“O why didn’t I wait to be drafted?Why didn’t I wait to be cheered?”“Well I’ll tell the world that you deserve the credit!”Anyway Company A has settled one point: if they ever march up Fifth Avenue I am to march with them.Bourmont, January 11.The “convicts” are out of quarantine, and none the worse it seems for the experience. Yet my family is still depleted. Forty boys from the company have been sent out on a wood-chopping detail. Detachments from each of the four companies in rotation are being sent out into the forest to cut fuel for the use of the First Battalion and now it is our turn.The boys, we learn, are billeted in a twelfth century fortress in a tiny village at the forest’s edge. From time to time some of them hike the four miles in to Saint Thiebault after the day’s work is done, in order to get a cup of hot chocolate and to tease a candle out of me. For the chateau boasts none of the modern luxuries of heat and light.“What do you do in the evenings?” I asked Mr. Gatts.“Sit in thecafé. It’s the only place there is to go.”“I’m sorry.”“Well you needn’t worry about the boys drinkin’. They ain’t none of them got no money. All they can do is to sit and watch the Frenchies.”Indeed such a long time has passed since our last payday that the whole company is feeling the pinch of poverty. Canteen sales have narrowed down to the three essentials; chocolate, cigarettes and chewing gum. I am running accounts on my personal responsibility, giving them “jawbone” as the boys say, a proceeding at which our Secretary looks with a disapproving eye. To be sure the air is full of rumours of impending payday but meanwhile there is no disguising the fact that the great majority is “dead broke.”Says Sergeant X to Sergeant Z, a boy with a curious cast of countenance; “Say, Bill, do you remember the time I paid ten cents to see you in a cage at Barnum’s? Well I want that dime back now.”Another lad in answer to the appeal of “got a cent?” replies with feeling; “One cent? Why man, if I had a cent I’d go to Paris!”They have court-martialed the lieutenant who beat Malotzzi. His punishment is to be transferred to another regiment.Bourmont, January 14.Madame is sick and I am worried. It isn’t so much that she is dangerously ill as that she is dangerously old. She lies in the big blue room upstairs, looking like a patient aged Madonna, without a fire, and with no one to look after her. Monsieur it seems has made up his mind to her demise and piously resigned himself. I called in an army doctor.“She’s pretty low,” he said, “but it isn’t medicine she needs so much as nursing.”I informed Monsieur. He must get a woman to come in and take care of her. But there was no such woman. He must try to find one. But no, it was impossible! “Well at least, you can make a fire in her room,” I told him. As forLa Petite, she has proved herself a broken reed. Lacking Madame’s rigid eyes upon her, she has become lazy and negligent. Moreover she is indubitably in love with some doughty doughboy, the proof being that she spends the time when she should be gathering the harvest of dust from theSalle des Assiettesin copying English phrases from our books on to the Gendarme’s pink blotting-paper. Yesterday we found “Welcome Americans” scrawled all over it. Meanwhile Monsieur seems to consider himself as qualifying for a martyr’s crown because he gets his own meals and washes his own dishes. “Mais, regardez Mademoiselle!” he calls to me as I pass through the living-room, and flourishes the dish-cloth at me with a tragic air. So between excursions to the canteen I am trying to play nurse to Madame, and a pretty poor one I make, I fear. Worse still, I must act as interpreter for the Doctor, whose French is absolutely nil, at every visit and since my scanty stock of French phrases hardly includes a sick-room vocabulary I am often absolutely at a loss. But we muddle through somehow and the Doctor gets his reward when we stop to speak to Monsieur in the front-room afterwards, for then Monsieur must bring out a bottle of champagne and together they sit in front of the fire and toast each other.Yesterday the Doctor prescribed fresh eggs. I told Monsieur. But there were none in Bourmont he declared.“Very well,” I said, “then I’ll get them.”I started out to search. I knew of course that eggs in France these days were difficult. In some places the Americans have been forbidden, on account of the scarcity, to buy either eggs or chickens; a ruling which officers have been known to evade by the simple expedient of renting laying hens. But no such prohibition exists at present in Saint Thiebault. Just the other day a lad told me he had consumed twelve fried eggs at one sitting.“Yes and Corporal G. ate more than I did.”“How many did he eat?”“Oh, just thirteen.”“No wonder,” I observed, “that the French talk aboutla famine!” I started a house-to-house canvas of Saint Thiebault only to be met by a shake of the head and “Pas des oeufs” everywhere I went. Finally back at the canteen I put the question in despair to the boys. “Have you been to the tobacco shop?” they inquired. So to the tobacco shop I hurried and sure enough there they were, all one wanted at the rate of seven francs a dozen.Last night Madame had an egg-nogg and this morning an omelette. Now the Doctor says that she is better.Bourmont, January 17.If my fairy god-mother should lend me her magic wand, the very first thing I would wish for would be a dinner, a real dinner just like Mother used to cook, for Company A. It would start with turkey and cranberry sauce and end with several kinds of pie, ice-cream and chocolate layer cake. There would be no soup on the menu. Such a meal I am sure would do more to raise the morale of Company A than the news of a smashing allied victory. It is the everlasting sameness, the perpetual reiteration of a certain few articles of food, I suppose, that makes the boys’ “chow” so depressing.“I’ve eaten so much bacon since I’ve been in the army,” remarked one boy mournfully,” that I’m ashamed to look a pig in the face.”There is one question which the whole A. E. F. would like to have answered. They’ve “got the bacon,” but what became of the ham?Far more hated than the bacon, however, is the “slum,” a word which Pat informs me is derived from the “slumgullion” of the hobo. It is this “slum” that gives the doughboy his horror of anything like soup.“When I get back to New York,” said a lad to me the other day, “I’m going to go into a real swell hotel and order a big dish o’ slum. Then I’m going to order a regular dinner, beefsteak and oysters and all the fixings, and then I’m going to sit and laugh at the slum.”Pat came in with a whoop after dinner yesterday. “We had a change today,” he sang out, “they put a pickle in the beans!” This noon he bounced in again. “We had a change today,” he shouted, “they cut the beans lengthwise instead of cuttin’ them acrosst.”I made a fatal error. “Don’t you like beans?” I asked. “Why I’m very fond of them. I wish they’d give them to us at our mess once in a while.”Pat looked at me with his sharp eyes narrowing. “D’you mean it?”“Why of course I do!”He turned and walked out of the hut. Two minutes later he returned with a hunk of bread and a mess-kit brimfull of beans; he laid them on the counter in front of me. I gasped but did my best to rise to the occasion. I was delighted to see those beans, I assured him. I had just been starting out to go to mess; a little bird had told me they were to have roast pork, French fries, and peach pie for dinner, but now I would stay at the hut and eat beans instead. Then I tasted the beans. They were as hard as bullets, they stuck in my throat; I had never known anything could be quite so awful. But Pat’s eyes were upon me. There was nothing for it but to swallow those beans. So swallow them I did, every last one, and there were positively at least a thousand. Then I washed the mess-kit and returned it to friend Pat with effusive thanks. At least, I complimented myself, I had been game. Tonight, just as I was starting out for my supper of toast and chocolate with the little old ladies of the Rue Dieu, Pat suddenly appeared on the other side of the counter.“We had ’em again tonight,” he announced joyfully, “and I thought since you were so fond of ’em,”—he pushed another mess-kit full of beans across the counter. I glared at him. I had vainly been trying to recover from the dinner beans all afternoon.“Take those things away,” I snapped, “I don’t want to lay eyes on another bean as long as ever I live!” Pat had called my bluff.For the last week Company A has had guests in the mess-hall. Several French soldiers have been sent here to instruct the boys in some special drill; it was arranged that they eat and sleep with the Americans. Dreary as the boys find their chow, it proved a treat to the poilus who evidently spread the news of their good fortune among their friends in the vicinity, for day by day the number of Frenchmen messing with Company A was mysteriously increased.“Yes sir!” the indignant Mess Sergeant declared to me. “They started in with five and now they’ve grown to be fifteen. I can’t tell one from t’other because all these frogs look alike to me, and they know as how I can’t sling their lingo. That’s a nice thing for them to be putting over on me!”But yesterday he got his chance to get even. He caught one of the Frenchmen putting a piece of bread in his pocket. It is of course a military offense to carry food out of the mess-hall.“I just sailed right into that guy”—the Mess Sergeant is a large and husky specimen—“and I sure did wipe up the floor some with him. And since then the whole gang of ’em has been scared stiff. Those frogs just watch me all the time. There ain’t a minute when I’m in the mess-hall that one of ’em takes his eyes off me.”The other day, they tell me, one of the boys in the company, possessed of a practical turn, employed his newly-issued “tin derby” as a kettle in which to boil some eggs. The delicacy proved dear. Betrayed by the blackened helmet, he was tried and fined twenty dollars.Bourmont, January 20.I’m off for Paris! My eyes have been in a horrid state for the last week. I have had all the doctors in the neighborhood treating them and they only get worse and worse. The Chief is going up to Paris tomorrow and has decided that the best thing to do is to take me along to see a specialist.Madame is so much better that I don’t feel uneasy at leaving her. But I hate to desert the boys, especially as the hut is in such a state. Yesterday we had a storm and the wind almost wrecked our tent. There was one moment while I was out at dinner, when such a gust hit it, that, as the boys said, “She sure seemed a goner.” At that moment there was a stampede for the door, the boys shooting out of the tent “just like seeds from an orange when you squeeze it.” But thanks to the Secretary and a crowd of boys who got out and hung for dear life on to the guy ropes, the tent came through damaged but still standing. When I returned after mess I found our hut with two great gaping rents torn in the outer walls and the inner lining all ripped loose and hanging down from the ceiling, so that one felt exactly as if one were inside a punctured zeppelin.Reports coming in this morning from other points on the division state that two tents actually did collapse during the tempest, and that one man, caught beneath the wreckage, had his collarbone broken. So we can count ourselves lucky.Tonight I saidau ’voirto Company A, telling them that if payday should occur during my absence, I hoped they all would be very, very good. Some of the boys lugubriously predicted that I would never return, while others darkly insinuated that they suspected I was “goin’ to Paris to git married.” To show them what my intentions honestly were, I inquired if there were any errands I could do for them in the city. Corporal G. looked at me, stammered, hesitated. There was something he would like, only he didn’t want to bother me. What was it? He paused, grew red, then blurted it out.“If it ain’t too much trouble, could you send me a picture post-card while you’re away? I ain’t never had a post-card from Paris.”Hôpital Claude-BernardPorte D’AubervilliersParis, January 25.This is a hideous hospital. They wake you up in the middle of the night to wrap you in a mustard poultice. They wake you up in the wee sma’ hours and order you to brush your teeth. And nobody in the whole establishment from head-doctor to scrub-lady knows a word of English; except the night-nurse and she knows “mumpsss!” like that she says it, “MUMPSSSSS!” Not that I have them; I have the measles. I don’t know where I got them. They were, so far as I am aware, almost the only known malady which we didn’t have at Bourmont. Probably some lad who was passing through the town and stopped in at the canteen gave them to me. It was undoubtedly the measles that were affecting my eyes; sometimes it seems they act that way.They sent me to this hospital because it was the only hospital in Paris admitting women that had room for me: known officially as the city hospital for contagious diseases, among Americans it passes as “the pest-house.”They think I’m a weird one here, because I want my window open. Twenty-nine times a day at least aninfirmièrewill come hurrying in and bang it shut and twenty-nine times a day I crawl out of bed and open it again.The nursing here is all done byinfirmières, or untrained women under the direction of two real nurses, one in charge of this wing during the day, the other during the night. Some of theseinfirmièresgo about in curl papers, others wear sabots. They mean well enough, but they are overworked, and frankly peasant types, with little education and almost no notion of cleanliness or of much else that is supposed to pertain to nursing. Last night a fat old soul without many teeth came waddling into my room to have a look at that interesting curiosity,la pauvre petite Dame Américaine. When she saw my open window she was so overcome with astonishment that she hurried out and fetched a companion to regard the phenomenon. The two of them stood and stared at it and discussed the matter between themselves for quite a while, then the fat one turned to me and remarked with a toothless but engaging smile; it was very warm in America where I lived, was it not? When I replied that, instead, it was much colder in winter there than here in Paris, they looked aghast and flatly incredulous. Their only explanation of the matter had been, it seemed, that I was accustomed to living in the tropics and just didn’t have sense enough to suit my habits to the atmosphere.Just outside the hospital there is a munitions factory. At night the light over the front door shines into my room and day and night the machinery keeps up an incessant thudding hum that says as plain as words over and over and over:Kill the Boches. Kill the Boches. Kill the Boches.Once in a long while the machines stop for a few moments in order, I suppose, to catch their breath and then I grow dreadfully worried, for I know that if someone doesn’t keep on killing the Boches every second, they will be breaking through the lines and pouring in over France in great drowning grey waves.January 27. I haven’t got the measles after all; I have the German measles, only they don’t call it that in French I am glad to say. At first I was so very red and speckled that they thought I had therougeole, but now they have decided it is only therubeoleafter all. A concourse of doctors considered me yesterday morning and pronounced the verdict. “But then,” I demanded, “if it’s only therubeolecan’t I be leavingtout de suite?” For the French do not consider quarantine necessary for the rubeole. “Eight days,” they answered, and when I expostulated they turned on their collective heels and marched callously out the door, each one holding up eight fingers apiece as a parting rejoinder.Last night I resisted a great temptation. This place is full of doors with little glass panes in them. As I lay awake in bed in the middle of the night, a wild desire grew on me to seize my big green bottle of mineral water by the neck and see how many panes of glass I could account for before they nabbed me. I had a perfect vision of myself, flying down the hall in my little flour-sack chemise of a night-gown, long legs stretching out beneath, going zip, bang, right and left into those window panes. I have seldom wanted to do anything quite so badly. And then just to top off with I was going to wring the interne’s neck. He is a little shrimp of a man—that interne, with no chin and a sort of scrawny picked-chicken neck, a neck that gets on one’s nerves.When they sent me to this hospital I comforted myself with the thought that I would at least learn a little French while staying here, but the only thing I have learned so far is thatgargarisermeans gargle and any goose might have guessed that.January 28. The Chief has sent me a rose-pink cyclamen. It is a lovely thing and very elaborately done up with pink crêpe paper and a large bow of shell-pink ribbon. Now I am no longer an object of any interest. Every last doctor, nurse, interne andinfirmièrewho comes into my room to take a look atla petite Mees, immediately turns his or her back on me and admires the cyclamen instead. I gather such objects are rare in French hospitals, for they examine and discuss it at the greatest length, always winding up with the remark that it must have “cost very dear.”Not having anything else to do I lie with my eyes shut and think. And of course I have been thinking chiefly about Company A. I have thought among other things of a play, or rather a dramatic charade in three acts, which we might give in the hut. It is to be entitledSlum. In the first act,—Bill— three doughboys hit on a plan to encompass the Kaiser’s death and so become rich by gaining the proffered reward:—they will send him a dish of slum! The second act,—et—shows a room in the Potsdam palace with Kaiser Bill and His Side Whiskers, the Lord High Chancellor, discussing the food situation. The slum appears; the Kaiser partakes of it and falls writhing to the floor. The last act shows a typical barn-loft billet, with rats squeaking, chickens clucking et cetera, where the Soldiers Three of the first act have their lodging. They receive the tidings of the Kaiser’s death; wild rejoicings ensue, as in fancy they spend their fortunes; only to be cut short by the discovery that the cook who made the slum has already claimed the reward. I think we can stage it successfully, though the costumes for the Kaiser and His Side Whiskers present some difficulties. One thing only troubles me; will it hurt the Mess Sergeant’s feelings?January 30. They have relented. They have shortened my stay. I am to be let out tomorrow, but I mustreposera few days before going back to work. Bother! I haven’t heard anything from Bourmont for ten days and I am full of uneasy apprehensions. Since I have been in the hospital the cyclamen has been the only word I have had from the outside world. I have been cut off as completely as if I were in a tomb. Ah well, some day I’ll get back to the hut again I suppose, and when I do, if those boys aren’t almost half as glad to see me as I am to see them, why I’ll know that some other canteen lady has been surreptitiously stealing their affections, and I shall put poison in her soup.Hôpital Claude-BernardParis, January 31.I have been in a big air raid; this is just how it all happened:It was a white night in the hospital for me. I had lain for hours, it seemed, in the little blue room watching through the glass panes of my door the coiffed head of a younginfirmièrebent over her embroidery. She sat outside my door because there was a light in the hall just there. Suddenly my drowsy ears were pierced by a long weird hoot. In an instant the girl had leaped to her feet and switched off the light, then she turned and ran down the hall. A moment later and the building was in darkness. I jumped from my bed and ran to the window. The light in front of the munitions factory was out, there seemed an uncanny silence, the machinery had been stopped. I hurried to the door. The corridor was full of hastening forms,infirmières, their loose white robes showing dimly in the grey light.“Qu’est ce qui arrive?” I demanded.“Les Boches!”The night nurse was peering from my window.“It’s the first warning,” she whispered. “See! the lights of Paris still shine.”But even as we looked, the light across the sky that was Paris flickered, dimmed, flashed out. At the same moment two great golden stars rose over the munitions factory.“Les avions!” cried the night nurse.And all the time the sirens kept up their ghostly wailing, like nothing one could imagine except a vast host of lost souls. Then the guns began. A moment later a crashing thud told that a bomb had fallen in our neighborhood. The night nurse drew me hurriedly into the hall.“Lie down against the wall,—close—like this,” she ordered.Up and down the corridor every space by the wall was occupied by the huddled form of aninfirmièreburied beneath a mattress. The night nurse, who had a whole heap of mattresses to herself, pushed one across to me. I lay on the top, finding it more comfortable that way.The bombs were falling nearer. A child in one of the wards woke up and began to wail fretfully. No one heeded her. There was a flash and then a tearing thud that shook the hospital. I had one ghastly moment, a thrill of panic terror at our utter helplessness as we lay there awaiting what seemed the inevitable coming of destruction. The moment passed. I got up and slipped down the side corridor to the glass door. The sky was full of moving lights; some burned with a steady brilliancy, some flickered and went out like fireflies, a few flashed red. There was no telling which was friend or foe. They seemed to be proceeding in all directions without plan or purpose. The air pulsated with the humming drone of their motors. They were like a swarm of angry hornets I thought. Across the road, standing on the top of a high wall, in sharp silhouette against the sky, three poilus stood to watch. Every now and then aninfirmière, curiosity outweighing caution, would leave her hiding-place and creep to the door beside me only to burrow like a bug, a moment later, underneath her mattress once more.“Mees! N’avez-vous pas peur?”“Mais non!”“Ah, vous êtes un soldat!”I went back to my room and climbed out on the window-sill. At first I thought the lights of Paris had been turned on again, but this time they were color of rose. As I looked the pink flush deepened, grew ruddy, flamed across the sky. I called the night nurse.“C’est une incendie,” she wailed staccato. “Quel malheur!”So Paris was on fire.As we watched two big puffs of white smoke rose over the munitions factory, spread into a cloud, drifted slowly toward us. The night nurse sniffed, then shut the window hurriedly.“La gaz,” she whispered. I questioned it but left the window shut.An aeroplane swung low over the munitions factory, so near that it looked like a great lazy fish with the rose light from below shining on its belly. Was it friend or enemy?The bombs were dropping close again. One could see the flashes and feel the jar of the explosions which made the windows rattle.“Oh les sales Boches!”“Oh la la!”The agonized wails sounded half stifled from beneath the mattresses.“Taisez! Écoutez!” It was the night nurse’s voice.The front door slammed. A fatinfirmièrein a badly shattered state of nerves stumbled down the hall weeping out unintelligible woes. At my mattress she came to a standstill, then ducked and tried to crawl beneath it; failing, she sat down on top of me. I ventured a polite protest,—in vain. The night nurse heard me. She emerged from beneath her heap. Followed a scene dramatic, unforgettable. Mattresses scattered to each side of her, heedless of the falling bombs, with Gallic passion she proceeded to point out to the sobbinginfirmièrethe shortcomings of her behaviour. But the fat lady proved unrepentant, her terror at the bombs superseding even her awe of the night nurse. She sat tight, holding her ground. She even ventured to answer back. The scene grew more intense. After I had heard the night nurse discharge theinfirmièresome six times over, feeling a trifle out of place, I managed to crawl from beneath and made my way back to the window. No more bombs were falling but the guns still barked. As I watched, a burning plane looking like a great tinsel ball seared its way through the sky, falling just to the right of Paris.“Pray God it is a Boche!” I thought.A round-eyedinfirmièrepeered in at the door, staring curiously at me.“Mees! Vous allez retourner en Amerique?”“Mais oui! A près la guerre!”The red glare over Paris was fading out. The machines in the munitions factory began to throb once more. In the grey light at the window I looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes past one. I turned to crawl into bed feeling cold and very sleepy. Some one touched my sleeve; it was the night nurse. She was staring out the window with eyes that saw nothing.“And how many little children will be dead in the morning do you think?” she asked.Bourmont, February 5.The blow that I somehow dimly apprehended while I was in the hospital has fallen. Last night late I arrived from Paris. The first thing I learned was, that with the addition of some new workers a general shuffle of the women at Headquarters was to take place. This morning the Chief called us together and gave us our new assignments. The Gendarme and I are to leave Bourmont. Since I have been away regimental Headquarters have been moved from Saint Thiebault to Goncourt, a town about two miles to the south, and the whole regiment with the exception of the First Battalion concentrated there. The Y. at Goncourt has had a hard time of it. Originally it occupied a barracks; then the regimental machine-gun company moved in and the Y. must move out. So the Y. settled itself in an old stone mill by the Meuse, only to have the military authorities decide that they needed that mill for a guard-house. So once more the Y. moved, this time to a little old house in the centre of the village; and here according to last reports it still is, for the simple reason that nobody else has any use for the little old house. Meanwhile, however, they are putting up a Big Hut which is to be ready in from one to three weeks, all according to who is making the estimate. It is to Goncourt that the Gendarme and I have been assigned. According to the Chief this is a “promotion.”“It’s the largest, the most important place on the division now,” he declared; “I’m sending you there because you made good at Saint Thiebault.”But this little piece of taffy doesn’t seem to help matters a bit. The only way to look at it is that it’s a case of the greatest good for the greatest number, and of course numerically Goncourt is about ten times as important as Saint Thiebault. And anyway it wouldn’t do the least good to kick against the pricks because when all is said and done one is under orders like a soldier. After all it isn’t as if I were going to Greenland or to Timbuctoo. And yet at even only two miles distance, so tied to the work one must be, one might almost as well be in a different planet.As for Saint Thiebault, they are going to have to do with just a man secretary there. The place is too small, the Chief says, to be allowed more than one worker.We won’t be moving for several days yet. I’m not going to say a word about it to Company A until the very last moment. I hate partings.
“O why didn’t I wait to be drafted?Why didn’t I wait to be cheered?”
“O why didn’t I wait to be drafted?Why didn’t I wait to be cheered?”
“O why didn’t I wait to be drafted?
Why didn’t I wait to be cheered?”
“Well I’ll tell the world that you deserve the credit!”
Anyway Company A has settled one point: if they ever march up Fifth Avenue I am to march with them.
Bourmont, January 11.
Bourmont, January 11.
The “convicts” are out of quarantine, and none the worse it seems for the experience. Yet my family is still depleted. Forty boys from the company have been sent out on a wood-chopping detail. Detachments from each of the four companies in rotation are being sent out into the forest to cut fuel for the use of the First Battalion and now it is our turn.
The boys, we learn, are billeted in a twelfth century fortress in a tiny village at the forest’s edge. From time to time some of them hike the four miles in to Saint Thiebault after the day’s work is done, in order to get a cup of hot chocolate and to tease a candle out of me. For the chateau boasts none of the modern luxuries of heat and light.
“What do you do in the evenings?” I asked Mr. Gatts.
“Sit in thecafé. It’s the only place there is to go.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well you needn’t worry about the boys drinkin’. They ain’t none of them got no money. All they can do is to sit and watch the Frenchies.”
Indeed such a long time has passed since our last payday that the whole company is feeling the pinch of poverty. Canteen sales have narrowed down to the three essentials; chocolate, cigarettes and chewing gum. I am running accounts on my personal responsibility, giving them “jawbone” as the boys say, a proceeding at which our Secretary looks with a disapproving eye. To be sure the air is full of rumours of impending payday but meanwhile there is no disguising the fact that the great majority is “dead broke.”
Says Sergeant X to Sergeant Z, a boy with a curious cast of countenance; “Say, Bill, do you remember the time I paid ten cents to see you in a cage at Barnum’s? Well I want that dime back now.”
Another lad in answer to the appeal of “got a cent?” replies with feeling; “One cent? Why man, if I had a cent I’d go to Paris!”
They have court-martialed the lieutenant who beat Malotzzi. His punishment is to be transferred to another regiment.
Bourmont, January 14.
Bourmont, January 14.
Madame is sick and I am worried. It isn’t so much that she is dangerously ill as that she is dangerously old. She lies in the big blue room upstairs, looking like a patient aged Madonna, without a fire, and with no one to look after her. Monsieur it seems has made up his mind to her demise and piously resigned himself. I called in an army doctor.
“She’s pretty low,” he said, “but it isn’t medicine she needs so much as nursing.”
I informed Monsieur. He must get a woman to come in and take care of her. But there was no such woman. He must try to find one. But no, it was impossible! “Well at least, you can make a fire in her room,” I told him. As forLa Petite, she has proved herself a broken reed. Lacking Madame’s rigid eyes upon her, she has become lazy and negligent. Moreover she is indubitably in love with some doughty doughboy, the proof being that she spends the time when she should be gathering the harvest of dust from theSalle des Assiettesin copying English phrases from our books on to the Gendarme’s pink blotting-paper. Yesterday we found “Welcome Americans” scrawled all over it. Meanwhile Monsieur seems to consider himself as qualifying for a martyr’s crown because he gets his own meals and washes his own dishes. “Mais, regardez Mademoiselle!” he calls to me as I pass through the living-room, and flourishes the dish-cloth at me with a tragic air. So between excursions to the canteen I am trying to play nurse to Madame, and a pretty poor one I make, I fear. Worse still, I must act as interpreter for the Doctor, whose French is absolutely nil, at every visit and since my scanty stock of French phrases hardly includes a sick-room vocabulary I am often absolutely at a loss. But we muddle through somehow and the Doctor gets his reward when we stop to speak to Monsieur in the front-room afterwards, for then Monsieur must bring out a bottle of champagne and together they sit in front of the fire and toast each other.
Yesterday the Doctor prescribed fresh eggs. I told Monsieur. But there were none in Bourmont he declared.
“Very well,” I said, “then I’ll get them.”
I started out to search. I knew of course that eggs in France these days were difficult. In some places the Americans have been forbidden, on account of the scarcity, to buy either eggs or chickens; a ruling which officers have been known to evade by the simple expedient of renting laying hens. But no such prohibition exists at present in Saint Thiebault. Just the other day a lad told me he had consumed twelve fried eggs at one sitting.
“Yes and Corporal G. ate more than I did.”
“How many did he eat?”
“Oh, just thirteen.”
“No wonder,” I observed, “that the French talk aboutla famine!” I started a house-to-house canvas of Saint Thiebault only to be met by a shake of the head and “Pas des oeufs” everywhere I went. Finally back at the canteen I put the question in despair to the boys. “Have you been to the tobacco shop?” they inquired. So to the tobacco shop I hurried and sure enough there they were, all one wanted at the rate of seven francs a dozen.
Last night Madame had an egg-nogg and this morning an omelette. Now the Doctor says that she is better.
Bourmont, January 17.
Bourmont, January 17.
If my fairy god-mother should lend me her magic wand, the very first thing I would wish for would be a dinner, a real dinner just like Mother used to cook, for Company A. It would start with turkey and cranberry sauce and end with several kinds of pie, ice-cream and chocolate layer cake. There would be no soup on the menu. Such a meal I am sure would do more to raise the morale of Company A than the news of a smashing allied victory. It is the everlasting sameness, the perpetual reiteration of a certain few articles of food, I suppose, that makes the boys’ “chow” so depressing.
“I’ve eaten so much bacon since I’ve been in the army,” remarked one boy mournfully,” that I’m ashamed to look a pig in the face.”
There is one question which the whole A. E. F. would like to have answered. They’ve “got the bacon,” but what became of the ham?
Far more hated than the bacon, however, is the “slum,” a word which Pat informs me is derived from the “slumgullion” of the hobo. It is this “slum” that gives the doughboy his horror of anything like soup.
“When I get back to New York,” said a lad to me the other day, “I’m going to go into a real swell hotel and order a big dish o’ slum. Then I’m going to order a regular dinner, beefsteak and oysters and all the fixings, and then I’m going to sit and laugh at the slum.”
Pat came in with a whoop after dinner yesterday. “We had a change today,” he sang out, “they put a pickle in the beans!” This noon he bounced in again. “We had a change today,” he shouted, “they cut the beans lengthwise instead of cuttin’ them acrosst.”
I made a fatal error. “Don’t you like beans?” I asked. “Why I’m very fond of them. I wish they’d give them to us at our mess once in a while.”
Pat looked at me with his sharp eyes narrowing. “D’you mean it?”
“Why of course I do!”
He turned and walked out of the hut. Two minutes later he returned with a hunk of bread and a mess-kit brimfull of beans; he laid them on the counter in front of me. I gasped but did my best to rise to the occasion. I was delighted to see those beans, I assured him. I had just been starting out to go to mess; a little bird had told me they were to have roast pork, French fries, and peach pie for dinner, but now I would stay at the hut and eat beans instead. Then I tasted the beans. They were as hard as bullets, they stuck in my throat; I had never known anything could be quite so awful. But Pat’s eyes were upon me. There was nothing for it but to swallow those beans. So swallow them I did, every last one, and there were positively at least a thousand. Then I washed the mess-kit and returned it to friend Pat with effusive thanks. At least, I complimented myself, I had been game. Tonight, just as I was starting out for my supper of toast and chocolate with the little old ladies of the Rue Dieu, Pat suddenly appeared on the other side of the counter.
“We had ’em again tonight,” he announced joyfully, “and I thought since you were so fond of ’em,”—he pushed another mess-kit full of beans across the counter. I glared at him. I had vainly been trying to recover from the dinner beans all afternoon.
“Take those things away,” I snapped, “I don’t want to lay eyes on another bean as long as ever I live!” Pat had called my bluff.
For the last week Company A has had guests in the mess-hall. Several French soldiers have been sent here to instruct the boys in some special drill; it was arranged that they eat and sleep with the Americans. Dreary as the boys find their chow, it proved a treat to the poilus who evidently spread the news of their good fortune among their friends in the vicinity, for day by day the number of Frenchmen messing with Company A was mysteriously increased.
“Yes sir!” the indignant Mess Sergeant declared to me. “They started in with five and now they’ve grown to be fifteen. I can’t tell one from t’other because all these frogs look alike to me, and they know as how I can’t sling their lingo. That’s a nice thing for them to be putting over on me!”
But yesterday he got his chance to get even. He caught one of the Frenchmen putting a piece of bread in his pocket. It is of course a military offense to carry food out of the mess-hall.
“I just sailed right into that guy”—the Mess Sergeant is a large and husky specimen—“and I sure did wipe up the floor some with him. And since then the whole gang of ’em has been scared stiff. Those frogs just watch me all the time. There ain’t a minute when I’m in the mess-hall that one of ’em takes his eyes off me.”
The other day, they tell me, one of the boys in the company, possessed of a practical turn, employed his newly-issued “tin derby” as a kettle in which to boil some eggs. The delicacy proved dear. Betrayed by the blackened helmet, he was tried and fined twenty dollars.
Bourmont, January 20.
Bourmont, January 20.
I’m off for Paris! My eyes have been in a horrid state for the last week. I have had all the doctors in the neighborhood treating them and they only get worse and worse. The Chief is going up to Paris tomorrow and has decided that the best thing to do is to take me along to see a specialist.
Madame is so much better that I don’t feel uneasy at leaving her. But I hate to desert the boys, especially as the hut is in such a state. Yesterday we had a storm and the wind almost wrecked our tent. There was one moment while I was out at dinner, when such a gust hit it, that, as the boys said, “She sure seemed a goner.” At that moment there was a stampede for the door, the boys shooting out of the tent “just like seeds from an orange when you squeeze it.” But thanks to the Secretary and a crowd of boys who got out and hung for dear life on to the guy ropes, the tent came through damaged but still standing. When I returned after mess I found our hut with two great gaping rents torn in the outer walls and the inner lining all ripped loose and hanging down from the ceiling, so that one felt exactly as if one were inside a punctured zeppelin.
Reports coming in this morning from other points on the division state that two tents actually did collapse during the tempest, and that one man, caught beneath the wreckage, had his collarbone broken. So we can count ourselves lucky.
Tonight I saidau ’voirto Company A, telling them that if payday should occur during my absence, I hoped they all would be very, very good. Some of the boys lugubriously predicted that I would never return, while others darkly insinuated that they suspected I was “goin’ to Paris to git married.” To show them what my intentions honestly were, I inquired if there were any errands I could do for them in the city. Corporal G. looked at me, stammered, hesitated. There was something he would like, only he didn’t want to bother me. What was it? He paused, grew red, then blurted it out.
“If it ain’t too much trouble, could you send me a picture post-card while you’re away? I ain’t never had a post-card from Paris.”
Hôpital Claude-BernardPorte D’AubervilliersParis, January 25.
Hôpital Claude-Bernard
Porte D’Aubervilliers
Paris, January 25.
This is a hideous hospital. They wake you up in the middle of the night to wrap you in a mustard poultice. They wake you up in the wee sma’ hours and order you to brush your teeth. And nobody in the whole establishment from head-doctor to scrub-lady knows a word of English; except the night-nurse and she knows “mumpsss!” like that she says it, “MUMPSSSSS!” Not that I have them; I have the measles. I don’t know where I got them. They were, so far as I am aware, almost the only known malady which we didn’t have at Bourmont. Probably some lad who was passing through the town and stopped in at the canteen gave them to me. It was undoubtedly the measles that were affecting my eyes; sometimes it seems they act that way.
They sent me to this hospital because it was the only hospital in Paris admitting women that had room for me: known officially as the city hospital for contagious diseases, among Americans it passes as “the pest-house.”
They think I’m a weird one here, because I want my window open. Twenty-nine times a day at least aninfirmièrewill come hurrying in and bang it shut and twenty-nine times a day I crawl out of bed and open it again.
The nursing here is all done byinfirmières, or untrained women under the direction of two real nurses, one in charge of this wing during the day, the other during the night. Some of theseinfirmièresgo about in curl papers, others wear sabots. They mean well enough, but they are overworked, and frankly peasant types, with little education and almost no notion of cleanliness or of much else that is supposed to pertain to nursing. Last night a fat old soul without many teeth came waddling into my room to have a look at that interesting curiosity,la pauvre petite Dame Américaine. When she saw my open window she was so overcome with astonishment that she hurried out and fetched a companion to regard the phenomenon. The two of them stood and stared at it and discussed the matter between themselves for quite a while, then the fat one turned to me and remarked with a toothless but engaging smile; it was very warm in America where I lived, was it not? When I replied that, instead, it was much colder in winter there than here in Paris, they looked aghast and flatly incredulous. Their only explanation of the matter had been, it seemed, that I was accustomed to living in the tropics and just didn’t have sense enough to suit my habits to the atmosphere.
Just outside the hospital there is a munitions factory. At night the light over the front door shines into my room and day and night the machinery keeps up an incessant thudding hum that says as plain as words over and over and over:Kill the Boches. Kill the Boches. Kill the Boches.Once in a long while the machines stop for a few moments in order, I suppose, to catch their breath and then I grow dreadfully worried, for I know that if someone doesn’t keep on killing the Boches every second, they will be breaking through the lines and pouring in over France in great drowning grey waves.
January 27. I haven’t got the measles after all; I have the German measles, only they don’t call it that in French I am glad to say. At first I was so very red and speckled that they thought I had therougeole, but now they have decided it is only therubeoleafter all. A concourse of doctors considered me yesterday morning and pronounced the verdict. “But then,” I demanded, “if it’s only therubeolecan’t I be leavingtout de suite?” For the French do not consider quarantine necessary for the rubeole. “Eight days,” they answered, and when I expostulated they turned on their collective heels and marched callously out the door, each one holding up eight fingers apiece as a parting rejoinder.
Last night I resisted a great temptation. This place is full of doors with little glass panes in them. As I lay awake in bed in the middle of the night, a wild desire grew on me to seize my big green bottle of mineral water by the neck and see how many panes of glass I could account for before they nabbed me. I had a perfect vision of myself, flying down the hall in my little flour-sack chemise of a night-gown, long legs stretching out beneath, going zip, bang, right and left into those window panes. I have seldom wanted to do anything quite so badly. And then just to top off with I was going to wring the interne’s neck. He is a little shrimp of a man—that interne, with no chin and a sort of scrawny picked-chicken neck, a neck that gets on one’s nerves.
When they sent me to this hospital I comforted myself with the thought that I would at least learn a little French while staying here, but the only thing I have learned so far is thatgargarisermeans gargle and any goose might have guessed that.
January 28. The Chief has sent me a rose-pink cyclamen. It is a lovely thing and very elaborately done up with pink crêpe paper and a large bow of shell-pink ribbon. Now I am no longer an object of any interest. Every last doctor, nurse, interne andinfirmièrewho comes into my room to take a look atla petite Mees, immediately turns his or her back on me and admires the cyclamen instead. I gather such objects are rare in French hospitals, for they examine and discuss it at the greatest length, always winding up with the remark that it must have “cost very dear.”
Not having anything else to do I lie with my eyes shut and think. And of course I have been thinking chiefly about Company A. I have thought among other things of a play, or rather a dramatic charade in three acts, which we might give in the hut. It is to be entitledSlum. In the first act,—Bill— three doughboys hit on a plan to encompass the Kaiser’s death and so become rich by gaining the proffered reward:—they will send him a dish of slum! The second act,—et—shows a room in the Potsdam palace with Kaiser Bill and His Side Whiskers, the Lord High Chancellor, discussing the food situation. The slum appears; the Kaiser partakes of it and falls writhing to the floor. The last act shows a typical barn-loft billet, with rats squeaking, chickens clucking et cetera, where the Soldiers Three of the first act have their lodging. They receive the tidings of the Kaiser’s death; wild rejoicings ensue, as in fancy they spend their fortunes; only to be cut short by the discovery that the cook who made the slum has already claimed the reward. I think we can stage it successfully, though the costumes for the Kaiser and His Side Whiskers present some difficulties. One thing only troubles me; will it hurt the Mess Sergeant’s feelings?
January 30. They have relented. They have shortened my stay. I am to be let out tomorrow, but I mustreposera few days before going back to work. Bother! I haven’t heard anything from Bourmont for ten days and I am full of uneasy apprehensions. Since I have been in the hospital the cyclamen has been the only word I have had from the outside world. I have been cut off as completely as if I were in a tomb. Ah well, some day I’ll get back to the hut again I suppose, and when I do, if those boys aren’t almost half as glad to see me as I am to see them, why I’ll know that some other canteen lady has been surreptitiously stealing their affections, and I shall put poison in her soup.
Hôpital Claude-BernardParis, January 31.
Hôpital Claude-Bernard
Paris, January 31.
I have been in a big air raid; this is just how it all happened:
It was a white night in the hospital for me. I had lain for hours, it seemed, in the little blue room watching through the glass panes of my door the coiffed head of a younginfirmièrebent over her embroidery. She sat outside my door because there was a light in the hall just there. Suddenly my drowsy ears were pierced by a long weird hoot. In an instant the girl had leaped to her feet and switched off the light, then she turned and ran down the hall. A moment later and the building was in darkness. I jumped from my bed and ran to the window. The light in front of the munitions factory was out, there seemed an uncanny silence, the machinery had been stopped. I hurried to the door. The corridor was full of hastening forms,infirmières, their loose white robes showing dimly in the grey light.
“Qu’est ce qui arrive?” I demanded.
“Les Boches!”
The night nurse was peering from my window.
“It’s the first warning,” she whispered. “See! the lights of Paris still shine.”
But even as we looked, the light across the sky that was Paris flickered, dimmed, flashed out. At the same moment two great golden stars rose over the munitions factory.
“Les avions!” cried the night nurse.
And all the time the sirens kept up their ghostly wailing, like nothing one could imagine except a vast host of lost souls. Then the guns began. A moment later a crashing thud told that a bomb had fallen in our neighborhood. The night nurse drew me hurriedly into the hall.
“Lie down against the wall,—close—like this,” she ordered.
Up and down the corridor every space by the wall was occupied by the huddled form of aninfirmièreburied beneath a mattress. The night nurse, who had a whole heap of mattresses to herself, pushed one across to me. I lay on the top, finding it more comfortable that way.
The bombs were falling nearer. A child in one of the wards woke up and began to wail fretfully. No one heeded her. There was a flash and then a tearing thud that shook the hospital. I had one ghastly moment, a thrill of panic terror at our utter helplessness as we lay there awaiting what seemed the inevitable coming of destruction. The moment passed. I got up and slipped down the side corridor to the glass door. The sky was full of moving lights; some burned with a steady brilliancy, some flickered and went out like fireflies, a few flashed red. There was no telling which was friend or foe. They seemed to be proceeding in all directions without plan or purpose. The air pulsated with the humming drone of their motors. They were like a swarm of angry hornets I thought. Across the road, standing on the top of a high wall, in sharp silhouette against the sky, three poilus stood to watch. Every now and then aninfirmière, curiosity outweighing caution, would leave her hiding-place and creep to the door beside me only to burrow like a bug, a moment later, underneath her mattress once more.
“Mees! N’avez-vous pas peur?”
“Mais non!”
“Ah, vous êtes un soldat!”
I went back to my room and climbed out on the window-sill. At first I thought the lights of Paris had been turned on again, but this time they were color of rose. As I looked the pink flush deepened, grew ruddy, flamed across the sky. I called the night nurse.
“C’est une incendie,” she wailed staccato. “Quel malheur!”
So Paris was on fire.
As we watched two big puffs of white smoke rose over the munitions factory, spread into a cloud, drifted slowly toward us. The night nurse sniffed, then shut the window hurriedly.
“La gaz,” she whispered. I questioned it but left the window shut.
An aeroplane swung low over the munitions factory, so near that it looked like a great lazy fish with the rose light from below shining on its belly. Was it friend or enemy?
The bombs were dropping close again. One could see the flashes and feel the jar of the explosions which made the windows rattle.
“Oh les sales Boches!”
“Oh la la!”
The agonized wails sounded half stifled from beneath the mattresses.
“Taisez! Écoutez!” It was the night nurse’s voice.
The front door slammed. A fatinfirmièrein a badly shattered state of nerves stumbled down the hall weeping out unintelligible woes. At my mattress she came to a standstill, then ducked and tried to crawl beneath it; failing, she sat down on top of me. I ventured a polite protest,—in vain. The night nurse heard me. She emerged from beneath her heap. Followed a scene dramatic, unforgettable. Mattresses scattered to each side of her, heedless of the falling bombs, with Gallic passion she proceeded to point out to the sobbinginfirmièrethe shortcomings of her behaviour. But the fat lady proved unrepentant, her terror at the bombs superseding even her awe of the night nurse. She sat tight, holding her ground. She even ventured to answer back. The scene grew more intense. After I had heard the night nurse discharge theinfirmièresome six times over, feeling a trifle out of place, I managed to crawl from beneath and made my way back to the window. No more bombs were falling but the guns still barked. As I watched, a burning plane looking like a great tinsel ball seared its way through the sky, falling just to the right of Paris.
“Pray God it is a Boche!” I thought.
A round-eyedinfirmièrepeered in at the door, staring curiously at me.
“Mees! Vous allez retourner en Amerique?”
“Mais oui! A près la guerre!”
The red glare over Paris was fading out. The machines in the munitions factory began to throb once more. In the grey light at the window I looked at my watch. It was fifteen minutes past one. I turned to crawl into bed feeling cold and very sleepy. Some one touched my sleeve; it was the night nurse. She was staring out the window with eyes that saw nothing.
“And how many little children will be dead in the morning do you think?” she asked.
Bourmont, February 5.
Bourmont, February 5.
The blow that I somehow dimly apprehended while I was in the hospital has fallen. Last night late I arrived from Paris. The first thing I learned was, that with the addition of some new workers a general shuffle of the women at Headquarters was to take place. This morning the Chief called us together and gave us our new assignments. The Gendarme and I are to leave Bourmont. Since I have been away regimental Headquarters have been moved from Saint Thiebault to Goncourt, a town about two miles to the south, and the whole regiment with the exception of the First Battalion concentrated there. The Y. at Goncourt has had a hard time of it. Originally it occupied a barracks; then the regimental machine-gun company moved in and the Y. must move out. So the Y. settled itself in an old stone mill by the Meuse, only to have the military authorities decide that they needed that mill for a guard-house. So once more the Y. moved, this time to a little old house in the centre of the village; and here according to last reports it still is, for the simple reason that nobody else has any use for the little old house. Meanwhile, however, they are putting up a Big Hut which is to be ready in from one to three weeks, all according to who is making the estimate. It is to Goncourt that the Gendarme and I have been assigned. According to the Chief this is a “promotion.”
“It’s the largest, the most important place on the division now,” he declared; “I’m sending you there because you made good at Saint Thiebault.”
But this little piece of taffy doesn’t seem to help matters a bit. The only way to look at it is that it’s a case of the greatest good for the greatest number, and of course numerically Goncourt is about ten times as important as Saint Thiebault. And anyway it wouldn’t do the least good to kick against the pricks because when all is said and done one is under orders like a soldier. After all it isn’t as if I were going to Greenland or to Timbuctoo. And yet at even only two miles distance, so tied to the work one must be, one might almost as well be in a different planet.
As for Saint Thiebault, they are going to have to do with just a man secretary there. The place is too small, the Chief says, to be allowed more than one worker.
We won’t be moving for several days yet. I’m not going to say a word about it to Company A until the very last moment. I hate partings.