CHAPTER XXVI
WHEN THE BOYS COME HOME
Should you happen to be in Paris or in any other French city in the early spring, you will witness an amusing and at the same time an inspiring sight; the carnival of the military class of the year before going into training camps.
France has lived next door to a burglar nation for nearly half a century. Ever since Alsace-Lorraine was stolen from her in 1871, France has known this, and she has therefore retained the system of compulsory military service.
Every year, on the eighteenth of April, all able-bodied young Frenchmen who have reached the age of twenty go up for a two years’ military training. Just before the war the term was lengthened to three years. Their term completed, they are placed in the reserves, ready at any time to be mobilized and fight.
The world well remembers how in late July, 1914, the tocsin sounded all over France, calling from field and factory, counting room and office the glorious citizen army that rushed out against the barbarian invasion, turned it at the Marne, and saved the life of civilization.
I believe that after this war some form of compulsory military service will be enacted in this country. Let us rather call it required military service, since in a democracy such service is agreed upon as a wise policy and is not forced on the people without their consent. The American form might well be something like that of France.
Proof that military service there is not in the least oppressive is the gaiety with which the young cadets greet their term of training. It has long been the custom for the year’s class to make a carnival of its going. Beginning two or three weeks before the date set for their encampment, groups of these lads, fantastically arrayed and decorated, would parade through the streets, singing their favorite choruses, making a great deal of noise between songs, shouting and chaffing the passers-by.
No youth considered himself properly dressed without a huge boutonnière, sometimes of flowers but oftener a paper monstrosity as big as a cabbage. Sometimes a lad appeared with a buttonhole bouquet of vegetables. Anything for a joke. Thus dressed, furnished with a guitar or an accordion, “the bunch,” as our slang would call them, fared forth to have a last good time before going under discipline. For the time being they owned the town, and nobody complained of their noise or their pranks.
I had seen this before the war, but I was unprepared to see the custom retained. Yet this April in Paris, in Bordeaux, and several other cities I saw the same singing groups, the same absurd decorations, the same fun-making. The class of 1918 was younger than the class of 1914, but it was every bit as exuberant. Four years of war and desolation, of sickening anxiety and cruel bereavement, were powerless to depress the spirit of young France.
Early on the morning of April eighteenth I started on a journey from the Orleans station, and there, filling the place with laughter and excited conversation, I saw about a hundred of the class of 1918 leave for their cantonment.
Their mothers and fathers and sweethearts were there seeing them off, just as we have been seeing our boys off to training camps this year. But these French fathers and mothers have suffered bitter losses. Hardly a family in France that has not known bereavement. Most of the women I saw that April morning wore deep mourning.
Even though they wept in their hearts, they sent their boys away with laughter and brave cheer. With bantering words on their lips, their hearts were saying: “O France, loved Mother, take one more of my sons. Like those who have died he was mine only until you needed him more.”
Their train left the station ahead of mine, and until it was far down the line these great fathers and mothers continued to wave and cheer. Then they clasped hands and silently went home.
After four years of war. It made me ashamed of every wavering moment I have allowed myself since we entered this conflict.
This is a time when the women of America must take stock of themselves, when they must consider whether or not they have grown up to the stature of the women overseas; whether they can keep step with the men who have gone over to fight beside the French, English, Belgian and Italian soldiers. For those women of the world war are very great in mind and spirit. Those young Americans are growing fast. They will never be the same again.
We sing about keeping the home fires burning, “Till the boys come home.” But we have got to face one big fact. When the boys come home they will have become men, and men of a totally different type than any to which we have been accustomed. They will be bigger, broader, finer, in body and mind. They will be better educated. They will expect more of their women.
In the first place our men, when they come home, will be such perfect physical specimens that they will be astonished to see women who are flat chested, or fat, sallow skinned or heavy-eyed. They won’t have much patience with indigestion and headaches. That kind of thing goes with slacking over there.
There ought to be a great big, earnest health movement among women in this country during the rest of the war. We see signs of it in the farmerettes, the campers, the women police.
The men in France are learning new things every day. They have traveled. They have had a chance to compare their country with others, their compatriots with other people.
We have been called a nation of boasters. We boasted of our achievements because most of us never had a chance to see anything of the achievements of other nations. These men have.
They know now that French cities are often far more beautiful than American cities. If they lack skyscrapers they have ancient castles and châteaux. What the French build they build beautifully and for the ages.
You never hear any boasting from Americans in France. Our men are learning humility. They know that we do some things well, but they know that we have much to learn from the older civilizations, and they are out to learn.
A young engineer over there told me how when the Americans began to double track the French railways and to build the miles on miles of switches necessary to handle trainloads of supplies for the armies, the French were shocked at the shoddy work done.
“You know how it is with us,” he said. “When we are doing a hurry job in laying rails we drive spikes in every other tie. The French drive them twice in every tie, and they rivet them after they are driven through. We do that now, over here. The French won’t stand for anything else. They say they won’t risk railroad accidents for their troops.”
Our men are getting a wonderful education, not only through their army experience and their faculties of observation, but through the Y. M. C. A. department of lectures and entertainment. At first the idea was simply to entertain the men in their leisure hours, to furnish music and moving pictures and vaudeville. But the men themselves soon called for better things, and the Y. M. C. A. is preparing to give what amounts almost to university extension courses in the camps. Books in unlimited quantities are being shipped overseas by the American Public Library Association. Text-books, reference books for every branch of study.
This spring Anson Phelps Stokes, secretary of Yale University, went to France, and was made head of the committee on education in the Y. M. C. A. in the field. Mr. Stokes made a thorough canvass of the situation, visiting many camps, consulting with army authorities and with the men themselves. He visited the camps and canteens of the English Y. M. C. A. in order to compare their work with ours.
The programme of education was not complete when I left, but I saw a tentative plan which by this time must have been worked into something truly admirable. The men of our army are going to be given a real practical education. Those behind the lines who wish to continue a college or technical course, dropped when the draft law went into effect, will be able to do so. Those whose early education was neglected will have a chance to go back to elementary school.
Men who do not care to take up any serious studies will hear lectures, if they choose, in which they will learn a great deal about French and English history. In the very region, perhaps the very town, where great events of history took place, they will hear the story told. The past will become real. It will help our men to understand the present.
I know that our soldiers are thirsty for this kind of an education. I was asked by the Y. M. C. A. to lecture in some of the camps on what I saw of the Russian revolution. It was with great reluctance that I agreed to try one lecture. It did not seem possible to me that soldiers, tired with the day’s labor, would care to listen to such a subject.
“I will try it once or even twice, if you like,” I told the secretary, “but I’m afraid it won’t get across.”
It did. I spoke something like thirty times, and every time to crowded rooms. I spoke in sheds, tents, theaters, town halls, and even in the open. I never had such audiences. Their eyes were keen and bright and they drank in every word. Afterward they crowded around asking questions.
These men are not going to be interested in women who never read anything but novels and the cheap magazines, who know nothing about geography or history or politics. They will want to talk over their experiences with their mothers and sisters and wives, and if they can not listen intelligently the men are going to be disappointed.
Hundreds of soldiers with whom I talked showed me pictures of their women at home. They said loving things, proud things, but the women they were proudest of were those who were doing some kind of real war service. “My sister Elizabeth is the head of the Red Cross canteen at the union station in my town. They feed hundreds of men every time a troop train goes through.”
“My wife is pretty busy these days, with the children and her surgical dressings classes.”
These are the things the men like to think of their women doing while they are away. They see the women workers in the canteens of the Red Cross and the Y. M. C. A. in France. They see nurses and women ambulance drivers working regardless of weariness, careless of danger. They see all around them unselfish, courageous service. The spirit is in the air over there, and the men like to feel that their women at home are like that, too.
When the boys come home they want to come back to women who have been born again into high and noble patriotism. “Not only hats off to the flag. Sleeves up for the flag.” That slogan, adopted by the men in the steel industries who are speeding up the building of ships, ships, and more ships, is the patriotism our men are living every day in France, and it is the kind they have a right to expect of the women at home.