With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

But the women and children in black are not convalescents. Their wounds heal slowly, or not at all.

At the wharfs a white ship with gigantic American flags painted on her sides and with an American flag at the stern was unloading horses. They were for the French artillery and cavalry, but they were so glad to be free of the ship that their future state did not distress them.

Instead, they kicked joyously, scattering the sentries, who were jet-black Turcos. As one of them would run from a plunging horse, the others laughed at him with that contagious laugh of the darky that is the same all the world over, whether he hails from Mobile or Tangiers, and he would return sheepishly, with eyes rolling, protesting the horse was a “boche.”

Officers, who looked as though in times of peace they might be gentlemen jockeys, were receiving the remounts and identifying the brands on the hoof and shoulder that had been made by their agents in America.

If the veterinary passed the horse, he was again marked, this time with regimental numbers, on the hoof with a branding-iron, and on the flanks with white paint. In ten days he will be given a set of shoes, and in a month he will be under fire.

Colonel Count René de Montjou, who has been a year in America buying remounts, and who returned on the Chicago, discovered that one of the horses was a “substitut,” and a very bad “substitut” he was. His teeth had been filed, but the French officers saw that he was all of eighteen years old.

The young American who, in the interests of the contractor, was checking off the horses, refused to be shocked. Out of the corner of his thin lips he whispered confidentially:

“Suppose he is a ringer,” he protested; “suppose he is eighteen years old, what’s the use of their making a holler? What’s it matter how old he is, if all they’re going to do with him is to get him shot?”

That night at the station, as we waited for the express to Paris, many recruits were starting for the front. There seemed to be thousands of them, all new; new sky-blue uniforms, new soup-tureen helmets, new shoes.

They were splendidly young and vigorous looking, and to the tale that France now is forced to call out only old men and boys they gave the lie. With many of them, to say farewell, came friends and family. There was one group that was all comedy, a handsome young man under thirty, his mother and a young girl who might have been his wife or sister.