When the French women learned that the Americans were trying to control the social intercourse of their homes, they deeply resented it. At one time the 92nd Division had issued the following orders:
HEADQUARTERS, 92nd DIVISION,
A. E. F.
Le Mans Area, Mienne, France.
December 26, 1918.
The special duties with which military police are charged are:—
(A) To insure order and proper behavior by enlisted men at all times....
(E) To prevent enlisted men from addressing or holding conversation with the women inhabitants of the town.
(F) To prevent enlisted men from entering any building other than their respective billets with the exception of stores, places of amusement and cafés.
By Command of Brigadier General Erwin.
G. K. Wilson,
Chief of Staff.
Official:
(Signed) Edw. J. Turgeon,
Major, Infantry, U. S. A.
Adjutant.
When this matter came to the attention of the women of the city, the leaders among them formed a committee and waited on the French Mission with the statement that they were mistresses of their own homes and morals, and knew with whom they wished to associate, and did not desire American officers to interfere with their social affairs.
Following is an extract from a letter written by a French girl to a young man who was located in the camp where the writer gave her longest period of service:
LE GUERANDAIS
Allee des Bouleaux, La Baule.
October 21, 1918.
Dear Mister:—
Your kind letter was welcome. I understand them very easily without my dictionary, and I thank you very much for the kind feelings you express me. Be not anxious about my health, I have recovered now.
I was very touched by all the sympathy you have showed me on this occasion, and I was surprised of it, very agreeably. Thank you for your friendship, I am happy to give mine in exchange, because I know now what is your hard condition. I have spoken to white men, and always I have seen the same flash (lightning) in their angry eyes, when I have spoken them of colored men. But I do not fear them for myself; I am afraid of them for you, because they have said me the horrible punishment of colored men in America. As I am a French girl I have answered, “It is not Christian.” I am full of pity for your unhappy condition, more still when I think you are very intelligent, and you have quality of the heart more than many white men....
When a colored man goes in the house of a white girl, the policeman wait for him and kill him when he goes away! I have thought this way to do is savage, and it is why I was pitiful for the colored man. But I see you are not unhappy as I believed, and I am glad of it for you....
I should like to express you how much I am revolted of that I have learned of your condition, and how amused I am to have heard many injurious opinions of white men upon ourselves, French women! I write you in English and I cannot express my feelings as well as in French.
Naturally these “injurious opinions” about the French women were resented, not only by the women themselves, but the Frenchmen as well.
The result of this, and other difficulties, was that two or three months before the American soldiers were out of France, it became generally known that the French people were tired of them and wanted them out of their country. The spirit of dislike became so great that sometimes French people were overheard saying that if the American soldiers had on German uniforms, they could not be told from the Huns! And that if they were to judge from their actions it would seem that they had a desire to treat them in the same manner as they treated the colored Americans.
After the signing of the Armistice there were frequent riotings between the American white soldiers and the French people. On the first Sunday in April, 1919, the city of St. Nazaire was changed from a quiet port city into a tumult of discord, during which a number of people were killed and wounded. It grew out of the fact that a white French woman and a colored Frenchman entered a restaurant frequented by American officers, in order that they might enjoy their lunch together. An insinuating remark concerning the woman was overheard by her brother, who understood English, and immediately resented it. The restaurant was demolished in a free-for-all fight, which grew in proportions until the French people mounted a machine gun in the middle of the public square, to restore order.
In the city of Nantes a colored French soldier was shot by an American Military Policeman, under the guise that he thought that the Frenchman was a colored American deserter disguised in French uniform.
During the writer’s period of service at Brest there were ever-recurring conflicts, and Camp Pontanezen was frequently closed and the soldiers not permitted to enter the city. Some of these were said to have occurred because of insults offered to colored Frenchmen. Rumor had it that these riots always resulted in a number of killed and wounded.
In order to substantiate our statement concerning these conflicts, we wish to quote from Sergeant Alexander Woolcott’s article in the October, 1919, issue of the North American Review:*
“Whatever turn is taken by international politics during the next two years, whatever the official post bellum relation between Washington and the government in France, the degree of understanding and the nature of the sentiment existing between our people and the French is going to be of incalculable importance in shaping the twentieth century. It is going to give the true validity to whatever doctrine our ministers may from time to time endorse.
“That is why it is worth while to look back over the A. E. F., and by so doing, to measure and search for the causes of mutual rancor which developed between the French people and our troops—the rancor which broke out here and there in riots, as at Brest; which made the irritated army of occupation lean over backwards in their affability towards the Rhinelanders; which moved Le Rire to some caustic cartoons at the expense of the A. E. F.; and which poured into our astonished ports a stream of returning doughboys all muttering under their breaths a disparagement of the ‘French Frogs.’5
“Perhaps it would be well first to consider two rather fixed delusions on the subject. For one thing, stay-at-home Americans have, quite pardonably, come to the easy conclusion that all the rancor could be explained by overcharging.... As a matter of fact, the amount of overcharging was slight, astonishingly slight, when one considers that there were more than two million spendthrift Americans in France, far from home, overpaid, irresponsible, and loose in an impoverished country. It is against the nature of the French peasant or shopkeeper to go in all at once for resourceful profiteering, just as it is against his nature to part lightly with a sou on which he has once laid his thrifty hands. Furthermore, both the French government and the American Army were vigilant in the matter, so that the doughboy was not despoiled with half the unscrupulousness that would have been practised among his own people—certainly no more than is the average lot of the expeditionary soldier, anywhere under the sun....
“Then, too, there was the delusion from which the French government suffered—the notion that the whole source of bad feeling was the friction between the French and American staffs. There was such friction, and during the first few weeks of the Armistice the staff officers of the Third Army were on edge with irritation at the neighboring French command....
“I think that if the dislike developed on one side before the other, the first appearance can be traced to a certain disdain for the French which the outspoken Americans were only too wont to display. To the resulting friction a hundred and one things contributed, of which high prices constituted the least—little things, like the French truck driver’s enraging habit of driving dreamily in the middle of the road; big things, like the French street walker’s unprejudiced habits of accepting the Negro’s attentions as affably as a white man’s.”
——
* By permission of North American Review.
It is interesting to note the comment of an English paper upon the mutual rancor which so unfortunately developed, and which must have some bearing upon the future relationship between the French and the American people. The following significant excerpt is from the London Saturday Review of June 28, 1919:*
“No one at this or any other time should write, or even say things likely to create international ill-feeling, but facts will not be ignored. There are indeed certain truths, which, like mushrooms, grow best in the dark. It is not only absurd, it is also in the long run contrary to international good will, to ignore the fact that Americans are not as popular in Paris to-day as they were twelve months ago. There can be surely no harm in discussing publicly what everyone privately knows....
“At the present moment the Americans are regarded by the ordinary Parisian as a barbarian nation, and the prospects of beholding them rejoice on July 4th, possibly on a large scale, already fills him with apprehension and disgust. The nation which a year ago was the most popular nation in Europe, has become in Paris a burden almost too grievous to be borne. The other evening we heard a lady whose profession brings her into rather close contact with the American soldiers and minor diplomatists in Paris, proclaim amid general assent, that the Americans are at the best children and that at the worst they are brutes. We are not subscribing to this opinion, we are merely recording that it was passed. The Americans could not avoid being unpopular in Paris. The mere fact that they came late into the war, and that the importance of their share in the peace negotiations is out of all proportion to their sacrifices, is in any event a difficult matter to discount or obscure....
“Socially the Americans in Paris are in the position of a man staying in the house of a friend, and forced to behave much as though the house were his own. It is even worse than that. We have to consider that the man who thus stays in the house of his friend, and behaves just as though it were his own, has in effect, a mortgage on the house. We are most of us the debtors of America, and France not least of all. The American army in Paris may almost be described as the man in possession, and there is no possibility of avoiding him. It was an unlucky decision to make Paris an American military headquarters. The wild west sprawls in the restaurants, and patrols the grand boulevards. The American army could no more be popular in Paris than the Canadians could be popular in Epsom. When on top of the military invasion of Paris there came an American delegation 1,400 strong, filling the air with principles and viewpoints, and amusing itself loudly and continuously, not the most civilized president in the world could quite cover with his professional mantle the nakedness of his countrymen.
“All of this would be of merely passing interest were it not for the peculiar position which America will occupy for the next thirty years. What is happening in Paris will happen on a large scale in Europe as soon as peace is signed. During the war America has become the creditor of the civilized world. Her chief problem will be how to spend the money she has made. She is so rich that she has begun to be alarmed for her foreign trade, for it is impossible for Dives to trade with Lazarus unless Lazarus can be induced to borrow the necessary capital to set himself up in business. Whatever ultimate arrangements are made it is fairly clear that America will have more money than she knows what to do with, and that Europe will be, to an extent unknown before, an American playground and Europe will hate it to-morrow as Paris hates it to-day.”
——
* By permission of The World’s Work.
For a period of time many of the colored fighting troops were brigaded with the French troops, which brought them into very close contact with the French life. As has been noted in another chapter, four regiments, those that were to have composed the 93rd Division, became a part of French Divisions of Infantry. It is interesting to note that by far the greatest majority of colored soldiers or organizations that were cited or decorated for bravery were these troops, and that the decorations were with few exceptions French and not American. It is also interesting to note that the regiment from Illinois, under command of colored officers, was awarded 30 Croix de Guerre decorations for officers, and 38 for non-commissioned officers and privates, while only 3 officers received the American Distinguished Service Cross, and 19 non-commissioned officers and privates. These colored officers have many happy recollections of the overflowing appreciation of the French people.
Certificates of good behavior secured by these troops show that the towns and villages through which they passed or in which they were billeted found no cause for complaint; that they came in an orderly manner and left in the same way. The same can be said of the thousands of labor troops and engineers who built the roads, unloaded the ships, laid telephone wires, built warehouses, and handled supplies.