Chapter V: Part 5

I suppose my voice sounded rather wabbly, for Robert gave me a sharp look and said, “Not on your life! Where did you get hold of that notion? Are you going to throw up the sponge?”

And then I remembered that my case was exactly that of a million other women scattered all over the land, who were still keeping the flag flying, as Edith had said; and so I bucked up and we finished up with a very good time.

ON SHIPBOARD, November 12th.

I begged papa and mamma not to come down to New York to see me off, but of course they would. However, it turned out all right. Papa blew us to a two-course dinner without wine downstairs in a famous grill frequented by successful actors and artists and writers, after which he packed us off to a musical comedy and kept up a light artillery of jokes all through the evening, and we both laughed so hard that mamma finally lost patience and declared we were a perfect scandal. There was just one awful moment at the last. That was on the boat when papa gave me a big still hug and then held his cheek close to mine the way he’s done ever since I was a baby.

“Papa,” I whispered fiercely into his ear, “if you make me cry now I’ll kill you!”

“Shucks, honey!” he murmured back. “If Miss Rankin can cry in Congress I guess a green little soldierette can shed a few tears when bidding a fond farewell to native land and mother, without grave dishonor. Still, I don’t want to cramp your style. Cable us when you land. Be a good girl--but not goody. And now, so long, dear. God bless us all together!”

And still smiling and steady he shook hands with me just as if I were his son, and then marched mamma, sobbing audibly, gently off by the arm. I went downstairs to my cabin.

No danger of my being sick. My bunk mate is! I hardly know how to describe my feelings after we had really started and there was time to look about--it all seemed so sort of natural and matter-of-fact, and France still merely a small pink dab on the map. It wasn’t a bit startling to be out of sight of land and hear people discussing submarines and lifeboats, but it was a horrible sensation to have the boat plunge down and leave your stomach in midair. A gorgeous sunset to-night, but it’s rough and going to be rougher, I fear. I walked about some, and then decided discretion was the better part of valor and retired to my deck chair.

November 15th.

Three awful days in my cabin, too sick to stir. But to-day it’s smooth and the air is marvelous. After a fine salt bath I came up and pranced about the deck; and there were lots of nice people to prance with--naval officers, Belgian generals, French _permissionnaires_, and any number of Y.M.C.A.-ers and Red Cross men. Played shuffleboard; tried the dining-room for ten minutes, and then decided to have all my meals on deck in order to watch for the submarines.

November 24th.

Land is in sight--a long low ribbon of mist away on the starboard. That’s France! It still doesn’t seem reasonable. The trip has been nothing at all. Evenings we would sit out on deck. It was weird with never a light, even cigarettes forbidden; inky blackness on deck, and stumbling and pitching into someone at every step. It was awesome from the stern to see two big black funnels silhouetted against the starry sky, the phosphorescence of the water rivaling the splendor of the heavens; and to realize that all the time this huge mechanical monster beneath our feet was plowing steadily, silently forward, carrying seven hundred human lives across three thousand miles of water.

PARIS, November 26th.

Paris at last, beautiful, soft, gray, in a blur of rain. I reported at Number Four, Place de la Concorde, heard a speech by the commissioner, and was assigned right away. It’s just exactly what I wanted and didn’t dare to dream I’d get! I’m to work in a canteen in one of the biggest aviation camps in France. With our own American men! We’ll live in barracks, get up at reveille, five-thirty a.m., and---- But I’m somewhat hazy as to our duties. Time will reveal. After the conference I met Lucile B----, a Bryn Mawr girl, and found she’s to canteen with me at the same barracks. We embraced and nearly fell downstairs in our excitement. Lucile has moved her things over to my hotel so we can chum together.

November 27th.

Slept--off and on--and had a breakfast in bed, after the luxurious Continental fashion,--wouldn’t Delia sniff?--and then I read Baedeker’s Paris aloud while Lucile unpacked. We lunched and did accounts and then walked over to Red Cross Headquarters. After reporting there we got our provisional cards of identity and went down to a shop on the boulevard and ordered bracelets of identity. Had my hair washed by a poilu on permission and tried out my Boston French on him. He understood me better than I did him! Later Lucile and I taxied over to Napoleon’s tomb, saw the German airplanes in the court of the Invalides, and then went on to Notre Dame. It is wonderful inside, so high and spacious and old and gray, with a scented misty twilight air as though dimmed by many prayers. I made two prayers myself--one personal, and the other impersonal for our army, and I only hope they come true.

November 28th.

While waiting to be sent to camp I delved into the subject of canteens in general. And I found that the old canteen idea is as different from the new canteen idea as day is from night. A canteen before this war meant simply a place where a soldier could buy a drink and perhaps procure notions, buttons and needles and thread. But that old idea has expanded and developed until now it really comprises a whole welfare center, a regular community plant for dispensing food and comfort and good cheer. There are restaurants, writing rooms, infirmaries, sleeping quarters, pianos, phonographs, entertainments--everything you can possibly think of to keep a collection of men far from home happy and sane and sound. Of course not all these canteens are alike, for each one caters to some particular need and thus develops along a particular line. Its location determines its special bent.

There are, I was told at headquarters, several types of canteen.

Number One: These are the metropolitan canteens of Paris, situated at the big railway stations--the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est and the Gare Saint Lazare--which catch all the troops coming into or leaving the city.

Number Two: These are the canteens of the _Grande Ceinture_, at little stations on the environs of Paris, where innumerable troop trains pass through daily, carrying thousands of soldiers from England, Italy, America, Saloniki, Portugal, Africa. These troops never even enter Paris, but are shifted on the outskirts of the city.

Number Three: Canteens in the French war zone behind the actual fighting lines in the big transportation centers.

Number Four: Canteens right on the French Front, in dugouts and _abris_. In these canteens there are no women helpers.

Number Five: Canteens in the American training camps, behind the war zone. That’s the kind I’m assigned to. It’s the biggest American aviation center in France.

Number Six: Canteens for American soldiers dotted along the lines of communication from the coast ports to the final training centers. All these canteens are under the control of the American Red Cross.

December 1st.

In barracks! Yesterday was my first day. I got up in the dark at bugle call, five-thirty A.M., and dressed in the cold--our stoves are not up yet and I don’t know who’s going to start the fires when they are!--had some hot coffee and went over to serve behind the counter, serving coffee, chocolate and sandwiches. A long queue of soldiers stood in line straight through the morning, and, work as hard as I could, the line constantly augmented. Some wanted to linger and chat. It was good, they said, to see a real live American girl who could talk God’s language, and not that scrambled-egg affair the Frenchies handed out. One confided he’d not seen a genuine honest-to-goodness girl for four months; since he’d left home, and added that he liked ’em on the American plan better than on the European plan. I couldn’t do much more than smile in answer, for the orders flew thick and fast.

By noon the place was so crowded you couldn’t see for the forest of campaign hats. A babel of voices; a rattle of dishes; the phonograph going; the piano banging; a bunch of enlisted men trying out Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory; canteeners running back and forth with meals for the officers, whose tables were in behind the counter; rain trickling down my neck from an overhead leak; sleet and windy rain shaking the windowpanes; sneezes and coughs mingling with shouts of laughter; and always the far door opening to let in the storm and still more and more men, till they were packed like sardines in rows--these are my impressions of that first noon hour.

Suddenly: “_Otto, Sie haben etwas vergessen!_” I heard a low guttural voice speaking close behind my ear.

“_Ja, ich weiss_,” replied another.

I whirled, visions of spies, explosions and poisoned soup rushing wildly through my brain.

“What’s this?” I cried. “German? In an American aviation camp? What are you two doing here?”

They stared at me stupidly. One held a mop and the other held a broom. Of course they were spies!

“You are Germans--_Deutsch_?” I challenged again, sure that I had uncovered a regular Guy Fawkes plot.

“_Ja_,” admitted the one called Otto, and jerked a thick dirty thumb toward his working blouse, on the chest of which was inscribed in big black letters “P G” with a slim little “i” between, so that it read “PiG.”

“Pig!” I said wonderingly.

A soldier across the counter came to my aid. “Prisoners of war,” he explained briefly. “P. G. stands for _prisonnier de la guerre_. Some joker slipped the middle “i” over onto him. And it’s not so far wrong at that! Look at the beggars’ fat jowls. They help round the camp, unloading trucks, scrubbing up the barracks, and so on. For obvious reasons they’re not allowed in the kitchens. They have their own quarters behind barbed-wire entanglements--but you just bet they don’t try very hard to get away. This is better than machine-gun fire.”

“Are they good workers?”

“Not so you’d notice--but they make up by being fine eaters. You should see them tuck away the grub that Uncle Sam sends three thousand miles across the sea to feed his Allies. I reckon they figure that the more they eat the less there’ll be for the enemy, and there’s more than one way of killing a cat. The French are too easy on them, and that’s the fact.”

In the afternoon things went easier for a while. As it was still raining we had mess in the canteen and then sat and made up jam sandwiches. Along about five another tremendous rush began. I was put on the _marmites_. These are big urns of coffee which are constantly filled and refilled from the boiling-hot vats on the stove. It is heavy, dirty, back-breaking work, and inside of an hour my clean blue blouse and spotless collar looked as though I had slid down a chimney. And my hands--was I ever proud of these red, chapped, grubby-nailed horrors? _Nota bene_: If you love to be dainty, don’t be a canteen maid.

At nine-thirty P.M. we closed, and I was so dead tired that I tumbled into bed and unlaced my boots by the feel. The first shift is from seven A.M. until four P.M., and the second from noon to nine-thirty P.M. But some of the workers are down with severe colds, their substitutes have not yet arrived, and that means double duty for the rest. From five in the morning until nine at night is some day’s job, believe me! You have to be hardened before you can stand the pace. A delicate girl would crumple up inside of a week. Of course when we get organized and a system blocked out things will move more smoothly. At present we’re a brand-new plant.

December 5th.

Superb aviation weather! For the past week it’s been blowing, hailing, raining, snowing, thawing, and then beginning all over again _da capo_ with unabated zeal, like a child with only one tune. Water overhead and slush underfoot. Colds, pneumonia, tonsillitis, dipththeria, grippe--these are the enemies our soldiers have to face and conquer or be conquered by, every single day. And yet, despite the hostile weather, the men go up for practice just the same. And thus far only one death.

Our stoves are up. The P. G.’s have put them in every room. No more rising in the dark in freezing temperature and washing in the water from your hot-water bottle. And we’ve appointed a fireman to build the fires. We’re to take the job week about. As there’s no water laid on in our barracks yet, we’ve had also to appoint a water bearer to keep the jugs filled and on the fire. Each morning the P. G.’s swab down the green linoleum floors of our quarters fresh and clean--and inside an hour they are caked with real estate. Entire town lots come away with our boots.

This morning when I went over to the canteen the cook had not shown up. And in front a long line of waiting doughboys stood, beating a hungry tattoo on the counter. What to do? Of course we could have turned them out while we rounded up another cook, but that’s not what we’re here for. “Get round your job,” said Axiom One, and feeding these men was it. So I went into the kitchen. A soldier volunteered his aid. And all through the morning hours we two worked like firemen at a ten-story fire. Bacon and eggs, _repas complet_; we cooked and cooked and cooked.

In the afternoon as a change I was assigned to go on a camion to the neighboring farms and collect butter, eggs, vegetables and fruit. It was lowering when we set forth, with a raw chill wind that blew every way at once, and presently the air turned black and the water came down like a waterspout out of the sky. Nevertheless we completed our circuit. It was twilight when we returned. I went into the canteen kitchen.

“Well, he’s been and gone!” a chorus of voices cried.

“Who?” I inquired, catching my breath. They tossed me a card and a note.

It was Bob! He had got a day’s leave unexpectedly and he spent four hours of it coming down to see me, found me gone, and spent another four getting back again. He’d sent a wire last night, but of course it hadn’t reached me. I suppose it will arrive the morning after eternity and rout me out of bed!

I went back to quarters feeling pretty blue. There were little zigzags of fiery pain running up and down my neck from bending so long over the stove; my skirts were sopping; and my feet in their heavy boots with their excess acreage of mud were so heavy I could scarcely drag them after me. I opened the door upon a cozy scene. Lucile was making tea. She had lifted the lid of the small fat-bellied stove in the center of the room, and with a long fork she was toasting the nubbins of war bread down over the live coals. Somebody strange was sitting in our one easy-chair.

“Come in,” cried Lucile, “and shut that door! Here’s a lady from ‘The Saturday Evening Post’; she’s come down to look at the animals in the zoo.”

“Well, what do you think of us?” I asked.

“I think,” she replied, looking first at Lucile bending over the stove, then round at the bare board walls hung thick with mackintoshes and storm skirts, at the shelves containing each girl’s toilet articles, at the cots ranged along the sides covered with dark army blankets, at the trunks standing everywhere, at a leak in the roof from which the rain was decanting with a steady tap-tap onto my pillow, and finally back at Lucile again--“I think it’s a cross between a girls’ boarding house, an East Side tenement and a Western mining shack. And I think you girls are ripping to rough it like this!”

“Pooh!” said Lucile, taking up her banjo and beginning to strum. “We love the hardships. Of course a weakling couldn’t stand the racket. You have to be sound through and through, or sooner or later it gets you. In a month or so, though, we’re going to have enlarged quarters, and then two girls will have a cubby-hole to themselves and we’ll be rid of all this clutter. Also we’re going to start an officers’ club where we serve hot meals to the aviators; in the same building will be recreation rooms, and just outside a garden and a tennis court. Then we’ll be _grand luxe_! As yet we’re still in the making, like creation on the fourth day.”

“How do you keep clean?” the visitor wanted to know.

“You don’t,” I said grimly. “Look! But since Lucile has bought a rubber bathtub we manage a bath once in a while.”

“She thinks our boots are funny,” said Lucile.

“She wouldn’t think they were quite so funny if she had had to oil them and keep them clean. You should have seen mine the other day when I slipped and fell in front of the post-office. I thought the whole camp and the hangars and the flying field were coming right along with me like the top of a layer cake. I give you my word, for a second I was afraid to move my feet for fear I’d lift the town.”

The lady rose to go. Lucile went over to her trunk and got her diary, which the lady had asked to see. After some debate I gave her mine, too. I only hope she uses discretion!

December 11th.

Dazzling sunshiny weather. I counted seventeen planes up. Got back my diary. The lady said she read it in bed and whooped so over some of the passages that we could have heard her clear out to camp, it was the parts where I told what I thought about men. She swore, though, she wouldn’t use them; and I hope she keeps her word! Worked at the _marmites_ in the forenoon and behind the counter in the afternoon. Right in the middle of the rush, when I was pushing hot chocolate and sandwiches across the counter as fast as my two hands could fly, I suddenly heard a voice say: “One coffee, please--and step lively!”

It was Robert! I was so busy that there was no time then for more than a handshake. After Robert had squeezed my hand he turned it over in his palm and stared steadily down at it, all chapped and rough and red. I cut my thumb yesterday, and the bandage was ragged and coffee-stained. Altogether, not a hand that you’d enter at a beauty show. But Bob only said “Bully little flapper!” and couldn’t seem to let go of it. Then for an hour he helped me. He’d got another leave, he said, and thought he’d try my camp again.

At four I went off duty and the directrice lent us her sitting-room, where we had tea together and--well, sort of caught up on arrears. Afterward we strolled about the camp in the early twilight and came by the post-office for the mail. Robert and I stood off at one side and watched the soldiers hurrying from all directions like ants converging upon that one radiant doorway of warm streaming light. The board walks resounded to their footsteps. On and on they came, some on the dead run. It was weird to see those figures suddenly evolve out of the gloom.

“And that’s not all,” said Robert. “This one camp with its thousands of men is the epitome of scores of other camps over here, where at this twilight hour exactly the same performance is taking place--thousands on thousands of lonesome soldiers hastening, with eagerness in their hearts, to get that word from home. That’s one end of the line. At the other end are the girls and wives and mothers at home writing those letters with cheerfulness and faith--thousands of Susie Smiths and Mamie Joneses! A Whitman could make a fine poem out of that, naming every girl and her town. And between those two ends so far apart is the big invisible rope of love. They talk about the necessity of guns and effectives, but, by George, if they lived in one of these god-forsaken little villages behind the Front they’d realize that it’s the guns plus the letters of the Susie Smiths and Mamie Joneses which are going to win this war!”

December 20th.

Robert left that same night, and ever since I’ve been laid up with tonsillitis--the first time I’ve been ill in my life. It was a splendid opportunity to think--only there wasn’t anything to think about. That’s the bother with this war--it kills thought. But I kept the fires up and the big jugs heating for the baths, and cleaned the girls’ boots, and talked with the P. G.’s, and indexed our new library, and counted the flies on the wall, and made the tea every afternoon. Nevertheless I could feel my brain begin to disintegrate with idleness. That’s the worst trouble with the soldiers in the trenches--nothing to do. It gives them the _cafards_, the black butterflies, the blue devils, the jimjams, the hump.

Christmas Day.

Raining again, slowly but surely. However, I’m on my job again--in waders; and with three pairs of heavy woolen stockings underneath. These frame buildings just can’t help but leak, and they always want to leak wherever the back of your neck is. To-day we gave out Red Cross Christmas boxes to all the soldiers and cadets and officers. You should have seen the rush! Men who at home were used to receiving from their fathers a six-cylinder car as a gift and then remarking casually “Oh, thanks awf’lly, old chap!” came crowding up for those boxes, as eager as kids for tin horns. And there was no put-on about it. They wanted their Christmas presents!

After a full day we had mess--turkey!--with some of the officers, and then half a dozen of us went over to the Y. M. C. A. hut to see the movies. We sat in the front row--six women among five hundred men. These evening entertainments are a great boon. And the shows are so well attended that they have to give two performances each night. Later we danced, overshoes and all. After that we tramped over to the barracks of the P. G.’s to see their Christmas tree. Altogether it was a strange Christmas. Where shall we be this time next year? All those solid husky youngsters who filled the hall with their jolly laughter? All these slim young aviators with their budding mustaches and their straight, keen, fearless eyes? What has 1918 in store for us?

December 31st.

I’ve been transferred! There was a call for more workers at a certain canteen, and so some of us were shifted round. Now I am at X----, which is a canteen on the environs of Paris, of Number Two Type. Here thousands of troops pass through each day from all parts of France, carrying the Allied man power for redistribution upon every Front. Occasionally soldiers lie over a few hours while new trains are being made up, but usually they go straight through, with a ten-minutes’ stop for food. Sometimes the men have traveled from thirty-six to forty-eight hours without a bite to eat. Thus our chief work is upon the platforms or _quais_, distributing hot coffee, chocolate and sandwiches. The heavy rushes come between six and eight in the morning, at noon, and once more at dusk. Often there will be trains on two tracks at the same time, one full of grim, silent troops bound for the Front, the other filled with jolly _permissionnaires_ going home on leave. There is a sharp contrast of mood between those two trainloads of Frenchmen, so close together upon those narrow parallel tracks. The incoming ones face home and a brief spell of happiness; the outgoing ones face--another year! And the unending weariness of it, the bitter black nostalgia, is to be read in those black eyes straining out at you from the windows.

This is to-day’s record--my first day here: I rose and was on the _quai_ by six-thirty. It was dark, and the cold was appalling. It had been snowing, and a high wind slapped icy particles against my cheek. The pavement of the _quai_, where it was not covered with snow, was caked with dirty, slippery ice so that one had to step gingerly for fear of accident. My feet were freezing, despite the customary three pairs of stockings and heavy boots.

“You’ll have to get some clogs,” said a white-haired American worker beside me. “Look!” She lifted her skirts and I beheld thick wooden-soled boots--sabots with leather tops. “Sweet, aren’t they? But better than frozen feet!”

The train was late. The _marmites_ of boiling hot coffee stood waiting by the track, each with its padded flannel jumper to keep the contents hot. The basket of ham sandwiches, apples and Camembert cheese were covered with oilcloth as protection from the wet. The workers, some Americans, some French, in blue blouses and veils, swathed to the eyes in their mantles, huddled in the sheltered lee of the station and stamped their feet and swung their arms to keep warm. Those drafty _quais_ in the raw dawns are the native heath of pneumonia microbes.

Suddenly the captain of the _gare_ blew his whistle.

“Here she comes!” cried the white-haired American, and seized her coffee cart and started down the track. The rest of us followed with sandwiches. The long train slowed to a halt. Snow piled high upon the roofs of the cars; snow upon the steps and vestibules; icicles dripping from the eaves--and nobody descended! Not a move or a stir. It looked like a specter train.

“_Café! Café, messieurs! Descendez, messieurs!_ You have ten minutes!”

It was the gay voice of a little French canteener as she ran from car to car, tapping on the windowpanes. And then--bang! Some of the windows were let down, heads began to poke out, and tin cups stained with _pinard_ appeared at the end of arms.

“No, no, messieurs. Descend if you please. You have time. And we can’t wait on you all up there. Ah, you little monster”--this to a big giant who suddenly loomed above--“come down from that window. The coffee is good and hot!”

That cheerful, laughing voice, so absolutely French in its intonations, roused the silent train. And then they came pouring out like a cloudburst and almost mobbed the coffee machine. Hundreds of hands and cups were under the faucet at once.

“_Dix centimes, messieurs! Dix centimes, n’est-ce pas?_”

The little mademoiselle shook her tin cup, and the sous rattled into it--but still the men did not speak. They drank their beloved scalding hot beverage in silence. The snow fell steadily, tipping their mustaches, the visors of their kepis, the edges of their coats--with a powder of white, like silhouettes. And still they uttered no word! Remember, it is the day before New Year’s--a day dear to every Frenchman’s heart--and these men were returning to the Front. The whistle blew.

“_En voiture!_”

The circle of hands about the coffee machine melted as if by magic. The train sucked them in. And still not a single word had been spoken! I turned, that strange grim muteness of a voluble warm-hearted race sinking into my heart. I turned, and the spell was broken. I heard a young French voice. It was a soldier, who at the risk of losing his train had lingered to thank the white-haired canteener for filling his coffee cup. She was down on her knees in the snow, decanting the last drop of precious liquid from the machine. Her white hair was powdered still whiter with shining crystals. Her face streamed with perspiration and was rosy from exertion.

“Ah, madame,” said the soldier, “it is the sympathy and courage of women like you that give us strength to go on with this dirty war!”

She did not understand a word of his rapid lingo, but she patted his arm and smiled. Each comprehended the other! The next instant the train was a rushing shadow on the blinding white landscape.

And then before we could draw breath or refill our _marmites_ another train was upon us. This time it was _permissionnaires_ returning home. They hopped out like joyous schoolboys, with a fusillade of teasing banter.

“Aha! ’Tis the pretty little Americans! Say! You are all right, you know, you Americans!”

“I have an American marraine. Will you be my marraine, mademoiselle? You don’t know how nice I am! Not ‘naughty boy’!”

“Look! Ham sandwiches! My God, we’re in Paradise!”

They bought out the apple basket and had apple fights. And while we were rushing the growlers cross-tracks for more coffee they marched up and down arm in arm and chanted in our honor a trench ditty about a new relative they’ve acquired. The chorus, loosely translated, runs like this:

“_’Tis my Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam!
He is a fine copain.[1]
He comes from Amérique.
The terror of the German,
’Tis my Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam!
He is sympathique.
The great Républicain.
The victory of demain,
’Tis to Uncle Sam, Sam, Sam!_”

And when at length the train pulled out, heads were thrust from the windows, cups and kepis were waved, and a rousing “_Vive l’Amérique!_” floated back to us. For these men were going home.

[1] _Pal._

January 4, 1918.

Aside from the work on the _quais_ we also run a canteen in behind the station, where we serve meals to the men obliged to wait for their trains. In addition next month we intend to start a buffet counter right on the tracks, where the hungry soldier passing through with only ten minutes at his command may obtain a solid meal of soup, meat, vegetables and coffee. The benefit of this kind of service to troops traveling, sometimes in open cattle cars, a day and a night without food, can never be estimated.

In our canteen we feed all the sons of earth--even German prisoners. Yesterday was our banner day. We began with some English from the Royal Flying Corps. Then followed in rapid succession Alpins Chasseurs; a company of Arabs, whose French officer had a tiny baton with which he waved them in and out and set them down to table like children in a row; Senegalese; Annamites; American negroes; Canadians; Hindus; Chinese; Portuguese; and train upon train of French and American troops. We were so rushed in the cluttered and cramped little kitchen that we had to establish a sort of bucket brigade to pass the food forward to the men.

Our cook, a mountain of jelly, is almost the ugliest woman in France; and her husband, a cross-eyed, bandy-legged little ogre, is certainly the ugliest man. And yet each considers the other a perfect paragon of beauty. Léonie brags about her handsome _mari_; and André chants the praises of his exquisite “_petit ange_,” and they nod and smile and coo endearing compliments to each other among the pots and pans. By profession André is a sexton, and it is only in his off hours, when he is not sweeping the church or burying the dead, that he consents to grace our kitchen with his Apollolike form.

Besides serving food, a canteen of this description is a sort of emergency bureau where almost anything may turn up. Buttons are sewn on, wounds bandaged, cough medicine administered, letters written home, and general physical and moral good cheer kept on tap day and night. After the great Italian débâcle, when thousands of French troops were being rushed down, our canteeners worked twenty-four hours at a stretch upon these icy _quais_. The emergency came in a minute, and they had to handle it in a minute. And the food they served was all the food those famished troops received. No time to halt and feed hungry mouths, with the Prussians battering down the gates of Italy! At another canteen, farther south, a trainload of French wounded came through from Italy. And the canteeners flew aboard with food, bandages and first-aid appliances, and in the brief time allotted transformed those starving, untended sufferers.

The other day a bunch of Montana cow punchers tramped into the canteen, and when the leader--a loose, lank, lean giant of seven feet nothing--saw the American flag he took off his hat and said, “Thank Gawd, boys, we’re found--at last. We’re home.”

It turned out that in the shift of trains they had somehow got separated from their detachment, and for over two days they had wandered about the frozen little town, without a word of French, without money--for they had not yet received their pay--and consequently without lodging or food.

“But why on earth don’t you ask for something to eat?” I exclaimed. “You’re nothing but great big sillies!”

The leader drew himself up proudly. “I reckon we warn’t going to let none of them fly Frenchies get onto our little private plight and give us the merry ha-ha--was we, boys?”

“Not by a dern sight!” agreed the strayed mavericks stoutly.

We fitted them out with food, postals, an English-French dictionary, some French money with written instructions as to its value, and steered them on their way.

Yesterday I had an experience of still another sort. It was in the middle of a bleak afternoon, and the canteen was empty. I was sitting in the kitchen by the stove, making up the baskets for the evening rush on the _quais_--so many slices of ham, so many apples, so many pieces of cheese--when the far door opened, an American soldier drifted in, leaned over the buffet for a time, and finally with a strong Texas drawl said: “I wish you’d write me a letter, ma’am--to my wife.”

“What’s the matter with your writing it yourself?”

“I don’t know exactly what to say. It’s dog-gone delicate, and that’s a fact. You see, I got a bad die-ges-tion.” He pronounced it as if it were three words, with a heavy stress on the “die.”

“But you don’t write with your die-ges-tion.”

“No; but it’s this way, ma’am. My wife, she’s went and divorced me. And it’s all along of my bad die-ges-tion. I don’t blame her no way. I reckon that bad die-ges-tion did sort of get between her and me. But that ain’t what I aim to say in the letter. It’s about this here new insurance. I’ve made mine out in her name.”

“But if she’s divorced you on account of your bad die-ges-tion she has no claim on you now.”

“I don’t give a whoop in hell about that,” he responded soberly. “I want her to get it, that’s all. And I kind of thought maybe you might fix it up for me in a letter, so’s she’d understand, and tell her I don’t bear no grudge. I got a bad die-ges-tion.”

And so I fixed it up for him in a letter; and there’s one woman in America who has lost a man with a mighty good heart even if he has a bad die-ges-tion.

January 10th.

Transferred again. But this time I’m settled for good. This is a canteen of Type Number Three, in the French war zone, in a big transportation center within sound of the guns of Verdun. Anywhere from three to ten thousand troops pass through daily. Here again, this canteen is absolutely different from the two others, because the conditions are different. It is a canteen which the French call _grand luxe_. A beautiful spacious building, given by the French Government; tastefully decorated interiors; rest rooms with papers, writing materials, piano, tables and easy-chairs; restaurant; sleeping quarters, hot baths; gardens with statuary; and _abris_ in case of aërial attack--altogether the poilu’s delight.

“_Très chic, hein?_” murmurs the Frenchman. He stares about him at the clean airy place, gay with chintz curtains, painted garlands on the walls, and even the electric globes veiled with soft yellow Chinese silk. And he catches the idea at once. “_Pas militaire, pas du tout du tout._” That’s it exactly. It’s not military at all at all. The French artist who conceived the scheme was so nauseated with everything military that he let himself loose on this canteen to make it cozy and homelike and gay. Its soft beauty delights the poilu; and its baths, its disinfecting plants where he can rid himself of vermin, its kiosk where he can buy his beloved _pinard_, its hot chocolate--made with milk, after an American recipe--contribute to make it a very paradise of canteens. Its fame is known all over the French war zone. The poilus come miles to see if it’s as good as report.

At night in the rest room they lie outstretched in those canvas easy-chairs--just how easy none but a weary poilu can know!--and they stare through dreamy half-closed eyes at the warm charm of the place, soaking it in at every pore; the smoke of countless cigarettes rises in a kind of enchanted mist; there is an occasional bubble of laughter or the low-toned give-and-take of _copains_ round the brazier; but chiefly there is silence, luxurious well-earned ease for tired limbs--linked sweetness long drawn out. Occasionally, when the wind is right, a vague distant rumble seems to echo in the air. Is it thunder, or is it bombardment? Or are those ears so accustomed to the ceaseless roar of heavy artillery that they still hear it resounding, even in this quiet spot? A poilu rolls over, opens one eye, listens.

“What is that? _Les canons?_”

His companion cocks an ear.

“_Mais non._”

“_Mais oui._”

“You’re crazy! Whence, then?”

The first soldier sits up and takes his bearings.

“’Tis Verdun,” he proclaims. “_N’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?_”

“Yes,” replies the canteener at the desk; “we can often hear the guns of Verdun on a thick night.”

“Me--I come from Verdun,” says the poilu, always ready for a chat.

“Were you one of those who held Verdun when the Crown Prince made that terrible attack?”

“_Oui._”

“Ah, those glorious heroes of Verdun!” murmurs the canteener with misty eyes.

The simple poilu looks at her, puzzled, angry, and finally blazes forth:

“Heroes! Heroes! I’m always hearing about those people--those heroes. But I never saw anything of them. They weren’t in the fight. I tell you, it was we, we Frenchmen alone, who won Verdun!”

The canteener apologizes to the unconscious hero.

In a canteen of this description, serving anywhere from three to ten thousand men a day, the work must be organized down to its last detail. And it is. The mechanism runs as smoothly as a well-oiled automobile. For one thing, our directrice has a “flair” for handling people, for getting along with the French domestics--we have a kitchen staff alone of twenty--and for making her workers contented and at home. Nor is the work itself so hard as in the other canteens. For one thing, labor is plentiful. For another, we live in a town. And in our time off we can shop or stroll or laze about the comfortable big house we’ve leased for quarters. Our hours, too, are well arranged. As the canteen remains open all night and meals are served straight round the clock, the day is divided into four shifts: From seven A.M. to one P.M.; from one to seven; from seven to eleven-thirty; and from eleven-thirty P.M. to seven A.M. In addition there is an extra shift to help at the rush hours, which occur usually about ten A.M. and four P.M. At these times the big dining-room resembles nothing so much as a six-o’clock subway rush. The poilus are packed in tight as they can squeeze--every one with his head pointed toward the _caissé_, where are sold the tickets for the _repas complet_. Each meal costs seventy-five centimes.

January 16th.

Of all the shifts I love the morning best. Then the men come storming in so ravenous that it’s a pleasure to see them eat. And then is when they’re gayest. The afternoon is apt to be prosaic. But the night shift is the most interesting of all. Then things seem to stand out, to take on personality, to become more alive, vivid and real. Then impressions, pictures, scenes are stamped on the brain as clean as if cut with a die, true in every trivial detail. Soldiers playing cards by the light of a flickering candle, their huge ungainly shadows capering up against the wall.

Now and again from the shadows emerges a clear profile, aquiline, delicate, a living medallion with closed eyes. Over in yonder corner, for example, is a boy fast asleep. His head tilted against the wall reveals a face as finely chiseled as any on an old Roman coin. His curly lashes lie flat on his thin cheeks. His nostrils are slightly pinched. Two perpendicular lines run from nose to jaw. How young he looks, how white and worn! His mobile mouth, softly closed, droops at the corners, like that of a tired child. He stirs and mutters something. And now he smiles! He is dreaming, that boy, I know. If his mother could see him now!... The rear door opens, the guard thrusts in a head and calls a certain train. The young soldier rouses, staggers for his pack, drunk with sleep, his face still soft with dreams.

I remember one night a slumbering poilu sprang to his feet, shouting “_Aux armes!_” And his voice was so thrilling and terrible, so charged with hoarse command, that all the soldiers leaped up, wide awake on the instant, and glared wildly about them. The next minute the room was filled with curses, not loud but deep.

Work of this kind, hard and monotonous as it undoubtedly is, is yet the most satisfying in the world--provided one has a gift for it. It takes hold of the heart. It is immediate, it has the warm personal touch, and it ties you straight up with humanity in the raw. The abstract philosophy of the war--who is the most to blame and why--ceases to vex you. You become absorbed in your own little circle. Life beyond it seems remote. You love the poilu and he loves you--and makes no bones about it. So let the Huns rage over behind yonder ridge, and imagine vain things. Somehow, all that does not concern you. You have become confident, gay, certain of destiny--like the simple little poilu. It’s service that does it.

Last night when I returned home from work it had stopped raining. Overhead the great overturned cup of sky glittered and gleamed--with half its stars dropped down into the dark flowing river by my side. And there was a second moon down there, pale and drowned. An enchanted mist, fine as a bride’s veil, hung over all. By night the Marne is beautiful. Far off came the boom of the Verdun guns, that hammering which has been going on now for years, “as if two armies of giants were striking unceasingly at an unshakable gate of bronze.” Here it was nothing but an echo on the wind. There, as one Tommy put it, it was “hell multiplied by six.”

They say the Germans will break through this way. I think of the thousand thousand poilus who have tramped through our canteen, each one an anonymous hero--and I smile. It’s all right. Let the Huns come on!

OLD GLORY AND VERDUN

In the beginning we did not intend to go to Verdun. We did not dream that it was even within the bright realms of possibility. At the moment--a supremely painful and suspense-filled moment, fraught with danger to France and the Allied world--Verdun belonged strictly to the forbidden zone. Forbidden to all outsiders, men and women, to all civilians and civilian affairs; forbidden, indeed, to all the world save those grim horizon-blue-clad veterans who were rushing northward by trainloads, together with heavy effectives.

Permission had been stopped. Stopped also the parcels to the Front. It was not the hour for the manifestation of woman or love or the transmission of tokens of affection. It was the hour for men and arms. Paris, a military camp shelled in the day by long-range guns and bombed in the night by Gothas, was locked to the north with a staunch lock, and the Grand Quartier General held the key. You could come in if you chanced to be caught up there when the storm broke, but you could not get out again. For it was the closing week of March, 1918. The long-awaited, much-heralded offensive had arrived. For months it had been the first word in the mouths of privates, officers, statesmen, editors--the entire civilized world. When, where, how--some one of those three aspects of the universal question cropped up in every conversation in the course of half an hour.

Well, now we knew the partial answer to those three questions. For the shadow of the menace of the long months was beginning to realize itself; it had become flesh and dwelt among us, a fabulous red monster of carnage and slaughter up there in the north.

When the Germans struck their first sledge-hammer blow and the Fifth British Army recoiled before the blow the entire line from north to south felt the thrill of the shock. Paris, the goal of the enemy, felt it, too, and there went up from the city a kind of big sigh, a long exhalation, which was almost a breath of relief. At any rate the long suspense was past. At the end of the third or fourth day refugees began to pour in by thousands, a poor, tragic, dazed procession, twice bereft of their scanty possessions. They brought with them wild, incoherent, garbled accounts of the terrible sanguinary losses on both sides.

Paris, perhaps all France, possesses the feminine temperament. In hours of ease she is willful, coy and hard to please--especially with strangers; she is charming, baffling, impatient, outspoken over the foibles of her best friends and allies, keenly aware of the ridiculous, gay with a spice of maliciousness; her caricatures, often grossly unjust, are masterpieces of fine satirical wit. But in the hour of trial she gathers herself together with a courage, a poise and a profound tenderness for those of her people who have been stricken that are exceedingly good to see.

And that is what happened now. Paris found immediate food and shelter for the fugitives; printed proclamations that appeared all over the city, bidding the citizens to remain steadfast and unshaken in their faith of victory and put no credence in lying rumors; and at the same time, as the Big Berthas continued their vehement spitting at intervals, and the air raids harried and took toll of the city’s innocent poor--for it is chiefly the workers, the servants, the little people of Paris living in the top stories up under the roofs who had to descend each night to the caves at the call of the siren--the newspapers urged all families who could afford it, all those who had children or old or sick to remove themselves out of the new zone of danger to the tranquillity of the country. And thousands followed the wise advice. Hôtels de luxe were emptied inside of a week. Shopkeepers and workers who could manage to leave ordained a spring holiday and departed to their relatives in the provinces. It was an exodus. There were left the big wide empty places of Paris, filled with a gray-blue gossamer mist soft as chiffon, which wrapped all the city in an enchanted web; the tranquil garden walks deserted by children, vivid with rhododendrons and the drifting pink and white petals of chestnut blooms; and the good solid block of reliable Paris citizens, neither frightened nor fugitive, who had lived through the Marne and the Mons and the Champagne and the Verdun attacks, and who read the disquieting communiqués with composed faces and went about their affairs as usual.

_Photograph passed by the Committee on Public Information._ _Copyright, 1918, by The Curtis Publishing Company._ _Reproduced from The Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia._

THE COMMANDING OFFICER OF THE CITADEL OF VERDUN. NEXT, ON LEFT, MISS FRAZER, IN HELMET, CARRYING GAS MASK. THE TUNNEL-ENTRANCE TO THE FORTRESS IS IN THE BACKGROUND.]

Practically no troops are now routed through the capital, but occasionally one saw small detachments of _fantassins_ with their heavy marching equipment filing through the empty squares. They did not look warlike, those poilus, veterans of four years, when they appeared in the streets of Paris. They marched slowly, laboriously, one foot lagging after the other, shoulders bent beneath the weight of the kit, their eyes fixed on the ground. The horizon-blue uniforms were faded and patched and their clumsy storm coats with the skirts buttoned back gave them an indescribably pathetic air. Seen thus at twilight and melting into the dusky background there was something about these somber, slow-plodding, burdened figures that hurt the heart. One felt an overwhelming tenderness, a pity for these brave little men. And yet these were the selfsame poilus who a few days later stemmed the furious German tide--and they sang as they went into battle. And nearly four years they sang!

It would not be untrue to say that underneath her courageous calm Paris did not feel the cruel strain of that first uncertain week of the offensive. The strain of the situation was brought home to me, waiting for my passes, by several incidents. Naomie, the trim little _femme de chambre_, pretty as a pink camellia, whose voice has the soft deep throb of a cello, went about with a face as pale as the linen she bore on her arm. And as she made the bed and swept and aired the room she wept, quietly, steadily, the silvery globules stealing silently one by one down her cheeks. When they obstructed her vision she stopped, brushed them away methodically and went on. My pillow was wet with Naomie’s tears.

“I am ashamed, mademoiselle; I ask pardon to be like this,” she murmured one morning when I had caught her outright drying her eyes. “One must be strong these days. But my husband, he has been transferred up north on the British line. And now I have not heard from him, here it is over a week. Before he always sent me a little word each day. He never failed--some little word each day.” She plaited the counterpane with unseeing eyes as she muttered: “Ten days! Yes, it is that--just. And not one little word. But one must be strong, _n’est-ce pas, mademoiselle_?”

The next disturbing thing that happened was the news that B---- had deserted. His wife was my friend. B---- was a Frenchman in a famous fighting regiment, sensitive, fine-strung, none too strong, who had been in the trenches since 1914. What evil of fear, irritation, revolt or sheer brain collapse led to the decision we shall never know. But one day he threw down his gas mask in the midst of an attack and walked out of the trenches. His battalion had been incessantly shelled for weeks. In the front-line trenches they were hammered by the guns. In the back areas, _en repos_, they caught the bombs. No sleep in either place. This kept up week after week. And suddenly, like an elephant, B---- had “gone bad.”

He appeared suddenly in Paris at a time when not a single Frenchman was on leave; and he walked the boulevards with the number of that famous fighting regiment on the collar of his tunic blazing forth for all the world to see. It was a miracle he was not instantly caught. As it was he was a prisoner; for he had no papers, and therefore he could not send a telegram or register at a hotel or take a train or leave the city. A friend telegraphed for B----’s wife, who was in the country, sending a noncommittal wire so as not to alarm B----’s mother, an ardent patriot, who would have instantly handed over her recreant son to the police. The wife arrived. To her B---- declared his intention of joining the Foreign Legion. That meant that his brain flare or momentary cowardice had passed.

Anyone may join the Foreign Legion. There no embarrassing questions are asked. They take on all comers, and then pitch them headlong into the very hottest hell of the battle. Accordingly B----, knowing that if he could once win to their offices he would be safe from arrest, stole out from his doorway one morning and, avoiding officers and gendarmes, gained the recruiting bureau.