only way I can get a word in edgewise. Once up and dressed, my time is no longer my own; but safe in bed, I am mistress of myself, and though I may be interrupted every ten minutes, the unarguable helplessness of my position is my great protection, and nothing but my conscience can move me. The first hour or so of day is the only time I reserve for myself. It is only thus that I ever see a newspaper, that my hair gets shampooed, clothes mended, or that you occasionally get a letter. This is the time when the men are out drilling or working on the roads, and the tent is empty, so I take advantage of it.
Interruption. By conscience! There is nothing to do about it. I must get up.
April 17th.
You have asked about the Americans' attitude toward the French. In general it is not flattering. Though I don't sympathize at all with the boys in this feeling toward the French, whom I love, yet I see perfectly how it has come about. It springs from the limitations of both nations. Our boys are terribly homesick and restless. Separated by time and distance from their country, they have come to glorify it even more than it deserves. Coming for the most part from thriving towns and farms, accustomed to work, but with the most modern appliances, they are disgusted by the lack of sanitation and the primitive methods of the peasants in these tiny old villages. It is the contempt of young, pressing, large-scale methods of getting results, for ancient, tranquil ways. It is our fierce elimination of waste versus their huge quantity of tiny savings. Nor is our efficiency more materialistic than this French thrift, though each appears sordid to the other. We are different, that is all. We are both greedy.
And then our soldiers meet mostly the worst sort of French girl, which gives them a bad impression of the country. Also, the French are making money off of us for all they are worth. Not the authorities, perhaps, but the people, in all their transactions. It is, in truth, rather disgusting and ungrateful of them, but perfectly inevitable after the glowing descriptions of the wealth of America which they continually hear, and since our boys will pay almost anything for what they want, and since they are foolish enough to buy tawdry and worthless souvenirs by the thousands at ridiculously high prices.
And then again, we never see an example of fine, strong, and young French manhood. We see the poor old tottering men and the degenerate. Once in a while a French soldier comes through town, and he is usually a poor specimen. We forget that our towns would be equally desolate if we had been at war four years.
It is difficult for this army of simple, honest, normal boys to imagine what they have not seen. Also the weather gets on everybody's nerves. You are inclined to despise anybody so poor-spirited as to settle down and live in such a climate. This continuous, everlasting, never-ending cold rain taxes your temper to the limit. And yet, many very sweet friendships have sprung up between our soldiers and the old women in whose houses they are billeted, their "French mothers" as they call them. And I feel perfectly sure that when they all get home and the dream of America has come true—or perhaps hasn't come true—they will look back on France with real affection and with a little sense of ownership; and they will think of even their discomforts with pleasure. This has been their big adventure; but since they are not bent just now upon reading the book of their own lives, they don't know it.
Paris, May 11th, 1919.
Another shift of scene. Oh, what a change it is! Back to Paris! back to the world, some might say, but—deserted by my family who are now joyously on the water going home. Gone are those happy, remarkable days in darling Pouillenay, gone my beloved Battalion of khaki-clad boys, and left behind is the peaceful, beautiful countryside of the Côte d'Or with its white cattle on the green hills, its ducks and its chickens, its skylarks, and its dear population in sabots.