Читать книгу With Our Soldiers in France - Sherwood Eddy - Страница 9

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We are in the midst of an American army encampment in a French village. For miles away over the rolling country the golden harvests of France are ripening in the sun, broken by patches of green field, forest, and stream. The reapers are gathering in the grain. Only old men, women, and children are left to do the work, for the sons of France are away at the battle front. The countryside is more beautiful than the finest parts of New York or Pennsylvania. In almost every valley sleeps a little French hamlet, with its red tiled roofs and its neat stone cottages, clustered about the village church tower. It is a picture of calm and peace and plenty under the summer sun. But the sound of distant guns on the neighboring drill grounds, a bugle call down the village street, the sight of the broad cowboy hats and the khaki uniforms of the American soldiers, arouse us to the realization of a world at war and the fact that our boys are here, fighting for the soil of France and the world's freedom.

We are in a typical French farming village of a thousand people, and here a thousand American soldiers are quartered. A sergeant and a score of men are in each shed or stable or barn loft. The Americans are stationed in a long string of villages down this railway line. Indeed it is hard to tell for the moment whether we are in France or in the States. Here are Uncle Sam's uniforms, brown army tents, and new wooden barracks. The roads are filled with American trucks, wagons, motors, and whizzing motorcycles, American mules, ammunition wagons, machine guns, provisions, and supplies, and American sentinels down every street.

These are the men of the First Division, scattered along behind the French lines, being drilled as rapidly as possible to take their place in the trenches for the relief of the hard-pressed French. The nucleus is made up of the men of the old army, who have seen service in Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippines, Texas, or along the Mexican border. And with them are young boys of nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one, with clear faces, fresh from their homes, chiefly from the Middle West—from Illinois to Texas.

The first thing that strikes us as we look at these men is their superb kit and outfit. From the broad cowboy hat, the neat uniform close fitting at the waist, down to their American shoes; from the saddles, bits, and bridles to the nose bags of the horses; from the guns, motors, and trucks down to the last shoe lace, the equipment is incomparably the best and most expensive of all that we have seen at the front. The boys themselves are live, clean, strong, and intelligent fellows, probably the best raw material of any of the fighting forces in Europe. The officers tell us that the American troops are natural marksmen and there are no better riflemen in the war zone. The frequency of the sharpshooters' medals, among both the officers and the men, shows that many of them already excel in musketry.

The second impression that strikes us is the crudeness of the new men, and the lack of finish in their drill, as compared with the veteran troops of Britain and France. The progress they have made, however, in the past few weeks under their experienced American officers of the regular army has been truly remarkable.

The next impression we receive is the enormous moral danger to which these men are exposed in this far-away foreign land. During the whole war it is the Overseas Forces, the men farthest from home influences, who have no hope of leave or furlough, who are far removed from all good women and the steadying influence of their own reputations, that have fared the worst in the war. The Americans not only share this danger with the Colonials and other Overseas Forces, but they have an additional danger in their high pay. Here are enlisted men who tell us that they are paid from $35 to $90 a month, from the lowest private to the best paid sergeants. When you remember that the Russian private is allowed only one cent a day, that the Belgian soldier receives only four cents a day, the French private five cents, the German six cents, and the English soldier twenty-five cents a day, most of which has to go for supplementary food to make up for the scantiness of the rations supplied, you realize what it means for the American soldier to be paid from one to three dollars a day, in addition to clothing, expenses, and the best rations of any army in Europe.[1]

Some of these men tell us that they have just received from two to three months' back pay in cash. Here they are with several hundred francs in their hands, buried in a French village, with absolutely no attraction or amusement save drink and immorality. In this little village the only prosperous trade in evidence is that in wines and liquors. The only large wholesale house is the center of the liquor trade and the only freight piled up on the platform of the station consists of wines and champagnes, pouring in to meet the demand of the American soldiers. There are a score of drinking places in this little hamlet. Our boys are unaccustomed to the simple and moderate drinking of the French peasants, and they are plunged into these estaminets with their pockets full of money. Others under the influence of drink have torn up the money or tossed it recklessly away. Prices have doubled and trebled in the village in a few weeks, and the peasants have come to the conclusion that every American soldier must be a millionaire; as the boys have sometimes told them that the pile of notes, which represents several mouths' pay, is the amount they receive every month. Compare this with the $1.80 a month, in addition to a small allowance for his family, which the French private gets, and you will readily see how this false impression is formed.

Temptation and solicitation in Europe have been in almost exact proportion to the pay that the soldier receives. The harpies flock around the men who have the most money. As our American boys are the best paid, and perhaps the most generous and open-hearted and reckless of all the troops, they have proved an easy mark in Paris and the port cities. As soon as they were paid several months' back salary, some of them took "French leave," went on a spree, and did not come back until they were penniless. The officers, fully alive to the danger, are now doing their utmost to cope with the situation; they are seeking to reduce the cash payments to the men and are endeavoring to persuade them to send more of their money home. Court martial and strict punishment have been imposed for drunkenness, in the effort to grapple with this evil.

Will the friends of our American boys away in France try to realize just the situation that confronts them? Imagine a thousand healthy, happy, reckless, irrepressible American youths put down in a French village, without a single place of amusement but a drinking hall, and no social life save such as they can find with the French girls standing in the doorways and on the street corners. Think of all these men shut up, month after month, through the long winter, with nothing to do to occupy their evenings. Then you will begin to realize the seriousness of the situation which the Young Men's Christian Association is trying to meet.

Here on the village green stands a big tent, with the sign "The American Y M C A," and the red triangle, which is already placed upon more than seven hundred British, French, and American Association centers in France. Inside the tent, as the evening falls, scores of boys are sitting at the tables, writing their letters home on note paper provided for them. Here are men playing checkers, dominoes, and other games. Other groups are standing around the folding billiard tables. A hundred men have taken out books from the circulating library, while others are scanning the home papers and the latest news from the front.

Our secretaries have been on the ground for a week, working daily from five o'clock in the morning until midnight. They have unpacked their goods and are doing a driving trade over the counter, to the value of some $200 a day. In certain cases goods are sold at a loss, as it is very hard indeed to get supplies under present war conditions. The steamer "Kansan" was torpedoed, and sank with the whole first shipment of supplies and equipment for the Y M C A huts in France.

Outside a baseball game is exciting rivalry between two companies; while near the door of the tent a ring is formed and the men are cheering pair after pair as they put on the boxing gloves and with good humor are learning to take some rather heavy slugging. Poor boys, they will have to stand much worse punishment than this before the winter is over. Just beside the present tent there is being rushed into position a big Y M C A hut which will accommodate temporarily a thousand men, before it is taken to pieces and shipped to some new center. The Association has ordered from Paris a number of permanent pine huts, 60 by 120 feet, which will accommodate 2,000 soldiers each, and keep them warm and well occupied during the long cold winter evenings that are to come. On the railway siding at the moment are nine temporary huts, packed in sections for immediate construction, and a score of permanent buildings have been ordered to be erected as fast as the locations for the camps are selected by the military authorities. Indeed, the aim is to have them on the ground and ready before the boys arrive and take the first plunge in the wrong direction.

What is the life that our boys are living here at the front? Let us go through a day with the battalion quartered in this village. At five o'clock in the morning the first bugle sounds. The boys are quickly on their feet, dressing, washing, getting ready for the day's drill. In half an hour they are tucking away a generous breakfast provided by Uncle Sam, of hot bacon, fried potatoes and coffee, good home made bread, and as much of it as a man can eat. They get meat twice a day, and we have found no soldiers in Europe who receive rations that compare with the food that our boys receive.

By 6:40 a. m. the men have reached the drill ground on the open fields above the village and are ready to begin the eight or nine hours of hard work and exercise that is before them. Half of each day is spent with the French troops, learning more quickly with an object lesson before them, and the remaining half day is spent in training by themselves. The French squad goes through the drill or movement; then the American battalion, after watching them, is put through the same practice. They are trained in bayonet work and charges, in musketry and machine gun practice, in the handling of grenades, and the throwing of bombs. There is evidence of speeding up and an apparent pressure to get them quickly into shape, in order to take their place in the trenches before the winter sets in. A few weeks at the front with the French troops will soon give them experience, and after a winter in the trenches, the men of these first divisions will doubtless form the nucleus for a large American army, and provide the drill masters quickly to train the men for the spring offensive.

On the day we were there, after a hard morning's drill, the Colonel assembled three battalions and put them through the first regimental formation and the first regimental review since landing in France. The men of the First, Second, and Third battalions marched by, and one could quickly contrast the disciplined movements of the veterans or old soldiers with the crude drill of the new recruits, some of whom could not keep step or smoothly execute the movements.

At the noon hour, after the men had taken their midday meal and had rested for a few minutes, the Colonel asked us if we would address the troops. Some two thousand men were marched in close formation around the large military wagon on which we were to stand. The mules were unhitched and the men seated themselves on the grass, while the band played several pieces. A great hunger of heart possesses any man with half a soul as he looks into the faces of these boys, beset by fierce temptations and facing a terrible winter in the trenches. At the beginning we reminded them of the words of Lord Kitchener to his troops before they left for France: "You are ordered abroad as a soldier … Remember that the honor of the Army depends upon your individual conduct … Your duty cannot be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, … treating all women with perfect courtesy." [2] Kitchener's words furnish a text for the two-fold danger which confronts these men. Here for an unhurried hour, with the generous backing of the officers, we plead with the men on military, medical, and moral grounds, for the sake of their own homes and families, for the sake of conscience and country, on the grounds of duty both to God and to man, to hold to the high ideals and the best traditions of the homeland. Here, with no church save the great dome of God's blue heaven above us, seated on the green grass, under the warm summer sun, we have the priceless privilege of trying to safeguard the life of these men in the grave danger of wartime.

We were encouraged alike by the splendid support of the officers and the warm-hearted and eager response of the men as they broke into prolonged applause. The General in command attended one meeting and pledged us his support for our whole program for the men. He had already cooperated with us most generously on the Canal Zone, in the Philippines, and in Mexico. Three colonels presided at three successive meetings, and gave the work their strong moral support. Three bands were furnished in two days. The official backing of the authorities placed the stamp of approval on the whole moral effort for the welfare of the men. In no other army in Europe that we have seen have the officers taken such a keen interest in the highest welfare of the troops, or offered such constant and efficient cooperation with every effort to surround the men with the best moral influences.

After the meeting, the regimental parade and the strenuous physical drill of the morning, the Colonel called for a short break, and the men gathered to learn some popular songs. Major Roosevelt assembled his battalion, and Archie Roosevelt enthusiastically led the men in singing Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the modern soldier songs of the war.

After nine hours of hard drill, the men swung cheerfully down the hillside into the village street. Now they have lined up, and with ravenous appetites are waiting for the evening meal. We are almost as hungry as they, and are glad to share the meal with them. Here on the table are huge piles of good home-made bread. It is almost the first white bread we have seen after months of brown war bread in England and France. Here are heaping plates of good pork and beans, tinned salmon, plenty of fried potatoes, and piping hot coffee. This is followed by a delicious pudding, as good as the men would have had in their own homes. Well fed, well clothed, well equipped, sleeping under Uncle Sam's warm blankets, on comfortable "Gold Medal" cots, our boys are well cared for.

In another village, at the close of the day, the Colonel commanding two battalions of the infantry called the men together in the open square of the market place, and after a band concert invited us to address the troops on the moral issues of the war. The next day almost the same program was repeated, and at noon in an open field on a grassy hillside the Major of another battalion marched out his men for a similar lecture. Every commanding officer seemed eager to arrange for meetings, to summon the men, and to back up the messages given to them. Not only have General Pershing, General Sibert, and the Colonels commanding the various regiments, met us half way in every plan for the welfare of the troops; but they have taken the initiative in insisting that every provision should be made for the physical, mental, and moral occupation and safeguarding of the men.

Probably more men are led astray in the war zone when they go on leave than at any other time, in reaction from the deadly monotony of camp life, or the inferno of the trenches. London and Paris are the chief centers of danger. In London, just before sailing for the States, we visited the finely equipped American "Eagle" Hut in the Strand. It would be difficult to devise a more homelike or attractive place for soldiers. In addition to sleeping accommodations for several hundred men, the lounge and recreation rooms, the big fireplaces and comfortable chairs suggested the equipment of an up-to-date club, in marked contrast to the surroundings of a cheerless soldiers' barracks.