The next serious trouble was that of the French women and the Negro. The indifference of white women whether the man they walked with was black or brown or white was taken as an intolerable affront by Southerners. They felt called upon to interfere and save the French woman from herself. The rape legend was imported, and every effort was made to infect the French male with race prejudice. Happily, the propaganda failed. For one thing, Puritanism does not easily take root in a French heart, and for another, the French have no instinctive horror of Negroes. Possibly the rape legend even made the Negro a little ornamental from the point of view of amour. “Black American troops in France have given rise to as many complaints of attempted rape as all the rest of the army ‘Les troupes noires Americaines en France ont donné lieu, a elle seules, a autant de plaintes pour tentatives de viol, que tout le reste de l’Armée,’” as an army order puts it.
Negro honor, however, demands that the charge be rebutted, and the matter has been thoroughly investigated. There does not seem to be much in it. As every one knows who served in the ranks, women of easy virtue were extremely plentiful and complaisant. The need might easily have been to protect the Negro from the women rather than the women from the Negro.
The fact is simply that the Negro walking with a white woman is to the Southern American White as a red rag to a bull. And as by nature this White is unrestrained and unreasonable, he seeks by all means, fair or foul, to part them.
Finally, the culmination of the story of the American Negro in the war is that the White denied him any valor or prowess or military virtue of any kind, said the Negro was a coward and a runaway and utterly useless in the fighting line. Fighting units were taken off their allotted duty and changed to labor units. Regiments were ordered home; whole brigades were given as a present to the grateful French. They may have been rather inefficient. But, if so, that was due to bad training. Negroes have fought magnificently in America’s wars of the past. They are a great fighting race, and they are capable of discipline.
I listened when at New Orleans to a lecture given by Sergeant Needham Roberts of the 369th U. S. Infantry, a handsome young Negro warrior, twice wounded, the first American to be decorated by the French Government. He was entirely patriotic, and made the apathetic Negro audience stand to sing the “Star-Spangled Banner.” He told how he ran away from home to enlist, trained with a mass of black strangers, went across the ocean—quite a terrifying experience for some of these young soldiers, who but for the war had never crossed the sea. He gave his first impressions of France and of the line, the exaggerated fright of shell explosions and night attacks and bombs from the air. They were just getting used to the first aspect of war when one day the news flew round—“We are all ordered home again.” Official orders to that effect quickly followed. They had all packed up and were marching to entrain for Cherbourg when, according to the sergeant, Foch intervened.
“Why are you sending them back?” said he.
“They are not wanted.”
Foch seemed astonished.
“If you cannot use them, I can,” said the French marshal.