With The Doughboy In France Part 8

The above is a translation of a quotation from a note written by the French Minister of War to a general of his army, at about the time of our first Red Cross Commission over there. If one were to attempt to translate between the lines he would be certain to find that the soldiers going home on leave or discharge, obliged to wait long hours in railroad stations, sometimes without food or other comforts, and ofttimes, too, forced to sleep upon a cold, stone-flagged floor, had often a greatly lowered morale as the result of such an experience. And if their mental state was not lowered, their physical condition was almost sure to be.

So it was that the American Red Cross jumped into the immediate a.s.sistance of its rather badly burdened French brothers--the various organizations of _Croix Rouge Francaise_. It seized as its most immediate opportunity, Paris, and particularly the junction points of the _Grande Ceinture_, the belt-line railroad which completely encircles the outer environs of the city, and provides track-interchange facilities for the various trunk-line railroads which enter her walls from every direction. For lack of funds and a lack of personnel the French Red Cross authorities were about to close some of the canteens which they already had established upon the _Grande Ceinture_, while the real necessity was that more should be opened. Such a disaster our American Red Cross prevented. On July 18, 1917, Colonel Payot, Director of the French Army Transports, wrote to H. H. Harjes--at that time representative of the American Red Cross at the general headquarters of the French Army--giving a list of railroad stations where canteens were needed, and in the order of their urgency. In the correspondence which followed between the French authorities and the American Red Cross, various agreements were reached.

It was agreed that the French administration would furnish the necessary buildings and provide electric light, running water, and coal for heating. On the other hand, the American Red Cross undertook to furnish all other supplies--cooking appliances, coal for cooking, equipment, stores, medical supplies, and personnel. As early as July 31, Major Perkins wrote that our American Red Cross was now ready to serve a full meal at seventy-five centimes (fourteen or fifteen cents) a person, and other drinks and dishes at small cost to the _poilu_. Men without funds on receiving a voucher from the _Commissaire de la Gare_ (railroad-station agent) could obtain meals and hot drinks without charge. The sale of wine, beer, and spirits was prohibited in our canteens. And because of the French cooperation in their establishment, they were named _Les Cantines des Deux Drapeaux_ and bore signs showing both the Tricolor of France and our own Stars and Stripes, with their designating name beneath.

The original list of outside stations suggested by the French authorities were five in number: Pont d'Oye, Chalons, epernay, Belfort, and Bar-le-Duc. Finally it was decided to reduce this list--the hour of the arrival of the American forces in number steadily drawing nearer--and Chalons and epernay were definitely chosen for American Red Cross canteen work. At that time both of these cities of the Champagne district were well behind the lines; afterwards the Germans came too close for comfort and sh.e.l.led them badly, which meant the withdrawal of the French troops and a closing of the neat canteens for a time; but they were reopened. When I visited epernay in January 1919, the Red Cross canteen there was again open and in charge of two young ladies from Watertown, N. Y.--the Misses Emma and Kate Lansing, sisters of the then Secretary of State. You could not keep down the buoyant spirit of our Red Cross.

Before the American Red Cross undertook to establish fully equipped canteens--on the scale of those at Chalons and at epernay--the London Committee of the French Red Cross had been operating at many railroad stations small canteens known as the _Gouttes de Cafe_, where coffee and bouillon were served free to the soldiers in pa.s.sing trains. In several cases agreements were made with the French society by which certain individual _Gouttes de Cafe_ pa.s.sed to the control of the American Red Cross and were, in other cases, absorbed in the larger installation which it was prepared to support. This, however, took place only when the demands of the situation really called for a larger canteen, prepared to serve full meals and operate dormitories and a recreation room. Occasionally it was found advisable for our Red Cross to inaugurate a canteen of its very own, while the _Goutte de Cafe_ continued to carry on its own work on the station platform or in the immediate vicinity.

I remember particularly the situation in the great central station of the Midi Railroad in Bordeaux. This huge structure is a real focal point of pa.s.senger traffic. From beneath its expansive train shed trains come and go; to and from Paris and Boulogne and Biarritz and Ma.r.s.eilles and many other points--over the busy lines, not only of the Midi, but of the Paris-Orleans and the Etat. A great proportion of this traffic is military, and long ago the French Red Cross sought to accommodate this with a huge _Goutte de Cafe_ in a barnlike sort of room in the main station structure and opening direct upon its platforms. I glanced at this place. It was gloomy and ill-lighted by the uncertain, even though dazzling, glow of one or two electric arc lights. It was fearfully overcrowded. _Poilus_ occupied each of the many seats in the room and flowed over to the floor, where they sat or reclined as best they might on the benches or on their luggage. The place was ill-ventilated, too.

It was not one that offered large appeal.

How different the appearance of the canteen of our own Red Cross. It had a far less advantageous location; well outside the station train shed and only to be found by one who was definitely directed to it. Two buildings had been erected and another adapted for the canteen. They were plain enough outside, but inside they were typically American--which meant that light and color and warmth had been combined effectively to produce the effect of a home that might have been in Maine, or Ohio, or Colorado, or California, or any other nice corner of the old U. S. A. There was homelike atmosphere, too, in the long, low buildings enhanced by the unforgetable aroma of coffee being made--being made American style, if you please. That building boasted a long counter, and upon the counter miniature mountains of ham sandwiches and big brown doughnuts--sandwiches and doughnuts which actually had been fabricated from white flour--and ham sandwiches with a genuine flavor to them. And all in great quant.i.ty--2,000 meals in a single day was no unusual order--and for a price that was nominal, to put it lightly.

In another building there were more of the lights and the warm yellows and greens of good taste in decoration; a big piano with a doughboy at it some twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four--whole companies of divans and regiments of easy-chairs: American newspapers, many weekly publications, a lot of magazines, and books in profusion. The room was completely filled, but somehow one did not gain the sensation of its being crowded. The feeling that one carried from the place was that a bit of the U. S. A. had been set right down there at the corner of the great and busy chief railway terminal of the French city of Bordeaux.

Only one forgot Bordeaux.

What was done at Bordeaux--and also at St. Nazaire and Nantes and Brest and Tours and Toul and many, many other points--by our Red Cross in the provision of canteen facilities was repeated in Paris, only on a far larger scale than at any other point. The A. R. C. L. O. C. canteens in Paris--there seems to be no holding in check that army pa.s.sion for initialization--soon after the signing of the armistice had reached fourteen in number, of which about half were located in or close to the great railroad pa.s.senger terminals of the city. The others were hotels, large or small, devoted in particular to the housing of the doughboy and his officers on the occasions of their leaves to the capital--for no other point in France, not even the attractions of Biarritz or the sunny Riviera, can ever quite fill the place in the heart of the man in khaki that Paris, with all her refinements and her infinite variety of amus.e.m.e.nts, long since attained. These last canteens we shall consider in greater detail when we come to find our doughboy on leave. For the present we are seeing him still bound for the front, the war still in action, the great adventure still ahead.

A single glance at the records of the organization of the Army and Navy Department under which the canteen work along the lines of communication is grouped at the Paris headquarters of the American Red Cross, shows that it was not until February, 1918, that the inrush of the American Army in France had a.s.sumed proportions ample enough to demand a segregation of canteen accommodations for it from those offered to the _poilus_. As I have said, the canteens for the _poilus_ were in the general nature of training or experimental stations for our really big canteen job over there, and as such more than justified the trouble or the cost; which does not take into the reckoning the valuable service which they rendered the blue-clad soldiers of our great and loyal friend--the French Republic.

Take Chalons, for instance: Chalons set an American Red Cross standard for canteens, particularly for such canteens as would have to take care of the physical needs and comforts of soldiers, perhaps in great numbers. This early Red Cross station was set in a large barracks some fifty yards distant from the chief railroad terminal of that busy town.

And, as it often happened that the leave permits of the _poilus_ did not permit them to go into the town, a fenced pa.s.sage, with a sentinel, was builded from the train platforms to the canteen entrance. At that entrance, a coat room where the soldier could check his bulky kit was established.

On going into the restaurant of the canteen one quickly discovered that what might otherwise have been a dull and dreary barracks' interior had been transformed by French artists--the French have a marvelous knack for doing this very sort of thing--into a light, cheerful, and amusing room. The effect on the _poilus_ who visited it for the first time was instantaneous; they had not been used to that sort of thing.

At one end of the gay and happy room was the counter from which the meals were served by the American women working in the canteen. The soldier went first to the cas.h.i.+er and from her bought either a ticket for a complete meal, or for any special dish that might appeal to his fancy or to his jaded appet.i.te. He then went to the counter, was handed his food on a tray, and took it to one of the clean, white-tiled tables that lined the room. Groups of friends might gather at a table. But no one was long alone, unless he chose to be. Friends.h.i.+ps are made quickly in the spirit of such a place, and the chatter and laughter that pervaded it reflected the gayety of its decorations.

After eating, if it was still summer, the _poilu_ might stroll in the garden where there were seats, a pergola, even a Punch and Judy Theater--for your Frenchman, be he Parisian or peasant, dearly loves his _guignol_--or he might find his way to the recreation room, where there were writing materials, games, magazines, lounging chairs, a piano and a victrola. Here men might group around the piano and sing to their hearts' content. And here the popularity of _Madelon_ was quite unquestioned.

And after all of this was done, he might retire to the dormitories with absolute a.s.surance that he would be called in full time for his train--whether that train left at one o'clock in the morning or at four. And if he so chose, in the morning might refresh himself in the fully equipped washrooms, shower baths, or the barber shop, have his coffee and eggs, his fruit and his beloved _confiture_ and go aboard the train in the full spirit of a man at complete peace with the world.

The orders that came in February, 1918, calling for the segregation of the accommodations for the A. E. F. from those given to the French, did not result in withdrawing financial support from Chalons and the other canteens which our Red Cross had established particularly for the _poilus_, but did result in the establishment of rest stations, or canteens, exclusively for our own men. This organization of canteens extended particularly along the lines of communication between the area of action and the Service of Supplies zone, and was quite distinct from the canteen organizations at the ports and the evacuation hospitals; these last we shall come to consider when we see the part played by our Red Cross in the entire hospital program of the A. E. F. The Lines of Communication task was a real job in itself.

One could hardly rub the side of a magic lamp and have a completely equipped canteen materialize as the fulfillment of a wish. Magic lamps have not been particularly numerous in France these last few years. If they had been France might have been spared at least some of her great burden of sorrow. And so, even for our resourceful Red Cross, buildings could not always be provided, nor chairs, nor counters, nor even stoves.

That is why at Vierzon, a little but a very busy railroad junction near Nevers, there was, for many months, only a tent. But for each dawn of all those months there was the cheering aroma of fresh coffee steaming up into the air from six _marmites_, as the French know our giant coffee containers. And the figures of American girls could be seen silhouetted against the glow of bonfires, while the line of soldiers, cups in hand, which started at that early hour, would continue for at least another eighteen, or until well after midnight.

Remember, if you will, that making coffee for a canteen is not making it for a household dining room. One does not measure it by teaspoonfuls. It is an affair of pounds and of gallons. The water--ten gallons for each _marmite_--was procured from a well which had been tested and adjudged pure. The sandwiches, with their fillings of meat or of jelly, were not the dainty morsels which women crumble between their fingers at bridge parties. They were sandwiches fit for fighting men. They were the sort that hungry soldiers could grip with their teeth.

Because of the necessary secrecy in reference to the exact numbers of pa.s.sing troops, in turn because of military necessities, the American Red Cross was not permitted during the war to keep an exact record of the number of men who visited its canteens. But where hundreds were accommodated, even at as comparatively small a place as Vierzon, thousands were fed at the larger places, such as Dijon or Toul, for instance. And it is to be noted that in all these canteens food was being served to regular detachments of the A. E. F. as well as to casuals leaving or rejoining their commands.

In the great September drive of 1918 a canteen was set up by the roadside at Souilly. Night and day and without intermission it was maintained. It was there that stretcher bearers and ambulance drivers were given hot drinks and warm food--all that they wanted of both--and where sometimes they toppled over from sheer fatigue and wearied nerves.

From this one tent--and this is but one instance typical of many, many others--three hundred gallons of chocolate were served daily. And while bread was procured with the utmost difficulty, no boy was turned away hungry. Many times the snacks of food so offered were, according to the statements of the soldiers themselves, the first food that they had received for three days.

And whether the canteen of our Red Cross was in a tent or a pine structure with splintery and badly put together walls, or, as ofttimes it was, in the corner of a baggage room of a railroad station, an attempt was always made to beautify it. We learned several things from the French since first we moved a part of America into their beloved land, and this was one of them. The example of the Chalons canteen was not lost. There is a psychological effect in decorative beauty that is quite unmistakable; translated it has a definite and very real effect upon that important thing that all really great army generals of to-day know as morale. It was the desire for good morale, therefore, that prompted the women of our Red Cross to decorate their canteens. And because skilled decorative artists were not always at hand, as they were as Chalons, makes.h.i.+fts--ingenious ones at that--were often used.

Magazine covers could be fas.h.i.+oned into mighty fine wall posters. In some instances, camouflage artists and their varied paint pots were called into service. For window curtains materials of gay colors were always chosen and, wherever it was possible, the lights were covered with fancy shades, designed according to the individual taste or the ingenuity of some worker.

Pianos were dug out of ruined houses or were even brought from captured German dugouts. A _boche_ piano served as well as any other for the "jazz" which we took to poor France from the United States. The pianos in these Red Cross canteens hardly would have pa.s.sed muster for a formal concert. But that did not matter much. It mattered not that they had the toothless look of old age about them, where the ivory keys had been lost; they were still something which a homeless Yankee boy might play--where he might still build for himself a bridge of favorite tunes right back into the heart of his own beloved home.

At Issoudon, the canteen reached an ideal of organization not always possible in some more isolated spots. At that point there was a mess for officers, a canteen for enlisted men, and clubrooms with books and the like for both. Moreover, a resthouse was inaugurated for officers and men by the Red Cross for the accommodation of those who stayed there overnight or even for a considerable number of hours. Eventually this last project was absorbed by the army, which took it under its direct control. The army knew a good thing when it saw it. The Issoudon resthouse was a good thing. It served as a model for a much more elaborate scheme of entertainment for our khaki-coated men which, at a later time, was established by the American Red Cross in Paris. And which--so far at least as the officers were concerned--also was taken over by the army.

"A piece of fairyland" was the name that a doughboy with a touch of sentiment gave to the canteen at Nevers. A gardener's lodge attached to a chateau was loaned the American Red Cross by a t.i.tled and generous lady. It possessed a "living room" and a dining room that needed few changes, even of a decorative order. Upon the veranda, which commanded a view of a gentle and seemingly perennial garden, were many easy-chairs, while somewhere among these same hardy flowers was builded a temporary barracks for the housing of casuals and for shower baths for the cleanly comfort of the guests.

In the course of my own travels through the Red Cross areas in Europe I came to another canteen center other than that of the Bordeaux district, which still clings to my memory. I am referring to Toul, that ancient walled city of eastern France which has been a great fortress for so many centuries that mortal man seems fairly to have lost count of them.

Few doughboys there are who traveled at all across the land of the lilies who can easily forget Toul--that grim American army headquarters close by its stone walls and ancient gates, a _marais_ of tight-set buildings and narrow stone-paved streets and encircled by a row of hills, which bore a row of fortresses. If the line had failed to hold at Verdun or at Pont-a-Mousson, Toul would certainly have become the next great battle ground, another gray city for which men might give their short lives in order that it might continue its long one.

This "if" was not realized--thank G.o.d for that! And the French, with their real generosity, realizing that the American headquarters in their eastern territory must be a city of great accessibility and real military strategic importance, quickly tendered Toul, which was accepted by our army in the same generous spirit in which it was offered by our Allies.

With Toul settled as a military center the problem of the Red Cross in connection with it at once became definite and important. It, of course, demanded immediate as well as entirely comprehensive solution. And that it had both was due very largely to the efforts of one woman, Miss Mary Vail Andress, of New York.

Miss Andress, who was one of the very first group of women to be sent by our Red Cross to France, arriving there August 24, 1917, came to Toul in January, 1918. Captain Hugh Pritchitt, who had been a.s.signed to the command of the American Red Cross work at that American Army headquarters point, already of great and growing importance, had preceded her there by but four days, yet had already succeeded in making a definite survey of the entire situation. Out of that survey, and the more extended knowledge of the problem that came to the Red Cross folk as they studied it in its details, came the big canteen activities. For before the American Red Cross had been in the ancient French town a full fortnight, the men of the American Expeditionary Forces began pouring through it in great numbers. It takes only a single glance at the map to realize the reason why; for to the east of Toul are Nancy, Pont-a-Mousson, and the Lorraine line, while to the north and even a little to the west one finds Saint Mihiel, Verdun, St. Menehold, and the Argonne--places that already are household names all the way across America, while from Toul to the south and west, even unto the blue waters of the Atlantic, stretch the main stems of the United States Military Railroad in France--that remarkable railroad which, as you already know, really is no railroad whatsoever.

So do not wonder that at the ancient railway station just north of the town walls and contiguous to the well-traveled Route de Paris, 1918 saw more and more of the long special trains stopping and debouching boys in khaki--hungry boys, thirsty boys, tired and dirty boys, and no provision for the relief of any of these ordinary human miseries.

It was a real situation, and as such the New York woman in the steel gray Red Cross uniform quickly sensed it. She moved toward its solution; which was easier said than done. For one thing the Red Cross chiefs in Paris, considering the thing judiciously from long range, were not at all sure of its practicability. But Miss Andress had no doubts, and so persisted at Paris until Paris yielded and permission was granted her to start a small canteen; yet this was only the first step in the solution of her problem. A second and even greater one was the securing of a location for canteen facilities. The meager facilities of Toul, selected as the field headquarters of an American Army, had been all but swamped by the fearful demands made upon them. Yet Miss Andress, moving heaven and earth itself, did secure a small apartment house in that same well-traveled Route de Paris, which was well enough, so far as it went, but did not go half far enough. She quickly determined that this building would serve very well as a hotel or resthouse for the casual soldiers and officers pa.s.sing through the town, but that the real canteen would have to be right at the station itself.

Now the station of the Eastern Railway at Toul was amply large for the ordinary peace-time needs of the eleven thousand folk who lived in the town, but long since its modest facilities had also been swamped by the war-time necessities thrust upon it. It was humanly impossible to crowd another single facility within its four tight brick walls. They told her as much.

"I know that," said Miss Andress quietly. "We shall have to have a big tent set up in the station yard. I shall speak to the railway authorities about it, and gain their permission."

In vain the army officers argued with her as to the futility of such a step. They, themselves, had thought of such procedure for their own increasing activities, but had been refused a tent, very politely but very firmly. Yet those refusals were not final. There were two other factors now to be taken into consideration--one was the potency of the very phrase, _Croix Rouge Americaine_, with the French, and the other was the persuasive ability of a bright New York woman who, having made up her mind what it was that she wanted to get, was not going to be happy until she had gotten it.

She got the tent--the permission and all else that went with the getting it up, of course. In the spring of 1919 it still was there, although in use as a check room instead of a canteen; for the canteen service long before had outgrown even its generous facilities. It spread in various directions; into a regular hotel for enlisted men, right across the narrow street from the station; a resthouse for both officers and enlisted men back on the Route de Paris about a block distant; a huge new canteen on the station grounds, and still another on one of the long island-platforms between the tracks, so that men held in pa.s.sing trains--all of which stopped at Toul for coal and water, if nothing else--and so unable to go even into the station to feel the comforting hand of the Red Cross, might be served with good things of both food and drink.

To maintain four such great inst.i.tutions, even though all of them were within a stone's throw of one another, was no child's play. The mere problem of providing those good things to eat and drink was of itself a really huge job. For by January, 1919, in the sandwich room of the enlisted men's hotel across the street, 2,400 pounds of bread a day were being cut into sandwiches. These sandwiches were worthy of investigation. They were really worth-while--the Red Cross kind. I have sampled them myself--all the way from Havre to Coblenz and south as far as Bordeaux, and so truthfully can call them remarkable. For fancy, if you can, corned beef--the miserable and despised "corn willie" of the doughboy--being so camouflaged with pickles and onions and eggs as to make many and many a traveling hungry soldier for the nonce quite unaware that he was munching upon a foodstuff of unbridled army ridicule. And ham, with mustard, and more of the palatable camouflage.

Oh, boy, could you beat it? And, oh, boy, did you ever eat better doughnuts--outside of mother's, of course--than those of the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, too, gave you?

In the big kitchen of the American Red Cross canteen hotel at Toul they cooked three thousand of these last each twenty-four hours, which would have been a sizable contract for one of those white-fronted chains of dairy restaurants whose habitat is New York and the other big cities of the United States, while four thousand cups of coffee and chocolate went daily to wash down these doughnuts--and the sandwiches.

Figures are not always impressive. In this one instance, however, I think that they are particularly so. Is it not impressive to know that in a single day of September, 1918, when the tide of war had turned and the oncoming hosts of Yanks were turning the flanks of the _boche_ farther and farther back, ground once lost never to be regained--in the eight hours of that day, from five o'clock in the morning until one o'clock in the afternoon, just 2,045 men were served by the American Red Cross there at the Toul station, while in the month of January, 1919, just 128,637 hungry soldiers were fed and refreshed there?

Figures do not, of course, tell the story of the resthouse--that apartment home first secured by Miss Andress--but the expressions of gratefulness that come from the fortunate folk who have been sheltered beneath its hospitable roof are more than ordinarily eloquent. It is not a large building; a structure rather ugly than otherwise. But it has spelled in every true sense of the word: "Rest." Yet to my mind its really unique distinction lies in another channel; it is the only army facility that I chanced to see in all France which extended its hospitality under a single roof to both officer and enlisted man, and so bespoke a democracy which, much vaunted at times, does not always exist within the ranks of the United States Army. For so far as I could discover, there was not the slightest particle of difference in the cleanliness and comfort between the beds a.s.signed to the enlisted men in the upper floor of the house and those given to the officers in its two lower floors. When they pa.s.sed its threshold the fine distinction of rank ceased. The Red Cross in its very best phases does not recognize the so-called distinction of rank.

Its hospitality at Toul did not cease when it had offered food and drink and lodging to the man in khaki who came to its doors. A very humble yet greatly appreciated comfort to a man coming off a hot, overcrowded, and very dirty troop train was nothing more nor less than a good bath. The bathhouse was a hurried but well-adapted one in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the enlisted men's hotel. Two Russian refugees ran the plant and did well at it--for Russian refugees. A system was adopted, despite Slavic traditions, by which at a single time sixteen men might be undressing, sixteen taking a quarter-hour bath, and a third sixteen dressing again--all at the same time. In this way 250 men could bathe in a single hour, while the daily average of the inst.i.tution during the busy months of the war ordinarily ran from eight hundred to nine hundred. It has handled 1,200 in a single working day, giving the men not only a bath, hot or cold, as might be desired, but a complete change of clean underclothing--all with the compliments of the Red Cross. The discarded garments were gathered in huge sacks, some twenty-five of these being forwarded daily to the army laundries in the neighborhood.

"The Red Cross in Toul?" said a young lieutenant of engineers one day to Miss Gladys Harrison, who was working there for the American Red Cross.

"It saved my life one forlorn night. Every hotel in town was full to the doors, it was raining bullets outside and no place to sleep but the banks of the ca.n.a.l, if--if the Red Cross hadn't taken me in."

Let Miss Harrison continue the story; she was extremely conversant with the entire situation in Toul, and so most capable to speak of it.