Breakfast
Five Francs—($1.00).
BananasQuaker OatsEggs and BaconGriddle Cakes with SirupConfitureCoffee, Cocoa, or Chocolate
Luncheon
Eight Francs—($1.60).
Oyster Soup, with OkraScollops of Veal, DeweyNouilles, MilanaiseCold Meats, with JellyRussian SaladAssorted EclairsRaspberry Ice CreamCoffee
Dinner
Ten Francs—($2.00).
Crème St. CloudRouget PortugaiseRoasted Filet of Beef, CressonPommes ChâteauEndive FlamandesSalade de SaisonCandied FruitsCoffee Ice CreamCoffee
Yet the charm of the American Officers' Hotel in Paris rested not alone in the real excellence of its cuisine, nor in the comfort of its cleanly sleeping rooms. It carried its ideals of genuine service far beyond these mere fundamentals. It recognized the almost universal Yankee desire to have one's shoes shined in a shop and so set up a regular American boot-blacking stand in one of its side corridors, a thing which every other Parisian hotel would have told you was quite impossible of accomplishment. It recognized the inconvenience of tedious waiting and long queues at the box office of the Paris theaters by setting up a theater ticket office in its lobby, which made no extra charge for the distinct service rendered. Nor was there a charge for the services of Miss Curtis, the charming little Red Cross girl, who went shopping with a fellow or for him, and who had a knack of getting right into those perplexing Paris shops and getting just what a fellow wanted at an astonishingly low price—for Paris in war times, anyway. Her range of experience was large; from the man with a silver star on each shoulder who wanted to buy a modish evening gown for his wife at a price not to exceed forty dollars, to the chunky Nevada lieutenant who had wonthree thousand francs at "redeye" on the preceding evening and was anxious to blow it all in the next morning in buying souvenirs for mother. With both she did her best. Her motto was that of the successful shop keeper: "We aim to please."
When Mr. Boomer had this hotel set up and running and turned his attention to some other housing problems of our Red Cross, the management fell to Major H. C. Eberhart, who had been his assistant in Paris and before that had been affiliated in a managerial capacity with several large American houses. He carried forward the job so well begun.
With the slow but very sure movement of our doughboys back from eastern France and Germany toward the base ports along the westerly rim of France, where they were embarking in increasing numbers for the blessed homeland, it became necessary for General Pershing to establish concentration areas, or reservoir camps, well back from the Atlantic Coast but convenient to it. By far the largest and most important of these was in the neighborhood of the city of Le Mans, some one hundred and fifty miles southwest of Paris, which meant in turn that what was finally destined to be the largest of the canteens of our American Red Cross in France outside of Paris was the final one established. It was known as the American Red Cross Casual Canteen and, situated within three blocks to the east of the railroad station at Le Mans, was a genuine headquarters for all the American soldiers for ten or fifteen or twenty miles roundabout. And in the bare chance that there might not be a doughboy who had chanced to hear of it, it was well indicated—by day, by a huge sign of the crimson cross, and by night that emblem blazing forth in all the radiance of electricity.
When the doors were finally opened—about the middle of March, 1919—there were sleeping quarters under its hospitable roof for 250 enlisted men and forty officers.In the canteen portion of the establishment, 200 men could be served at a single sitting; in all 500 at each of the three meals a day. The comforts of this place almost approximated those of a hotel. When the men rose from their beds in the morning—clean sheets and towels and pillowcases, of course, even though it did mean that the Red Cross had to establish its own laundry in the establishment—they could step, quickly and easily, into a commodious washroom and indulge, if they so chose, in a shower bath. Eighteen showers were installed—for their convenience. It represented the acme of Red Cross service.
Finally the beginning of the end for the average doughboy in France—that long anticipated and seemingly never-arriving day of departure in the troopship for home.
Our Red Cross was down to see him off when he sailed. It might have been from Brest or Bordeaux or St. Nazaire that he took his departure—or from some one of the lesser ports that were used to a greater or less extent. That made no difference to the American Red Cross. It was part of its job to be on hand whenever and wherever the boy of the A. E. F. sailed for home—whether it was Brest or Vladivostok or Southampton or Marseilles.
As a matter of real and actual fact, Brest was the most used of all the embarkation ports for the journey home. It boasted what was sometimes called "the most beautiful canteen in France" which had been builded by our Red Cross, with the generous help of the army engineers. It immediately adjoined the embarkation sheds, and night and day in the months that followed the signing of the armistice, it was supremely busy—serving the inevitable cigarettes, doughnuts, chocolate, and other hot drinks. An interesting and extremely valuable adjunct to the place was a bakery, with a capacity of twenty thousand buns a day.
The enlisted men's rest room, with its bright hangingsand draperies, its cartoons of army life painted upon its wall panels, its big fireplace, its comfortable settees, lounging chairs, and tables supplied with games, magazines, and writing material, held especial attraction for the doughboys. In all the mud and grime of the dirtyPort du Commerceit was the one cheery and homelike place.
I told in an earlier chapter of the American Red Cross canteen at Bassens, just across the Gironde from Bordeaux. It is enough to add here and now that this American-builded port with its mile-long Yankee timber pier at which seven great ships might be berthed simultaneously, discharging or loading cargoes, never justified its worth half so much as in the days after the armistice. Thomas Kane's coffee attained a new perfection while Miss Susanne Wills, the Chicago woman who was directress of the canteen on the pier, and her fellow workers made renewed efforts to see that the boys that passed through the canteen had every conceivable comfort—and then some others. I, myself, spent a half day questioning them as to these. The verdict to the questionings was unanimous. It generally came in the form of a grin or a nod of the head, sometimes merely in a pointing gesture to the crimson-crossed comfort bag, that the big and blushing doughboy carried hung upon his wrist.
For the sick boy, going homeward bound from all the ports, very special comfort provisions were made—and rightly so. All of these last passed through the Red Cross infirmaries on the embarkation docks. As each went over the gangway he was questioned as to his equipment. If he was short a mess kit or a cup, a fork, a knife, a spoon or a blanket, the deficiency was promptly met; in addition to which each boy was given a pair of flannel pajamas and the inevitable comfort bag, with its toothbrush, tooth paste, wash cloth, bar of soap, and two packages of cigarettes.Books and magazines also went upon each troopship, while Red Cross nurses accompanied the boys on to the ships and saw them safely settled in the hospital wards.
No mere cataloging of the work of our Red Cross in the embarkation ports can ever really begin to tell the story of the fullness of its service there. Charts of organization, details of operations, pictures of the surroundings go just so far, but never quite far enough to tell of the heart interest that really makes service anywhere and everywhere. Such service the American Red Cross rendered all across the face of France—and nowhere with more strength and enthusiasm than in those final moments of the doughboy which awaited him before his start home. Have I not already told you that our Red Cross over there was not a triumph of organization—or anything like it? It was a big job—and with big mistakes. But the bigness of the things accomplished so far outweighed the mistakes that they can well be forgotten; the tremendous net result of real achievement set down immutably and indisputably as a real triumph of our American individualism.
On the ship that bore me from New York to Europe in the first week of December, 1918, there were many war workers—and of many sorts and varieties. We had men and women of the Y. M. C. A., of the Y. W. C. A., of the Jewish Welfare Board, of the Knights of Columbus—and twenty-five women of the American Red Cross. And so, in the close-thrown intimacy of shipboard, one had abundant opportunity to study this personnel at rather short range, and the fact that our ship, which had been builded for South African traffic rather than for that of the North Atlantic, nearly foundered in mid ocean only served to increase the opportunity.
There were women war workers of nearly every age and variety in that motley ship's company. There were school-teachers—one from Portland, Maine, and another from Portland, Oregon—stenographers, clerks, women of real social distinction, professional women, including a well-known actress or two, and girls so recently out of finishing school or college that they had not yet attained their full places in the sun. Few of them had known one another before they had embarked upon the ship; there was a certain haziness of understanding in many of their minds as to the exact work that was to be allotted to them overseas. A large percentage of the women, in fact, had never before crossed the Atlantic; a goodly number had not even seen salt water before this voyage. Yet with all this uncertainty there was no timidity—no, not even when the great December storm arose, and with the fullness of its fury lashed itself into a hurricane the like ofwhich our captain, who had crossed the ocean a hundred times or more, had not seen. And when the fury of this storm had crashed in the cabin windows, had torn the wheelhouse away, had set the stout ship awash and the passengers to bailing, the courage and serenity of these American women remained undisturbed. They suffered great personal discomforts, yet complained not. And with our national felicity for an emergency organization—that sort of organization really is part and parcel of our individualism—relieved the steward's crew at night and cooked and served the Sabbath supper.
There were women in uniform on our ship whose mouths were tightly shut in the grim determination of service—one could fairly see "Z-E-A-L" written in unmistakable letters upon their high foreheads—and there were girls who fretted about the appearance of the curls under the edges of their small service caps and who coquetted with the young British aviators returning home after service as instructors on the flying fields here in the United States. Between these extremes there was vast range and variety. But the marvelous part of it all was that all of them—each after her own creed or fashion, for the dominating quality of our individualism multiplies geometrically in the case of our American womanhood—ranged true to any test that might be put upon them. The storm showed that. I did not have the personal opportunity of seeing the Red Cross girls in battle service; but I did see them in the canteens in the hard, hard months that followed the signing of the armistice, saw them in the wards and the recreation huts of hospital after hospital, saw them, too, in Paris headquarters, working under very difficult conditions of light and ventilation—living of every sort—and at manual or office work or humdrum dreariness. The girl in uniform who sat all day in a poorly lighted and aired room at a typewriter or a filing case had a far less dramatic or poetic job than the traditional Red Cross girl who stands at a battlefield canteen or in a hospital ward holdingthe hand of some good-looking—and perhaps marriageable—young captain or colonel. Yet her service was as real as uncomplaining and—for the reasons we have just seen—vastly more difficult.
None of the women's work over there was easy—the romantic girl who went to France lured on by the dream pictures of some artist-illustrator as to the dramatic phases of canteen or hospital work was quickly disillusionized. The real thing was vastly different from the picture. A dirty and unshaven doughboy in bed or standing in a long queue waiting for his cigarettes or chocolate, and speaking Polish or Yiddish when he came to them, was a far, far different creature from the young wounded officer of the picture who must have been an F. F. V. or at least from one of the first families of Baltimore or Philadelphia. And the hours! They were fearfully hard—to put it lightly. Eight, ten, or twelve hours at a stretch was a pretty good and exhausting test of a girl's vitality. Nor was this all of the job, either. Many and many a woman worker of the Red Cross or, for that matter, the Y. M. C. A., too, has stood eight or ten or twelve hours on her feet in a canteen and then has ridden twenty or thirty miles in a truck or camionette to an army dance, has danced three or four or five more hours with soldier boys who, even if they do not happen to be born dancers, do covet the attention and interest of decent girls, and has returned to only a few hours of sleep, before the long turn in the canteen once again. And has repeated this performance four or five times a week. For what? Because she was crazy for dancing? Not a bit of it. For of a truth they became sick of dancing—"fed up" is the phrase they frequently used when they spoke of it at all.
"I feel as if I never wanted to hear an orchestra again," one of them told me one day as I stopped at her canteen—in a French town close to the occupied territory. "But I have four dates already for next week and three for the week after. Another month of thissort of thing and I shall be a fit candidate for a rolling chair."
"Why do you do it?" I ventured.
"Why do I do it?" she repeated. "The boys need us. Have you noticed the kind of girls that drift up here from Paris? If you have, you will understand why my job is unending, why it only pauses for a very little while indeed at night, when I jump into my bed for six or seven hours of well-earned sleep."
I understood. I had spent an evening in the grand boulevards of Paris and had watched a "Y" girl, under the escort of a member of the American Military Police, save foolish doughboys and their still more foolish officers—from themselves. In a few minutes after ten o'clock that evening an overcrowded hotel of one of our largest American war-relief organizations had regretfully turned away sixteen of our soldiers and in this time there were fifteen French girls waiting to give the hospitality that the sadly overburdened hotel had been compelled to refuse them. No wonder that our Red Cross was forced into the building of the great Tent City there on the Champs de Mars. As these French girls of the Paris streets came up to the doughboys the job of the "Y" girl began. In a few more minutes she had convinced the boys that it was not too late to give up hope of securing lodgings in overcrowded Paris; and was quick with her suggestions as to where they might be found. It was not a pleasant job. I hardly can imagine one more unpleasant. But the girl had her reward, in the looks of gratitude which the doughboys gave her. One or two of them cried like babies.
This was an unusual job to be sure. But our American Red Cross also was filled with unusual jobs for women as well as for men; jobs that took not merely endurance and courage, but in many, many cases rare wit and tact and diplomacy, and these were rarely lacking, and sometimes came where they were least expected.
I am not allanxious to over-glorify these women. It would hardly be fair; for, after all, they were very human indeed—witness one young widow on our ship to Europe who not merely confessed but actually boasted that she had received three proposals of marriage upon that stormy voyage. And one little secretary girl from the Middle West, who was of our ship's company, wanted to be a canteen worker, although she was specifically enrolled for the office work for which she was particularly qualified, but when she found that the canteen to which she was to be assigned was located in a lonely railroad junction town in the middle of France, demanded that she be sent to Coblenz, where the Army of Occupation had its headquarters; she said quite frankly that she did not want to be robbed of all her opportunities of meeting the nice young officers of the army. She was very human, that young secretary, and eventually she got to Coblenz. Insistence counts. And she was both insistent and consistent.
But at the Rhine her lot, oddly enough, was not thrown in with officers but with the doughboys—the enlisted men of our most amazing army. She fed them, walked with them, danced with them, wrote their letters, and finally began to understand. And so slowly but surely came to the fullness of her real value to the country that she served.
One evening she dined in the Y. W. C. A. hostess house at Coblenz with two of these boys. Left alone, she would have dined by herself. She was tired, very tired. There comes the hour when a woman worker wearies a bit at sight of a ceaseless file of chattering and khaki-clad men. And so when she seated herself in one of the little dining booths of the "Y. W." restaurant, it was with a silent prayer that she might be left alone—just that evening. Her prayer was not granted. A big doughboy came and sat down beside her, another across the narrow table from her. The second vouched for the first.
"Youwill like Hank," said he. "He's one of the livest in the whole First Division. He's from Waco, Texas, and say, he's the best gambler in the whole army."
At which Hank grinned and produced a huge wad of ten and twenty and fifty and hundred franc notes from his hip pocket.
"Don't you let him string you, Miss Tippitoes," said he, "but if ever you get where you need a little spare change you know where your Uncle Hank is to be found."
He called her "Miss Tippitoes" because he could not remember her real name even if ever it had been given to him. But he had danced with her and watched her dance, and marveled. And well might he have marveled. For if I were to give you Miss Tippitoes' real name you might know it as the name of the most graceful and popular dancer in a fashionable suburb of Chicago.
Hank edged closer to her. It was in the crowded restaurant, so he took off his coat and unbuttoned his blouse, as well as the upper buttons of his undershirt. And Tippitoes stood for it—it was a part of her job and she knew it—while Hank leaned closer to her and confided some of his troubles—they were troubles common to so many of the doughboys.
"It's a dump that we're billeted in, miss," said he, "and it's all the fault of our colonel—him and that Red Cross girl he's stuck on. Just because he's got a mash on her he had the regiment moved in to G——. But I've got his number. And as for her—why, that girl comes from my home town. I've got hers, too."
Tippitoes' eyes blazed. She could have lost her temper so easily. It is not difficult when one is fagged and nerves begin to get on edge, but she kept her patience.
"Don't be foolish, young man," said she, "otherwise somebody will have to take the trouble to tell you that a colonel does not locate his regiment. He has no more to say about where you shall all be billeted than you yourselves.And as for the Red Cross girl, she is in the same position. Moreover, your remark is not worthy of an American soldier—and a gentleman."
There was something in the way she said these things—no type may ever put in upon paper—that, in the language of the motion-picture world, "registered." In a little time Hank was ashamed of himself, and with the innate generosity of his big, uncouth heart, apologized—like a gentleman and an American soldier.
Ofttimes, even though with the American Army women were not permitted to go very close to the front line, the job of the Red Cross girl was fraught with much real danger. The air raid was too frequent and too deadly a visitor not to have earned an awsome respect for itself. The tooth marks of Big Bertha still show all too plainly as horrid scars across the lovely face of Paris—the beauty of the world. Theboche, as we all very well know, did not stop his long-distance warfare from the air even at the sight of the roofs which bore crimson crosses and so signified that they were hospitals and, under every condition of civilization and humanity, exempt from attack. The story of these hospital raids, with their casualty lists, not merely of American boys already sick and wounded, but of the wounding and killing of the men and women who were laboring to give them life and comfort, is already a well-known fact of record; yet even this was not all. Death never seemed far away in those hard months of 1917 and 1918, and Death was no respecter, either of persons or of uniforms or of sex. Upon the honor roll of our Red Cross there are the names of twenty-three American women, other than nurses, who made the supreme sacrifice for their country.
The experiences of the Red Cross girls in the air raids were as many and varied as the girls themselves. That of a canteen worker at Toul was fairly typical. She had been over at the neighboring city of Nancy to aid in one of theinnumerable soldiers' dances which had been given there. In the middle of the dance it had suddenly occurred to her chum and herself that neither had eaten since morning. A young lieutenant had taken them to a very good little restaurant in the great Place Stanislas that all through the hard days of the war held to a long-time reputation of real excellence, and had insisted that they order a dinner of generous proportions.
Yet before their soup had been fairly served an air raid was upon them. The roar of the planes and the rattle of cannonading were continuous. Every light in the place went out instantly, and because the proprietor insisted even then in keeping his shades and shutters tightly drawn the place was inky black.
"What did you do?" I asked her.
"What did we do? We went ahead and ate our dinner. It was the best thing we could do. I realized for the first time in my life the real handicaps of the blind. I don't see how they ever learn to eat fried chicken gracefully."
In an earlier chapter I told of the remarkable work done by the Smith College girls at the crux of the great German drive. It was impossible in that chapter to tell all of the sacrifice and the devotion shown by these women—the most of them from five to fifteen years out of college, although one of the best of them was from the class of 1882 and still another from that of 1917. "We were an unbaked crew," one of them admitted quite frankly to me.
Miss Elizabeth Bliss was typical of these college girls. A long time after Château-Thierry they were all working behind the lines in the Argonne, Miss Bliss herself in charge of a sanitary train for the Red Cross from the railhead back to the base hospital. It was part of her job to work up to midnight and then be called at three o'clock in the morning to see the four o'clock train start offwith its wounded. On one of those October mornings, when the weather was a little worse than usual, if that could be possible, she exerted a perfectly human privilege and decided not to get up.
But no sooner had this decision been made than the still, small voice spoke to her.
"Can you afford to miss even one day?" it said to her.
"I'm all in. I just can't get up," she replied to the S. S. V.
"Can you afford to miss—even one day?" it repeated.
She got up and dressed and made her way down in the rain to the waiting train. As she went into the long hospital car a wounded doughboy raised himself on one elbow and shouted to all his fellows:
"Hi, fellows, I told you that a Red Cross girl would be here, and here she is. I told you she'd come."
"Just think if I hadn't," says Miss Bliss in telling of this incident.
When life back of the front was not dangerous or dramatic, it was apt to be plain dreary. There is not usually much drama just in hard work. Take once again the case of Miss Mary Vail Andress, whom we found in charge of the canteen at Toul. Miss Andress came to France on the twenty-fourth of August, 1917, one of a group of seven Red Cross women, the first of the American Red Cross women to be sent over. The other members of the party were Mrs. Dickens, Mrs. Lawrence, Miss Frances Mitchell (who was sent to the newly opened canteen at Épernay), Miss Rogers, Miss Andrews, and Miss Frances Andrews, and were immediately dispatched to Châlons. For a short time Miss Andress was the assistant of Henry Wise Miller, who was then in charge of canteen work in France. She, however, enlisted for canteen work and so asked Mr. Miller to be allowed to go into the field and was sent to Épernay. From there she went back to Paris and on to Chantilly,where she prepared a home for girls in canteen work. She came to Toul in January, 1918, and, as you already know, was the first woman worker to reach that important American Army headquarters.
"For a while it seemed as if I could never quite get down to the real job," she says, "it seemed so often that something new broke loose and always just at the wrong time. While we were working to get the first canteen established here at Toul—we had a nurses' club in mind at the time—word came from the hospital over there back of the hill that the Red Cross was needed there to help prepare for the comfort of the nurses in that big place. I went there at once—of course. Within fifteen minutes after I got there I was hanging curtains in the girls' barracks—couldn't you trust a woman to do a job like that? I did not get very many hung. Captain Hugh Pritchitt, my chief, came bursting in upon me. 'They're here,' he shouted.
"I knew what that meant. 'They' were the first of our American wounded, and they must have comfort and help and immediate attention. They got it. It was part of our job, you know. And after that part was organized there was nothing to it but to come back to Toul and set up our chain of canteens there."
And you already know how very well that particular war job was done. And doing it involved much devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice, not only on the part of the directress, but on that of her staff of capable assistants.
Talk about devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice! Into the desolate ruin of the war-racked city of Rheims there walked last October two American Red Cross women on a sight-seeing trip. They had had months of hard canteen work and were well tired out, and were about to return home. In a week or so of leave they went to Rheims because that once busy city with its dominating cathedral has become the world's new Pompeii. And the man orwoman who visits France without seeing it has missed seeing the one thing of almost supreme horror and interest in the world to-day.
The two Red Cross women had but a single day to see Rheims. That was last October. They still are there; for back of the ruins, back of the gaunt, scarred hulk of that vast church which was once the pride of France, and to-day the symbol of Calvary through which she had just passed, there rose the question in their minds: what has become of the folk of this town? It was the sort of question that does not down. Nor were the two women—one is Miss Emily Bennet of the faculty of a fashionable girls' school in New York and the other Miss Catherine Biddle Porter of Philadelphia—the sort that close their souls to questions such as these.
They found the answer. It was in the basement of the commercial high school—a dreary, high-ceilinged place, but because of its comparatively modern construction of steel and brick a sort ofabrior bombproof refuge for the three or four hundred citizens that stuck it out through the four years of horror. In that basement place of safety an aged school-teacher of the town, Mademoiselle Fourreaux, month in and month out, prepared two meals a day—bread and soup—for the group of refugees that gathered round about her and literally kept the heart of Rheims abeat. The Red Cross women found this aged heroine—she confesses to having turned seventy—working unaided, and within the hour were working with her, sending word back to Paris to send up a few necessary articles of comfort and of clothing. That night they slept in Rheims, and were billeted in a house whose windows had been crudely replaced with oiled paper and whose roof was half gone.
In a short time relief came to them. The American Red Cross sent in other supplies and workers and established a much larger and finer canteen relief in another section of the town. Other organizations—French andBritish and American—poured in relief; but Miss Bennett and Miss Porter stuck it out, and soon began to reap the fruit of their great endeavors.
I have cited here a few instances of women who have gone overseas—frequently at great personal sacrifices—to help bear the burden of the war. If space had permitted I might easily have given five hundred, and each of them would have had its own personal little dramatic story. I might simply tell of some of the women whom I have met on the job; of Miss Lucy Duhring of Philadelphia, setting up the women's work of the Y. M. C. A. in the leave areas of the occupied territory; of a girl superintendent of schools from Kansas, working in the hospital records for the Red Cross at Toul; of another girl from Kingston-on-Hudson running a big Y. W. C. A. hotel for army girls in Paris and running it mighty well; of still another woman—this one a welfare worker from a big industrial plant in Kansas City—as the guiding spirit in the hostess house at Coblenz. The list quickly spins to great lengths. It is a tremendously embracing one, and when one gazes at it, he begins to realize what effect this great adventure overseas is going to have upon the lives of the women who participated in it; how it is going to change the conventions of life, or its amenities, or its opportunities. How will the weeks and months of camaraderie with khaki-clad men, under all conditions and all circumstances affect them? Many of the silly conventionalities of ordinary life and under ordinary conditions of peace, have, of necessity, been thrown away over there. Men and women have made long trips together, in train or in motor car, and have thought or made nothing of it whatever. On the night train up from Aix-les-Bains to Paris on one of those never-to-be-forgotten nights the autumn the conflict still raged, two girls of the A. E. F. found it quite impossible to obtain seats of any sort. Four or five marines, back from a short leave in a littletown near there, did the best they could for them and with their blankets and dunny rolls rigged crude beds for them in the aisle of a first-class car, and there the girls rode all night to Paris while the marines stood guard over them.
The gray-uniformed woman war-worker knows that she may trust the American soldier. Her experience with the doughboy has been large and so her tribute to the high qualities of his manhood is of very real value. Moreover, she too, has seen real service, both in canteen work and in the still more important leave area work which has followed—this last the great problem of keeping the idle soldier healthily amused.
"I have known our girls," she will tell you, "to go into a miserable little French or German town filled with a thousand or twelve hundred American boys in khaki and in a day change the entire spirit of that community. There has been a dance one night, for instance, with the boys restless and trying stupidly to dance with one another, or in some cases, even bringing in the rough little village girls from the streets outside. But the next dance has seen a transformation. The girls of the A. E. F. have come, they are dancing with the men; there is cheer and decency in the very air, there are neither French nor German present—the place is American.
"You have told of what the American girl has been to the men of our army; let me tell, in a word, what the army has been to the American woman who has worked with it: We have trusted our enlisted men in khaki and not once found that trust misplaced. Night and day have we placed our honor in their hands and never have trusted in vain."
"The reason why?" we venture.
"The mothers of America," is the quick reply.
I know what she means. I have read letter after letter written by the doughboys to the mothers back here, and the mass of them still stay in my mind as a tribute that all but surpasses description. Some of them misspelled;many of them ungrammatical—where have our schools been these last few years?—a few of them humorous, a few pathetic, but all of them breathing a sentiment and a tenderness that makes me willing to call ours the sentimental as well as the amazing army. Add to these letters the verbal testimony of the boys to the women of their army.
"We're not doing much," one after another has said, "but say, you ought to see my mother on the job back home. She's the one that's turning the trick."
It was a large experiment sending women with our army overseas—in the minds of many a most dubious experiment. In no other war had an army ever had women enrolled with it, save possibly a few nurses. It is an experiment which, so far as the United States is concerned, has more than justified itself. Our women have been tried in France—in other European lands as well—and have not been found wanting; which is a very faint way, indeed, of trying to tell of a great accomplishment. For if the American soldier, through many months of test and trial—and test and trial that by no means were confined to the battlefield—has kept his body clean and his soul pure through the virtue of woman which has been spread about him through the guarded years of his home life, how about the virtue of the women that, clad in the uniform of our Red Cross and the other war-relief organizations, guarded him successfully when he was far away from home? There is but one answer to such a question, but one question to follow after that. Here it is: Is it fair to longer consider such a real accomplishment a mere experiment? I think not. I think that it is rather to be regarded as a real triumph of our Americanism.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Transcriber's NoteClick on illustrations to see enlarged images.Obvious errors of punctuation and diacritical marking have been corrected.Hyphen removed: over[-]burdened (p. 160), soup[-]kitchen (pp. 146-7), team[-]work (p. 23).Hyphen added: post[-]office (p. 246), to[-]day (p. 288).The text uses "coöperation", "coördination", etc. consistently, except when hyphenated, where "co-operation", "co-ordination", etc. are used. With the removal of the hyphenation, these have been changed to use the diaeresis everywhere.P. 9: "plaîl" changed to "s'il vous plaît" (s'il vous plaît).Pp. 10, 222: "embrochure" changed to "embouchure" (the Seine embouchure, the embouchure of the Loire).P. 28: "civilan" changed to "civilian" (military and affairs).P. 29: "obtainalbe" changed to "obtainable" (were not readily obtainable).P. 30: "Agriculture" changed to "Argiculture".P. 36: added "a" (without a coördinated system).P. 49: duplicate "the" removed (the main stems).P. 49: "sizeable" changed to "sizable" (fifty-five sizable trucks).P. 52: "similiar" changed to "similar" (a few similar trifles).P. 55: "their" changed to "there" (there is nothing light).P. 62: added "it" (but if it had lasted two weeks).P. 71: "carrry" changed to "carry" (As it was impossible to carry).P. 72: "dack" changed to "back" (After that we drove back).P. 92: "Quai de la Lorie" changed to "Quai de la Loire".P. 97: "a" added (so to prepare a proper system).P. 98: "Salt Park" changed to "Salt Pork".P. 107: "authorites" changed to "authorities" (the French authorities).P. 107: missing "t" replaced (keep down the buoyant spirit).P. 117: "whatsover" changed to "whatsoever" (is no railroad whatsoever).P. 118: "spall" changed to "shall" (I shall speak to the railway authorities).P. 118: added "a" (within a stone's throw).P. 122: "exquistite" changed to "exquisite" (its exquisite cathedral).P. 124: "pastboard" changed to "pasteboard" (a sizable pasteboard box).P. 126: "geen" changed to "been" (the vines had been growing).P. 131: "Colombes-la-Belles" changed to "Colombes-les-Belles".P. 147: "ofter" changed to "after" (case after case).P. 149: "opportunites" changed to "opportunities" (seek out the opportunities).P. 157: "troup" changed to "troupe" (a troupe of seventeen girls).P. 165: "tubes" changed to "cubes" (bouillon cubes from a stock).P. 171: "Mareieul" changed to "Mareuil".P. 220: "atrractiveness" changed to "attractiveness" (great attractiveness).P. 225: "to" changed to "too" (that passed none too quickly).P. 236: "Neaves" changed to "Mesves".P. 246: "men" changed to "women" (the efforts of these women).P. 259: missing "t" replaced (the ebb tide of American troops).P. 262: "placed" changed to "place" (the vast placed packed to the very doors).P. 266: "procelain" changed to "porcelain" (white porcelain pitcher).P. 273: "Beet" changed to "Beef" (Roasted Filet of Beef).P. 284: "of" added (the job of the Red Cross girl).P. 284: "respector" changed to "respecter" (Death was no respecter).P. 286: "wark" changed to "work" (just in hard work).
Transcriber's Note
Click on illustrations to see enlarged images.
Obvious errors of punctuation and diacritical marking have been corrected.
Hyphen removed: over[-]burdened (p. 160), soup[-]kitchen (pp. 146-7), team[-]work (p. 23).
Hyphen added: post[-]office (p. 246), to[-]day (p. 288).
The text uses "coöperation", "coördination", etc. consistently, except when hyphenated, where "co-operation", "co-ordination", etc. are used. With the removal of the hyphenation, these have been changed to use the diaeresis everywhere.
P. 9: "plaîl" changed to "s'il vous plaît" (s'il vous plaît).
Pp. 10, 222: "embrochure" changed to "embouchure" (the Seine embouchure, the embouchure of the Loire).
P. 28: "civilan" changed to "civilian" (military and affairs).
P. 29: "obtainalbe" changed to "obtainable" (were not readily obtainable).
P. 30: "Agriculture" changed to "Argiculture".
P. 36: added "a" (without a coördinated system).
P. 49: duplicate "the" removed (the main stems).
P. 49: "sizeable" changed to "sizable" (fifty-five sizable trucks).
P. 52: "similiar" changed to "similar" (a few similar trifles).
P. 55: "their" changed to "there" (there is nothing light).
P. 62: added "it" (but if it had lasted two weeks).
P. 71: "carrry" changed to "carry" (As it was impossible to carry).
P. 72: "dack" changed to "back" (After that we drove back).
P. 92: "Quai de la Lorie" changed to "Quai de la Loire".
P. 97: "a" added (so to prepare a proper system).
P. 98: "Salt Park" changed to "Salt Pork".
P. 107: "authorites" changed to "authorities" (the French authorities).
P. 107: missing "t" replaced (keep down the buoyant spirit).
P. 117: "whatsover" changed to "whatsoever" (is no railroad whatsoever).
P. 118: "spall" changed to "shall" (I shall speak to the railway authorities).
P. 118: added "a" (within a stone's throw).
P. 122: "exquistite" changed to "exquisite" (its exquisite cathedral).
P. 124: "pastboard" changed to "pasteboard" (a sizable pasteboard box).
P. 126: "geen" changed to "been" (the vines had been growing).
P. 131: "Colombes-la-Belles" changed to "Colombes-les-Belles".
P. 147: "ofter" changed to "after" (case after case).
P. 149: "opportunites" changed to "opportunities" (seek out the opportunities).
P. 157: "troup" changed to "troupe" (a troupe of seventeen girls).
P. 165: "tubes" changed to "cubes" (bouillon cubes from a stock).
P. 171: "Mareieul" changed to "Mareuil".
P. 220: "atrractiveness" changed to "attractiveness" (great attractiveness).
P. 225: "to" changed to "too" (that passed none too quickly).
P. 236: "Neaves" changed to "Mesves".
P. 246: "men" changed to "women" (the efforts of these women).
P. 259: missing "t" replaced (the ebb tide of American troops).
P. 262: "placed" changed to "place" (the vast placed packed to the very doors).
P. 266: "procelain" changed to "porcelain" (white porcelain pitcher).
P. 273: "Beet" changed to "Beef" (Roasted Filet of Beef).
P. 284: "of" added (the job of the Red Cross girl).
P. 284: "respector" changed to "respecter" (Death was no respecter).
P. 286: "wark" changed to "work" (just in hard work).