Should you happen to be in Paris or in any other French city in the early spring, you will witness an amusing and at the same time an inspiring sight; the carnival of the military class of the year before going into training camps.
France has lived next door to a burglar nation for nearly half a century. Ever since Alsace-Lorraine was stolen from her in 1871, France has known this, and she has therefore retained the system of compulsory military service.
Every year, on the eighteenth of April, all able-bodied young Frenchmen who have reached the age of twenty go up for a two years’ military training. Just before the war the term was lengthened to three years. Their term completed, they are placed in the reserves, ready at any time to be mobilized and fight.
The world well remembers how in late July, 1914, the tocsin sounded all over France, calling from field and factory, counting room and office the glorious citizen army that rushed out against the barbarian invasion, turned it at the Marne, and saved the life of civilization.
I believe that after this war some form of compulsory military service will be enacted in this country. Let us rather call it required military service, since in a democracy such service is agreed upon as a wise policy and is not forced on the people without their consent. The American form might well be something like that of France.
Proof that military service there is not in the least oppressive is the gaiety with which the young cadets greet their term of training. It has long been the custom for the year’s class to make a carnival of its going. Beginning two or three weeks before the date set for their encampment, groups of these lads, fantastically arrayed and decorated, would parade through the streets, singing their favorite choruses, making a great deal of noise between songs, shouting and chaffing the passers-by.
No youth considered himself properly dressed without a huge boutonnière, sometimes of flowers but oftener a paper monstrosity as big as a cabbage. Sometimes a lad appeared with a buttonhole bouquet of vegetables. Anything for a joke. Thus dressed, furnished with a guitar or an accordion, “the bunch,” as our slang would call them, fared forth to have a last good time before going under discipline. For the time being they owned the town, and nobody complained of their noise or their pranks.
I had seen this before the war, but I was unprepared to see the custom retained. Yet this April in Paris, in Bordeaux, and several other cities I saw the same singing groups, the same absurd decorations, the same fun-making. The class of 1918 was younger than the class of 1914, but it was every bit as exuberant. Four years of war and desolation, of sickening anxiety and cruel bereavement, were powerless to depress the spirit of young France.
Early on the morning of April eighteenth I started on a journey from the Orleans station, and there, filling the place with laughter and excited conversation, I saw about a hundred of the class of 1918 leave for their cantonment.
Their mothers and fathers and sweethearts were there seeing them off, just as we have been seeing our boys off to training camps this year. But these French fathers and mothers have suffered bitter losses. Hardly a family in France that has not known bereavement. Most of the women I saw that April morning wore deep mourning.