A CANTEENER IN FRANCE

Hooray! Vive la belle France! I’m going to France! I’m going to be a canteener! Maybe I shall go right up to the Front just behind the first-line trenches and be under shell fire and be bombed by boche avions and hear the alerte and have to scurry to abris and all that sort of thing. I don’t know any of the details yet—nobody over here does—but anyhow I’m going! That’s the chief thing.

I’m so excited and thrilled I scarcely know what I’m doing, but outwardly I try to keep poised and calm, for mamma has been disappearing at intervals into her handkerchief ever since she gave her consent; and as for papa, he doesn’t say much; in fact, the dear old sport is quieter than ever—but I catch him looking at me, when he thinks I don’t see, in a way that makes me realize I’m the only girl he’s got down here below and that he’d never send me if he had a son to give. Not having a son and being a true-blue American with generations of fighting blood inside of him—for the man who said “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes!” was my father’s great-grandfather—he’s figured it out that the best he can do is to send his girl instead. That’s the ground of his consent. And mamma’s a Daughter of the American Revolution, so that lets her out.

It was pure accident—or fate—which made me run into Edith on the street a week ago to-day and thus start the wheels of destiny.

“Come in and have some tea,” she said after congratulating me on my engagement, which had just been announced, “and tell me all about it—and him. You deep little mouse—to pull this off right under everybody’s nose and keep as secret as the grave! Who is he, anyhow?”

“He’s Major B——, of the Fifty-blank Infantry. He’s just received his majority and he’s just twenty-nine.”

“Major, eh? That’s not so bad.”

“And, oh, Edith, he’s leaving for France sometime this month, and I—I don’t know what to do!”

“What would you like to do?” asked Edie, laughing a little at my blushes.

“I’d like to go over there, too,” I replied without hesitation, staring straight into her deep blue eyes. “It doesn’t seem as if I could stand it—the long, long separation. Irregular letters. And when they go into action, not knowing, not hearing, maybe never hearing. Never. Just the silence!”

“You’re in the same fix as a million other American women right now,” replied Edith grimly. “And you’ve got to stand it. That’s our job.”

“I know,” I said heavily. “But it doesn’t make your own toothache any better to know that there’s an epidemic of toothache raging over the whole civilized world.”

Edith sat looking at me with a smile deep down in her eyes. She has been married three years, the first of our class; and now she looks at the entire outside world with that same air of tender smiling abstraction.

“It’s all part of the game,” she said finally. “And we women must keep the flag flying. Jack”—Jack’s her husband—“is going over next month. He doesn’t have to, of course, being over the age limit. But he foresaw this two years ago, and went and prepared himself at Plattsburg. He wouldn’t volunteer then on account of me and baby. But now the call has come it finds him ready. He feels the whole situation deeply. I’m glad.”

“Oh, Edie, you—brick!” I breathed, squeezing her hand hard. I thought of her left alone with her child—and not any too much money either.

“Edie’s all right,” she murmured unsteadily, her blue eyes bright as diamonds. “Don’t you fuss about her! But now about you—I have an idea. What can you do? Practically, I mean.”

“I’ve had a six-months’ course in the hospital——”

“They don’t take anything but graduate nurses now.”

“——and I’ve had two years of domestic science and food values. Then last summer I operated a cafeteria in the suburbs for the Women’s League—did all the buying and accounts myself. It was fun. In college I was head of the basket-ball team and the tramping club, and I’ve never been sick a day in my life.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“A bit young. However,” said Edith briskly, rising, “I’ll see what I can do. There’s just a bare chance—but I’m not going to tell you beforehand, for fear we burst the bubble. Run home now. Stick round the telephone. There may be a long-distance call. Put a few things into a bag while you’re waiting. Do you think you could go on to New York to-night?”

I suppose my eyes must have been as big round as saucers with excitement, for suddenly Edith bent right over and dropped a kiss on my cheek. “You darned little kid!” she whispered. “I know exactly how you feel. Now trot!”

I trotted—walking on air.

For the next two hours I hung round the landing where the telephone is, and finally settled down on the top stair.

“For goodness’ sake, child!” cried mamma, stumbling over me as she came out of the sitting-room, “what on earth are you doing here, all bunched up in the dark?”

“I—I’m——”

Just then the telephone rang. I sprang to the receiver.

“Oh, I see!” said mamma, laughing as she went downstairs.

But she didn’t.

Central got the long-distance line cleared and then over the wire there came a woman’s clear, crisp, businesslike voice: “I wish to speak to Miss Carlotta Murray.”

“This is she.”

“Miss Murray, could you sail for France a week from Saturday?”

My heart gave a sort of big thrilly jerk and I had a sudden shock as if my nerves had got short-circuited.

“Ye-yes!” I gulped faintly.

“What? Speak louder.”

“Yes!” I shouted into the mouthpiece, holding on to the wall for support. “Dee-lighted!”

“Very well. Be at our office at eleven to-morrow morning. You’d better come prepared to go straight on to Washington to arrange about your passes. Good-b——”

“Wait!” I cried excitedly. “Who is it speaking? I don’t know who you are.”

“Red Cross Headquarters. New York office. Good-by.”

She hung up and left me gasping in the darkness on the stair. Well, I was in deep over my head now; and so I found mamma and put it straight up to her: Would she give her consent if papa did? At first she refused up and down, but by six o’clock I had her coaxed round to the point where she was packing my suitcase and making up lists of things I’d need in France—woolen underwear and galoshes and sweaters and first-aid outfits and what nots. And all the time we didn’t either of us know what I was going to do when I got over there any more than the man in the moon. The call had tumbled right out of a clear sky. But once I’d got mamma to see the situation as it really was, outside her motherhood so to speak, she was as keen as mustard for it.

We had dinner upstairs in my room. Delia served it on a tray. And when she heard I was sailing for France she just said, “Oh, my Gawd! Submarines!” and dropped the tray and burst into tears. You’d have thought the submarines were right under my bed. At that mamma broke down altogether and Delia embraced her—Delia’s been with us ever since I was born—and there followed a hectic half hour. I was beginning to think Delia had spilled the beans for me with her “Oh, my Gawd!” when all of a sudden mamma glanced at the clock, pulled herself together and exclaimed sharply:

“Good gracious, child, get into your clothes—quick! Do you want to miss that train? Delia, run down and phone for a taxi.”

Delia went, still dribbling tears and tomato bisque. Then mamma rushed off a telegram to Uncle Jim to meet me in New York, rushed me into my things, rushed me down to the station, through the gate, onto the train, gave me a swift breathless hug and departed. That’s the way she is, all tears one second and a regular little whiz-bang field marshal the next. But it was some evening!

The next morning in New York Uncle Jim and I breakfasted at the Belmont, after which I walked over to Red Cross Headquarters, had an interview, and took the train to Washington. I had already wired papa, who was down there on business, to meet me, and told him to watch out for a life-size jolt. When I stepped off the train, there he was, leaning against a pillar and looking, as the novelists say, singularly handsome and debonair.

“Hello, Miss Murray!” he said, taking my bag away from the porter. “Now come on with your jolt.”

“Vive la France!” I said by way of commencement.

“Ha! So that’s the bill of fare? With all my heart. May she vive forever. But what’s that got to do with the price of winter umbrellas?”

“The Rochambeau sails a week from to-morrow.”

“Well,” said papa, still bluffing away, though I could see from the way he started that I had landed him one right over the heart, “I haven’t any stock in her. The submarines may go as far as they like.”

“They want me to sail on her—as a canteener.”

“As a whatter?” demanded papa.

“A canteener. A person that works in a canteen. You know—serves hot drinks and food and all to the soldiers.”

“Who wants you to go?” he growled in his crossest cross-examining-witness manner.

“President Wilson. God. American Red Cross. Mamma. Delia. Me.”

“Pretty good references,” observed papa dryly. “Especially Delia. But not worth a single red cent in the present instance—unless indorsed by me. Now let’s get down to brass tacks. What is this all about?”

That’s the way papa always talks with me, straight from the shoulder, just as if I were his law partner and we were threshing out a case. And so I told him. I told him how the high commissioner for Europe of the American Red Cross had cabled to Washington for women to be sent immediately to France to work in canteens; how Washington had telegraphed to New York to collect a group of workers without delay; how New York had telegraphed to Boston for names of suitable persons with training along that line; how Edith, the president of her Red Cross chapter, had been called into council—and how that led to me.

“It’s the finger of destiny, papa,” I wound up; “and it’s pointed straight at me—like the man in the ad. There’s just one hitch.”

“Only one?” observed papa with his grim little half smile.

“The cable says women over thirty.”

“Well,” chuckled papa, “I guess that lets you out—for about six years anyhow. And by that time the war will be over. Though Bairnsfeather says that the first seven years will be the worst, and after that every fourteenth year.”

“I’m within the draft limit,” I protested. “And if they take infants of twenty-one to be soldiers I don’t see why a college graduate of twenty-four, captain of the basket-ball team and with a record in Greek, hasn’t enough gumption to stand behind a counter and deal out sandwiches and coffee. It makes me sick!”

“Well, all that’s a minor matter,” said papa. “It’s fitness, not age or lack of it, that counts. But let’s waive that for the moment and get down to the kernel of this proposition. Why are you interested in this thing? Why do you want to go—or think that you want to go? Now don’t hand out any cheap sentimentality. Don’t insult the cause by any tawdry emotionalism. Come clean. What are your reasons?”

Followed a conference—or moral examination, rather—which lasted for over four hours, straight through dinner, up to eleven o’clock; and still we sat on at table, papa smoking one cigar after another, until the big hotel dining-room was deserted and the lights went out. There was no question from the first of a downright refusal. He simply talked to me, eye to eye and man to man. He spoke as if I were his son, a soldier, going off to war, and he charted the cardinal points of conduct. He saw the thing big from the start, and I loved him for it. Then we talked about life and love and marriage, the rights of men and nations, and how this war was going to temper and fuse America like steel that’s been through fire; we talked about personal responsibility, the Red Cross, and he showed how any human institution rested straight back on the individual, so that if I fell down on my job the whole organization would feel the shock. He didn’t give me a whole decalogue of “Don’ts” to guide me over there, but he did give me three big “Do’s.” Here they are:

Number One: Get round your own job and leave it to the other fellow to get round his.

Number Two: Keep alive and lovable. Women, he said, are a little more apt than men to go to seed.

Number Three: Keep your sense of humor.

Altogether, it was the best talk I’ve ever had on earth, and when it was done he kissed me; and then we sailed out arm in arm for some ice-cream soda at the corner drug store, and I treated him and he treated me—our immemorial custom.

It was all settled the next morning that I was to go to war. They didn’t even query my age!

That morning, after breakfast, papa said, “Guess I’ll just walk over with you to that shebang of yours, in case you need identification.”

“No, you don’t!” I said. “I’m going to get this on my own credentials—my cafeteria credentials!—and not because I’m the daughter of Judge Murray, alias Old Silver Tongue. ‘Get round your own job and leave it to the other fellow to get round his.’ Axiom One.”

Papa grinned. “Strike one—right over the plate. All right. Let me hear what the jury decides.” And we went our separate ways.

At the office in the Women’s Bureau it took less than ten minutes to get through the red tape and settle my future, as follows: I’m to be a canteen worker. I pay all my own expenses. And I literally do pay them, with my cafeteria money and a check I received for writing a movie. I’ve signed on for six months, during which time I can’t marry an American army officer—without losing my job and getting sent home to America. Wow! For further orders report to Number Four, Place de la Concorde, Paris, France, seat of a world war for civilization. Think of it, oh, my soul! Well, sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, the Murray family gives its heart and its hand to this vote!

The last week has been one mad, wild, excited scramble—with canteen uniforms, French lessons, gum boots, telephones, typhoid and paratyphoid injections, girls dropping in to say good-by, mamma dismal as a corbie crow weeping off in odd corners, and papa humming mournfully: “‘I didn’t raise my kidlet to be a soldierette.’”

On Tuesday night I said good-by to Robert. We dined together downtown and then Bob said, “Let’s go round to Lucille’s and dance.”

And so we did. But I just couldn’t seem to put any spirit into it.

“Do you realize, Bob,” I said, “that this is our last dance together?”

I suppose my voice sounded rather wabbly, for Robert gave me a sharp look and said, “Not on your life! Where did you get hold of that notion? Are you going to throw up the sponge?”

And then I remembered that my case was exactly that of a million other women scattered all over the land, who were still keeping the flag flying, as Edith had said; and so I bucked up and we finished up with a very good time.

On Shipboard, November 12th.

I begged papa and mamma not to come down to New York to see me off, but of course they would. However, it turned out all right. Papa blew us to a two-course dinner without wine downstairs in a famous grill frequented by successful actors and artists and writers, after which he packed us off to a musical comedy and kept up a light artillery of jokes all through the evening, and we both laughed so hard that mamma finally lost patience and declared we were a perfect scandal. There was just one awful moment at the last. That was on the boat when papa gave me a big still hug and then held his cheek close to mine the way he’s done ever since I was a baby.

“Papa,” I whispered fiercely into his ear, “if you make me cry now I’ll kill you!”

“Shucks, honey!” he murmured back. “If Miss Rankin can cry in Congress I guess a green little soldierette can shed a few tears when bidding a fond farewell to native land and mother, without grave dishonor. Still, I don’t want to cramp your style. Cable us when you land. Be a good girl—but not goody. And now, so long, dear. God bless us all together!”

And still smiling and steady he shook hands with me just as if I were his son, and then marched mamma, sobbing audibly, gently off by the arm. I went downstairs to my cabin.

No danger of my being sick. My bunk mate is! I hardly know how to describe my feelings after we had really started and there was time to look about—it all seemed so sort of natural and matter-of-fact, and France still merely a small pink dab on the map. It wasn’t a bit startling to be out of sight of land and hear people discussing submarines and lifeboats, but it was a horrible sensation to have the boat plunge down and leave your stomach in midair. A gorgeous sunset to-night, but it’s rough and going to be rougher, I fear. I walked about some, and then decided discretion was the better part of valor and retired to my deck chair.

November 15th.

Three awful days in my cabin, too sick to stir. But to-day it’s smooth and the air is marvelous. After a fine salt bath I came up and pranced about the deck; and there were lots of nice people to prance with—naval officers, Belgian generals, French permissionnaires, and any number of Y.M.C.A.-ers and Red Cross men. Played shuffleboard; tried the dining-room for ten minutes, and then decided to have all my meals on deck in order to watch for the submarines.

November 24th.

Land is in sight—a long low ribbon of mist away on the starboard. That’s France! It still doesn’t seem reasonable. The trip has been nothing at all. Evenings we would sit out on deck. It was weird with never a light, even cigarettes forbidden; inky blackness on deck, and stumbling and pitching into someone at every step. It was awesome from the stern to see two big black funnels silhouetted against the starry sky, the phosphorescence of the water rivaling the splendor of the heavens; and to realize that all the time this huge mechanical monster beneath our feet was plowing steadily, silently forward, carrying seven hundred human lives across three thousand miles of water.

Paris, November 26th.

Paris at last, beautiful, soft, gray, in a blur of rain. I reported at Number Four, Place de la Concorde, heard a speech by the commissioner, and was assigned right away. It’s just exactly what I wanted and didn’t dare to dream I’d get! I’m to work in a canteen in one of the biggest aviation camps in France. With our own American men! We’ll live in barracks, get up at reveille, five-thirty a.m., and—— But I’m somewhat hazy as to our duties. Time will reveal. After the conference I met Lucile B——, a Bryn Mawr girl, and found she’s to canteen with me at the same barracks. We embraced and nearly fell downstairs in our excitement. Lucile has moved her things over to my hotel so we can chum together.

November 27th.

Slept—off and on—and had a breakfast in bed, after the luxurious Continental fashion,—wouldn’t Delia sniff?—and then I read Baedeker’s Paris aloud while Lucile unpacked. We lunched and did accounts and then walked over to Red Cross Headquarters. After reporting there we got our provisional cards of identity and went down to a shop on the boulevard and ordered bracelets of identity. Had my hair washed by a poilu on permission and tried out my Boston French on him. He understood me better than I did him! Later Lucile and I taxied over to Napoleon’s tomb, saw the German airplanes in the court of the Invalides, and then went on to Notre Dame. It is wonderful inside, so high and spacious and old and gray, with a scented misty twilight air as though dimmed by many prayers. I made two prayers myself—one personal, and the other impersonal for our army, and I only hope they come true.

November 28th.

While waiting to be sent to camp I delved into the subject of canteens in general. And I found that the old canteen idea is as different from the new canteen idea as day is from night. A canteen before this war meant simply a place where a soldier could buy a drink and perhaps procure notions, buttons and needles and thread. But that old idea has expanded and developed until now it really comprises a whole welfare center, a regular community plant for dispensing food and comfort and good cheer. There are restaurants, writing rooms, infirmaries, sleeping quarters, pianos, phonographs, entertainments—everything you can possibly think of to keep a collection of men far from home happy and sane and sound. Of course not all these canteens are alike, for each one caters to some particular need and thus develops along a particular line. Its location determines its special bent.

There are, I was told at headquarters, several types of canteen.

Number One: These are the metropolitan canteens of Paris, situated at the big railway stations—the Gare du Nord, the Gare de l’Est and the Gare Saint Lazare—which catch all the troops coming into or leaving the city.

Number Two: These are the canteens of the Grande Ceinture, at little stations on the environs of Paris, where innumerable troop trains pass through daily, carrying thousands of soldiers from England, Italy, America, Saloniki, Portugal, Africa. These troops never even enter Paris, but are shifted on the outskirts of the city.

Number Three: Canteens in the French war zone behind the actual fighting lines in the big transportation centers.

Number Four: Canteens right on the French Front, in dugouts and abris. In these canteens there are no women helpers.

Number Five: Canteens in the American training camps, behind the war zone. That’s the kind I’m assigned to. It’s the biggest American aviation center in France.

Number Six: Canteens for American soldiers dotted along the lines of communication from the coast ports to the final training centers. All these canteens are under the control of the American Red Cross.

December 1st.

In barracks! Yesterday was my first day. I got up in the dark at bugle call, five-thirty A.M., and dressed in the cold—our stoves are not up yet and I don’t know who’s going to start the fires when they are!—had some hot coffee and went over to serve behind the counter, serving coffee, chocolate and sandwiches. A long queue of soldiers stood in line straight through the morning, and, work as hard as I could, the line constantly augmented. Some wanted to linger and chat. It was good, they said, to see a real live American girl who could talk God’s language, and not that scrambled-egg affair the Frenchies handed out. One confided he’d not seen a genuine honest-to-goodness girl for four months; since he’d left home, and added that he liked ’em on the American plan better than on the European plan. I couldn’t do much more than smile in answer, for the orders flew thick and fast.

By noon the place was so crowded you couldn’t see for the forest of campaign hats. A babel of voices; a rattle of dishes; the phonograph going; the piano banging; a bunch of enlisted men trying out Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory; canteeners running back and forth with meals for the officers, whose tables were in behind the counter; rain trickling down my neck from an overhead leak; sleet and windy rain shaking the windowpanes; sneezes and coughs mingling with shouts of laughter; and always the far door opening to let in the storm and still more and more men, till they were packed like sardines in rows—these are my impressions of that first noon hour.

Suddenly: “Otto, Sie haben etwas vergessen!” I heard a low guttural voice speaking close behind my ear.

“Ja, ich weiss,” replied another.

I whirled, visions of spies, explosions and poisoned soup rushing wildly through my brain.

“What’s this?” I cried. “German? In an American aviation camp? What are you two doing here?”

They stared at me stupidly. One held a mop and the other held a broom. Of course they were spies!

“You are Germans—Deutsch?” I challenged again, sure that I had uncovered a regular Guy Fawkes plot.

“Ja,” admitted the one called Otto, and jerked a thick dirty thumb toward his working blouse, on the chest of which was inscribed in big black letters “P G” with a slim little “i” between, so that it read “PiG.”

“Pig!” I said wonderingly.

A soldier across the counter came to my aid. “Prisoners of war,” he explained briefly. “P. G. stands for prisonnier de la guerre. Some joker slipped the middle “i” over onto him. And it’s not so far wrong at that! Look at the beggars’ fat jowls. They help round the camp, unloading trucks, scrubbing up the barracks, and so on. For obvious reasons they’re not allowed in the kitchens. They have their own quarters behind barbed-wire entanglements—but you just bet they don’t try very hard to get away. This is better than machine-gun fire.”

“Are they good workers?”

“Not so you’d notice—but they make up by being fine eaters. You should see them tuck away the grub that Uncle Sam sends three thousand miles across the sea to feed his Allies. I reckon they figure that the more they eat the less there’ll be for the enemy, and there’s more than one way of killing a cat. The French are too easy on them, and that’s the fact.”

In the afternoon things went easier for a while. As it was still raining we had mess in the canteen and then sat and made up jam sandwiches. Along about five another tremendous rush began. I was put on the marmites. These are big urns of coffee which are constantly filled and refilled from the boiling-hot vats on the stove. It is heavy, dirty, back-breaking work, and inside of an hour my clean blue blouse and spotless collar looked as though I had slid down a chimney. And my hands—was I ever proud of these red, chapped, grubby-nailed horrors? Nota bene: If you love to be dainty, don’t be a canteen maid.

At nine-thirty P.M. we closed, and I was so dead tired that I tumbled into bed and unlaced my boots by the feel. The first shift is from seven A.M. until four P.M., and the second from noon to nine-thirty P.M. But some of the workers are down with severe colds, their substitutes have not yet arrived, and that means double duty for the rest. From five in the morning until nine at night is some day’s job, believe me! You have to be hardened before you can stand the pace. A delicate girl would crumple up inside of a week. Of course when we get organized and a system blocked out things will move more smoothly. At present we’re a brand-new plant.

December 5th.

Superb aviation weather! For the past week it’s been blowing, hailing, raining, snowing, thawing, and then beginning all over again da capo with unabated zeal, like a child with only one tune. Water overhead and slush underfoot. Colds, pneumonia, tonsillitis, dipththeria, grippe—these are the enemies our soldiers have to face and conquer or be conquered by, every single day. And yet, despite the hostile weather, the men go up for practice just the same. And thus far only one death.

Our stoves are up. The P. G.’s have put them in every room. No more rising in the dark in freezing temperature and washing in the water from your hot-water bottle. And we’ve appointed a fireman to build the fires. We’re to take the job week about. As there’s no water laid on in our barracks yet, we’ve had also to appoint a water bearer to keep the jugs filled and on the fire. Each morning the P. G.’s swab down the green linoleum floors of our quarters fresh and clean—and inside an hour they are caked with real estate. Entire town lots come away with our boots.

This morning when I went over to the canteen the cook had not shown up. And in front a long line of waiting doughboys stood, beating a hungry tattoo on the counter. What to do? Of course we could have turned them out while we rounded up another cook, but that’s not what we’re here for. “Get round your job,” said Axiom One, and feeding these men was it. So I went into the kitchen. A soldier volunteered his aid. And all through the morning hours we two worked like firemen at a ten-story fire. Bacon and eggs, repas complet; we cooked and cooked and cooked.

In the afternoon as a change I was assigned to go on a camion to the neighboring farms and collect butter, eggs, vegetables and fruit. It was lowering when we set forth, with a raw chill wind that blew every way at once, and presently the air turned black and the water came down like a waterspout out of the sky. Nevertheless we completed our circuit. It was twilight when we returned. I went into the canteen kitchen.

“Well, he’s been and gone!” a chorus of voices cried.

“Who?” I inquired, catching my breath. They tossed me a card and a note.

It was Bob! He had got a day’s leave unexpectedly and he spent four hours of it coming down to see me, found me gone, and spent another four getting back again. He’d sent a wire last night, but of course it hadn’t reached me. I suppose it will arrive the morning after eternity and rout me out of bed!

I went back to quarters feeling pretty blue. There were little zigzags of fiery pain running up and down my neck from bending so long over the stove; my skirts were sopping; and my feet in their heavy boots with their excess acreage of mud were so heavy I could scarcely drag them after me. I opened the door upon a cozy scene. Lucile was making tea. She had lifted the lid of the small fat-bellied stove in the center of the room, and with a long fork she was toasting the nubbins of war bread down over the live coals. Somebody strange was sitting in our one easy-chair.

“Come in,” cried Lucile, “and shut that door! Here’s a lady from ‘The Saturday Evening Post’; she’s come down to look at the animals in the zoo.”

“Well, what do you think of us?” I asked.

“I think,” she replied, looking first at Lucile bending over the stove, then round at the bare board walls hung thick with mackintoshes and storm skirts, at the shelves containing each girl’s toilet articles, at the cots ranged along the sides covered with dark army blankets, at the trunks standing everywhere, at a leak in the roof from which the rain was decanting with a steady tap-tap onto my pillow, and finally back at Lucile again—“I think it’s a cross between a girls’ boarding house, an East Side tenement and a Western mining shack. And I think you girls are ripping to rough it like this!”

“Pooh!” said Lucile, taking up her banjo and beginning to strum. “We love the hardships. Of course a weakling couldn’t stand the racket. You have to be sound through and through, or sooner or later it gets you. In a month or so, though, we’re going to have enlarged quarters, and then two girls will have a cubby-hole to themselves and we’ll be rid of all this clutter. Also we’re going to start an officers’ club where we serve hot meals to the aviators; in the same building will be recreation rooms, and just outside a garden and a tennis court. Then we’ll be grand luxe! As yet we’re still in the making, like creation on the fourth day.”

“How do you keep clean?” the visitor wanted to know.

“You don’t,” I said grimly. “Look! But since Lucile has bought a rubber bathtub we manage a bath once in a while.”

“She thinks our boots are funny,” said Lucile.

“She wouldn’t think they were quite so funny if she had had to oil them and keep them clean. You should have seen mine the other day when I slipped and fell in front of the post-office. I thought the whole camp and the hangars and the flying field were coming right along with me like the top of a layer cake. I give you my word, for a second I was afraid to move my feet for fear I’d lift the town.”

The lady rose to go. Lucile went over to her trunk and got her diary, which the lady had asked to see. After some debate I gave her mine, too. I only hope she uses discretion!

December 11th.

Dazzling sunshiny weather. I counted seventeen planes up. Got back my diary. The lady said she read it in bed and whooped so over some of the passages that we could have heard her clear out to camp, it was the parts where I told what I thought about men. She swore, though, she wouldn’t use them; and I hope she keeps her word! Worked at the marmites in the forenoon and behind the counter in the afternoon. Right in the middle of the rush, when I was pushing hot chocolate and sandwiches across the counter as fast as my two hands could fly, I suddenly heard a voice say: “One coffee, please—and step lively!”

It was Robert! I was so busy that there was no time then for more than a handshake. After Robert had squeezed my hand he turned it over in his palm and stared steadily down at it, all chapped and rough and red. I cut my thumb yesterday, and the bandage was ragged and coffee-stained. Altogether, not a hand that you’d enter at a beauty show. But Bob only said “Bully little flapper!” and couldn’t seem to let go of it. Then for an hour he helped me. He’d got another leave, he said, and thought he’d try my camp again.

At four I went off duty and the directrice lent us her sitting-room, where we had tea together and—well, sort of caught up on arrears. Afterward we strolled about the camp in the early twilight and came by the post-office for the mail. Robert and I stood off at one side and watched the soldiers hurrying from all directions like ants converging upon that one radiant doorway of warm streaming light. The board walks resounded to their footsteps. On and on they came, some on the dead run. It was weird to see those figures suddenly evolve out of the gloom.

“And that’s not all,” said Robert. “This one camp with its thousands of men is the epitome of scores of other camps over here, where at this twilight hour exactly the same performance is taking place—thousands on thousands of lonesome soldiers hastening, with eagerness in their hearts, to get that word from home. That’s one end of the line. At the other end are the girls and wives and mothers at home writing those letters with cheerfulness and faith—thousands of Susie Smiths and Mamie Joneses! A Whitman could make a fine poem out of that, naming every girl and her town. And between those two ends so far apart is the big invisible rope of love. They talk about the necessity of guns and effectives, but, by George, if they lived in one of these god-forsaken little villages behind the Front they’d realize that it’s the guns plus the letters of the Susie Smiths and Mamie Joneses which are going to win this war!”

December 20th.

Robert left that same night, and ever since I’ve been laid up with tonsillitis—the first time I’ve been ill in my life. It was a splendid opportunity to think—only there wasn’t anything to think about. That’s the bother with this war—it kills thought. But I kept the fires up and the big jugs heating for the baths, and cleaned the girls’ boots, and talked with the P. G.’s, and indexed our new library, and counted the flies on the wall, and made the tea every afternoon. Nevertheless I could feel my brain begin to disintegrate with idleness. That’s the worst trouble with the soldiers in the trenches—nothing to do. It gives them the cafards, the black butterflies, the blue devils, the jimjams, the hump.

Christmas Day.

Raining again, slowly but surely. However, I’m on my job again—in waders; and with three pairs of heavy woolen stockings underneath. These frame buildings just can’t help but leak, and they always want to leak wherever the back of your neck is. To-day we gave out Red Cross Christmas boxes to all the soldiers and cadets and officers. You should have seen the rush! Men who at home were used to receiving from their fathers a six-cylinder car as a gift and then remarking casually “Oh, thanks awf’lly, old chap!” came crowding up for those boxes, as eager as kids for tin horns. And there was no put-on about it. They wanted their Christmas presents!

After a full day we had mess—turkey!—with some of the officers, and then half a dozen of us went over to the Y. M. C. A. hut to see the movies. We sat in the front row—six women among five hundred men. These evening entertainments are a great boon. And the shows are so well attended that they have to give two performances each night. Later we danced, overshoes and all. After that we tramped over to the barracks of the P. G.’s to see their Christmas tree. Altogether it was a strange Christmas. Where shall we be this time next year? All those solid husky youngsters who filled the hall with their jolly laughter? All these slim young aviators with their budding mustaches and their straight, keen, fearless eyes? What has 1918 in store for us?

December 31st.

I’ve been transferred! There was a call for more workers at a certain canteen, and so some of us were shifted round. Now I am at X——, which is a canteen on the environs of Paris, of Number Two Type. Here thousands of troops pass through each day from all parts of France, carrying the Allied man power for redistribution upon every Front. Occasionally soldiers lie over a few hours while new trains are being made up, but usually they go straight through, with a ten-minutes’ stop for food. Sometimes the men have traveled from thirty-six to forty-eight hours without a bite to eat. Thus our chief work is upon the platforms or quais, distributing hot coffee, chocolate and sandwiches. The heavy rushes come between six and eight in the morning, at noon, and once more at dusk. Often there will be trains on two tracks at the same time, one full of grim, silent troops bound for the Front, the other filled with jolly permissionnaires going home on leave. There is a sharp contrast of mood between those two trainloads of Frenchmen, so close together upon those narrow parallel tracks. The incoming ones face home and a brief spell of happiness; the outgoing ones face—another year! And the unending weariness of it, the bitter black nostalgia, is to be read in those black eyes straining out at you from the windows.

This is to-day’s record—my first day here: I rose and was on the quai by six-thirty. It was dark, and the cold was appalling. It had been snowing, and a high wind slapped icy particles against my cheek. The pavement of the quai, where it was not covered with snow, was caked with dirty, slippery ice so that one had to step gingerly for fear of accident. My feet were freezing, despite the customary three pairs of stockings and heavy boots.

“You’ll have to get some clogs,” said a white-haired American worker beside me. “Look!” She lifted her skirts and I beheld thick wooden-soled boots—sabots with leather tops. “Sweet, aren’t they? But better than frozen feet!”

The train was late. The marmites of boiling hot coffee stood waiting by the track, each with its padded flannel jumper to keep the contents hot. The basket of ham sandwiches, apples and Camembert cheese were covered with oilcloth as protection from the wet. The workers, some Americans, some French, in blue blouses and veils, swathed to the eyes in their mantles, huddled in the sheltered lee of the station and stamped their feet and swung their arms to keep warm. Those drafty quais in the raw dawns are the native heath of pneumonia microbes.

Suddenly the captain of the gare blew his whistle.

“Here she comes!” cried the white-haired American, and seized her coffee cart and started down the track. The rest of us followed with sandwiches. The long train slowed to a halt. Snow piled high upon the roofs of the cars; snow upon the steps and vestibules; icicles dripping from the eaves—and nobody descended! Not a move or a stir. It looked like a specter train.

“Café! Café, messieurs! Descendez, messieurs! You have ten minutes!”

It was the gay voice of a little French canteener as she ran from car to car, tapping on the windowpanes. And then—bang! Some of the windows were let down, heads began to poke out, and tin cups stained with pinard appeared at the end of arms.

“No, no, messieurs. Descend if you please. You have time. And we can’t wait on you all up there. Ah, you little monster”—this to a big giant who suddenly loomed above—“come down from that window. The coffee is good and hot!”

That cheerful, laughing voice, so absolutely French in its intonations, roused the silent train. And then they came pouring out like a cloudburst and almost mobbed the coffee machine. Hundreds of hands and cups were under the faucet at once.

“Dix centimes, messieurs! Dix centimes, n’est-ce pas?”

The little mademoiselle shook her tin cup, and the sous rattled into it—but still the men did not speak. They drank their beloved scalding hot beverage in silence. The snow fell steadily, tipping their mustaches, the visors of their kepis, the edges of their coats—with a powder of white, like silhouettes. And still they uttered no word! Remember, it is the day before New Year’s—a day dear to every Frenchman’s heart—and these men were returning to the Front. The whistle blew.

“En voiture!”

The circle of hands about the coffee machine melted as if by magic. The train sucked them in. And still not a single word had been spoken! I turned, that strange grim muteness of a voluble warm-hearted race sinking into my heart. I turned, and the spell was broken. I heard a young French voice. It was a soldier, who at the risk of losing his train had lingered to thank the white-haired canteener for filling his coffee cup. She was down on her knees in the snow, decanting the last drop of precious liquid from the machine. Her white hair was powdered still whiter with shining crystals. Her face streamed with perspiration and was rosy from exertion.

“Ah, madame,” said the soldier, “it is the sympathy and courage of women like you that give us strength to go on with this dirty war!”

She did not understand a word of his rapid lingo, but she patted his arm and smiled. Each comprehended the other! The next instant the train was a rushing shadow on the blinding white landscape.

And then before we could draw breath or refill our marmites another train was upon us. This time it was permissionnaires returning home. They hopped out like joyous schoolboys, with a fusillade of teasing banter.

“Aha! ’Tis the pretty little Americans! Say! You are all right, you know, you Americans!”

“I have an American marraine. Will you be my marraine, mademoiselle? You don’t know how nice I am! Not ‘naughty boy’!”

“Look! Ham sandwiches! My God, we’re in Paradise!”

They bought out the apple basket and had apple fights. And while we were rushing the growlers cross-tracks for more coffee they marched up and down arm in arm and chanted in our honor a trench ditty about a new relative they’ve acquired. The chorus, loosely translated, runs like this:

And when at length the train pulled out, heads were thrust from the windows, cups and kepis were waved, and a rousing “Vive l’Amérique!” floated back to us. For these men were going home.

January 4, 1918.

Aside from the work on the quais we also run a canteen in behind the station, where we serve meals to the men obliged to wait for their trains. In addition next month we intend to start a buffet counter right on the tracks, where the hungry soldier passing through with only ten minutes at his command may obtain a solid meal of soup, meat, vegetables and coffee. The benefit of this kind of service to troops traveling, sometimes in open cattle cars, a day and a night without food, can never be estimated.

In our canteen we feed all the sons of earth—even German prisoners. Yesterday was our banner day. We began with some English from the Royal Flying Corps. Then followed in rapid succession Alpins Chasseurs; a company of Arabs, whose French officer had a tiny baton with which he waved them in and out and set them down to table like children in a row; Senegalese; Annamites; American negroes; Canadians; Hindus; Chinese; Portuguese; and train upon train of French and American troops. We were so rushed in the cluttered and cramped little kitchen that we had to establish a sort of bucket brigade to pass the food forward to the men.

Our cook, a mountain of jelly, is almost the ugliest woman in France; and her husband, a cross-eyed, bandy-legged little ogre, is certainly the ugliest man. And yet each considers the other a perfect paragon of beauty. Léonie brags about her handsome mari; and André chants the praises of his exquisite “petit ange,” and they nod and smile and coo endearing compliments to each other among the pots and pans. By profession André is a sexton, and it is only in his off hours, when he is not sweeping the church or burying the dead, that he consents to grace our kitchen with his Apollolike form.

Besides serving food, a canteen of this description is a sort of emergency bureau where almost anything may turn up. Buttons are sewn on, wounds bandaged, cough medicine administered, letters written home, and general physical and moral good cheer kept on tap day and night. After the great Italian débâcle, when thousands of French troops were being rushed down, our canteeners worked twenty-four hours at a stretch upon these icy quais. The emergency came in a minute, and they had to handle it in a minute. And the food they served was all the food those famished troops received. No time to halt and feed hungry mouths, with the Prussians battering down the gates of Italy! At another canteen, farther south, a trainload of French wounded came through from Italy. And the canteeners flew aboard with food, bandages and first-aid appliances, and in the brief time allotted transformed those starving, untended sufferers.

The other day a bunch of Montana cow punchers tramped into the canteen, and when the leader—a loose, lank, lean giant of seven feet nothing—saw the American flag he took off his hat and said, “Thank Gawd, boys, we’re found—at last. We’re home.”

It turned out that in the shift of trains they had somehow got separated from their detachment, and for over two days they had wandered about the frozen little town, without a word of French, without money—for they had not yet received their pay—and consequently without lodging or food.

“But why on earth don’t you ask for something to eat?” I exclaimed. “You’re nothing but great big sillies!”

The leader drew himself up proudly. “I reckon we warn’t going to let none of them fly Frenchies get onto our little private plight and give us the merry ha-ha—was we, boys?”

“Not by a dern sight!” agreed the strayed mavericks stoutly.

We fitted them out with food, postals, an English-French dictionary, some French money with written instructions as to its value, and steered them on their way.

Yesterday I had an experience of still another sort. It was in the middle of a bleak afternoon, and the canteen was empty. I was sitting in the kitchen by the stove, making up the baskets for the evening rush on the quais—so many slices of ham, so many apples, so many pieces of cheese—when the far door opened, an American soldier drifted in, leaned over the buffet for a time, and finally with a strong Texas drawl said: “I wish you’d write me a letter, ma’am—to my wife.”

“What’s the matter with your writing it yourself?”

“I don’t know exactly what to say. It’s dog-gone delicate, and that’s a fact. You see, I got a bad die-ges-tion.” He pronounced it as if it were three words, with a heavy stress on the “die.”

“But you don’t write with your die-ges-tion.”

“No; but it’s this way, ma’am. My wife, she’s went and divorced me. And it’s all along of my bad die-ges-tion. I don’t blame her no way. I reckon that bad die-ges-tion did sort of get between her and me. But that ain’t what I aim to say in the letter. It’s about this here new insurance. I’ve made mine out in her name.”

“But if she’s divorced you on account of your bad die-ges-tion she has no claim on you now.”

“I don’t give a whoop in hell about that,” he responded soberly. “I want her to get it, that’s all. And I kind of thought maybe you might fix it up for me in a letter, so’s she’d understand, and tell her I don’t bear no grudge. I got a bad die-ges-tion.”

And so I fixed it up for him in a letter; and there’s one woman in America who has lost a man with a mighty good heart even if he has a bad die-ges-tion.

January 10th.

Transferred again. But this time I’m settled for good. This is a canteen of Type Number Three, in the French war zone, in a big transportation center within sound of the guns of Verdun. Anywhere from three to ten thousand troops pass through daily. Here again, this canteen is absolutely different from the two others, because the conditions are different. It is a canteen which the French call grand luxe. A beautiful spacious building, given by the French Government; tastefully decorated interiors; rest rooms with papers, writing materials, piano, tables and easy-chairs; restaurant; sleeping quarters, hot baths; gardens with statuary; and abris in case of aërial attack—altogether the poilu’s delight.

“Très chic, hein?” murmurs the Frenchman. He stares about him at the clean airy place, gay with chintz curtains, painted garlands on the walls, and even the electric globes veiled with soft yellow Chinese silk. And he catches the idea at once. “Pas militaire, pas du tout du tout.” That’s it exactly. It’s not military at all at all. The French artist who conceived the scheme was so nauseated with everything military that he let himself loose on this canteen to make it cozy and homelike and gay. Its soft beauty delights the poilu; and its baths, its disinfecting plants where he can rid himself of vermin, its kiosk where he can buy his beloved pinard, its hot chocolate—made with milk, after an American recipe—contribute to make it a very paradise of canteens. Its fame is known all over the French war zone. The poilus come miles to see if it’s as good as report.

At night in the rest room they lie outstretched in those canvas easy-chairs—just how easy none but a weary poilu can know!—and they stare through dreamy half-closed eyes at the warm charm of the place, soaking it in at every pore; the smoke of countless cigarettes rises in a kind of enchanted mist; there is an occasional bubble of laughter or the low-toned give-and-take of copains round the brazier; but chiefly there is silence, luxurious well-earned ease for tired limbs—linked sweetness long drawn out. Occasionally, when the wind is right, a vague distant rumble seems to echo in the air. Is it thunder, or is it bombardment? Or are those ears so accustomed to the ceaseless roar of heavy artillery that they still hear it resounding, even in this quiet spot? A poilu rolls over, opens one eye, listens.

“What is that? Les canons?”

His companion cocks an ear.

“Mais non.”

“Mais oui.”

“You’re crazy! Whence, then?”

The first soldier sits up and takes his bearings.

“’Tis Verdun,” he proclaims. “N’est-ce pas, mademoiselle?”

“Yes,” replies the canteener at the desk; “we can often hear the guns of Verdun on a thick night.”

“Me—I come from Verdun,” says the poilu, always ready for a chat.

“Were you one of those who held Verdun when the Crown Prince made that terrible attack?”

“Oui.”

“Ah, those glorious heroes of Verdun!” murmurs the canteener with misty eyes.

The simple poilu looks at her, puzzled, angry, and finally blazes forth:

“Heroes! Heroes! I’m always hearing about those people—those heroes. But I never saw anything of them. They weren’t in the fight. I tell you, it was we, we Frenchmen alone, who won Verdun!”

The canteener apologizes to the unconscious hero.

In a canteen of this description, serving anywhere from three to ten thousand men a day, the work must be organized down to its last detail. And it is. The mechanism runs as smoothly as a well-oiled automobile. For one thing, our directrice has a “flair” for handling people, for getting along with the French domestics—we have a kitchen staff alone of twenty—and for making her workers contented and at home. Nor is the work itself so hard as in the other canteens. For one thing, labor is plentiful. For another, we live in a town. And in our time off we can shop or stroll or laze about the comfortable big house we’ve leased for quarters. Our hours, too, are well arranged. As the canteen remains open all night and meals are served straight round the clock, the day is divided into four shifts: From seven A.M. to one P.M.; from one to seven; from seven to eleven-thirty; and from eleven-thirty P.M. to seven A.M. In addition there is an extra shift to help at the rush hours, which occur usually about ten A.M. and four P.M. At these times the big dining-room resembles nothing so much as a six-o’clock subway rush. The poilus are packed in tight as they can squeeze—every one with his head pointed toward the caissé, where are sold the tickets for the repas complet. Each meal costs seventy-five centimes.

January 16th.

Of all the shifts I love the morning best. Then the men come storming in so ravenous that it’s a pleasure to see them eat. And then is when they’re gayest. The afternoon is apt to be prosaic. But the night shift is the most interesting of all. Then things seem to stand out, to take on personality, to become more alive, vivid and real. Then impressions, pictures, scenes are stamped on the brain as clean as if cut with a die, true in every trivial detail. Soldiers playing cards by the light of a flickering candle, their huge ungainly shadows capering up against the wall.

Now and again from the shadows emerges a clear profile, aquiline, delicate, a living medallion with closed eyes. Over in yonder corner, for example, is a boy fast asleep. His head tilted against the wall reveals a face as finely chiseled as any on an old Roman coin. His curly lashes lie flat on his thin cheeks. His nostrils are slightly pinched. Two perpendicular lines run from nose to jaw. How young he looks, how white and worn! His mobile mouth, softly closed, droops at the corners, like that of a tired child. He stirs and mutters something. And now he smiles! He is dreaming, that boy, I know. If his mother could see him now!... The rear door opens, the guard thrusts in a head and calls a certain train. The young soldier rouses, staggers for his pack, drunk with sleep, his face still soft with dreams.

I remember one night a slumbering poilu sprang to his feet, shouting “Aux armes!” And his voice was so thrilling and terrible, so charged with hoarse command, that all the soldiers leaped up, wide awake on the instant, and glared wildly about them. The next minute the room was filled with curses, not loud but deep.

Work of this kind, hard and monotonous as it undoubtedly is, is yet the most satisfying in the world—provided one has a gift for it. It takes hold of the heart. It is immediate, it has the warm personal touch, and it ties you straight up with humanity in the raw. The abstract philosophy of the war—who is the most to blame and why—ceases to vex you. You become absorbed in your own little circle. Life beyond it seems remote. You love the poilu and he loves you—and makes no bones about it. So let the Huns rage over behind yonder ridge, and imagine vain things. Somehow, all that does not concern you. You have become confident, gay, certain of destiny—like the simple little poilu. It’s service that does it.

Last night when I returned home from work it had stopped raining. Overhead the great overturned cup of sky glittered and gleamed—with half its stars dropped down into the dark flowing river by my side. And there was a second moon down there, pale and drowned. An enchanted mist, fine as a bride’s veil, hung over all. By night the Marne is beautiful. Far off came the boom of the Verdun guns, that hammering which has been going on now for years, “as if two armies of giants were striking unceasingly at an unshakable gate of bronze.” Here it was nothing but an echo on the wind. There, as one Tommy put it, it was “hell multiplied by six.”

They say the Germans will break through this way. I think of the thousand thousand poilus who have tramped through our canteen, each one an anonymous hero—and I smile. It’s all right. Let the Huns come on!