With The Doughboy In France Part 23

"Don't be foolish, young man," said she, "otherwise somebody will have to take the trouble to tell you that a colonel does not locate his regiment. He has no more to say about where you shall all be billeted than you yourselves. And as for the Red Cross girl, she is in the same position. Moreover, your remark is not worthy of an American soldier--and a gentleman."

There was something in the way she said these things--no type may ever put in upon paper--that, in the language of the motion-picture world, "registered." In a little time Hank was ashamed of himself, and with the innate generosity of his big, uncouth heart, apologized--like a gentleman and an American soldier.

Ofttimes, even though with the American Army women were not permitted to go very close to the front line, the job of the Red Cross girl was fraught with much real danger. The air raid was too frequent and too deadly a visitor not to have earned an awsome respect for itself. The tooth marks of Big Bertha still show all too plainly as horrid scars across the lovely face of Paris--the beauty of the world. The _boche_, as we all very well know, did not stop his long-distance warfare from the air even at the sight of the roofs which bore crimson crosses and so signified that they were hospitals and, under every condition of civilization and humanity, exempt from attack. The story of these hospital raids, with their casualty lists, not merely of American boys already sick and wounded, but of the wounding and killing of the men and women who were laboring to give them life and comfort, is already a well-known fact of record; yet even this was not all. Death never seemed far away in those hard months of 1917 and 1918, and Death was no respecter, either of persons or of uniforms or of s.e.x. Upon the honor roll of our Red Cross there are the names of twenty-three American women, other than nurses, who made the supreme sacrifice for their country.

The experiences of the Red Cross girls in the air raids were as many and varied as the girls themselves. That of a canteen worker at Toul was fairly typical. She had been over at the neighboring city of Nancy to aid in one of the innumerable soldiers' dances which had been given there. In the middle of the dance it had suddenly occurred to her chum and herself that neither had eaten since morning. A young lieutenant had taken them to a very good little restaurant in the great Place Stanislas that all through the hard days of the war held to a long-time reputation of real excellence, and had insisted that they order a dinner of generous proportions.

Yet before their soup had been fairly served an air raid was upon them.

The roar of the planes and the rattle of cannonading were continuous.

Every light in the place went out instantly, and because the proprietor insisted even then in keeping his shades and shutters tightly drawn the place was inky black.

"What did you do?" I asked her.

"What did we do? We went ahead and ate our dinner. It was the best thing we could do. I realized for the first time in my life the real handicaps of the blind. I don't see how they ever learn to eat fried chicken gracefully."

In an earlier chapter I told of the remarkable work done by the Smith College girls at the crux of the great German drive. It was impossible in that chapter to tell all of the sacrifice and the devotion shown by these women--the most of them from five to fifteen years out of college, although one of the best of them was from the cla.s.s of 1882 and still another from that of 1917. "We were an unbaked crew," one of them admitted quite frankly to me.

Miss Elizabeth Bliss was typical of these college girls. A long time after Chateau-Thierry they were all working behind the lines in the Argonne, Miss Bliss herself in charge of a sanitary train for the Red Cross from the railhead back to the base hospital. It was part of her job to work up to midnight and then be called at three o'clock in the morning to see the four o'clock train start off with its wounded. On one of those October mornings, when the weather was a little worse than usual, if that could be possible, she exerted a perfectly human privilege and decided not to get up.

But no sooner had this decision been made than the still, small voice spoke to her.

"Can you afford to miss even one day?" it said to her.

"I'm all in. I just can't get up," she replied to the S. S. V.

"Can you afford to miss--even one day?" it repeated.

She got up and dressed and made her way down in the rain to the waiting train. As she went into the long hospital car a wounded doughboy raised himself on one elbow and shouted to all his fellows:

"Hi, fellows, I told you that a Red Cross girl would be here, and here she is. I told you she'd come."

"Just think if I hadn't," says Miss Bliss in telling of this incident.

When life back of the front was not dangerous or dramatic, it was apt to be plain dreary. There is not usually much drama just in hard work. Take once again the case of Miss Mary Vail Andress, whom we found in charge of the canteen at Toul. Miss Andress came to France on the twenty-fourth of August, 1917, one of a group of seven Red Cross women, the first of the American Red Cross women to be sent over. The other members of the party were Mrs. d.i.c.kens, Mrs. Lawrence, Miss Frances Mitch.e.l.l (who was sent to the newly opened canteen at epernay), Miss Rogers, Miss Andrews, and Miss Frances Andrews, and were immediately dispatched to Chalons.

For a short time Miss Andress was the a.s.sistant of Henry Wise Miller, who was then in charge of canteen work in France. She, however, enlisted for canteen work and so asked Mr. Miller to be allowed to go into the field and was sent to epernay. From there she went back to Paris and on to Chantilly, where she prepared a home for girls in canteen work. She came to Toul in January, 1918, and, as you already know, was the first woman worker to reach that important American Army headquarters.

"For a while it seemed as if I could never quite get down to the real job," she says, "it seemed so often that something new broke loose and always just at the wrong time. While we were working to get the first canteen established here at Toul--we had a nurses' club in mind at the time--word came from the hospital over there back of the hill that the Red Cross was needed there to help prepare for the comfort of the nurses in that big place. I went there at once--of course. Within fifteen minutes after I got there I was hanging curtains in the girls'

barracks--couldn't you trust a woman to do a job like that? I did not get very many hung. Captain Hugh Pritchitt, my chief, came bursting in upon me. 'They're here,' he shouted.

"I knew what that meant. 'They' were the first of our American wounded, and they must have comfort and help and immediate attention. They got it. It was part of our job, you know. And after that part was organized there was nothing to it but to come back to Toul and set up our chain of canteens there."

And you already know how very well that particular war job was done. And doing it involved much devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice, not only on the part of the directress, but on that of her staff of capable a.s.sistants.

Talk about devotion and endurance and self-sacrifice! Into the desolate ruin of the war-racked city of Rheims there walked last October two American Red Cross women on a sight-seeing trip. They had had months of hard canteen work and were well tired out, and were about to return home. In a week or so of leave they went to Rheims because that once busy city with its dominating cathedral has become the world's new Pompeii. And the man or woman who visits France without seeing it has missed seeing the one thing of almost supreme horror and interest in the world to-day.

The two Red Cross women had but a single day to see Rheims. That was last October. They still are there; for back of the ruins, back of the gaunt, scarred hulk of that vast church which was once the pride of France, and to-day the symbol of Calvary through which she had just pa.s.sed, there rose the question in their minds: what has become of the folk of this town? It was the sort of question that does not down. Nor were the two women--one is Miss Emily Bennet of the faculty of a fas.h.i.+onable girls' school in New York and the other Miss Catherine Biddle Porter of Philadelphia--the sort that close their souls to questions such as these.

They found the answer. It was in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the commercial high school--a dreary, high-ceilinged place, but because of its comparatively modern construction of steel and brick a sort of _abri_ or bombproof refuge for the three or four hundred citizens that stuck it out through the four years of horror. In that bas.e.m.e.nt place of safety an aged school-teacher of the town, Mademoiselle Fourreaux, month in and month out, prepared two meals a day--bread and soup--for the group of refugees that gathered round about her and literally kept the heart of Rheims abeat. The Red Cross women found this aged heroine--she confesses to having turned seventy--working unaided, and within the hour were working with her, sending word back to Paris to send up a few necessary articles of comfort and of clothing. That night they slept in Rheims, and were billeted in a house whose windows had been crudely replaced with oiled paper and whose roof was half gone.

In a short time relief came to them. The American Red Cross sent in other supplies and workers and established a much larger and finer canteen relief in another section of the town. Other organizations--French and British and American--poured in relief; but Miss Bennett and Miss Porter stuck it out, and soon began to reap the fruit of their great endeavors.

I have cited here a few instances of women who have gone overseas--frequently at great personal sacrifices--to help bear the burden of the war. If s.p.a.ce had permitted I might easily have given five hundred, and each of them would have had its own personal little dramatic story. I might simply tell of some of the women whom I have met on the job; of Miss Lucy Duhring of Philadelphia, setting up the women's work of the Y. M. C. A. in the leave areas of the occupied territory; of a girl superintendent of schools from Kansas, working in the hospital records for the Red Cross at Toul; of another girl from Kingston-on-Hudson running a big Y. W. C. A. hotel for army girls in Paris and running it mighty well; of still another woman--this one a welfare worker from a big industrial plant in Kansas City--as the guiding spirit in the hostess house at Coblenz. The list quickly spins to great lengths. It is a tremendously embracing one, and when one gazes at it, he begins to realize what effect this great adventure overseas is going to have upon the lives of the women who partic.i.p.ated in it; how it is going to change the conventions of life, or its amenities, or its opportunities. How will the weeks and months of camaraderie with khaki-clad men, under all conditions and all circ.u.mstances affect them?

Many of the silly conventionalities of ordinary life and under ordinary conditions of peace, have, of necessity, been thrown away over there.

Men and women have made long trips together, in train or in motor car, and have thought or made nothing of it whatever. On the night train up from Aix-les-Bains to Paris on one of those never-to-be-forgotten nights the autumn the conflict still raged, two girls of the A. E. F. found it quite impossible to obtain seats of any sort. Four or five marines, back from a short leave in a little town near there, did the best they could for them and with their blankets and dunny rolls rigged crude beds for them in the aisle of a first-cla.s.s car, and there the girls rode all night to Paris while the marines stood guard over them.

The gray-uniformed woman war-worker knows that she may trust the American soldier. Her experience with the doughboy has been large and so her tribute to the high qualities of his manhood is of very real value.

Moreover, she too, has seen real service, both in canteen work and in the still more important leave area work which has followed--this last the great problem of keeping the idle soldier healthily amused.

"I have known our girls," she will tell you, "to go into a miserable little French or German town filled with a thousand or twelve hundred American boys in khaki and in a day change the entire spirit of that community. There has been a dance one night, for instance, with the boys restless and trying stupidly to dance with one another, or in some cases, even bringing in the rough little village girls from the streets outside. But the next dance has seen a transformation. The girls of the A. E. F. have come, they are dancing with the men; there is cheer and decency in the very air, there are neither French nor German present--the place is American.

"You have told of what the American girl has been to the men of our army; let me tell, in a word, what the army has been to the American woman who has worked with it: We have trusted our enlisted men in khaki and not once found that trust misplaced. Night and day have we placed our honor in their hands and never have trusted in vain."

"The reason why?" we venture.

"The mothers of America," is the quick reply.

I know what she means. I have read letter after letter written by the doughboys to the mothers back here, and the ma.s.s of them still stay in my mind as a tribute that all but surpa.s.ses description. Some of them misspelled; many of them ungrammatical--where have our schools been these last few years?--a few of them humorous, a few pathetic, but all of them breathing a sentiment and a tenderness that makes me willing to call ours the sentimental as well as the amazing army. Add to these letters the verbal testimony of the boys to the women of their army.

"We're not doing much," one after another has said, "but say, you ought to see my mother on the job back home. She's the one that's turning the trick."

It was a large experiment sending women with our army overseas--in the minds of many a most dubious experiment. In no other war had an army ever had women enrolled with it, save possibly a few nurses. It is an experiment which, so far as the United States is concerned, has more than justified itself. Our women have been tried in France--in other European lands as well--and have not been found wanting; which is a very faint way, indeed, of trying to tell of a great accomplishment. For if the American soldier, through many months of test and trial--and test and trial that by no means were confined to the battlefield--has kept his body clean and his soul pure through the virtue of woman which has been spread about him through the guarded years of his home life, how about the virtue of the women that, clad in the uniform of our Red Cross and the other war-relief organizations, guarded him successfully when he was far away from home? There is but one answer to such a question, but one question to follow after that. Here it is: Is it fair to longer consider such a real accomplishment a mere experiment? I think not. I think that it is rather to be regarded as a real triumph of our Americanism.