“You say ‘gimme a match.’ But listen here, Gaston, cut out the Sammie. Forget it.”
“What you mean ‘forget it,’ Sammee?” persisted the poilu, accepting the match. The lesson went on, and I agreed with the old general that the sight of French and American youths associating on affectionate terms and learning each other’s familiar argot was indeed agreeable.
One of the stock arguments of the pacifists in trying to make war out an unmixed evil is that it sets back education. I am sure that many American mothers have had misgivings on this point, and have deplored the necessity of interrupting their sons’ college life. But I want to assure them that their sons are learning more in France than any college could have taught them. They are learning French, for one thing, at least all the enterprising ones are. Not the foolish, academic sort of thing they study in high school and college, the object being to read Molière and the classics, but the living language.
A striking illustration of the difference in the two methods was afforded me during a trip into the war zone. In the party was one of our intelligence officers and a French woman writer of unusually broad education. The American officer spoke very little French, the woman writer spoke only a few broken sentences of English, and they had to be constantly interpreted to each other. One day, in the course of the conversation, it transpired that the officer before joining the colors had been a high-school professor of French, and that the woman had for five years drawn a good salary as a teacher of English.
The American soldier in a few months can, if he wants to, gets a practical knowledge of the French language that will be a business asset to him all his life. Most of the soldiers appreciate this, and the free classes offered in all the Y. M. C. A. centers are well attended. They learn in the classes, and they learn even more by association with French soldiers and civilians.
My soldier son knew not a word of the language when he enlisted, but when I saw him in France he was using it fairly well. I congratulated him on his new acquisition, and he laughed and said: “There’s an awfully pretty girl in a café the fellows up our way patronize, and she doesn’t know any English.”
It is not only the French language that our soldiers are learning, but French history as well. The part of central France occupied by our army is a storied treasure house of history. No part of France is more French. It abounds in castles, châteaux, museums, pointed towers, dungeon cells and torture chambers, ancient churches and crumbling city walls. Even the farms, centuries old, some of them, show the remains of past defenses.
To our boys, fresh from the new prairies of Iowa and Dakota, or the still virgin forests of Oregon and Washington, this past they are surrounded by is the most romantic and wonderful thing that ever came into their lives. They can hardly believe it is real.
Even to those soldiers who come from the older sections of the United States the sight is thrilling. In the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace, in Paris, built by Henry of Navarre for his second wife, Marie de Medici, stands a stately marble fountain, moss-grown and mellow with time. The date cut in the marble is 1620.
I had this pointed out to me by a soldier from Massachusetts. “Think of it,” he exclaimed, “the very year when our oldest aristocracy, the Pilgrim fathers, were cutting down trees for their first log huts and their rude stockades, these French people were making beautiful things like that fountain.”