A soldier's mother in France

by Rheta Childe Dorr

They had crossed the plains in rough wagons, daring weather, starvation and thirst, hostile Indians. They had leveled forests, they had built homes with no tools but axes and hand saws. They had farmed arid lands. They had lived in caves and dugouts. They had raised corn that some years they had been forced to burn for fuel because there was no market for it. But they lived, and won out, and built homes for their children.

And now, once more the Americans are pioneering. They are pioneering in France. They are building an army and doing it, as their fathers before them, from the ground up. “If you were not building these miles of docks and warehouses, if we didn’t have hundreds of thousands of men constructing ice plants, storage warehouses, railroads, barracks, bakeries, hangars, hospitals, how would the men in the trenches get food and ammunition and clothes and medical supplies and everything else they have to have before they can win the war?” I put it to him straight, and he turned an uncomfortable pink.

“Of course, you are right,” he said. “But we have to blow off once in a while. You see we didn’t know anything about it before we came. We drew our numbers in the draft, and most of us were mighty glad of it. We had the time of our lives in training camp, and we thought we were going right into the big show.

“We thought the engineers would be right up at the front building railroads for the artillery. Instead of that we are kept down here, hundreds of miles from the fighting, doing the kind of hard labor some of us have money enough to hire done at home.

“Why, do you know,” he continued, “that in——,” naming a near-by engineering camp, where immense seaplane hangars were being built, “there is one company of two hundred and fifty men, every one a graduate of a university or a technical school? All of those men are in overalls, doing day labor.”

I did know those men. I had seen them, or some of them, the day before at the noon hour smoking short pipes and cigarettes, sitting or sprawling on their backs beside the road. And a fine, husky, happy lot they were, too. Nothing in their university careers ever did for them what this rough job of pioneering was doing.

There was one man there who had put in a magnificent water system in his home town. When he went to France the newspapers gave him a great send-off, described his work, and said that no doubt he would be called on to take charge of the water system in one of the large French cities. When I met him he was acting as water boy to a railroad tie carrying squad.

The engineers in this part of France publish a monthly magazine called The Spiker. They love to get hold of these newspapers notices and to publish them with comments. From a San Francisco paper they gleaned that “Willie ——, the cotillion leader of last season’s younger set, leaves for France shortly with the Blankth Engineers to take charge, it is understood, of the construction of a telephone system contemplated by the government to facilitate the hauling of troops to the front.”

The comment records that the erstwhile cotillion leader, Private ——, is now on the business end of a No. 2 shovel.

Well, what of it? The shovel work has to be done just as the prairie sod had to be turned. The men growl about it sometimes, but mostly they grin. They chalk “P. G.” on the backs of their jumpers, the same letters appearing in white on the vivid green uniforms of the German captives at work in many camps.