The A. E. F.: With General Pershing and the American Forces

The American soldier does not seem to be much of a song maker. Songs by soldiers and for soldiers are not common with us yet. We have nothing as close to the spirit of the trenches as the British ditty "I want to go home," which always leaves the auditor in doubt as to whether he should take it seriously and weep or humorously and laugh. Possibly there is something of both elements in the song. The mixture has been typical of the British attitude toward the war. Here is the song:

I want to go 'ome
I want to go 'ome
The Maxims they spit
And the Johnsons they roar
I don't want to go to the front any more
Oh take me over the seas
Where the Alley-mans can't get at me
Oh my; I don't want to die,
I want to go 'ome.

The American army is still looking for a song. None of the new ones has achieved universal popularity. However the many who heard the quartet of Company L sing on this particular evening seemed to have no objection to the old songs. In fact they were new to many in the audience for as the concert went on French soldiers joined the audience and townspeople hung about the edges of the crowd. They listened politely and applauded, though indeed one must get a strange impression of America if his introduction is through our popular songs. Such a foreigner is in danger of believing that ours is a June land in which the moon is always shining upon a young person known as "little girl." Yet the French expressed no astonishment at the songs. Only one feature puzzled them profoundly. At the end of a particularly effective song the captain said, "Those men sang that very well. Bring 'em each a glass of water."

No villager could quite understand why a man who had committed no more palpable crime than tenor singing should be forced to partake of a drink which is cold, tasteless and watery.

Most the villages in our part of France had only one dimension. They consisted of a line of houses on either side of the roadway and they were always huddled together. Land is too valuable in France to waste it on lawns and suchlike. Some of the villages were tiny and shabby, but none was too small or too mean to be without its little café. It took the doughboys some little time to get over their interest in the startling fact that champagne was within the reach of the working man, but they went back to beer in due course and now champagne is among the things which shopkeepers must not sell to American soldiers. The prohibition of the sale of cognac and champagne is all that the army needs. Beer and light wines are not a menace to the health or behavior of our army. Beer is by far the most popular drink and it would be an ambitious man indeed who would seek the slightest deviation from sobriety in the thin war beer of France. He might drown.

Absolute prohibition for the army in France would be well nigh impossible. It would mean that every inn and shop and railroad station and farmhouse would have to be classed as out of bounds. In fact prohibition could not be enforced unless our soldiers were ordered never to venture within four walls. Wine is to be had under every roof in France and you can get it also in not a few places where the roof has been shot to pieces. The French are interested in temperance just now. On many walls posters are exhibited showing a German soldier and a black bottle with the caption, "They are both the enemies of France," but when a Frenchman talks of temperance or prohibition or the abolition of the liquor traffic he never thinks of including wine or beer. The civil authorities of France would not be much use in helping the American army enforce a bone-dry order. They simply wouldn't understand it.

There was some excessive drinking when the army first came to France but it has been checked. A number of influences have made for discretion. One of the most potent is the opportunity for promotion in an army in the field. Officers have been quick to point this out to their men. One captain called his company together in the early days and said, "Some of the men in this company are going out and getting pinko, stinko, sloppy drunk. Any man who gets drunk goes in the guard house of course and more than that he will get no promotion from me. I'm going to pick my sergeants from the fellows that have got sense. You may notice that some of the men who drink are old soldiers. Don't take an example from that. Remember that's why they're old soldiers. There isn't any sense in blowing all your money in for booze. Now if I took my pay in a lump at the end of a month I could buy every café in this town and I could stay drunk for a year. That would be fine business, wouldn't it?"

"I guess maybe I exaggerated a little about the length of time I could stay drunk," the captain told me afterwards, "but do you know that talk seems to have done the trick."

One factor which worked for temperance was the French fashion of making drinking deliberate and social. When an American can be induced to sit down to his potion he is comparatively safe. These little village cafés did no harm after the first brief period when the American soldier had his fling and they served the good purpose of encouraging fraternization between doughboy and poilu.

The contact with French soldiers brought no great vocabulary to our men but if they learned few words they did get the hang of making their wants understood. In a week or two innkeepers or women in shops had no trouble at all in attending to the wants of Americans. Probably the French people made somewhat faster linguistic progress than the soldiers. The Americans were willing to be met at least halfway. When I asked one doughboy, "How do you get along with the French? Can you make them understand you?" he said, "Why, they're coming along pretty well. I think most of 'em will pick it up in time."

But there was one French word the soldiers had to learn. That was "fineesh." The children forced that word upon them. They were always at the heels of the American soldiers. They galloped the doughboys up and down the village streets in furious piggyback charges. They borrowed jam from company cooks and rode in the supply trucks. Of course there had to be an end to the rides, sometimes, and even to the jam and the only way to convince the children of France that an absolute unshakable limit had been reached was to thrust two hands aloft and cry "fineesh." The old women liked the doughboys too because they would draw water from the wells for them and occasionally lend a hand in moving wood or wheat or fodder. Nor do I mean to imply that the younger women of the little villages did not esteem the doughboys. "Tell 'em back home that there aren't any good looking women in France," was the message that ever so many soldiers asked me to convey to anxious individuals in America. I hand the message on but must refuse to pass upon its sincerity.

American officers got along well with the French but they never reached the same degree of chumminess that the men did. They met French officers at more or less formal luncheons and had to go through a routine of speeches largely concerned with Lafayette and Rochambeau and Washington. Poilus and doughboys did not go so far back for their subjects of conversation. The American enlisted man had a great advantage over his officer in the matter of language. He might know less French, but he was much more ready to experiment. An officer did not like to make mistakes. His was defensive French, a weapon to be used guardedly in cases of extreme need. When a visiting officer hurled a compliment at him he replied, but he seldom took the initiative. After all he was an American officer and he feared to make himself ridiculous by poor pronunciation and worse grammar. The soldier had no such scruples. He saw no reason why he should be any more abashed by French grammar than by English and as for pronunciation he followed the advice of a little pamphlet called "The American in France" which was rushed out by some French firm for sale to the American army. In the matter of pronunciation the book said, "Since pronunciation is the most difficult part of any language the publishers of this book have decided to omit it." The soldiers were ready to adopt this method and only wished that it could be extended to other things. To trench digging for instance.

The most daring man in the use of an unfamiliar language was not a soldier but a second lieutenant. He took great pride in his talent for pantomime and asserted that his vocabulary of some thirty words and his gestures filled all his needs. He was somewhat startled though on an afternoon when he went into a shop to purchase "B.V.D.'s" and found the store in charge of the young daughter of the proprietor. Pantomime seemed hardly the thing and so he paused long to think up a word for the garment he wanted or some approximation. At last he smiled and exclaimed brightly, "Chemise pour jambes, s'il vous plait."

Stores were not the strong point of our bit of France. We soon came to regard our town as a metropolis because people journeyed there to make "shopping tours." One afternoon I marked fifteen visiting soldiers with their eyes glued against a shop window which displayed half a dozen electric flashlights, two quarts of champagne, a French-English dictionary and a limited assortment of postcards. These, of course, were barred from the mail by censorship but the soldiers collected them to be taken home after the war.

"These French postcards aren't exactly what some of the boys back home are going to expect," one soldier admitted. "I went to three shops now but the others have been ahead of me and all I could get was these two. One's a picture called 'l'eglise' and the other's 'la maison de Jeanne d'Arc.'"

The shops had hard work in keeping up with more commodities than picture postcards. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for canned peaches and sardines. Somehow or other men who have been on a long march simply crave either sardines or canned peaches. The doughboys did a good deal of eating at their own expense. Army food was plentiful and moderately varied. Beans and corned beef hash were served a good many times perhaps, but there was no lack of fresh meat and there was plenty of jam and of carrots and onions and heavy gravy. Food, however, was an outlet for spending money and in some villages the men got so eager that they would buy anything. Little traveling shops in wagons came through the smaller villages in the northern part of the training area loaded with all sorts of gimcracks intended for the peasant trade. The peddlers had no time to put in a special line for the soldiers. They found that it was not necessary. Desperate men with pockets full of money would purchase even the imitation tortoise shell sidecombs which the itinerant merchants had to sell.

The purchasing capacity of the soldier was not limited to his pay alone. The villagers were wildly excited about the white bread issued to the American army. It was the first they had seen since the second year of the war. One old lady seized a loaf which was presented to her and crying "il est beau," sat down upon a doorstep and began to eat the bread as if it were cake. The rate of exchange fluctuated somewhat but there were days when a loaf of white bread could be exchanged for a whole roast chicken.

The eagerness of the American soldier to spend his money had the result of tempting French storekeepers to raise their prices and as the cost of living mounted the civilian population began to complain. Even the soldiers had suspicions at last that they were being charged too much in some stores and the American officers took over price control as another of their many responsibilities.

"I went to the mayor," one town major explained, "and I said, 'Look here, Bill, I don't mind 'the shopkeepers putting a little something over. All I ask is that they just act reasonable. They'll get all the money in time anyhow, and so I wish you'd tip them off not to be in so much of a hurry.' He couldn't talk any English, that mayor couldn't, but the interpreter told him about it and he went right to the front for us. From that day to this we've had only one complaint about anything in our village. That came from an old lady who had some doughboys billeted in a barn next to the shed where she kept her sheep. She came to me and said the soldiers talked so much at night that the sheep couldn't sleep."

CHAPTER VII

PERSHING

NOBODY will ever call him "Papa" Pershing. He is a stepfather to the inefficient and even when he is pleased he says little. In the matter of giving praise the General is a homeopath. For that reason he can gain enormous effect in the rare moments when he chooses to compliment a man or an organization. Pershing believes that discipline is the foundation of an army.

"I think," said one young American officer, "that his favorite military leader is Joshua because he made the sun and the moon stand at attention." In other words Pershing is a soldiers' soldier. No man can strike such hard blows as he does and leave no scars. There are men here and there in the army who do not love him but their criticism almost invariably ends, "but I guess I'll have to admit that he's a good soldier."

Pershing is not a disciplinarian merely for the sake of discipline but he believes that it is the gauge of the temper of any military organization. His interest in detail is insatiable. He can read a man's soul through his boots or his buttons. Next to the Kaiser, Pershing hates nothing so much as rust and dust and dirt. Perhaps round shoulders should go in the list as well, and pockets. Certainly he makes good the things he preaches. There is no finer figure in any army in Europe. The General is fit from the tip of his glistening boots to his hat top. We saw him once after he had walked through a front line trench on a rainy day. There were sections of that trench where the mud was over a man's shoetops and the back area which had to be crossed before the trench system was reached was a great lake of casual water fed at its fringes by roaring rain torrents. And yet the general came out of the trench without a speck of mud on his boots in spite of the fact that he had plunged along with no apparent regard for his footing.

There was dust behind him, though, on the afternoon he first came to the training area to see his men. News reached our town that the general was up in the northern end of the training zone and moving fast. An officer passing by gave me a lift in his car and when we arrived at the next village half a dozen soldiers who were sitting on a bench jumped up for dear life and jarred themselves to the very heels with the stiffest of military salutes.

The officer grinned. "Pershing's in town," he said and so he was.

We found him in a kitchen talking about onions to a cook. He asked each soldier in turn what sort of food he was getting. Some were too frightened to do more than mumble an inaudible answer. A few said, "Very good, sir." And one or two had complaints. The General listened to the complaints attentively and in each case pressed his questions so as to make the soldier be absolutely concrete in his answers. Next he turned upon an officer and wanted to know just what the sewage system of the town was. The officer was a dashing major and he seemed ill at ease when Pershing asked how many days a week he inspected the garbage dump.

"That isn't enough," said the General when the major answered. "I want you to pay more attention to those things."

From the kitchen he went into every billet in the village. In two he climbed up the ladders to see what sort of sleeping quarters the men had in their lofts. In one billet a soldier stole a look over his shoulder at the General as he passed. Pershing turned immediately.

"That's not the way to be a soldier," he said. "You haven't learned the first principle of being a soldier." He turned to a second lieutenant. "This man doesn't stand at attention properly," he explained. "I want you to make him stand at attention for five minutes."

The next offender was a captain who had one hand in his pocket while giving an order. The General spoke to him just as severely as he had to the enlisted man. Then he was into his car and away to the next village.

Pershing is always on the move. One of his aides told me that he never had more than five minutes' notice of where the General was going or how long he would stay. No man in the army has covered so much territory as Pershing. He has been in practically every village occupied by the American troops. He has inspected every hospital and every training camp. One day he will be at a port looking at the accommodations which are being made for incoming vessels and on the next he will have jumped from the base to a front line trench. He has been on all the Western fronts except the Italian. His French and British and Belgian hosts find him a most ambitious guest. He wants to see everything. Once while observing a French offensive he expressed a desire to go forward and see a line of trenches which had just been captured from the Germans. The French tried to dissuade him but the General complained that he could not see just how things were going from any other position and so into the German trench he went.

Pershing has developed in France. Like every other man in the American army he has had to study modern warfare, but more than that he has caught something of the spirit of the French. He has acquired some of their ability to put a gesture into command, to utilize personality in the inspiration of troops. He is not yet the equal of the French in this respect. Joffre, for instance, fully realized the military usefulness of his enormous popularity and capitalized it. It was not mere luck that he became a tradition. Pétain, while by no means the equal of Joffre on the personal side, knows how to talk to soldiers and to townsfolk and to make himself a big human force.

While he is still a homeopath, General Pershing realizes more than he ever did before the value of a pat on the back given at the right time. I saw him do one of those little gracious things in a base hospital which was caring for the first American wounded. A youthful doughboy was lying flat on his back wondering just how long it was going to be before supper time came round when all of a sudden there was a clatter at the door. The doughboy was afraid it was going to be some more nurses and doctors. They had bothered him a lot by bandaging up his arm every little while and it hurt, but when he looked up at the foot of his bed there stood the man with four stars on his shoulders. The little doughboy grinned a bit nervously. He thought it was funny that he should be lying on his back and General Pershing standing up.

The General was somewhat nervous and embarrassed, too. He still lacks a little of the French feeling for the dramatic in the doing of these little things. He had to clear his throat once and then he said, "I want to congratulate you. I envy you. There isn't a man in the army who wouldn't like to be in your place. You have brought home to the people of America the fact that we are in the war."

The doughboy didn't say anything, but the nurse who made the rounds that evening wondered why a patient who was doing so well should have a pulse hitting up to ninety-six.

Earlier in the summer General Pershing encountered some far more embarrassing tests. He had to handle bouquets. The donor was usually a French girl and a very little one. When Pershing and Pétain made a joint trip through the American army zone there were two little girls and two bouquets in each village. General Pétain, after receiving his bouquet, would bend over gracefully and kiss the little girl, adding one or two kindly phrases immediately following "ma petite." General Pershing began by patting the little girls on the head, but he realized it was not enough and after a bit he began to kiss them, too; only once or twice he got tangled up in their hats and found it hard to maintain military dignity. He handled the flowers gingerly. He seemed to regard each bouquet as a bomb which would explode in five seconds but each time there was some aide ready to step forward and relieve him.

The attitude of the average West Pointer towards his men is generally speaking the same as that of General Pershing. Some observers think the West Point attitude too strict, but I was inclined to believe that the men from the academy handled men better than the reserve officers. They are strict, it is true, but at the same time they have been trained to look after the needs of their men closely. The trouble with the average reserve officer is that he has not had time to learn how much he must father his men and mother them, too, for that matter. He does not know probably just how dependent the average soldier is upon his officer.

Perhaps the strictest officer of all is the man who was once a non-com. The former doughboy knows the tricks of the enlisted man and he is determined that nobody shall put anything over on him. He is often just a little bit afraid that the soldiers are going to trade on the fact that he was once an enlisted man. I once saw a soldier offer some cigars to two officers. One of the officers was a West Pointer and he laughed and took a cigar but the former non-com. refused very sternly. He could not afford to be indebted to an enlisted man.

I do not wish to imply that the men who come up from the ranks do not make good officers. As a matter of fact they are among the best, once their preliminary self-consciousness has worn off. The transition from stripes to bars is perfect torture to some of them. One company had a crack soldier who had been a sergeant for seven years. He was recommended for promotion and was sent to an officers' training school in France. He did very well but just a week before he was to receive his commission he succeeded in gaining permission to be dropped from the school and go back to his old company as sergeant. At the last minute he had decided that he did not want to be an officer.

I watched him put a company through its drill two days after his return. They moved with spirit and precision under his commands but when it was all over I found one reason why he didn't want to be an officer.

"That was very good today," he said. "You done well."

The first lieutenant smiled. He had a right to smile, too, for the return of the sergeant to his company had almost cut his work in half. He knew his value well enough.

"The best I can do is teach the men," he said. "It takes an old sergeant to learn them."

CHAPTER VIII

MEN WITH MEDALS