American Civilization from the Foreign Point of View
| [I.] | [ENGLISH] |
| [II.] | [IRISH] |
| [III.] | [ITALIAN] |
I. AS AN ENGLISHMAN SEES IT
A little less than two years ago—on the 14 July, 1919, to be exact—it fell to my lot, as an officer attached to one of the many military missions in Paris, to “assist,” from a reserved seat in a balcony of the Hotel Astoria, at the défilé, or triumphal entry of the Allied troops into Paris.
The march à Berlin not having eventuated owing to the upset in schedule brought about by the entry of dispassionate allies at the eleventh hour, it was felt that the French must be offered something in exchange, and this took the happy form of a sort of community march along the route once desecrated by Prussian hoof-beats—a vast military corbeille of the allied contingents, with flags, drums, trumpets, and all the rest of the paraphernalia that had been kept in cold storage during four years of gas, shell, and barbed wire. Such a défilé, it was calculated, would be something more than a frugal gratification to the French army and people. It would offer to the world at large, through the medium of a now unmuzzled press, a striking object lesson in allied good feeling and similarity of aims.
My purpose in referring to the défilé is merely to record one unrehearsed incident in it but I would say in passing that the affair, “for an affair,” as the French say, was extraordinarily well stage-managed. A particularly happy thought was the marshalling of the allied contingents by alphabetical order. This not only obviated any international pique on what we all wanted to be France’s day, but left the lead of the procession where everybody, in the rapture of delivery, was well content it should remain. Handled with a little tact, the alphabet had once more justified itself as an impartial guide:
B is for Britain, Great.
A is for America, United States of.
* * * * *
For impressiveness I frankly and freely allot the palm to what it was the fashion then to term the American effort. Different contingents were impressive in different ways. The Republican Guard, jack-booted, with buckskin breeches, gleaming helmets, flowing crinières, and sabres au clair, lent just the right subtle touch of the épopée of Austerlitz and Jena to make us feel 1871 had been an evil dream; the Highlanders, the voice of the hydra squalling and clanging from their immemorial pipes, stirred all sorts of atavistic impulses and memories. Nevertheless, had I been present that day in Paris as a newspaper man instead of as the humblest and most obscure of soldiers, neither one nor the other would have misled my journalistic instinct. I should have put the lead of my “story” where alphabetical skill had put the lead of the procession—in the American infantry.
In front the generalissimo, martial and urbane, on a bright coated horse that pranced, curvetted, “passaged” from side to side under a practised hand. At his back the band, its monster uncurved horns of brass blaring out the Broadway air before which “over there” the walls of pacifism had toppled into dust in a day. Behind them, platoon by platoon, the clean shaved, physically perfect fighting youth of the great republic. All six feet high—there was not one, it was whispered, but had earned his place in the contingent by a rigorous physical selection: moving with the alignment of pistons in some deadly machine—they had been drilled, we were told, intensively for a month back. In spotless khaki, varnished trench helmets, spick and span, scarcely touched by the withering breath of war. Whenever the procession was checked, platoon after platoon moved on to the regulation distance and marked time. When it resumed, they opened out link by link with the same almost inhuman precision, and resumed their portentous progress. How others saw them you shall hear, but to me they were no mere thousand fighting men; rather the head of a vast battering ram, the simple threat of which, aimed at the over-taxed heart of the German Empire, had ended war. A French planton of the Astoria staff, who had edged his way into the ticketed group was at my back. “Les voilà qui les attendaient,” he almost whispered. “Look what was waiting for them.”