A soldier's mother in France

I shall never hear that musical classic, Where Do We Go From Here?, without remembering a young lieutenant I tried to be a mother to in France. I really led the young man terribly astray, and but for a bit of luck at the end I might have got him court-martialed.

The whole thing grew out of the fact that so many of the men in France are mobilized that they haven’t enough left for train conductors and station guards. You can travel for hundreds of miles in France and never have your ticket taken up by anybody. I have a collection of French railroad tickets which I bought and used, but never had to show to a conductor.

One of these tickets entitled me to ride first class from Bourges to a certain large American military camp. I bought the ticket one morning last spring and was informed by the polite Frenchman behind the wicket that it would be necessary for me to change at a junction about midway in the journey.

“They allow you barely five minutes to make the change,” he warned me, “but you can not miss the train. It is the Paris express.”

We were slightly delayed, and when I reached the junction I made a quick leap to the station platform and looked around for my train. There were several standing there, so I ran, suit-case in one hand and typewriter in the other, in search of a guard. There was only one, but I hailed him and asked him to indicate the Paris express.

“Platform three,” he exclaimed. “But, hurry, hurry, madame. Already the train he marches.” And surely enough the queer little tin whistle which is a characteristic of French trains was shrilling its starting signal and the doors of the carriages were slamming.

I dashed across the tracks and almost into a young officer who was looking wildly around and calling in English for a porter. Seeing my O. D. uniform, he recognized a compatriot, and implored me to tell him, if I knew, which train he should take to go to Y——.

“Come along,” I flung back at him, for I was still racing for that moving train. “I’m going there, too.”

We just made it, flinging my suit-case and typewriter in, and falling in after them ourselves. The lieutenant had no luggage.

I was tired, having been up late the night before, and without any more conversation I curled up in a corner and went to sleep. I must have slept for an hour, and after I awoke the train rolled on for another hour without coming to Y——.

We were alone in the compartment, and no conductor appeared. So I spoke to the young officer. “I thought Y—— was only about an hour and a half from the junction,” I remarked.

“I thought so, too,” he answered. “But I don’t speak a word of French, so I don’t always get very precise information.”

“Well, the guard told me that this was the Paris express,” I said. “We must be on the right train.”

We commented on the singular lack of train conductors, and the lieutenant said yes, you could travel all over France free if you had luck. He had traveled for forty-eight hours for one franc and eighty centimes. At least, the only ticket he had been asked to surrender cost one franc eighty. The rest were in his pocket.

But he didn’t enjoy traveling alone in a foreign country. He couldn’t even ask for a match in French, much less inquire about trains. I resolved that I would be nice to that young man and see that he got safely to his destination. But when another hour went by and we still didn’t reach Y—— it occurred to me that I might not be very much of a guide. I opened my suit-case, got out a map of France, found the junction from which we had started and watched for the name on the next station.

We were on the Paris express all right, but we were going to Paris instead of away from it, as I had intended. We were within a mile or two from the city of Orleans. I broke the news to the lieutenant and he turned a little pale. He simply had to get to Y—— that night, he said. He was on a special mission and had been charged to deliver his message as quickly as possible.

“Even if we get there this evening,” he added, “I don’t know how I am going to get out to the camp. They don’t allow officers to sleep in the town, you know. They know I’m on the way because I sent all my luggage on ahead.”

“Perhaps there is a train back very soon,” I suggested. “We’ll get off at Orleans and I will inquire.”

We did, the lieutenant carrying my suit-case, and both of us hurrying as fast as we could to the ticket office. What was the next train for Y——? The next train was about to start. “Hurry, hurry, madame and monsieur. You will miss it unless you run. It is necessary to change at X,” mentioning the very junction where our unfortunate lives had been joined.

We ran, without stopping to buy tickets, and scrambled breathlessly aboard the moving train. Nobody asked us for any tickets, and we actually traveled the entire distance back to X without paying the French government a single sou. We arrived about seven o’clock, dusk, with our final destination still forty-five miles ahead. Moreover, there was no train before midnight.

The young lieutenant was very blue, but he agreed that there was no use worrying, and we might as well go up-town and get some dinner. We would have to go together, whether we liked it or not, because he couldn’t get along alone. We had a good dinner, and by the time it was finished it selfishly occurred to me that I had had about enough of that strange young man’s society. It was obvious that he had had enough of mine, because it is a little bit dangerous for an American officer to be seen in a lady’s company in France. Officers are not supposed to have women friends or relatives on that side of the ocean, and if a member of the military police were to see him carrying a woman’s suit-case through a civilian town the policeman soldier might develop a little curiosity. And what a fishy story we had to tell after all. Childish!

“I think,” said I to the lieutenant, “that you can get along all right now. I am very tired and I believe I will take a room in this hotel and stay over until to-morrow.”

He brightened up amazingly and said that it was a capital idea. But when I asked for a room the little patronne declared that she didn’t have a bed in the house. Perhaps I could get one at the hotel opposite the station. I couldn’t, nor did I find a room vacant in any one of the other hotels.

“Well,” I said, “I’m not going to get into Y—— after midnight. It’s a small place, and I am not sure I can get a room there. I’m going back to Bourges. There are large hotels there, and there’s a train at ten.”

“I can’t get to Y—— after midnight either,” gloomed the lieutenant. “There won’t be any place for me to stay, and at that hour I couldn’t telephone the camp to send an ambulance for me. I’ll have to go to Bourges, too.”

To Bourges we went, and in addition to getting a room for myself I had to take the lieutenant along and get a room for him. Why had I ever met the man? Why had he ever met me? Would we never get rid of each other, or were we tied for life?

The next day we met at an early luncheon and again we set out for X. “Remember,” I warned him, “we shall have barely time at the junction to make that other train. I know which track it is on now. We’ll all be ready to jump when this one stops.”

But our train was shunted on to a side track a little way out of Bourges, in order to let some troop trains pass. We were late, and we got into X just in time to see the train for Y—— disappear around a curve.

“See here,” I said to the pale and despairing man, “I do not propose to spend the rest of my life traveling between this wretched junction and the city of Bourges. I have already spent twenty-four hours traveling thirty-five miles. At this rate I might die of old age before I got back to America. You go up-town and find a motor-car, anything that will go, and we’ll finish the journey in that.”

“How can I expect to find a motor-car?” cried the lieutenant. “You know as well as I do that no pleasure automobiles are allowed to run in France, and this hole won’t have any taxi-cabs. Besides a taxi down to Y—— would set us back two or three hundred francs.”

“Never you mind about that,” I retorted. “You do what you are told. You go straight up-town and look for a car.”

We quarreled by this time, like a real married pair, and with quite the air of a defeated husband he departed on his quest. In a short time he came back. Of course, there was no motor-car to be had, he reported, but he had had some luck. A colonel’s limousine had broken down somewhere in the neighborhood and it was being towed down to Y—— by an army truck. He had heavily subsidized the doughboys who were accompanying the truck, and they had agreed to stop on a certain corner long enough for us to surreptitiously get into the limousine.

It was a beautiful car, apparently in pre-war days the property of some woman of fashion. The upholstery was pale French gray and there were all sorts of scent bottles, tablets and flower holders in silver and cut glass. But it was a terribly open limousine, all windows, and the lieutenant and I were conspicuous objects. The old truck that towed us made a lot of noise, and at every village we passed through the people ran to the doors and windows and cheered vociferously with delighted laughter.

The worst was getting into the camp at Y——, but here the bit of luck appeared. It began to rain just before we arrived, and when we rolled in the rain was coming down in such sheets that everybody except the men on guard were under cover. Nobody saw us but the soldiers who examined our passes. So the lieutenant’s military career was saved.

We never met again. The lieutenant, I am sure, hopes we never shall.