“Why,” they said, “don’t you think it is terribly interesting to look at people who actually lived five hundred years ago? Those mummies are worth a franc any day.”
Two Sundays before I left France I spent the afternoon in the Hotel des Invalides, where Napoleon lies in his granite tomb, now completely buried in sandbags. In spite of that fact, however, the chapel was filled with American soldiers gazing raptly at the tomb they could not see, but which they knew held the ashes of the great conqueror.
More soldiers were in the large courtyard, now a museum of captured Germans guns, cannon, “minnies” and shattered airplanes. There are the burned and charred skeletons of several Zeppelins, and in the very center of the collection, as if its captor, the remains, nearly intact, of Guynemer’s favorite fighting plane, his “Old Charles” which brought so many German flyers to earth. This plane, white, with a scarlet symbolic bird in flight painted on its body, is decorated like a shrine, with a constantly renewed tribute of fresh flowers.
The American boys who wandered through the courtyard and long galleries of the Invalides that day were on their way to the front, and were spending every precious minute of their stay in Paris storing up impressions. I watched them studying with intent faces the marvelous collection of armor, some of it restoration work, but most of it the actual harness of kings and knights of old. Soldiers of all the ages, Greek, Roman, Gaul, Frenchmen of the age of chivalry, are represented in the collection. The whole history of warfare.
“When they are giving us tin hats why didn’t they give us things like these?” sagely remarked one soldier. “These protect the eyes.”
“But, gee!” exclaimed another, pausing in front of a “tin hat” the size of a garbage bucket and several times as heavy, “wouldn’t you like to catch a Hun with one of them things on?”
Where the American soldiers lingered longest that day was in the gallery sacred to the relics of Napoleon. His camp bed is there, and they exclaimed at the smallness of the great soldier. There were also his camp chair, his writing table and books, scores of personal belongings, uniforms and decorations. The walls are covered with paintings of his battles and the stirring events of his life.
You’ll never get those soldiers to agree that war sets education back. Our soldiers are learning at first-hand in France what they would never have learned so well at home, the great, big thing we are fighting for in this war, what in all ages the flower of manhood have fought and died for—better life, and more freedom for the generations next to come.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY
There is one thing our soldier sons are learning in France that is more valuable than the French language or history or any mere knowledge acquisition. Our men are learning the true meaning of nationalism, love of country and the flag.