Trouping for the troops; fun-making at the front

TROUPING FOR
THE TROOPS

T

MARGARET MAYO

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TROUPING FOR
THE TROOPS

MARGARET MAYO

TROOPING
FOR THE TROOPS

Fun-Making at the Front

BY

MARGARET MAYO

NEW XBJr YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPTRIGHT, 1919, BY

GEORGE H. DOBAN COMPANY

PRESTTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MY DEAR LITTLE MOTHER

And to those who, like her, waited, watched
and prayed against so many dangers that
never came, I dedicate these pocket flash-
lights of the last three months of the war as
seen by me and my fellow-players in an ef-
fort to carry to "the boys" a message of
cheer that every sister, wife, and mother
would gladly have brought in our place had
she been permitted.

A o o rr 7 7

*g O» O t) f 8

CONTENTS
PART I:

PAGE

ON THE EDGE 11

PART II:

THE ADVANCED ZONE. . 62

vu

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TROUPING
FOR THE TROOPS

PART I: ON THE EDGE

Sunday, Sept. 8th, 1918
Somewhere in France.

It is just about one calendar month since
we said good-bye to New York. "We" mean-
ing a band of six players from the "Overseas
Theatre League" who have come here to play
under the "Y" in the American camps in
France.

I understand now why those at home are so
often disappointed in the lack of color and
human detail that they receive in the reports
from the Americans over here. Things come
too fast for us in this warriors' world and novel-
ties have become commonplaces before we can
find time to write home about them. Then,
too, the lack of routine in one's daily life over
here, the necessity for constant readjustment

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idniew conditions, the desire to drink in new
knowledge of a world about which all those who
have come before are eager to report. All
these things exhaust both time and vitality and
when the "Good nights" are going round one
is glad to draw the funny, fat, French feather
bed over as much of one's anatomy as it will
cover and console the conscience that is trying
to get one to write with the old, familiar "tna-
nyana." And by the way, I have discovered
that the Spanish "manyana" and the French
"tout de suite" arrive at about the same time.

On leaving "the other side" I didn't watch
the Goddess of Liberty out of sight, nor even
the New York dock and in this I am told I was
not in the minority. In the first place, since
all the friends and relatives of passengers had
been forbidden to come within more than gun-
shot of the dock, a merciful provision for all
concerned even in peace times, it was not nec-
essary either for them or for us to stand first on
one foot then on the other waving sickly fare-
wells with smiles growing more and more
forced. In the second place, there were three
classes of persons on board, those eager to get
away from conditions at home, those with
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splendid and difficult jobs to be tackled on
"the other side," big humanitarian jobs, and
those whose services the Government had
drafted. Any and all of these motives meant
"eyes straight ahead" not backward.

A bored ingenue and ex-film actress who
shared my stateroom with two other "Over-
seas" players, voiced her feelings about de-
parture without much ceremony when she
said:

"Why should I want to watch the darned
Goddess out of sight?"

"I'm so sick of hearing what those pie-faced
picture stars get, that I hope I'll never see the
'Land of Liberty' again."

I walked round the deck soon after this re-
mark and most of the sallow faces and dull
eyes staring out from the backs of steamer
chairs were equally world weary. Of course
there had been the long drawn fatigue of get-
ting passports and standing in line for days in
badly ventilated offices only to be told that
whatever one had done or wherever one had
come, preliminary to departure, one was all
wrong and must start over again, and some of
the lassitude that was on us now was from the
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relief of not having to make out any more
"questionnaires."

About half way down the deck, there was
one pair of eyes with a different light in them,
a pure, holy, far-seeing light. They belonged
to a woman who was crossing for the third time
within a few months. Her name was Mrs.
Ray Brown. I believe she was assisting in the
extension and re-organisation of some of the
hospital systems, though she never talked about
herself, so I do not know. She, at least, knew
why she was going and to what.

At the end of the deck I stopped to look
over the rail. The deck below was swarming
with red-coated Polish soldiers. There was a
light in most of their faces, too, and a spirit
of adventure quickened all their movements.

While I stood at the rail General du Pont,
the powder king, joined me. He was in the
uniform of the Y. M. C. A. and going over not
only to study the activities of that organisation
and the Red Cross in relation to the war, but
also to "see the war" and to give service where-
ever the opportunity might offer. This is a
sort of free lance soldiering permitted only to
men of unusual power, influence and money
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and very much envied by the less fortunate who
are restricted by a more limited field of action.
The General was joined in turn by a rich
young stock-broker who had been known
around New York for years as a sort of harm-
less lounge lizard and indulgent "first nighter."
His ambition at present was to get to the front
and drive an ambulance for the Red Cross. He
had already acquired the uniform but I am
told that he is now bewailing his fate in the
warehouse of a dull French port where he has
been set to "counting chemises." Upon hear-
ing which, one of his friends remarked that his
reputation on Broadway had no doubt pre-
ceded him.

The next person to join our group was the
dark, snappy-eyed wife of a Spanish official
who was greatly perturbed because America
was not sending her most beautiful "cocottes"
to the cafes of Spain to compete with the Ger-
man cocottes who were there in great numbers
heavily backed by their government to spread
German propaganda amongst their table com-
panions.

We were interrupted by an emissary to Bel-
gium who pointed out to us the floating city

[15]

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that now surrounded us, merchantmen, sailing
vessels, torpedo destroyers, battleships, trans-
ports, fruit ships, coalers, twenty-two in all
moving forward in neighbourly proximity on a
sea of gold, while airplanes and dirigibles
floated like guardian angels above them. It
reminded one of Venice in a late September
sun with its canals and baby castles, and one
felt almost as though it were possible to step
about on this still sea of gold from ship to ship.

At noon of next day while most of us were
at "dejeuner" our particular ship, the fastest
of the convoy suddenly leapt ahead. The
change in speed was so sudden and so apparent
that some of the men went up on deck to in-
quire about it. They learned that a submarine
had hit a provision ship just in our wake and
coir captain having women and children aboard,
had, according to his orders, put on "full speetl
ahead." In an incredibly short time we were
out in the now gray sea alone.

That night and every night no lights were
permitted on deck, even the illuminated wrist-
watches which most of the passengers wore
were ordered "turned in," meaning inside out

[16]

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on the wrist. The air was heavy and hot and
the staterooms overcrowded and we were still
in the danger zone so most of the passengers
preferred to remain on deck and finally, when
most of these dark mysterious figures had
ceased bumping into each other and apologis-
ing for having got into the wrong chairs, arms,
or laps, one of the American "entertainers" —
Gray by name — woke many, and amused some
of us, by marching along the deck with three at-
tendants and calling out in a military manner
"Cover up your wrist watches and your lieuten-
ants." I
When we looked round the deck in the ap-
proaching dawn we realised to how many cou-
ples this command might have applied and
during the day the number of uniforms on deck
seemed constantly to increase. We got the ex-
planation of this at about the same time that it
reached the Captain. Besides the officers who
were booked on our deck there was a full com-
pany of our boys in the steerage and two hun-
dred and fifty other boys who were trying to
catch up with their commands, having taken
too long on previous occasions to bid their
Weethearts "good-bye." Among the former

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was the son of a Milwaukee brewer who pays
taxes on thirty million a year. When the pangs
of hunger began to gnaw, our government hav-
ing neglected to equip these boys with the bread
baskets with which the average steerage pas-
senger "pieces out/* the son of our many times
millionaire remembered a rich friend of his
father's who was reported as being aboard ship.
A message was manoeuvred to the said friend
and a return message was accompanied by an
official permit for young brewer to visit "fath-
er's friend" on deck. This was the beginning of
a two days' successful foraging campaign from
the steerage to the first class. Those below
who had no friends above, got the word up on
deck and were adopted. If they were not al-
ways permitted to visit their unseen protectors
they could at least receive sweets and food from
them and by noon of the second day every
woman on board was surreptitiously dropping
part of her meal into a paper in her lap and
stealing out on deck with it to some waiting
"prowler."

But on the morning of the third day when
an overly hungry youth called at the state-
room of one of these ladies before she had had

[18]

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her bath and asked for the breakfast promised
him, the stewardess who was in attendance
thought the matter had gone far enough and
evidently reported her observations to head-
quarters and by noon time the Captain had is-
sued orders that no more visits were to be per-
mitted from the Netherlands.

There was a great deal of bemoaning about
this and some depressing rumours came up
from below. First of all one of the boys down
there died of heart failure and was buried at
sea, a second one engaged in a peppery bout
with one of his fellows, was knocked off or fell
overboard, a third jumped over and was
drowned. Each of us tried to argue that a life
more or less mattered little when so many were
going to the sacrifice but each of us felt the
double tragedy of these mere boys going under
without the big chance of first "going over the
top."

On the first Sunday morning of the voyage
the sunlight returned to us and I ambled out
on deck. I heard a monotonous mumbling. I
followed the direction of the sound and soon
looked down on hundreds of red coats on the
backs of kneeling Polish soldiers. Against a

[19]

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background of ally flags a priest in white vest-
ments officiated at an emergency altar made up
of packing cases. A ray of sunlight fell aslant
of his face as he turned with uplifted arms to
pronounce the benediction.

The next night I stood at the door of the
saloon after dinner with Parker Nevin, a typi-
cal New Yorker. The curtains were drawn to
shut out the light from prowling submarines
and the decks outside were pitch black, but in-
side, the atmosphere was quite as gay as in
peace times and the lights quite as bright.
Some Y. M. C. A. "Entertainers/5 two of them
members of my unit, had just concluded a
show that would not have bored a lover of the
Ziegf eld Follies, and a dance was now starting
in which there was no small sprinkling of "Y"
and Red Cross uniforms. At the far end of
the corridor through a cloud of smoke, one
could see other members of these two organiza-
tions sipping light wines, smoking and playing
bridge. It was all harmless enough but
picturesque. I heard Parker Nevin's sigh. I
turned to see him shaking his head sadly. I
asked his trouble. He answered with a sad lit-
tle smile that the world was all upside down,
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"The Y. M. C. A. dancing and the Red Cross
drinking and the soldiers praying."

The short respite from danger zone to dan-
ger zone was soon over and new interest was
provided when we failed to meet our convoy oa
the other side, at either of the spots designated.
Using his own judgment our Captain shot
ahead full speed unconducted and a more de-
corous fellow ship just behind that waited for
the convoy was torpedoed for its pains.

The moon hurst forth on our last night
aboard, round and red as harvest, and at mid-
night with the flood tide we made our way up
the beautiful Gironde with "La Belle France"
smiling from either shore. All the steamer
chairs were occupied and many confidential
promises were exchanged. Then again there
were those who sat apart gazing silently out
over the waters toward the soft, mysterious
tree-fringed shores. Was this new phase of life
going to fill the aching void or would it, too,
disappoint them?

With the early morning came all the hustle
and confusion of disembarking at Bordeaux.
Officials demanding passports and health cer-

[21]

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tificates and giving landing permits to some
and subjecting others who were under suspicion
to further examination, luggage to be weighed
and checked, identification papers and photo-
graphs to be signed — Heaven knows what other
details — and then all of us loaded into the toy
French train bound for Paris. On our way to
the station we passed our Polish friends, hun-
dreds of them, in their red coats marching with
a jaunty air and smiling faces. "Bon chance 1"
we called to them with lumps in our throats and
they called back similar farewells to us.

Then hours of soul satisfying landscape each
of us exclaiming at first at sight of a new cha-
teau, picturesque courtyard or vineyard, then
one by one subsiding under the calm of the
beautiful well tilled fields, winding streams
edged with poplars and the low lying hills over
which creep the white ribbon roads that lose
themselves in the pale blue horizon.

But we were barely under the spell of all this
gentle domesticity when we were startled out
of our reverie by suddenly whizzing through a
dusty covered, training encampment of Ameri-
can soldiers and here we caught our first sight
of German prisoners. They were laying Ameri-

[22]

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can tracks under the direction of American
engineers and a little further on we saw Ameri-
can locomotives and cars moving hundreds of
American flying machines over American
tracks already laid. From here on the land-
scape was repeatedly dotted by signs of the
most stirring American activity. There was a
certain pathos in the picture of a bent-backed
old Frenchman bringing his one or two cows
round his hay stack into his quiet little court-
yard only to see them sent flying for their lives
before a huge American motor truck that came
rattling across his court yard almost upon his
heels.

One began to speculate as to the permanent
change that busy industrial America was go-
ing to effect in dreamy picturesque France.

It was night when we crept into Paris. No
eager porters, "f acteurs," to snatch our luggage
from our hands, no one even to lift it from the
railway carriages. We shoved, pulled, or
pushed it onto the platform as best we could
and struggled with it up an escalator that was
not working. Outside in the semi-darkness a
few army cars and trucks loaned to the Y. M.

[23]

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C. A. were waiting to take us to our various
hotels and with hasty good-byes to ship ac-
quaintances scattering now to all parts of
France, we rattled away over the cobble stones
into the narrow winding byways, across the
Seine that shone like a silver ribbon in the
moonlight and into the lovely white, still gar-
dens of the Tuileries.

We gasped at the beauty of it all. I had
seen Paris many times in the full glare of its
yellow night lights, its tawdry night prowlers
exchanging cheap pleasantries, everything
false, fakey and covered with tinsel to enslave
and betray the senses of the already bewildered
stranger, but I had never seen Paris robbed of
cheap camouflage lit only by the moon and the
starlight and a faint green ray that peeped
from beneath the heads of the elevated street
lamps ; it was as though — some one of our party
remarked — as though old Paris were dead and
the soul of new Paris were arising out of the
debris.

When we reached the Hotel, the "Y" had
seen to it that our rooms and a hot supper were
waiting.

As I looked down the long supper table I
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knew for the first time just how many sorts
and conditions of men and women had crossed
under the auspices of the "Y" on our steamer.
There were "spiritual advisers" as the boys call
them, engineers for hut construction and road
building, supply men to assist in the provision-
ing of these huts, athletic instructors, canteen
workers, secretaries, stenographers, bankers,
and other important American financiers and
last, but not least popular, our own little band
of American "entertainers" bound for we
knew not what nor where. The interesting in-
struction given us before leaving America was
so to arrange our programme that we would
not be disconcerted if we found it necessary to
cut our "show" in half and rush on to another
camp where the boys were about to go into ac-
tion and needed relief from their tense state of
thought. Upon talking to some of the Gen-
erals since, I'm inclined to agree with them
that it is the boys who have just come out of
action, having been obliged to fight across the
bodies of their fallen comrades, the boys who
are trying to forget the sight of staring eyes
in ghastly upturned faces, these are the boys
who need to be wakened from their trance of

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horror and brought back to a realisation that
the world still laughs and plays somewhere.
These are the boys that we are hoping later to
reach.

After supper we were informed that we were
to report at a little chapel just back of the
Madeleine at 9.30 the next morning for "con-
ference." A murmur of rebellion was distinct-
ly audible as we made our way to bed. Early
morning conference about a lot of Y. M. C. A.
dogma that could not possibly interest us when
we were all dying to spend our first morning
in Paris basking in the sunlight, gazing in shop
windows, or sipping our coffee, French fash-
ion, at the dirty little outdoor tables looking
out on the busy boulevards,

The spirit of resentment was so strong in
some of the travellers that they did not go
near the Chapel the next morning. Theirs was
the loss for those of us who went to "scoff re-
mained to pray."

We found not only a part of our ship's party
there but hundreds of other recent arrivals
under the "Y." Some had come by way of
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England, some on Army transports, some on
passenger ships.

The handful of men waiting to talk to us
in an informal way was not made up of
"preachers" as we had supposed it would be
but of various workers — representing the more
important branches of the " Y," activities, work-
ers who had been at their jobs for many
months, who had served not only in Paris and
in the advanced zones of war but some of them
up to the front line trenches. j

They were not there to make us feel their
superiority or offer advice; they were there to
hold out their hands and help us across the
stepping stones on which their poor feet and
hearts had too often been bruised. They were
there to beg that we, fresh from an unridden
country with strong nerves and brave hearts,
remember always the shattered condition of
the nerves of our French allies ridden by
four years of war, privation and discourage-
ment. They asked the question, how many
out of the hundreds of us assembled there were
now living in the houses in which we were born ;
three persons raised hands. They asked how
many of us were living in houses in which we

[27]

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had been for more than ten years. A few more
persons raised hands. Then they asked us to
remember that the average Frenchman was
accustomed to live not only in the house of his
birth but in the house in which his grandfather
and his great-grandfather had lived and that
when this home was invaded, or threatened by
invasion, he was like a lost child crying out in
the wilderness and yet each one of the men and
women amongst whom we were to take up our
duties had lived in constant dread of losing the
little left to them and there was not one among
them who had not lost at least one person out
of their lives whose coming had once quickened
their pulses.

The speakers also reminded us that there
were many tired, overworked, disappointed
Americans who also deserved our patience and
our admiration, men and women who had vol-
unteered at the very outset of the struggle who
had given up good lucrative positions at home,
some of them big executive positions, and who
for the good of the cause had forced them-
selves to fit into dull obscure niches over here
and work for eighteen hours a day at secre-
tarial jobs which they had outgrown at home
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in their youth. Some of the jobs were in out of
the way ports far from Paris or the battle line,
or from anything to stimulate interest in their
performance and yet because some one must
do this dull work these men and women had
consented to be the martyrs*

It takes seven men behind the line to keep
one man in the line so the experts have figured
out and the man to be pitied is the man who
has come to France with high hopes of pictur-
esque service only to find himself the seventh
behind the gun, relegated to counting packing
cases in some out of the way port.

After our approaching relations with the
French had been touched upon, the engineer
at the head of the hut construction told us how:
his men were managing to complete one hut a
day at an evarege cost of from fifteen to twenty
thousand dollars. He told us something of the
difficulty of procuring the materials for these
huts and how diplomatic bodies both in France
and America had to pass upon a request for
even a few pounds of nails. Next followed a
report from one of the supply agents who ex-
plained that by command of General Pershing
the "Y." had taken over the grocery depart*
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ment in addition to its canteen business. We
learned that bacon was worth so much in
Spain, chocolate so much here, sweet crackers
so much there, etc., and to our amazement we
learned that the Y. M. C. A. in France alone
was handling in its construction and provision
department more than one hundred million dol-
lars a year.

Next came a report from one of the athletic
directors and from him we learned that Gen-
eral Pershing had just directed the "Y." to
teach baseball to both the American and
French troops. He explained the inclination
of the naturally polite Frenchman to sacrifice
a home run while he apologised to his opponent
for having seemed rude to him, he said too that
the Frenchmen were often more anxious to ac-
quire our slang than our strokes. Every good
play with a Frenchman was a "peepin."

One of the most important banking men in
America who had enlisted in the service of the
"Y" spoke of what he hoped to accomplish in
the way of better exchange and somewhere far
down the line some of the veteran "spiritual ad-
visers" were permitted a word. They were
each of them men, every inch, sunny, brave,
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and with faces radiating healthy humour and
fine understanding.

Their warning to the new arrivals was not
to take advantage of a world crisis to thrust
their personal creeds or propaganda down the
throats of the defenceless but rather to avoid
reference to any creed and to post in the huts
an announcement of a Jewish ceremony as
quickly as the announcement of a Presbyterian
one. They were urged to allow then* lives and
their deeds rather than their words to indicate
their motives and one so-called "preacher"
gave the following rule of living as sufficient
creed for any man:

"Keep yourself persistently at your best;

"Keep yourself persistently in the presence
of the best ;

"Be your best and share your best."

On my way home to luncheon I kept repeat-
ing the words of this last speaker and I ap-
plied his rule mentally to the whole art of liv-
ing, the aesthetic side, the business side, the
physical and the spiritual side. It seemed
equally sound in control of either.

When I got back to the hotel I found
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a "Y" secretary who had the Paris division of
camp entertainment in charge, waiting to
ask if our Unit of six would play in the Tuil-
eries Gardens on Sunday afternoon to an au-
dience of twenty-five thousand soldiers. There
was to be a sort of continuous performance, the
first of its kind ever given, it was to run from
two until seven and three regimental bands
and three singers from the Opera Comique
were to fill a large part of the programme.
Being a fatalist, I accepted though it seemed to
me that our few small personalities and our
limited bag of tricks could not go far in the
open, scattered amongst twenty-five thousand
men of dissimilar tastes and tongues. It was a
golden afternoon when we made our way up
the high platform in the centre of the Gardens.
A backing of lattice and a roof of overhanging
boughs was our only enclosure, yet, strangely
enough almost every line that we spoke or sang
got a hearty and almost universal response.
After the performance which was hailed as a
great success we were photographed and pam-
pered and sent back to our hotel in one of the
Army cars. Frenchmen doffed their caps to
us as we passed and Americans cheered us. It
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was all very exciting and much too pleasant to
seem like war work. I remembered the rather
stinging remark of a General in whose com-
pany I had dined the night before, as guest of
the Paymaster of Marines. The General had
been in an important command at Belleau
Woods a few weeks before when the Marines
prevented the Boche from entering Paris. He
had acquitted himself so well that he was to
receive the Legion of Honour on the morning
following our dinner party. He was not a
sentimentalist and he said that if the over-
seas entertainers were serious in wishing
to accomplish real good they would devote very
little time to the camps around Paris but get as
quickly as possible to the boys fresh from ac-
tion and scenes of horror. I was glad to have
played in the Tuileries but eager to press on
toward the front.

The next day, our last in Paris for a long
while to come, we lunched at the Ritz, or at
least most of us did so, some of us as the
guests of General du Pont who had crossed
with us on the steamer and who was now bid-
ding us Godspeed and I as the guest of Mary
Young and John Craig, who were in town for

[33]

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a few days to get supplies and who were eager
to tell me of the splendid success they were hav-
ing in the Camps with "Baby Mine." They had
asked me for the use of the play when the first
ship-load of our boys were sailing for France
and while I had been proud of the opportunity
to give it for such a cause, I had been sceptical
about their being able to get any effect from
it, played in tents or out-of-doors, with no
scenery or properties. They now told me
laughingly how they carried three large bisque
dolls under their arms to represent the babies
and balanced a soap or cracker box on two
chairs to suggest a cradle and tried, when pos-
sible, to seat the boys above them in a semi-
circle on the hillside and in this way they could
play to thousands at one performance. Their
eyes were dancing with the joy of the good
they were doing and as I looked across the table
at these two who had closed up their splendid
house in Boston and turned their backs on the
Stock Company it had taken them years to
establish it seemed to me that Mary still looked
only a child — and yet she and John had already
given two boys to the army and one of them to
the Field of Honour — and would continue to

[34]

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give of their best until the last big gun should
be fired.

Just now, with characteristic generosity, it
was their fixed purpose to make me feel that it
was my play that had been responsible for their
success and while I knew quite differently they
did succeed in giving me a stouter heart for the
bit that I was hoping to contribute to this
"Man's War" and everything seemed to get
very bright in the big restaurant and I no-
ticed for the first time, that the sun had come
out.

I looked round the Ritz and contrasted the
present picture with that of the old days when
Maxine Elliot used to sit at a certain round
table in the corner in all her luscious beauty,
bankers, leading-men, tennis and polo cham-
pions hanging over the back of her chair. I
remembered a smaller table where Ethel Levy
used to lunch during her great success in her
first Parisienne review, and the chair on her
left where her favourite poodle used to sit in
state and a chair on her right usually occupied
by the Younger Guitry. The scene was much
changed now. In the entire length of the din-
ing-room and in the charming court outside,

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the only men to be seen out of uniform were
the waiters and the few women present were
also mostly in uniform, Red Cross or Y. M. C.
A., and at a little table apart, wrapped in a
long dark service cape, a veil bound round her
now serious brow, sat the once gay and colour-
ful Elsie de Wolfe. And on every side men in
khaki, blue, or grey, but of all the uniforms
present it seemed to me that the grey one with
the black and white trimmings, that of the
Italian flying corps, was the most interesting
and the most distinguished.

In spite of changed accoutrements and con-
ditions the same old gentle reassuring dignity
hung over the Ritz guests, like a soft gauze
canopy not to be pierced by harsh sounds. And
the greetings and recognitions and good-byes
that would have been boisterous in the street
outside sounded only like the humming of bees
in June time. A Ritz is always a Ritz I
thought as we passed out into the pebble pathed
sunlit garden for our coffee.

At the far end of the garden, sipping his cof-
fee and smoking a made-to-order cigarette, sat
George Burr, in earnest conference with two
officials of the Red Cross. He had abandoned

[36]

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the administration of large offices in every im-
portant city in America and crossed the ocean
to offer his services to the Red Cross in any ca-
pacity in which they could use him — no matter
how humble. He had no premonition that he
was soon to become the beloved head of the
whole organization and be known by the fond
title of "The Big Col."

He was joined by Gilbert White, America's
most famous unpublished wit, now serving in
the Signal Corps, and by Mrs. Florence Ken-
dal. Gilbert had just drawn a cartoon of Mrs.
Kendal, a charming young woman of fifty,
leaving New York to establish an officer's con-
valescent home in France. On the curb, wav-
ing good-bye to his mother as she passed down
Fifth Avenue, stood her popular son Mess-
more. He was saying ruefully to the bystand-
ers— "I'm too old to fight but I'm sending
mother."

We all had a good laugh at Gilbert's cartoon,
then simultaneously, every one seemed to real-
ize that "dejune" — the only enjoyable respite
still permitted in war time — was over and with-
in a few minutes the garden and restaurant
were silent and deserted.

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That night another Army car tore its way
through the streets with us and out into the
country to a little band of engineers stationed
near some barge canal. When we arrived they
were still busy with saw and hammer finishing
a platform which they had erected hurriedly
under a canvas covering. We were chilled to
the bone and a little depressed by the dim light
of two tottering torches but we gave what
spirit we could to the show and left to their
hurrahs, never having clearly understood to
whom we had really played.

The next morning we left Paris amidst the
customary confusion of mysterious servants
arriving in the hotel lobby at the last moment
and the laundry that always returns only in
time to be carried under one's arm.

We had already begun the shedding process
so familiar to even the most experienced trav-
ellers who come over in war time. Most of us
had left our trunks containing quantities of
soap and shoes and sugar in the keeping of our
landlords, having cussed out the misinf ormants
on the other side who had told us that these
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and many other things were not to be had in
Paris.

Our first meal in the hotel had shown us that
Paris was suffering from less food restriction
than we were at home, and our first promenade
up the Avenue de FOpera had opened our eyes
to the astonishing fact that, now as always,
everything in the world was to be bought in
Paris and many military things in much snap-
pier more convenient design than at home.
Even the woollens of which we had been
warned there was such a scarcity, were dis-
played in every outfitter's window.

We had meant to write home about all these
things for the sake of other benighted travel-
lers who would no doubt follow us, and now we
were leaving Paris without having found time
for more than the conventional cable home
"Well and happy."

At the station again confusion and distress,
no porters, insufficient help for the weighing
and checking of baggage, no compartments to
be reserved, necessity for showing passports
and getting movement orders stamped in order
to "check out," train about to leave and only
one or two bored officials to serve long lines of

[39]

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excited travellers, indifferent shrugging of
shoulders on part of officials and yet some way
or other when the toy train at last departed,
amidst shrill boastful whistling, all those who
had hoped to be aboard had managed to be
there, hot, angry and perspiring to be sure,
but present.

Some hours later our unit of six was clatter-
ing up the main street of Chaumont, one of
the most picturesque, most historic villages in
France. We were on our way to the principal
hotel at G. H. Q. — meaning the General
Headquarters of the American Army in
France. If we had put on a wishing cap and
succeeded in winning our wish we could scarce-
ly have found ourselves in a more fortunate
spot as a starting point for our campaign of
the American camps.

Even before we reached our hotel we were
receiving familiar hellos from every side and
before we had had time to register and get to
our rooms we had had to put our luggage down
time and again to shake hands with old friends
from England, America, anywhere and every-
where for to G. H. Q. sooner or later comes
almost every one engaged in the business of
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war. High officials, war correspondents,
magazine writers, camera and "movie" men,
Red Cross workers, canteen officers, American
politicians and millionaires over draft age on
their way to the front to catch a quick glimpse
of the war, spies, staff officers, supply agents,
all kinds, colours and conditions of men of all
orders and ranks and degrees of preferment.

We got to our rooms as soon as we could
for we were scheduled to give a performance
that same night in one of the Y. M. C. A. huts
on the edge of the town. When one of the
young women of the company ventured a criti-
cism of her room the tired proprietress ex-
plained in rapid-fire French that we were for-
tunate to get any rooms at all since no less a
personage than a General had been obliged to
sleep on a park bench the night before with his
men around him on the ground.

My room was amusing in its outlook. From
my window I looked down upon the back
court of the hotel, with the old fashioned pump
and stone laundry basins, plump-armed French
maids preparing the vegetables for the even-
ing meal, cats and mongrel dogs on the kitchen
tables or under them, pigeons pecking at what-

[41]

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ever they could find on the tables or under
them, pigs grunting from a nearby pen, to
remind the proprietor that it was also their
supper time, guests calling in bad French from
their windows to the servants in the court-
yard below — in short, a typical French small
town hotel, and back of this domestic scene of
disorder and confusion a picturesque vine cov-
ered arch of heavy masonry through which one
caught a vista of winding moss-grown steps
and tangled garden that the greatest water
colour artist of them all might have been de-
lighted to paint. France ! "La belle France 1"

Before our hats were even off Isaac Marcos-
son burst into the room, fresh from the front
and on his way up the street to the barracks
now occupied by General Pershing and his
staff and known by the boys as G. H. Q.

I had never before kissed Isaac Marcosson
but in the excitement of the moment I did so
now. I am inclined to think that Mary Young
who was with me also kissed him. She had
stopped off at G. H. Q. to see our perform-
ance before going on into Joan of Arc's coun-
try to resume the playing of "Baby Mine"
while she rehearsed in the forthcoming pageant
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of "Joan" in which she was to play the maid
herself.

In a few moments Mary, Isaac Marcosson
and I were curled up on the foot of the high
French bed, the only comfortable place in the
room to sit, eating from a tin of chocolates that
he had bought at a Northern canteen and remi-
niscing about our last meeting at Carnegie
Hall in New York just after he had delivered
his maiden lecture, and here we were such a
short time afterward in such a strange place
under such different conditions and he, in the
meantime had seen three battle fronts. He
touched upon a few of the high points and
humorous incidents of his latest experiences
with the rapidity of which he alone is master
and went on his way with a promise to see us
later that evening.

When we reached the hut where we were to
play that night we found it so packed that we
could scarcely force our way through to get
back of the stage and the green silesia curtains
that had been provided for us. Bodies hung
through the windows, heads protruded from
the skylights and although we were early we
were told that our audience had been in its

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seats, eager for good places, for as much as two
hours before our arrival.

We gave our best and from the cheers that
came back from the boys and the invitations to
stay with them forever, they evidently found
our best good enough for them. It was a won-
derful night, or so it seemed to us. Generals,
Colonels, Majors and Lieutenants also thanked
us and assured us that we had given them and
their men the best show they had seen since
they left America. The officers were not sup-
posed to attend this performance as we were
to give a special performance for them later
in the week but several of them had "slipped
in" as they put it, and some of them remained
for a cup of chocolate and an American dough-
nut with us in the back office of the "Y" hut,
where the hostess and the secretary of the hut
had graciously prepared a little supper for us.

When we got back to the hotel who should
emerge out of the darkness of the court but
Arthur Rulil who had been waiting for our re-
turn. He too was down from the Front, hav-
ing just finished some new work for Colliers
which he had managed to get "passed" by the
censor that afternoon. The only thing that
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prevented him from being completely happy
was the prospect of having to sleep in the hotel
bath tub that night, a fate that frequently
overtakes late arrivals. He was rescued later,
however, by Charles Edward Kloeber, one of
America's most picturesque war correspon-
dents and general war time pet.

And so the hello's and good-byes continued
from early morning until late at night. The
next day at luncheon I met a fashionable West-
chester woman whose country place I had
passed, near mine, for years. She was wear-
ing a Red Cross uniform and her husband, one
of the brainiest men in New York State, was
serving on General Pershing's staff. She and
I had never known each other at home but by
the time we rose from the luncheon table we
were fast friends.

The first few days at G. H. Q. will always
seem like a glimpse of fairy land to me, the
sunlit court of our funny hotel with excited
French waitresses screaming at generals and
privates alike, the gay little groups around the
dirty, iron tables, war correspondents, staff of-
ficers, and all sorts of birds of passage, the

[45]

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quaint winding streets with huge dust-covered
military trucks dashing through them, the
guard mount, each morning; the wonderful
marine band organised by Damrosch himself at
the time of his last visit to see General Per-
shing, the hours I stole for dreaming in a still,
secluded garden back of the old bastille that
looked down hundreds of feet upon a beautiful
valley dotted with fields, homes, flower-strewn
gardens and hemmed in on the other side by
low-lying hills over which the broad white road
made its way toward Paris — a valley through
which Caesar himself had fought, and on the
other side of the town from a high bluff an-
other view even more lovely of a lazy, poplar
edged canal winding in and out through a
still green meadow, a stream having broken
from its banks and run wilfully away in an op-
posite direction, children of the peasants wad-
ing in the stream, cattle grazing by its side,
a white road winding out of sight up the val-
ley toward a famous old chateau where no less
a personage than General Pershing himself
was housed, and all this within ear-shot of the
shrill whistle of French locomotives bearing
troops back and forward from the front line
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trenches and not infrequently German prison-
ers. It was a rare sight to see a real troop train
come home laden with all the paraphernalia of
war, men lounging about in the flat cars or
hanging their feet out of the open doorways
while they played cards or checkers, horses and
straw and fighting apparatus all piled in to-
gether and one day a curious sight came by —
an entire train load of German prisoners
guarded only by wounded French soldiers.
These were glimpses one caught of what was
going on further up the line, but the sunshine
and the laughter seemed at first to make all the
pain of it unreal. Then, too, the first camps
that we played differed so much in avocation
and personelle that we were constantly excit-
ed by surprises. At the Gas School where
deadly and important experiments are made
we dined at the officers* mess which was served
in what looked like an iron-lined hogshead. I
pricked up my ears when I heard one of the
men say he had to be up early in the morning
to "shoot dogs." He explained to me later
that it is necessary for them to shoot poison-
ous gases into the lungs of the dogs, rabbits
and even snails to discover ways of combating

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their effect. He told me, too, of the experiments
being made by injecting certain fluids or gela-
tins in the horses' hoofs and sealing them up
there to protect the beasts from the poisoned
earth where deadly gases have been used.

Dogs are procured from the neighbouring
villages or shipped up from Paris by the car
load. I began to wonder if the improved con-
dition I had noticed amongst the Paris cab
horses meant only that the fittest were spared
from experimentation. "C'est la guerre."

On our way out from the camp that night
a soldier jumped on the running board of our
car as we passed one of the sentry posts, re-
fused to accept our countersign and ordered
our chauffeur to take us to the guard-house.
We were haled before a sleepy-looking officer
who pronounced us suspicious characters, said
he had heard of no entertainment being per-
mitted that night in the camp and gave orders
that we be locked up for trial in the morning.
Tommy Gray, one of our players produced his
false whiskers and other stage "props" in sup-
port of his contention that he was a mere actor,
Will Morrisey offered to play his violin to
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prove that he was an ^entertainer," Lois Mere-
dith, our ingenue went into giggling hysterics
to prove her right to the title, Elizabeth Brill
our leading chanteuse became properly tem-
peramental and I argued as calmly as my bad
disposition would permit, but all to no avail, we
were about to be led forth to a night of tor-
ture when a captain who had been chief host
at the supper after the performance appeared
in the doorway and "gave us the laugh" and we
realised for the first time that we had been the
victims of a clever practical joke. The story
went the rounds of headquarters the next day
and for some reason or other seemed to add to
our popularity.

Of course it made confirmed sceptics of us
and a few nights later when one of the boys
brought in a small German balloon that had
fallen near the tent in which we were playing
we refused at first to even approach it for in-
spection for we thought they had concealed
some explosive inside of it.

From the Gas Camp we were taken to the
wood choppers' camp where hundreds of
sturdy Americans, many of them engineers,
were engaged night and day in cutting down

[49]

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and transporting to headquarters a forest in
which Marie Antoinette had once played.
Winter was coming on and it was necessary to
work fast before the snows came, though even
the snow would not stop them, so they said.
To get to this camp we abandoned our big
army Renault for the first time and took to
Ford cars for the roads were thought difficult.
They would not seem so to the average Ameri-
can. We were rather relieved to lose the Re-
nault for with it we lost Conde, the speed fiend,
who had been driving us up and down hill at
sixty miles an hour and barely touching the
earth, when we reached a level stretch of road.
When we ventured a protest he reminded us
that he had been the favourite driver of the late
President of France and had also driven in the
automobile races in New York. In his opinion
this evidently made him immune from acci-
dent and criticism. One night when we were
irritated into being very sharp with him he ad-
mitted that he had been driving fast out of
temper because three bees had "bited" him that
day. Later on when I offered him ten francs
to soothe his ruffled feelings he drew himself up
proudly and reminded me that he was a soldier
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in the Army. When I confessed my faux pas
to a millionaire American that night he told
me that he'd made a fool of himself by trying
to tip a chauffeur that had been loaned to him
from the Army Transportation Department
and had discovered that the chauffeur was
President of a company at home in which he
merely owned stock and the chauffeur had
twice as much money as he had. Such awk-
ward situations as these leave one entirely at
the mercy of one's driver over here and when
we got into the dark woods I was thankful that
Coride was not at the wheel. Oh, those de-
licious woods, the smell of smoke from burn-
ing autumn leaves! We picked up a doctor
,who was walking to a camp beyond ours to see
some negro boys. He too was rejoicing in the
clean fresh odour of the woods. What a re-
lief after the smelly courtyards of the French
hotels. He said France had knocked his germ
theories all hollow for if there were anything in
germs all France would have been dead long
ago.

As usual we found our audience had been
waiting for us long before the appointed time.
They were a fine looking lot of young "hus-

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kies" and how they did laugh at the show and
how they did cheer, lined up either side of the
wood road, as we called our good-byes to them
and their camp fires.

The next night was "negro camp night" and
I've never seen so many square feet of white
teeth before nor since. The Commander told
me that he had four companies of these boys
when he landed and he loved them. He'd lost
a great many of them because they were un-
able to endure the damp and the cold and two
of his companies had been detailed at South-
ern pyorts to work on the new American-made
docks. We had seen one of these docks before
landing at Bordeaux and the brave fearless
way in which it juts out to meet in-coming
ships is guaranteed to thrill even the dullest
edged American.

I could imagine these black good natured
faces in front of me much more habitually gay
down on the Southern docks than way up here
in the north preparing to go "over the top" to
what they call a "good mornin' Jesus." They
had forgotten their troubles for the moment
however, and so had General du Pont in the
front row and Major Wills, the Paymaster
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of the Marine Corps, and the Chief Censor of
the War Correspondents and several other
friends who had stopped in at our hotel to see
us on their way down to Paris and decided to
attach themselves to our party for the evening
to "hear the coons laugh." And how those
boys did laugh, and those teeth!

When our show was over the boys volun-
teered a return entertainment and with their
Commander's permission they hopped onto the
stage and did some wonderful buck dancing
and when we all piled into our cars and headed
back for G. H. Q. our chief comedian again
declared that it was the best war he had ever
attended.

The next night we left our hotel early and
drove, or rather flew, for Conde was with us
again, over miles of beautiful rolling hills to
the Ordnance Camp. We were to have mess
with the officers and give a show for them after-
ward. This function seemed to take on more
dignity than any of the others, perhaps be-
cause we were made serious before dinner by
being shown through the laboratory and the
class and experimental rooms where row upon

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row of hellish contrivances for killing were on
exhibition, some of them of our own invention,
some of them souvenirs from the enemy. It
was the first time that I had known that pow-
der comes in hard brittle sticks, some of it looks
and feels almost exactly like uncooked spa-
ghetti or macaroni. We were afterward told
that the young captain who explained the
mechanism of some of the more deadly bombs,
was a very great genius and had just made a
discovery of great importance. He had the
clear blue, far-seeing eyes of a genius and
looked like the sort of young man the world
needs.

After the "show," as we call it, we found
that some of the officers who were billeted in a
town below, through which we must pass, had
prepared a supper for us in the village tavern,
and were determined to way-lay us. They did
so and when I looked round the long, narrow,
dingy walled room lit by a few sputtering
candles and surveyed the picturesque, incon-
gruous party at the long table, the blue of an
occasional French uniform off-setting the kha-
ki of our boys, a chaplain whom we had picked
up on the way, the gay tinsel and chiffon of

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our gowns, and over it all the haze of cigarette
smoke and through the hum of voices the pop-
ping of champagne corks from bottles of which
the women did not partake, a little song, much
laughter, it looked like a scene from Fran£ois
Villon, and I felt that life was being made
much too easy and too picturesque for us, but
the very next day we got our first introduction
to the more serious side of it all. When we
came down for breakfast in the court we found
the place almost deserted, I looked at my
watch thinking that I was later than usual.
On the contrary I was earlier. I asked one of
the habitues of the place what had become of
everybody — meaning more especially the war
correspondents, journalists, and staff officials.

He said that every one was up at G. H. Q.
and I thought he looked rather sinister
about it.

A little later I heard a young lieutenant at
the next table say that thousands of troops had
passed through the village during the night on
their way to the front.

I went for a walk and was amazed to see
how many grey camions had suddenly stolen
into the streets as from nowhere.

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At luncheon when the men returned from
G. H. Q. there was a silent expectant some-
thing in the air and a constraint about discuss-
ing something that every one apparently felt
rather than knew.

Later as we got more familiar with the tra-
ditions of war we came to know that this sud-
den suspension of social candour — this tighten-
ing of the moral fibre, always precedes the dec-
laration of each big "offensive" and until the
big guns are actually firing and the knowledge
of the manoeuvre has become common prop-
erty one has a feeling of being suspended in
space awaiting some unavoidable cataclysm
and not being permitted to discuss one's fore-
bodings with one's neighbour.

So impossible is it to determine the extent of
an "offensive" at its inception that it is only
on looking back upon it that history is able to
label it in relation to its most salient point.
This movement was to be known in history as
the "Saint Mihiel Drive."

We knew nothing of all this however when
we were loaded into the car after luncheon, to
"show" in our first hospital. It was a base
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hospital on the edge of the town. Even yet I
don't feel like writing about it. 111 never get
away from the consciousness of that side of
war again no matter how funny the stories
round the supper table. No matter how bright
the morning sunshine, there will always be
that dark, gaping, subterranean passage under-
neath all the flow of chatter and chaff and
art. Of all the hungry disappointed eyes that
looked out from those grey coverlets, eyes nar-
rowed by pain, I think the childlike eyes of the
dumb, puzzled negroes will haunt me longest.
They made me think of wounded animals who
had never harmed any one and who could only
wonder at their fate.

On our way home we passed several lines of
great dust-covered camions on their way to-
ward "the front" and when we got back to the
hotel we found what we called our "camp fol-
lowers" waiting in the court for us, young
lieutenants who had attached themselves to
our party without consulting us, who insisted
upon carrying our coats and usually ended by
losing them, who frisked about like gay young
puppies regardless of what mood one might be
in. I was tired and longed to get to my room

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and I said irritably to one of our unit that I
wished we could lose the infants for a while.

I had occasion to regret that remark the
very next afternoon and I shall always re-
member it with shame. When we came out
from luncheon there were our "Newfoundland
pups" as usual in the court but their faces were
grave and their smiles a little forced and their
"roll-ups" were slung across their shoulders.
They'd been suddenly called "to the front."

We knew what that meant. The white faces
of those poor boys in the hospital yesterday
rose between me and the red-cheeked youths
who stood before us now. They held out their
hands one by one, each with some message to
the girl he had left behind in the States. And
right here I want to make my first criticism of
Uncle Sam even though I may be hanged for
it. If he could know how his boys over here
have lost confidence in both his conscience and
his ability to deliver their messages to their
loved ones at home he would be sorry.

"It's pretty tough," so one of them put it,
"when you're 'going over the top' to feel you
can't even get a last word back to your girl."

He showed me the picture of his girl, young
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brave, sweet and trusting. She was sitting out-
side a lonely looking shack in North Dakota.
She seemed to be looking out over the plains
for the return of "her boy."

The boy told me how he had written to her
every single day since he left, nearly nine
months ago, and how he had received a letter
from her only yesterday saying that she had
had only four letters from him since his depar-
ture. He had figured out that according to
that average, it would mean that more than two
hundred and fifty ships must have been sunk
each bearing a letter from him. This of course
was impossible, so what had they done with his
letters? "Dumped them into the sea," was his
conclusion, "It saves trouble." I'm sorry to
say that is the cynical conclusion of many of
the boys over here. I suggested to this chap
that he might have written things that the cen-
sor couldn't pass. "No chance," he answered.
"The first thing a fellow gets in his head over
here is that all he can write home is "well and
love" and, then, half a dozen other guys have
to read it before it gets a fair start, but some of
us boys would like to get even that much back
if we could, but I guess there's not much

[59]

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chance of my girl getting a last message from
me unless one of you folks run across her."

I took her name and had another look at the
dreamy face in the photograph, that sublime
line of Masefield's came back to me, — "Each
man follows his Helen with her gift of grief."
How many of these men would return to their
Helens?

All the voices became blurred now in a
general buzz of good-byes, there was a genial
reaching out of hands and meeting of eyes that
said only too plainly that they knew it might
be for the last time. I couldn't speak and I
knew it would not be considered sporty of me
to cry. I just held out my hand and nodded,
and oh, the ache in my throat ! It was my first
necessity for keeping a stiff upper lip and I
wondered how mothers and sisters and sweet-
hearts live through such hours without break-
ing the courage of their men when I could suf-
fer so about men who, a moment before, had
been only a nuisance to me. The mothers and
sweethearts of these boys would have been
proud if they could have seen them turning
their faces to the front that day, each eager to
"go over the top." They were a brave looking
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lot, God grant we may see them again in
America as whole in mind and body as then.

At eight the next morning the speed maniac,
Conde, was waiting in his big Renault to take
us away from G. H. Q. to what and where?
We had been told the name of our next head-
quarters but it meant little to us. We knew
only that it was in the "advanced zone."

[61]'

PART II: THE ADVANCED ZONE

In the Argonne
Wednesday night,
11:15

Sept. 25, 1918.

Within a few miles of us the greatest battle
in history is just starting. Big guns are thun-
dering, the lights are flashing across No Man's
Land, and air ships are buzzing overhead in
the starlight and yet I am able to turn my
back upon this and a golden moon and sit here
in a tiny barracks room on the head of one of
the three cots upon which I and two of the
other players sleep, and write; for it is all so
wonderful that one feels an impulse to share
it with those who are not here, even while
everything tempts one outside.

Day after day, night after night, camions
have streamed along "The Sacred Road" —
which is what the French call the broad white
highway from Bar-le-duc to Verdun — infan-

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try, cavalry, machine guns, tanks, one endless
procession manned by Americans, French,
Singalese, Amanites, Chinese, African negroes
and American negroes — a line broken here and
there by the pompous, cars of high officials,
French or American, ministers of state, and
generals. And back and forth on the newly
laid American railroad tracks at the foot of the
hill on which we are now billeted large Ameri-
can engines have been bearing hither and
thither for days heavy artillery, gasoline, pro-
visions and ammunition and sections of port-
able houses and long sections of empty Red
Cross hospital cars. To-morrow these cars
with the big red crosses painted on their sides
will come back from the front — but not empty.
Many of them will bear back to the waiting
nurses behind the lines some of the boys that
we have seen staggering along "The Sacred
Road" these past few nights, exhausted by long
marches and the sixty pound packs on their
backs — boys who were so weary that when the
occasional order came to halt they would sink
back in the roadway too tired to drag them-
selves to one side or to even remove their packs,
and too numb to care for the huge camions that

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whizzed by so close to them that we, watching,
feared for their lives. The surgeon who stood
by my side explained to me that when one of
these boys could no longer keep up with his
comrades he was divested of his pack and con-
sidered good for six more miles. If he could
then stagger no further he was allowed to drop
out until he was treated — his feet were bathed
and protectors put over the blisters and then a
man who would ordinarily be told to stay in
bed for days — was shoved back into the march
and told to catch up with his regiment — "and
many of these chaps" he said "are college boys
or mother's pets, tenderly reared." I looked at
the ones*who lay before me along the roadside
— in the mud or on the wet earth. "That boy
over there," I said to the Doctor, "looks as
though he were dead. Let's speak to him."
The doctor shook his head. "He's still alive
but he's too tired to answer," he said. "He
wants only to be left alone — they all do."

We walked on up the road, past what seemed
miles of these same mute listless figures. Some-
times the order would come to march and they
would stagger to their feet and move on —
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still without even a murmur. "Boots! boots!
boots!" Kipling knew.

The surgeon who walked by my side was a
wealthy southerner who had been requested by
the Government to accept the direction of a
large corps of surgeons and Red Cross workers.
He had three homes in America, a devoted
family and a large practice and yet he was glad
to sacrifice all these, and more, to sleep on a
hard cot in an advanced war zone, if he was
fortunate enough to be spared for a few hours
to sleep, and he pretended that he liked "corn
;willie." His big, heavy voice grew very ten-
der when he spoke of his doughboys and yet he
told me quite calmly while we stood under a
wayside cross, bearing the drooping figure of
the Christ — a cross surrounded by pines and
marking one of the bloodiest cross-ways in
France, he told me that his first duty and any
surgeon's first duty on the battlefield is to
treat first the men who need treatment least,
for these can be made to quickly fight again
while the more fatally wounded are only a drag
on the army and are to be treated only out of
compassion after the more fortunate ones have
been put on their feet. A few moments later

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this same big fellow gave to a tired doughboy
his last cigarette — the cigarette he had been
treasuring to smoke on his way home. "C'est
la guerre," he said when I smiled at his tender
action so in contrast to the harsh principles of
procedure that he had just outlined.

"C'est la guerre — C'est la guerre!" Every-
where from every one on every side one hears
it. It comes rumbling back to me now from
the first night when we pressed into the "ad-
vanced zone." But that night it was said mer-
rily almost in a spirit of derision for we were
dining in a famous old chateau — one in which
General Joffre had lived during the battle of
the Marne and in which Napoleon was said to
have taken refuge when he was trying to es-
cape capture. The wine which we were enjoy-
ing had been poured from bottles whose corks
were mildewed from long storage in the vaults
of the chateau — a late September sun was
dancing in and out between the branches of the
trees and the shadows lay gently on the long
peaceful lawn and some of our players were
dancing on the terrace to the strains of the
band that had come to serenade us before as-
sisting in the entertainment which we were
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about to give in the eleventh century stable
which had been lighted by candles and decorat-
ed with flags for our performance.

Life seemed very idyllic and gay this night
and death very far away, and yet the next
morning these same officers would be leading
their men in sham battle to prepare them for
their part in the great death struggle that was
bound to come soon to many of them. It came
sooner than we expected and the next day we
were ordered to "double up" on our perform-
ances and play our four days' schedule in that
region in two days as the entire division of
forty thousand or more was to move forward
to relieve another division that was going im-
mediately to the front. We watched many of
them get under way* — fine stalwart fellows,
with the wild-cat insignia on the sleeves of
their uniforms. I saw their handsome General
later in Paris taking his first "permission"
since the war and it was amusing to watch the
admiring glances of the French girls change
into slightly shocked expressions as they be-
held the black cat on his sleeve which to them
suggests a very questionable vocation.

While these forty thousand "Wild Cats"
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were moving forward we were called back to
Paris fo be fitted with gas masks, iron helmets,
"roll ups," cots, and blankets before proceed-
ing yet further into the advanced zone.

On our way to Paris we stopped for lunch-
eon at Chaumont, G. H. Q, and here we found
many old friends and got our first word of the
American victory at St. Mihiel and two men
who had been in the action the night before
told us how the old men and women in the re-
gained territory who had thought France lost
to them forever had thrown their arms about
the knees of the on-marching Americans and
kissed their feet and wept. How also that not
one woman in all that newly conquered area
had been left undefiled by their late German
conquerors and how all the young girls had
been carried away by the now retreating Ger-
mans.

When we reached Paris that night it was in
time to experience the first air raid that Paris
had seen in a month and one of the heaviest
raids it had ever seen — and as history has since
proven, the last .

It came just as I had tucked myself in for
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the night. My first thought was that I was
utterly alone and I was a little sorry for my-
self. I wished that I knew some one to whom
I could go to get "snuggled up." Not know-
ing any such person and not even remember-
ing on what floor to find any of the other mem-
bers of the company I lay quite still and wait-
ed. There were occasional flashes of light from
the barrage firing on the enemy planes and the
changing direction of this firing caused the
sound of it to die away and return like the rum-
ble of thunder. After a time I heard voices
in the corridor. I slipped on my dressing gown
and went out. Three men in white pyjamas
were standing in the doorway next to mine.
They asked me if I was nervous and whether
I would not like to go down to the cellar. I re-
plied that I was a fatalist and one of them
laughed and called that a good idea. I went
back to bed and with the barrage still thunder-
ing and dying away and returning, I finally
went to sleep.

The next morning I learned that not one of
our company had taken the precaution of go-
ing into the cellar while every French person in

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the hotel had done so. This was explained by
an old American resident on the ground that
the nerves of the French had been unsettled by
a long succession of raids, while to us a raid
was still in the nature of a novelty.

Armed with all sorts of military orders the
next morning we set out on our quest for gas
masks and helmets and had our first lesson in
the use of the mask. It wasn't a very cheery
business. The fat puffy lieutenant delegated
to instruct us seemed very bored with us and
we thought him in danger of apoplexy from
having so often to blow up his cheeks and to
hold the air in them while adjusting his experi-
mental mask. To concentrate our attention on
the business in hand, and on himself, he told us
terrifying stories about what had happened to
others before us who had been stupid or slow
in adjusting their masks in battles and he re-
peated the old saying about there being only
two kinds of men where gas attacks were con-
cerned— the quick and the dead.

After more than an hour of this exhausting

drill when he had alternately bullied and

coaxed us to keep pace with his rapid counting

— and when each woman in the party had been

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made to feel that her hair was a crime against
nature because it would get entangled in the
straps of her mask and when most of the men
had decided that there was something defective
in their teeth, nose, ears or lungs — after all this
boredom the young instructor swooped down
upon Elizabeth Brice and me with an accusing
eye, thrust his fingers under the edges of our
masks just beneath our chins and thundered at
us that our faces were too small for our masks.
We thought it would have been more gallant
of him to have put it the other way round but
we were too cowed and exhausted to protest
and I personally felt that I would rather be
gassed than go through this ordeal again and
said so.

Again I was properly rebuked and informed
that the army was not concerned with my pref-
erence in such matters and that we would not
be allowed to enter the danger zone until our
masks did fit properly.

Telephoning followed and it was ascertained
that there was a carload of new masks — small
sizes — on the way from Bordeaux but since this
car was in charge of a "Frog" — as the lieuten-
ant put it — there was no telling whether the

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masks would arrive during the present war.
Anyway we could call the next morning and
see.

This was rather a let down after our impa-
tience to get off to "the front" and we were
feeling a little depressed when we reached the
hotel.

In front of the hotel we found Senator Hol-
lis waiting with a friend from one of the South-
ern Encampments.

The Senator suggested that we join them for
dinner at Montmartre. We were tired and
ready for our beds but we remembered that the
Senator had lost his only boy in the air service
less than a week ago and we knew that we
could help him by sharing the burden of enter-
taining his friend and also by trying to keep his
mind off his loss.

How little I had known Montmartre in the
old days — the days when I'd dashed up the hill
in the wild hours of the night in a cab or taxi
with a lot of laughing Americans whose only
idea was to use Pigale's and the Moulin Rouge
as a stopping place for another drink. There
were no cabs nor taxis to draw us up the hill
to-night. We took the "Metro" to the foot of

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the mountain, then climbed tier upon tier of
steep stone steps — stopping at every landing
to look down on Paris as we had never seen it
before — Paris lit by the setting sun on the one
side and the rising moon on the other — dim,
mysterious, alluring Paris. I loved it for
the first time in my life — and I knew for the
first time the lure of Montmartre — how many
lovers had climbed these steps in the moonlight
and halted at each landing and looked down
into the mist and then into each other's eyes.
How little would the rich tourist ever know of
the real Montmartre.

When we reached the top of the hill and
made our way along the middle of the street on
the rough cobble stones, we passed the Cuckoo
and other famous little cafes made so by hectic
writers and we stopped outside a semi-out-
door eating place from which we could look
across the street at the Sacre Cceur. The seats
were all taken at the outdoor tables so we gave
our dinner order and went on to the place of
the Martyr to watch the afterglow of the sun-
set and wait our turn at table.

For the first time I saw the statue at the foot
of the Cathedral — the statue of the Martyr that

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gave the mountain its name — the statue that
has looked down so many years on gay, wicked,
sorrowing Paris.

After dinner we wandered through the
crooked narrow streets searching for the old
Moulin Rouge. We were told it had been
burned — probably by an exploding shell. A
little further on we passed the Black Cat — it
was too early to go home — we went inside.
Here again was the real Montmartre. A funny,
low ceiling vaultlike room with plaster walls
daubed with cheap drawings, fine etchings,
nude paintings, charcoal cartoons, black cats ;
bits of red and white plaid gingham, faded
leaves, shelves containing pewter mugs, brass
bowls and all sorts of discarded bric-a-brac, a
platform at the far end of the room with a
piano on it, a small picture screen behind it, a
bar to the right of it and a stair to the left of it.
Benches in the room and long tables and all of
these occupied by all sorts and conditions of
humans. Frenchmen, and French soldiers,
American doughboys and officers, and here and
there a cheap cocotte — and smoke! One could
^scarcely see the length of the room.

The entertainment was being given by
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French soloists and by naughty tales told in
silhouette by paper figures on the "movie

screen."

After an interval some one asked one of the
Americans present to sing. He passed along
the word that Miss Brice of our company
could sing and in a jiffy she was forced on to
the platform and Mr. Morrisey of our com-
pany was rattling off an accompaniment for
her. The French and the Americans were
wild with delight. She was given a "double
claque" and made to sing until she was hoarse
then we went out into the street again and
glanced almost with envy at some of the gay
little groups that we saw around some of the
small bars, then we picked our way down the
steep steps and farewell Montmartre.

The next morning our gas masks had not
arrived but the young lieutenant having ap-
parently had a good night's sleep decided that
we could proceed with the large masks and use
them as a camouflage if questioned en route,
provided we would exchange them at one of
the hospital bases further up where he had re-
cently shipped some small masks for Red
Cross nurses.

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We went to another part of the town for our
iron helmets and then returned to the "Y"
armed with our new implements of war.

Here we accumulated our "roll-ups" blank-
ets and cots, for we could be sure of no bedding
accommodations in the region to which we
were going. How we came to detest these
blankets and cots during the following weeks
when we staggered under them by day and
tried to cling to them by night! And how we
longed to throw away our gas masks and hel-
mets and all the rest of our cursed parapher-
nalia and how weary we grew always having to
go back for one or the other of these that some
one in the party had always forgotten.

Our first irritation began at the Paris sta-
tion when our trappings became entangled
with those of other cross grained individuals
also pushing and jostling to make the over-
crowded train. But once we were on the edge
of the country where real battles had been
fought and looking out the car windows at
shell holes, graves, grass-grown trenches and
heaps of mortar and brick where villages had
been, we forgot all our lesser trials and began

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to suspect something of the seriousness of the
great tragedy that we were approaching.

A little further up we began to see on the
white roadways, paralleling the track, long
lines of grey camions moving north with men
and supplies, then cavalry halted on the banks
of the streams or canals for their noonday rest,
then more shell holes — one with an impudent
poppy nodding from its very brink, and hours
and hours later, because the railways were con-
gested with supply and hospital trains, we
reached a town in the region of the Argonne,
which we were to use as a central point for our
scouting tours — a town that was to be for many
months a point of contact between the Argonne
trail and the more removed political and supply
bases that fed one of the final battles of the
war. Day and night, day and night, so close
that one could scarcely pick one's way across
the road, the great grey camions rumbled
through the streets of the little village on their
way to "The Sacred Road'* that would lead
them later toward the encounter. Some of the
camions were loaded with men packed so tight
that they made one think only of the animals
that one sees in cattle cars — animals being

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shipped to pens for slaughter. Other camions
bore heavy fire arms and ammunition.

The streets of the village and the hotels were
filled with wayfarers, some of importance,
some who had failed to connect with their regi-
ments, a few I have reason to believe who were
trying to desert — young boys who had been de-
tached intentionally or otherwise from their
command and who feared to be caught by the
local military police and thrown into jail.

One of these boys had been sent back down
the line with a detail of sick horses, He had
delivered his horses but had failed to catch up
again with his regiment and was wandering
about the streets, frightened and hungry when
a kindly officer succeeded in getting his confi-
dence and persuaded him to go to the police
and tell his tale and escape capture and arrest.

Sometimes a whole company of lost men
would drift into the village, hungry and foot-
sore and with no place to sleep, some misunder-
standing having left them without proper pro-
vision or command. In such a case the "Y"
would allow them to sleep on the floor of the
canteen and provide them, as far as possible,
with chocolate.

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We played two nights in this town in a
theatre rented by the French to the "Y"
for the price of the electricity. The show was
a great success — it was the first that many of
the hoys had seen since leaving America. Our
audience was made up of cavalrymen, infan-
trymen, airmen, doughboys and officers, French
and American, for every variety of soldier was
either passing through the town or stationed
near it. They all applauded and our own
boys cheered and whistled. We were cold and
hungry after our performance so the " Y" man
led us back to the kitchen of the canteen where
a tired soul was ladelling out hot chocolate
from huge caldrons on the range and by the
time we left the kitchen the floor of the hall
leading to it had become so occupied by ex-
hausted soldiers that we had to fairly step over
them to get back to the street.

There was no room for us in any of the ho-
tels so we slept on our cots in a store room of
the "Y" across the street — if one can ever be
said to sleep the first night he rides a cot. I
was wakened early the next morning to find a
dignified old gentleman — a French official in
silk hat and civilian clothes — waiting outside
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my door to apologise for what he considered
the rude behaviour of the boys who had whis-
tled at our show the night before. He said
that he thought the performance most amusing
and deserving of anything but derision, and it
was only by the aid of one of his countrymen
who was called in to interpret for us that I
was able to make him understand that with the
Americans whistling is a mark of approval,
whereas in the French theatre it indicates the
; reverse.

During the day we wandered about the
streets and everywhere one turned there were
opportunities for doing good. For instance
some of those up here on the edge of the danger
zone undergoing hardships were inclined to
speak slightingly of those in Paris in executive
positions who "had it easy," but when we
pointed out to them that the chaps in Paris
would give their eye teeth to be up near the
firing line and that they were already dreading
the day when they must go home and tell their
sweethearts and families that they got only to
Paris — then the chaps up nearer the front were
happier again.

I climbed up to a magnificent view on a high
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mountain back of the hotel. Soldiers crowded
every nook and crannie of the ruined cathedral
on the mountain's crest. They also were on
their way to the front. At the foot of the hill,
tied to an iron ring in an old stone wall, stood
a wreck of a horse with a festering shrapnel
wound in his shoulder. The poor beast strained
in^vain toward a few spears of grass growing
just outside his reach. I gathered the grass
and gave it to him. I found a sympathetic
French girl in a shack near by and she found
some hay for the beast. I was so grateful that
I cried. She brought me some water to wash
the tears away and the sea that rolls between
our two countries and the babble of tongues
that confuse meant very little.

I couldn't leave the horse until some one had
adopted him and at last an ambulance came
and took him away, still munching the hay that
we transferred to the ambulance.

Further down the street a French lad was
carrying a fox terrier in his arms and crying
over it — a passing camion had broken its leg.
Again the tears came to my eyes and yet I
looked down that same street at miles upon
miles of human beings borne forward to slaugh-

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ter in these same grey camions and I could not
cry. It was all too horrible and too colossal
— neither could I sleep that night for we were
now in a hotel with rooms fronting on the street
and the constant procession of hoofs and wheels
on the cobble stones sounded to our tired nerves
like the roar of the ocean.

As I came in that evening I had noticed
through the open door of the room next to
mine a bent old figure in black, sitting near the
window, gazing into space. Near her on the
bed sat a young girl so tragic and strained in
her grief that I was sure she did not even know
that the door stood ajar and I hurried into my
own room feeling a little ashamed of having
seen what was not meant for my eyes.

Later in the night, as I turned my pillow
again and again trying to make it fit into the
tired spot in the back of my neck, I heard the
door of the next room thrown open and I
could almost see the girl who fell sobbing with
her arms round her mother. I've heard many
women cry in my life and some men but I
never knew until then what agony could come
out of a human soul. And the mother spoke
no word — it was no use. It was daylight when

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the sobs at last died into low infrequent moans
and I learned that the girl had come from the
death bed of her fiance whom she and the poor
old mother had travelled days and nights to
find.

We played many nights in this town for the
steady stream of troops continued to pass
through it. We also played the engineering
camps, supply camps and aviation camps there-
abouts— there were sixteen of the last — and
I shall never forget the first time that we drove
up to one of the most important of these, the
"First Pursuit Group." Everything as far as
the eye could reach had been camouflaged,
hangars, huts and trucks and the green and
yellow new-art designs looked so fantastic and
queer in the twilight.

"The Little Major," as he was fondly called
by the men of his group, had arranged for us
to dine before the show in the mess tent at the
foot of the hill, below a newly ploughed field.
By the time dinner was over the rain was com-
ing down in torrents, the field was a lake of
mud and it was impossible to move the automo-
bile that had brought us.

We set out on foot toward the distant han-
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gar where men from other aviation camps were
also waiting for us. We were not supposed
even to use our pocket flashes, for enemy obser-
vation planes might be far above us in the black
sky. The women carried their evening slip-
pers under their arms, meaning to put them on
later when we reached the hangar and it was
not until we were at the very entrance of it
that one of the girls discovered that one of her
slippers was missing. Such a to-do! It was
not an easy matter to get satin slippers in this
benighted corner of the earth and we were
headed for even more benighted regions.

She was tired and depressed by the long pull
through the mud and she fell onto a camp stool
inside the big truck that had been rolled inside
the hangar to serve as a dressing room and be-
gan to cry. Her street shoes were caked in
mud to their tops and she refused to try to play
in them.

Three aviators Immediately shot off into the
darkness with one of our own men to search the
muddy field for the missing slipper. They re-
turned with it at last and by this time the audi-
ence which we had heard but not seen were
booing, whistling and clapping with impa-

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tience. At last the missing slipper was re-
covered and on the lady's small foot. I was
frightfully nervous as I pushed aside the green
silesia curtains that we always carried and
cleared my throat to make the supposedly
comic speech with which we always opened
the show. I never could remember afterward
just what I said, for of all the picturesque au-
diences that I had ever seen this was certainly
the most fantastic.

There were twenty-five hundred men, so we
were afterwards told, huddled together on the
ground and above them imperilling their own
lives and those of the men underneath, were
hundreds of others intertwined in the huge steel
framework supporting the largest hangar that
I had ever seen. Some of the men seemed to
be holding onto their perches like monkeys,
their feet crossed round a bar of steel, others
had made themselves comfortable on, wide
beams and were lying with their hands crossed
under their heads, and all through the per-
formance I could scarcely keep my mind on
the lines of the playlet for trying to locate
various members of the audience and fearing
that some of them would tumble off their

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perches when they released their hold to ap-
plaud— and how they did applaud and yell,
and how wild and picturesque it all looked in
the fog that had crept in through the cracks
and made golden circles round the dim torch
light. And then came the whir of an enemy ob-
servation plane overhead and a hush and no-
thing said and then on with the show.

The next day we were sent to a camp nearby
where it was hoped that Miss Brice and I
would at last find the small gas masks. There
was nothing among the American masks that
would do, so it was decided to give us the old
style French masks for which we were devout-
ly grateful for they seemed far easier to ad-
just. It was pointed out to us that the oxygen
in these would not last so many hours as in
the American masks but we in turn pointed
out that we couldn't run more than one hour
at the most.

We had received our final equipment none
too soon for the next morning with our blan-
kets, folding cots, new masks and helmets we
were loaded into an army car and taken yet
further up the line to an engineering camp

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on the side of a hill on the edge of the Argonne
forest.

It was explained that we could be billeted
here in the engineers' barracks because there
was a supply station nearby, from which pro-
visions and ammunition were "shot" up to men
in the front lines, just above, and we would
also have thousands of troops to which to play,
as the woods for miles around were sheltering
troops that kept under cover by day and
marched by night, so that the enemy's observa-
tion planes might not discover the full strength
of the blow that we were preparing to deliver.

Some of the officers in the barracks were
kind enough to give up one of their rooms to
the three women of our company and our cots
were tucked into this room so closely that we
had to crawl over the foot of them to get into
bed. The men of the company were put into
an equally small room behind the kitchen of
the officers' mess and Mr. Morrisey says that
he will never forget the sound of the rats claws
as they scratched their way up and over the
slick surface of the tarpaulin under which it
was necessary to sleep to keep out the damp-
ness. He says he used to lie awake in the night

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and gamble with himself as to which of the rats
would get "over the top" first.

At the foot of the hill below the main build-
ing was a black little "lean-to" called "The
Greasy Spoon."

It was at the intersection of many lines of
track that our American engineers had been
laying for months — track connecting with our
main bases of supplies hundreds of miles be-
low, with the shipsdocks still further below,
and with intermediary hospitals and supply
bases, and finally with the very outposts of
what was to mark the starting point of the
great and final offensive.

And over these tracks every twenty minutes
American engines were passing with long
trains of American cars — cars bearing food,
guns, tanks, aeroplanes, Red Cross supplies,
humans, live stock, portable houses, hospital
tents and huge barrels of gasoline and oil. And
wherever these latter were known to be side-
tracked the Boche planes were quickly over-
head to drop explosives in the hope of start-
ing a general conflagration. The light from
these explosives, sometimes near sometimes far,
was almost the only light that we saw these
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nights, for the camp was obliged to keep itself
in utter darkness lest even one tiny spark of
light might serve as a target for the Boche
planes constantly hovering overhead.

The hut in which we gave our first show was
hermetically sealed and the entrance hung with
double curtains so that no ray of light should
escape, and not even a lighted cigarette was
permitted to any one departing from it and
the same rules were applied to the mess room
and sleeping quarters.

In fact divers tales were told of a whole
company being wiped out near that very spot
by an idiot who had lighted a cigarette just
as a Boche bombing plane was passing over-
head, though it was suspected by some that
he was a spy and took this way of giving a
signal.

In any case, the black surroundings did
not prevent the thousands of boys hidden with
their commands in the adjoining woods from
finding their way to the hut for our first show
and in spite of the fact that we gave two shows
the same night hundreds had to be sent away
with the promise of other shows the next night
for those who had not been swept on toward

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"the front." It was late when we'd finished
the second performance and as usual we were
hungry, so one of the officers helped us to pick
our way down the hill to "The Greasy Spoon"
and here we met our first "Corned Willie"
also some undecorated heroes.

A youth who had been on duty forty-eight
hours, his face smeared with soot, his hands red
and swollen, stood with his back to the glowing
oven "slinging" corn willie, beans, and coffee
across a counter of dry goods boxes to tired
grimy trainmen who were averaging only three
hours' sleep a night and were putting through
a train every twenty minutes — an American
train over American tracks laid by American
engineers, manned by American soldiers, bear-
ing American supplies, ammunition, and men.
Just now they were rejoicing in having run a
train for the first time over the last section
of track laid to the very line of what was soon
to become our fighting front — these last miles
of track had been laid under shell fire but
would save eight hours in the transportation
of the wounded and that eight hours would
mean life or death to hundreds.

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It was in "The Greasy Spoon" that we first
heard the doughboys' frank opinion of what
they called "Sammie backers," meaning the
fellows who stay at home and send them cigar-
ettes and "good wishes."

In fact there were few things, persons, or
institutions that did not come in for their fair
share of criticism in the black little shanty with
its long benches and tables lit only by flickering
candles and the yellow light from the open
oven. Generals, Presidents and fickle sweet-
hearts were introduced and retired with a
phrase or a shrug and above the jangle of tin
pans and forks one caught fragmentary re-
ports of the night's happenings, trains over-
turned, gasoline cars shelled, tracks blown out,
and trainmen killed.

I was inclined to wonder if these moody,
overworked men and boys were colouring some
of the details to entertain us "tenderfeet" —
but next morning in the officers* mess where we
were treated like members of the family, we
could not escape hearing most of these reports
repeated and we began to look with new ad-
miration on the grim business like men who
sat with us at table. They were not typical

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army men nor were all of them young enough
to come within the draft age. Some of them
were men not unlike others I mentioned earlier,
rich, successful and at the height of their busi-
ness careers. They had given up interesting
occupations to assume duties they had left be-
hind in their youth and had not seen their
homes since the very start of the war. Who
can say when the records of these years are
printed that there is no idealism in the busi-
ness world of to-day?

After breakfast, we walked to the little
French Cemetery on the top of the hill, above
the barracks, and here the American flags told
the tale of many who would never see their
homes again — not men who had been mentioned
for brilliant service or had the thrill of going
"over the top" but men who had died in ob-
scurity providing ways and means for their
more fortunate fellows to go "over the top."

The Chaplain of the regiment joined us in
our walk and asked if we'd like to take a look
at a lost division that was making camp in
the woods above. We asked what he meant by
"lost." He told us how the Commander of
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these twenty thousand men had received in-
structions to proceed to this point, where fur-
ther orders were presumably to be waiting for
him, but, finding no orders, he had no other
course than to conceal his men in the woods
and bide his time.

From where we stood there was no sign of
life whatever, but we had not beat our way
more than a hundred feet through the thick
underbrush when we literally fell upon thou-
sands of burrowing, slashing humans, hacking
their way through the vines and bushes to make
trails to central points of manoeuvre, and using
the cut boughs to camouflage the tops of their
"pup tents" and wagons, so that enemy obser-
vation planes could see only what was ap-
parently a thick forest. These thousands of
busy, bent figures made one think of ants tak-
ing possession of a new home. So close and
so well concealed were their "pup tents" that
it took us some time to realise that we were in
the midst of whole villages of them — canvas
coops, so low and so small that the two men
allotted to each have barely room enough to
crawl in side by side and roll up in their blan-
kets— the canvas is supposed to protect the

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men from the rain but it is taken as a matter
of course that in case of hard rain the men
wake up in puddles of water. One of our
players remarked that these must be called
"pup tents" because no dog would sleep in
them. And speaking of dogs our doughboys
have dubbed the identification tags which the
army are compelled to wear on their wrists or
necks "dog tags." This is typical of the mat-
ter-of-fact way in which our men regard the
grim business of war. They have no false
sentimentality to buoy them up, no love of
adventure, no inborn lust of blood, nothing
but a frank abhorrence for the wholesale
butchery and brutality into which they find
themselves plunged and a steady stoical de-
termination to see the job through.

"Somebody has to do it," one of them said
to me, "so we might as well get it over as soon
as possible."

One doughboy, hacking at a tough root near
a space being cleared for the cooking oven, ex-
pressed what most of them feel about France.
He was hungry and tired and drenched to the
skin and he didn't care who heard him. "The
only thing that would serve the Germans
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right," he said, "would be to give them a
damned good licking and then give them
France." The officer who stood near me pre-
tended not to hear, but I caught a sly smile
lurking around his lips and I remarked that the
French scenery didn't seem to impress the
doughboys as much as it did the American
tourists. He answered that it was not the
scenery that got on their nerves but the lack of
sanitary plumbing, and he admitted that it
would be a pretty hard matter for travel pam-
phlets ever to '"sell" France to any of our
doughboys.

"Come on, fellows," shouted this particular
boy when he'd finally torn out the unruly root
and given way to the mess sergeant who was
waiting to lay his brick for the oven.

"I'm going down to the de-louser." The I
"de-louser" is the name the boys give to the
public baths that assist them in separating
themselves and their clothes from their cooties.

"Those boys are willing to miss their mess
to get that bath," the officer said, "they're a
damned clean lot," and so they were and soon
a long line of them was filing down the hill,
some toward the de-louser, some to carry up

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the water for the mess — and by the time we
reached our barracks mid- way on the hill, some
of them were already filing back again and
once more I was reminded of ants — busy and
steady, their minds thoroughly on the affair
of the moment.

This "lodging for the night" we soon learned
was typical of hundreds of others in the forest
all round us. And each day our local "Y"
guide would take us in a car to some thicket
where within twenty minutes we would have
such an audience as none of us shall prob-
ably ever see again. Sometimes we would
mount a truck for our performance; for
wagons, artillery, and horses were also con-
cealed in these woods, but more often we would
play on the ground, and the officer in command
would give the order for the first few hundred
boys to lie flat, those behind them were per-
mitted to kneel, those at the back could stand
and those who were "left over" would "shin-
ney" up the trees like squirrels and drape
themselves across the branches and hang sus-
pended in strained attitudes during the entire
show. If we happened to be playing in a
young forest we were sometimes almost dizzy

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with the swaying of the slender saplings wav-
ing back and forth under the weight of human
bodies.

Sometimes our performance would be can-
celled or cut short by the men to whom we were
playing being suddenly ordered forward. On
one occasion when our "Y" conductor had
happened to leave us to the Colonel of the
regiment who had volunteered to send us home
in his car, the whole division was ordered for-
ward in the midst of our performance. The
Colonel had no alternative but to move with
them and we were obliged to walk to the
nearest railway station and beat our way
"home" huddled together on a meat chest in a
box car. We arrived about midnight, hungry
and chilled and as we picked our way through
the mud and the darkness up the hill toward
the barracks Ray Walker our musician drew
his foot out of a hole and paused long enough
to remark that he was sick of life and he didn't
care whether his gas mask fitted or not.

But the next morning we were all going
back down the hill in the sunlight with the de-
spised gas masks and helmets, because the Col-

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onel of the regiment where we were billeted

!had decided that we had been working so hard
that we deserved a little pleasure trip and had
detailed one of his lieutenants to take us, in a
limousine, to see the ruins of Verdun a few
miles distant. Verdun! White dust-covered
heaps of stone and bricks, crumbling mortar,
silent streets paved with huge, shiny cobble-
stones, solemn faced gates that have withstood
for ages the onslaughts of man and of nature,
the sluggish Meuse winding stealthily round
the base of the hill and, looking up from the
Gateway, the walls of the magnificent Cathe-
dral still crowning the hill-top.

We halted the car at the foot of the hill and
our lieutenant went in search of some one who
would give us permission to enter the fortress
underneath the mountain.

He was gone so long that our party disap-
peared, one by one, up the mountain side — each
impatient to do his or her own exploring. I
was last to leave the car and as I did so I
noticed a small man in black coming toward
me round the bend in the white road-way.
With him walked a soldier in American uni-
form and several French officials. He made
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his way up the hill with them talking earnestly.
It was Secretary Baker.

Out of the golden stillness came a "Hello" —
our Lieutenant was returning with a military
guide to lead us through the Fortress. We en-
tered by way of a cold damp tunnel through
which narrow gauge cars were being pushed —
they were laden with provisions and presently
we were in the midst of huge bakeries where
miles of bread, flour and cereals were stored —
from there we passed to what looked like a
wholesale grocery store and from there to a
restaurant where thousands of men were hav-
ing their mid-day meal, discussing the politics,
feuds or amusements of their underground
world with the same vehemence with which we
discuss similar matters in our over-world.

With the artist's desire to show us a con-
trasting picture the guide now led us to a gay
little chapel — still underground — where these
same men were accustomed to worship. It was
charming and reassuring in colour and detail
but it always seems incongruous to think of
men communing with God underground and
later when we passed out into the sunlight I

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felt as though I had emerged from a strange
world of gnomes.

On top of the hill, sublime in its isolation and
with dignity wrapping it round and enfolding
it in a soft mantle of haze, stood the great Ca-
thedral.

We climbed up to it — no tourists — no voice
to break the silence save that of one lone watch-
man.

We gazed in awe at the high vaulted en-
trance that still remained intact, then stepped
with reverence on the worn stones leading to
the main body of the church — stones over which
so many thousands of feet had so often borne
aching or rejoicing hearts.

We were barely out of the shadow of the
vestibule when a shaft of light made us turn
our eyes upward and there before us stood the
four great twisted columns of marble that had
once supported the canopy of the high altar,
now reaching their empty arms toward the sun-
light pouring through the shell-torn roof and
to the blue sky beyond.

And the altar itself — that fine slab of un-
adorned marble that seemed all the more im-
posing stripped of everything save its own en-
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during quality and symbolism! We edged
nearer to it and lingered there, saying little.
Its very presence gave one a confidence in the
ultimate survival of the fine and the strong.

Next the guide led us to one of the smaller
sanctuaries of the cathedral where a shell had
just shattered the crucifix above the altar —
fragments of blue glass still lay on the tiled
floor where they had fallen from a broken vase.
We turned our eyes again toward the high al-
tar. Doves now flew in and out at random
through the great shell hole in the vaulted ceil-
ing, the altar was bathed in noon sunlight and
through the shattered windows in the opposite
wall unruly vines were beginning to creep from
the garden of the Convent of Marguerite, nes-
tling with such confidence under the eaves of its
great protector. And everywhere there was
majesty and calm dignity — damage, perhaps
but not destruction. There was a spirit within
those battered walls that seemed to defy de-
struction.

We were late reaching camp for our lunch-
eon and I at first thought that the restrained
air of the Colonel and the heavy silence of his
men was due to our tardiness. Then I remem-
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bered another and similar change in the social
atmosphere weeks before at G. H. Q. just be-
fore the big drive on Saint Mihiel and I felt
certain that the hour of attack was at hand.
Week uponi week of preparation had been
under way and it had been remarked the past
few days that the necessary apparatus for the
placement of some of the large naval guns con-
verted to land service was the only thing delay-
ing the announcement of the "zero hour." And
now no doubt the big guns were in place and
one might expect to hear their thunder at any
moment.

This conclusion was strengthened by the ar-
rival of a courier before we had finished lunch-
eon. He had come to tell us that the "matinee"
we were to play that afternoon for his regi-
ment in the woods nearby must be cancelled.
The division was moving forward in response
to a sudden order.

Being set free from all other engagements,
there seemed no reason why we should not con-
sider an invitation to a pleasure party to which
"the Little Major" of the Aviation Camp,
miles back down the line had been trying for
days to entice us. He had 'phoned our Colonel
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of Engineers about it and even sent one of his
flyers over our barracks to drop a note in our
vicinity reminding us of it. And after a few
hints on our part to our Colonel, who was no
doubt glad to be rid of our prattle at such a
critical moment we were loaded into his car and
sent down the line to the Aviation Camp — it
being understood of course that we were to re-
turn to the barracks at a reasonable hour.

When we arrived at the Aviation Field we
found that the "Little Major'* and some of his
officers had taken up their billet with a charm-
ing old French couple in the village nearby and
it was here that a dinner and dance were await-
ing us — the first real dance since we had left
America. The lion of the occasion was to be
Eddie Rickenbacker who had just brought
down his eighth Boche plane and who was soon
destined to win the title of "The American
Ace" and to be tcld by the Commander deco-
rating him to increase his chest expansion to
accommodate the many more decorations
awaiting him.

The Major's charming dining room with its
polished walnut and candle light and flow-
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ers looked strangely civilised after the rough
surroundings to which we had become accus-
tomed and he had managed to get together a
stringed orchestra and it played between
courses and we all danced and "The Little Ma-
jor" seemed in fine spirits. One of his men con-
fided to me that it was because he'd got a Boche
that day. He said the men could always tell
when they saw the Major coming home whether
he had got a Boche for if he'd had a good day he
always did a flip-flap over the hangar. I ex-
pressed surprise that a commander of a wing
should be permitted to fly. His Aide replied
that the Major ought not to do it, but he did.
The Major discovered by now that we were
talking about him and he became self-conscious
and blushed like a girl, so to change the subject,
I asked the man on my right the customary
bromidic question as to what had been his most
thrilling experience in the service. He told me
of having been ordered one night during his
earlier term of service to proceed to a certain
point, pick up a certain passenger to whom he
twas not to speak, proceed with him across the
German lines, drop him at a certain point, still
without speaking, and leave him there. The
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man was, of course, one of our spies but my
partner said that the most disagreeable moment
of his whole life was when he was obliged to
depart without even a word of farewell leaving
his unknown passenger in that "black land of
hell."

By the time he had reached his dramatic cli-
max the others at table suddenly burst into
boos and derisive cat-calls and declared that
the party was becoming much too solemn, so
the dinner table was pushed aside and we began
dancing in real earnest and every one was feel-
ing deliciously reckless and merry. Then sud-
denly "The Little Major" was called to the
'phone and again the old air of suppressed ex-
citement about which no one speaks but every
one feels, and later, without any one exactly
saying so, it seemed to get round from guest
to guest, that we would hear the big guns be-
fore morning.

When we reached the foot of the hill on
which our barracks stood, it was later than we
had meant it to be. The moon had escaped
from the few shifting clouds and the whole val-
ley was bathed in a soft hazy light. We were
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still in a very happy mood and we stopped half
way up the hill to look down on the valley be-
low us and at the dark line of the Argonne For-
est beyond it, when suddenly out of the silvery
distance at a quarter past eleven, came the
boom of the first Great Gun of the last great
battle of the World's Greatest Conflict — and
in quick succession more guns — great Naval
monsters pressed into land service, far from
their natural bases — then flashes of light in
front and to each side of us until we stood in a
wide horse-shoe of light. Oh, the thrill of it!
I sometimes think if I am ever to be born again
I should like it to be as a war correspondent
with just enough income to insure me against a
poverty-stricken old age, and then I should like
to stay always in sound of the guns. Great
Commanders must manipulate affairs from
afar, their lives are too precious to be put in
peril, doughboys are soon killed if they are
given their chance at the front, but War cor-
respondents are free agents — they can follow
the sky rockets of war and dash from battle to
battle wherever the fighting is thickest.

All night the heavy firing continued and
when it died down the next morning, I was
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alarmed, lest something had given us a tempo-
rary set-back, but the seasoned campaigners
assured me that the silence was a good sign
for it meant that we had driven the enemy so
far that we must cease firing until we could
move our artillery forward to pursue them, and
so it proved to be, and so it continued to be day
after day and week after week.

And as our army advanced our little "En-
tertainment Unit" was also permitted to ad-
vance, and next time, after fond farewells to
the Engineer group with whom we had been
billeted so long and so well, we were loaded
into a big brown touring car and carried up the
"Great White Way" toward the direction in
which the big guns had again resumed their
booming. Now that the battle was on, the
Army no longer confined itself to moving
troops and supplies by night and we had to
pick our way in and out as best we could be-
tween the steady stream of heavily laden cam-
ions moving forward and the returning stream
of empty camions moving back for fresh sup-
plies. It was tedious business and we were
sometimes blocked for hours and ,at times like
this we would amuse ourselves watching the
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strange assortment of men and things moving
toward "the front."

Few regiments of men were without their
animal mascots — sometimes it would be a huge
shaggy dog balancing himself as well as he
could on top of the rolling, rocking munitions,
upon top of which he had been placed, some-
times it was a goat held in the arms of some
youth staring into space with dreamy eyes,
sometimes a rooster or a parrot. I even saw an
eagle and a young pig with a ribbon round his
neck. And they all moved forward together
— infantry, cavalry, artillery — black, white and
yellow — all toward a fate that promised them
little hope of escape from mutilation.

When we finally reached our destination it
proved to be a somewhat shell-torn town in the
heart of which two important war arteries
crossed and so great was the congestion that we
could scarcely work our way to the entrance of
the Canteen above which our Unit was bil-
leted.

When we did finally get to the door and up

the rickety stairs and look down upon the

streets from the windows of the one, desolate

room where the three women were to sleep, I

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fairly gasped at the colour and picturesqueness
of the surging billowing sea of camions, men
and animals all striving to fight their way
through the congestion at the cross-roads and
in spite of the waving arms and harsh com-
mands of the American military police, the
"Froggies" would get their camions out of line
and the more excited they became by argument
the further out of line they would get and gen-
eral bedlam would prevail with every one ex-
cept the stoical round-faced Amanites who
seemed to sit at the wheels of their huge motor
trucks without speaking, smiling, or looking to
the right or the left at the Red Cross wagons,
the machine guns, the "baby tanks" or parent
tanks, the French cavalry, the black or white
infantry, or mules — all struggling to disen-
tangle themselves from the constantly occur-
ring "mix-ups."

When we had tired watching this '"midway
plaisance" effect from our windows we closed
the shutters and lit our candles — here again no
ray of light was permitted without everything
being hermetically sealed.

The sole furniture of our room consisted of
the three cots which we had brought with us
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and on which the men had placed our blankets,
one long rough board table with bench and one
dry goods box on which was placed a small
tin pan and near which stood a tin pail filled
with water. This was all. The walls of the
room were streaked with weather stains from
the last rain and the cracks in the uncarpeted
floor were filled with the dirt of ages.

The resident "Y" man had broken up some
packing cases to make firewood for us and we
started a little blaze and got out our towels and
soap to make ready for dinner which we were
told we were to eat at the sergeants' mess
across the street and after which we were to
give two performances in the town theatre — a
little old glorified stable that had defied both
shell fire and the ravages of time.

It did boast a stage, however, and tin reflec-
tors for the footlights. The organ for this fes-
tive occasion, so the boys at the mess table told
us, had been purloined from a distant "Y"
hut and might be requisitioned at any moment.

We learned other things in this jolly little
Mess with its open fire and long benches and
its tables covered with gay oilcloth and its kit-
chen with glowing range gaping through the
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open door and sunny faced good natured boys
officiating at the range and smiling at the
thought of the surprise that was going to
"knock us cold" when they gave us pumpkin
pie for our supper. We gathered from this
fragmentary conversation that here, at last, we
were to play to the men who so many of the
Commanders had said were in greatest need of
us — the men who were just on the eve of "go-
ing over the top.'* The boys of the mess were
stationed in the village as were their whole di-
vision— a division that had been "stuck in the
mud" up there for months holding the Argonne
line which they -and their dead comrades had
helped to establish four years ago and it was'
only since "the big offensive" had begun to
shove this line back that the currents of fresh
war activities flowing toward the firing line had
begun to vitalise the air of their torpid little
village.

These currents were running flood tide now
— sometimes the men passed through in whole
divisions but more often in isolated hundreds or
as individuals and those last were the ones who
touched our hearts most, they were called "re-
placements." They had been detached from
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their own regiments or recruited from conva-
lescent wards and shot forward into unknown
terrors with no comrades by their sides, know-
ing only that on the morrow they must take the
places of the fallen. And this village was their
last stopping place on the night before going
into action. And on and on they came in such
numbers that it was impossible for the Army,
the "Y," or the residents to find shelter for
them and they would curl up in doorways or
in the thickets beyond the village, or in barns,
or stretch themselves on the "Y" floor, if they
were early enough in town to find space there,
and draw their overcoats or their blanket over
them — for by the time they had reached this
place they had been stripped of most of their
other equipment. It was impossible to march
long, under the weight of a sixty pound pack
and extra rounds of ammunition, and although
the weather was beginning to be bitter cold,
when asked to choose between extra ammuni-
tion and their blankets, I am told they invari-
ably chose the extra ammunition.

Oh, the joy of being able to offer shelter for
at least a few hours each night in the theatre to
at least a part of these cold, lonely, friendless
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souls and to hear them laugh at our silly non-
sense and to make them forget that they were
only so much fodder to be fed on the morrow
into the same relentless maw that had swal-
lowed up their comrades before them.

An unfortunate thing happened one night,
Miss Meredith, our ingenue, was ill and it had
been decided that we had better not attempt
more than one performance that night, for in
addition to our night work we were playing the
Camps in the woods during the day and we
feared that the young lady might lose her voice
entirely.

The "Y" man failed, however, to post a
notice of the second performance being can-
celled and when I came out the back entrance
of the theatre, with two others of the Company,
he rushed up to me to say that thousands of the
boys, out in front, were clamouring for admit-
tance, and that they had stood in line for three
hours expecting a second show and were about
to break in the door.

It was pitch black in the streets — no lights
were permitted — not even a pocket flash — our
Company was stopping some distance from the
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theatre — and the others had gone home some
time before us.

I suggested that they open the doors and let
the boys in so that we could explain to them.
The "Y" man said that once they were in, they
would demand a performance and probably
tear up the place if they didn't get it. He sug-
gested that I go round to the front of the thea-
tre and speak to them in the street. I picked
my way through the dark alley as well as I
could and found myself in the midst of thou-
sands of them. When the "Y" man told them
I was there — it was so dark they couldn't see
me — they were quiet and attentive but when
I explained that we could not give a second
"show" they booed and protested. I told them
that if they would only come again the next
night we would play all night for them if they
wished it.

"We'll not be here to-morrow night," came a
voice out of the darkness. "You needn't
trouble. We'll be in the trenches to-morrow
night," was another bitter answer, and I knew
it was the truth.

By this time I was desperate. I resolved to
rush back to the two members I had left at the
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stage entrance and see if we three could not
give a show. When I got back through the
crowd and the darkness they had gone. I
stumbled up the dark street as best I could, the
"Y" man also having become detached by now,
and I burst into the room where Miss Meredith
had made ready for her cot. She was in her
dressing gown and very white but willing to
make an attempt at another show if I could find
the others.

I looked in the back part of the building
where the men were quartered, not one of them
there, and at last I fumbled my way back
through the dark street to tell the boys waiting
at the theatre that there was no hope of an-
other show. But they had evidently divined
this and had slipped away into the night, no
doubt cursing us in their hearts. I went back
to our desolate little room and sat by the few
remaining embers with my head in my hands
so tired and so depressed and so sorry for the
bitter thoughts that those boys would carry
away with them that I didn't care a whoop
whether I lived or died.

r

One of the officers scolded me next day when
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I was still in the dumps and said I would never
make a good soldier if I was going to have re-
grets, but I did have regrets and each day and
night no matter to how many men we played
I was always conscious that we would never
again have the opportunity of playing to those
men who had waited so long that night in the
dark and the cold and who are now — God
knows where. And so long as'we stayed in
that town — no matter how heavy our work
during the day, nor how ill or tired we felt at
night, we always gave our two shows, for here,
if ever, they were needed, for day by day and
night by night the steady stream of victims and
war implements never ceased passing under
our windows — feeding — feeding — feeding!

And soon came back the returning stream —
the dead and the dying — and sometimes came
with them long lines of German prisoners be-
ing marching to the barb wire pens already pro-
yided for them further down the line — and
most of these looked young, well fed and con-
tent to be taken.

Soon the temporary hospitals in the barns
and woods nearby began to fill and overflow
with the maimed and gassed and what a pity
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that those at home could not have seen the un-
believable efficiency with which the great sani-
tary experts and surgeons of our country han-
dled the hygiene and surgical necessities of
situations, that men of less resource would have
considered impossible.

The relay system, the tabulation system, the
impromptu operating devices, sterilising de-
vices, and heating apparatus, the specialisation
for gas cases, psychopathic cases, surgical cases
and medical cases, handled in tents, stables or
sheds and the Herculean endurance of these
men who kept their brains clear and their
hands steady for seventy-two hours at a stretch.
Oh, Humanity, be proud! [You can never be
proud enough of your best — never!

We tried sometimes to play to some of the
men in the hospital tents who had not been too
seriously gassed, for while our nights were still
needed at the theatre our days were now com-
paratively free. We found, however, that as
soon as the patients were sufficiently recov-
ered to take notice of us, they were relayed to
hospitals further down the line in order to
make way for new cases, so we gave up these
attempts and went back to our old scheme of
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hunting out the encampments in the woods or
playing to troops halted along the roadside.

One Sunday we were sent forward to within
three miles of the firing line, into woods that
had been for the past four years in possession
of the Boche. We were to play chiefly to a
company of engineers who had not even seen a
woman in eighteen months. They had belonged
to one of the detachments that go in advance
of the attacking forces to cut the barb wire or
follow behind to clean up the wreckage left in
the wake of victory. The roads through the
deep rain-soaked wood were almost impassable
and by the time we reached the place where we
were to leave the car and proceed on foot we
were already late. We came upon our audience
still farther in the thicket sitting on the wet
ground, or logs, round a stage that they had
built and equipped from German loot which
they had salvaged from the recent drive. It
was screened from above by a thick canopy of
leaves and boughs so as to escape detection by
the enemy planes. Four small German ma-
chine guns, also salvaged, served as chairs for
us and the table made from beech wood was
edged with German shells and adorned with
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German canteens filled with goldenrod — a
flower that apparently blooms in every coun-
try. There was even a piano salvaged from a
nearby dugout that had been occupied for four
years by German officers. We inspected the
dugout later and found that it was cement
lined, calcimined and wired for electricity. The
piano which had been originally captured by
the Boche from the French was now to be
played by an American musician.

Being Sunday the Army Chaplain opened
the "show" with prayer; then standing we all
repeated the oath of allegiance with the men
and officers ; then the regimental band that had
marched from a camp some miles below played
the National Anthem, and at intervals througK
it all came the steady boom of the big guns,
slaughtering while we prayed.

On our way out of this section we passed
through another part of the forest. There
were a great many graves by the roadside made
for the German dead during their four years*
occupation. The Huns had stolen tombstones
from the French Cemeteries and painted Ger-
man inscriptions over the carved inscriptions of
the French.

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When still further 'down the line in a deso-
late little village we were requested by a Col-
onel's aide to give a performance to part of a
division temporarily quartered there, we did so
— on the steps of a shelled cathedral, the high-
est point of vantage in the town. The men
stood on the side of the hill beneath us. We felt
several times that we were losing their atten-
tion, even though their eyes were on us, and we
heard the faint whirrings of machines evidently
high in the clouds. One of the officers confid-
ed to us later that he had been obliged to have
the order passed from man to man not to look
up, for he knew from the peculiar throbbing of
the engines that they belonged to the enemy
and a sea of white faces turned upward is far
easier to discern than the tops of heads — bald
heads, of course, excepted. We were growing
quite accustomed to overhead enemies by now
but we all looked up a few days later when we
were giving a performance to what was left of
an Oregon division and we counted 107 of our
own planes flying past at sunset in perfect for-
mation toward the front. We learned later
that some of our friends of the first pursuit
group were among them and that they formed
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part of one of the largest formations ever sent
across the German lines. And all of them re-
turned.

When we got back to our mess that night
we were perfectly certain that some rumour
was going the rounds in which we were not
partners and the next morning Tommy Gray
of our unit who had been sighing for a priest to
confess him fell upon the information that had
not yet reached even our camp officials.

After walking miles toward a camp where
he arrived only to find the Priest down with the
"flu," a Jewish Rabbi undertook to guide him
to a camp of the Seventy- Seventh Division,
further on, where he believed a priest was to be
had and to their astonishment they found men
loading an aeroplane with provisions and hom-
ing pigeons which it was hoped they could drop
to a battalion of their men that had been cut
off by the enemy — a battalion that has since
covered itself in glory, and become one of the
picturesque features of the war.

It was quite a feather in Tommy's cap to
have found out something that none of the men
in our division actually knew, and while he
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wasn't encouraged by the officers to talk about
it we had become such close friends with the
boys in the sergeants' mess that it somehow
leaked out, and since it only confirmed rumours
which they had already heard, it seemed rather
stingy of us to be too reticent about it and
each morning each asked his neighbour guard-
edly if he had "heard anything." But it was
not until weeks later that we heard the details
of the ultimate fate of the battalion and of the
stout heart of commander Whittelsey who
shaved each morning with death at his elbow
just to keep up the morale of his men.

In the meantime our friendship with the boys
in the mess grew warmer and we used to linger
longer and longer over our hot cakes and mo-
lasses to hear the boys spin their yarns and
chaff each other.

Rodeheaver of Billy Sunday fame "blew in"
for coffee one morning and told us of the songs
that he'd been singing in the mouths of the can-
non and the boys responded with fifty-seven
verses of a doughboy lay which seemed fa-
miliar to them but was quite new to me. It
was something about a boy from Arkansas who
couldn't bear to kill a fly and what happened
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to him at the front and the refrain was always
the same— "Oh this bloody, Bloody War!"

Rodeheaver chuckled with delight and told
us some funny stories and left us laughing
when he said Good-bye and after he had disap-
peared down the alley the boys proceeded to
dissect him and religionists in general and other
celebrities of their country and of every other
fellow's country and there was enough Ameri-
can humour forthcoming from that group to
have kept George Ade chronicling for the rest
of his natural lif e — tender college youths, wild
western thoroughbreds, East Side gangsters
and country yokels all equally dear to each
other and all determined to have their little joke
till the finish. One chubby faced youth with
an interrupted college career put his chin in his
hands and gazed at the fire and said dolefully:
"To think that one so young as I should have
been through two wars!" I asked what he
meant and it seems he had been through both
the Mexican Border flurry and this and he still
looked too young to be out at night.

Only twice did I ever see their spirits even
temporarily overcast. The first time was when
two of the "casuals" from another division
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"helping out" in the kitchen were ordered back1
to the front. They, too, were infants, but they
had already been "over the top" once and land-
ed in hospitals from which they had beaten
their way to this place and now they were off
for their second chance with death. It touched
one's heart to see the other chaps stuffing cigar-
ettes and chocolate into their pockets and dig-
ging up mascots for them — and as the two in-
fants swung out the alley and into the street
they called back to us gaily, "Good-bye, fel-
lows, see you in New York or hell."

The next morning at breakfast one of the
boys brought in a letter on the envelope of
which was scrawled in a fine, feeble hand the
name of a youth whom they knew and in the
corner of the envelope was this request from
his mother: "Will some one please give this to
my boy somewhere in France." The youth had
been the chauffeur of the Colonel in that regi-
ment and he had been killed by an exploding
shell only that morning. The letter had been
wandering around France for five months and
had missed him by only five hours. And again
"C'est la Guerre.'^ Some lines of Grantland
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Rice came back to me — lines from a Mother's
Prayer.

My baby's gone ; gone is my little lad ;
And now a man stands in his place,
Stands where I cannot be, or see or shield.
God guard Thou him !

When guns are still and strife is overpast.
Whisper to him, where'er he lies this night,
The words I fain would speak could I be near ;
For, though he is no more a child,
I always am his Mother."

There was a hush at the table after the direc-
tions on the envelope had been read aloud and
we all hailed the first opportunity of interrup-
tion when one of the boys rushed in from the
street and told us to "come and see the fun."
It was pretty well over when we arrived but
it had evidently had something to do with a
goat that was travelling as a mascot on top of
one of the big camions and who had taken ad-
vantage of the congestion of the traffic to start
a little attack of his own on the unsuspecting
driver whose back had been toward him.

In front of the goat's vehicle was something
even more amusing — an American driver
swearing at French mules in English and then
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trying to conciliate them with the few words of
French that he knew.

I noticed that the mules had no gas masks
tied under their chins while all the horses wore
them and I was told that the mules were so
"damned stubborn" that nobody could ever get
the masks on them in time to save their fool
lives, so the Government had given up supply-
ing them with them.

Our little street party was broken up by the
news that a perfectly good German piano had
just been captured and unloaded on one of the
salvage dumps further up the line and, before
we knew it, the Mess Sergeant and half a doz-
en of the boys had got a truck and were off
to get that piano for us, to replace the poor one
that we were in hourly fear of losing from the
.village "Show Shop."

The fact that the salvage dump was under
shell fire only heightened their enthusiasm and
some of the members of our unit decided to go
with them. They didn't get the piano but they
got sensations about which they are still
strangely non-committal and the next day when
I went over the same trail with one of the offi-
cers and saw the death and desolation that lay
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either side of it, I realised why those returning
from it had had nothing to say. "The Salvage
Dump!" What will all Europe be after this
frightful struggle but one huge Salvage
Dump? Odds and ends of wreckage, animate
and inanimate, heaped together on the blood-
soaked shores of the flood of war.

When we woke next morning we found a
large car waiting outside our window to bear
us back to Bar-le-duc, the headquarters of that
particular region — and we were told that the
Paris office had been wiring for us for days to
proceed to the next "sector" where we were
long overdue. It was not easy to say Good-
bye to what had been our first real taste of bat-
tle and as our car edged its way back down the
line against the steady stream of men and mu-
nitions still pouring toward the front and as
the din of the big guns grew fainter and fainter
our spirits sank lower and lower.

At Bar-le-duc, however, where we were to
stay for the night, we were met by "Helios"
from every side and in the main hotel we found
war correspondents from New York, London,
and Paris and many friends we'd not seen since
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the beginning of our tour at G. H. Q. It was
by one of these that we were dubbed "The
Mayo Shock Unit," we having been farther to
the front, at that time, than any other "Play-
ers," and the title stuck to us for the remainder
of our tour, much to the temporary distress of
my mother who heard about it without know-
ing the compliment it implied. Bar-le-duc it
seemed had become a non-official headquarters
for all those who needed to keep in close touch
with everything going on at the Argonne front
• — journalists, war lords, and war heroes, air
conquerors and naval attaches.

In one corner of the cafe munching cheese
and jam sat Will Irwin, George Barr Baker,
Maximilian Foster, Bozeman Bulger, Arthur
Ruhl, Cameron McKenzie and Charles Kloeber
— at the other side of the room with their rum
and coffee were Damon Runyon, Claire Kena-
more and Eddie Rickenbacker, now the Amer-
ican Ace. Further on were A. L. James,
Douglas McArthur, the youngest General in
the army, Allen of the London Times and a
half dozen comrades. At the cashier's desk
was Alexander Wolcott, Patron Saint of "the
Stars and Stripes," threatening to report
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"the joint" and have it closed if the pro-
prietor did not make good a five francs over-
charge to one of the doughboys. It seemed as
if we were in the Knickerbocker Cafe and the
Savoy Grille and the Crillon Restaurant all
rolled into one, and then some one mentioned
Don Martin and that only he out of that whole
crowd was missing. There was a silence after
this, then one of the boys suggested that we all
walk round to the Press headquarters and find
out what day had been fixed for his funeral in
Paris. We stopped on the way to look from
the bridge at the sluggish canal and at the gay
coloured crockery that accidentally decorated
some of the steps leading down to it. At the
office there was apparently little news from the
front and Will Irwin fell into a chair by the
fire and began pounding his beloved typewriter.
The rest of us had a look at the big map on the
wall and felt vexed to see that the horrid little
kink in the line, at the foot of the Argonne,
was still unstraightened and so many lives had
been given in the effort. Less stubborn strong-
holds were yielding, however, and the line was
moving forward rapidly and as we returned
down the street some one dared to prophecy
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that peace negotiations would be under way by
Christmas. This was considered by the others
as being highly absurd and one chap, who in-
sisted that he had come over with the first Na-
poleon, gave it as his opinion that the blooming
war would never be over and became so de-
pressed about it that it was decided to take him
into a cafe nearby where somebody had a spe-
cial "pull" and could get everybody a hot rum
with spice which was thought most necessary
by now to counteract the cold. And over the
spiced rum the possible end of the war was
again discussed and when obliged to face the
thought of a world without a war they became
more and more melancholy and some one de-
cided that the least our Government could do
for us in such an emergency would be to rent a
nice warm country like Spain and allow those
who had no other occupation to start another
war. One preferred Bulgaria for the cheese,
another Palestine for the tangerines and some
one else China because of no "grafters," and by
the time the map of the world had been covered
with imaginary battles it was decided that they
now needed the cold to counteract the rum and
again we ambled down the street.
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At the French post one of the English boys
left us to send a wire to his "little French girl."
Another woman of my unit and I pretended
that our vanity was hurt because he was so will-
ing to abandon our company, upon which he
remarked: "There is no satisfaction in you
American women because your brains never
cease to function."

When we got back to the "Y" we found
our old chauffeur, "Conde — the speed maniac"
— loading papers and cigarettes into a large
army car in front of the door. He was
blissfully happy, having received permission to
make one trip each day to the very front line, if
he could get there, to deliver those things to the
boys. He had to drive all night to get back in
time to make the next day's trip, but was per-
fectly satisfied with the three hours sleep that
he got each morning. Upstairs other packages
of papers and cigarettes were being prepared
for some one who was to drop them over the
fighting front from aeroplanes. One of the by-
standers suggested that the Secretary had bet-
ter put some "Y" cards with the gifts or the
boys would think that the "Knights of Colum-
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bus" had sent them. The busy little Secretary
answered that he didn't care if the boys thought
they came from God so long as they got them
and this is probably what the boys did think.

We went into the next room to inquire for
our mail and I found a second and more insist-
ent telegram from Paris saying that it was
most important that we report back there at
once. I couldn't imagine anything more im-
portant than the work we were leaving at the
front but we, in our small way, were also sol-
diers and under orders and as soon as we could
get the necessary travel papers we caught the
night train for Paris. It was impossible to get
sleepers or reserved seats, for every available
comfort was retained for the wounded and all
trains were running out of schedule to make
way for the "Blesses."

No lights were permitted in any of the com-
partments and at each station mobs of desper-
ate travellers forced their way into our pitch
black compartments, fell over our feet and our
baggage, sat upon us and cursed us as we
cursed them and the entire night's ride to Paris
consisted of a series of pitched battles between
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those in the train and those, at way stations, at-
tempting to get into it.

When we finally reached headquarters we
found that we were to be sent next into the
quarantined camps in the S. O. S. where the
Spanish Grippe and the Flu had necessitated
the men's being shut up for weeks with no di-
version and where the inaction was making sav-
ages of them.

It was not an easy matter to leave the big
guns so far behind but we were promised that
if we would go into the S. O. S. for two weeks
that we might return to the Front at the end
of that time. I shook my head and answered
that the fighting would be over before we ever
got back to the front. The "Y" secretary said,
we'd be lucky if the war was over in two years,
but as it turned out I was right.

I find it as difficult to write of the S. O. S. as
our men find it to go there, or to remain there,
and yet many of our true heroes are there and
have been there since the beginning of the war.
There has been no pomp, glory nor excitement
for them. They have had to play the unpic-
turesque role of "The Man Behind the Gun"' —
I dare say there are not ten amongst all those
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thousands that go to make up the great belly
of the sea that sends its waves toward the front,
who would not gladly have risked arms, legs,
and life itself, any and every hour of the day in
preference to the enforced safety of those who
must prepare the ways and means for those who
reap death and decoration. Mothers and
sweethearts and those at home take care that
no shade of disappointment crosses your face
when your returning man tells you that he did
not get up to "the front." Remember that it
takes seven men back of the line to keep one
man in the line and that your Government, not
your son or sweetheart, has "the say" as to who
the lucky seventh shall be who goes over the
top, and remember, too, that it is the consensus
of opinion of those who have dealt in this bloody
business that "there are no cowards."

Then, too, you'll hear tales of misfits, men
reduced in rank, or relieved of their command,
— this does not prove cowardice, it means only
that in the business of war as in the business of
life some men, many men, through no fault of
their own get shoved into the wrong cubby
holes. These must be re-classified.

In one of the big re-classification centres in
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the S. O. S. I found the following lines by Rob-
ert Freeman printed on a little pamphlet in the
hall of the "Y" Hut.:

t

I played with my blocks, I was but a child,
Houses I builded, castles I piled;
But they tottered and fell, all my labour was vain.
Yet my father said kindly: "Well try it again!"

I played with my days. What's time to a lad?
Why pore over books? Play! Play, and be glad!
Till my youth was all spent, like a sweet summer rain.
Yet my father said kindly: "Well try it again!"

I played withi my chance. Such gifts as were mine
To work with, to win with, to serve the divine,
I seized for myself, for myself they have lain.
Yet my father says kindly: "Well try it again!"

I played with my soul, the soul that is I;
The best that is in me, I smothered the cry,
I lulled it, I dulled it — and now, oh, the pain!
Yet my father says kindly : "Well try it again !"

Our only glimpse of home life in the S. O. S.
was provided by Mrs. Mallon, the matron of
the "Y" hut at Saumur — only this time the
"hut" Happened to be a handsome chateau con-
verted into a social haven for the men and of-
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ficers of the big artillery training camp. There
were large cosy arm chairs in front of the open
fire, and books to read and a piano and a writ-
ing room and a dainty tea table where chocolate
and cakes were served each afternoon and on
the mantel the photograph of Mrs. Mallon in
the centre of a large family group.

She saw me glance at the photograph and the
colour crept up to the edge of her lovely snowy
hair. A little later she bent over me and whis-
pered: "It's in awful taste for me to have that
photograph there but it encourages the boys to
tell me more about themselves when they real-
ise that I am the mother of that family," and
still later, by the fire that night, she told me
how many boys out of a sense of chivalry and,
not knowing the French customs, would find,
after calling a few times on a French girl, that
they were considered by the family to be en-
gaged to her and rather than place her in an
awkward position they would often place them-
selves in a very unhappy one and would be
breaking their hearts in secret because of the
girl at home whom they really loved.

She said she used to watch them day after
day when they began to droop and lose heart
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and very often they would finally ask her about
her boys and little by little they would confide
in her and permit her to help them out of dif-
ficulties with which she with her worldly knowl-
edge and experience knew how to cope.

~Not all of the men in this town were there for
re-classification. Many of them belonged to
the light artillery that was fighting sham bat-
tles each day on the planes just back of the
town and straining to get into "the real thing"
• — others were there for cavalry training and
it was a wonderful sight to see them sitting
their horses so splendidly and taking the jumps
on a field where Napoleon himself had trained.

From the artillery, cavalry, and re-classifi-
cation camps of the S. O. S. we passed into
what is known as "The Forbidden City" — a
name given to Tours by the men in the smaller
towns near it, who are forbidden to enter it.
Perhaps this is because America already has
more men there than can be comfortably disci-
plined in one town — for grey-roofed, mud-rid-
den Tours is the very hub of the wheel of
[America's war industry in Europe — a wheel
with spokes pointing toward Paris and the
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fighting fron? beyond it, toward Switzerland,
Italy, the South of France — in any, and all di-
rections, where we are obliged to deal in the
ways and means of butchery and its after ef-
fects. Outside the city walls were miles of
tracks laid by our engineers, acres of railroad
yards devoted to the loading and shipping of
our war implements and food supplies, trucks,
automobiles, aeroplanes and hospital equip-
ment— and within the city walls the streets
teeming with our army officials, engineers, car-
penters, mechanicians, telephone girls and tech-
nical experts. For instance some of the finest
watch makers are needed for the delicate ad-
justments of the aeroplane mechanism and I
was told that the superintendent of the Wal-
tham Watch works was putting in ten hours a
day in Tours as one of Uncle Sam's dollar a
day men — and that he was one of many rich
volunteers from America's business world who
were sacrificing fortune and family comfort
without any hope of recognition for service be-
yond that given them by their own soul's ap-
proval.

Tours was a little world of itself, and with
the military and the industrial factions run-
[138]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

ning hand in hand or rather watching each
other out of the corner of the eye one got that
uncomfortable feeling of hidden treachery, se-
cret rebellion, sullen fear and hate that I used
to feel under the smiling surface of Germany's
suavity or sometimes under the smooth waters
at Salt Lake City.

It is a condition that arises out of the disci-
plining of the every detail and thought of lives
that, robbed of their natural freedom, feel jus-
tified in cheating the oppressor who has robbed
them, and then follows suspicion and hatred
and intrigue and frantic striving for power lest
one be destroyed lacking it, and the next evolu-
tion is called politics and out of that grows cor-
ruption, dishonesty and every other horror and
the end of it all is open war. And in a small
way the little Kingdom of Tours while loyal to
the country of its birth and fervent toward the
cause that it was pledged to serve, seemed to
me to be going through all the internal agony
of a militarised industrial centre and I knew
once and for all that I should rather be dead
than obliged to live long in any atmosphere
where one must be eternally on the alert against
the subtle tyrannies of a military government,,
[139]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

I was homesick for the big free spirit at the
front where each man took it for granted that
his fellow was more than equal to looking after
his own job and I wished — as they wished —
that each man in Tours could have a breath of
"the air up there" even though it might even-
tually be charged with gas. Anything was
better than this heaviness and dullness and
drabness. I was thankful when our work here
was done. In fact we played two performances
here each night — and most days — not altogeth-
er out of kindness of heart — but in order to
cover this area that much sooner and be on our
way.

In the next town we arrived late, having been
sent by motor and lost our way — not so late
however as we should have been by train for
the tracks were now so congested by "blesse"
trains relaying the wounded to hospitals fur-
ther down the line that all train schedules had
been practically abandoned. We were hustled
into another car with very little supper and
were again driven miles through the cold to the
outskirts of the town where we played to an
audience of twenty-five hundred men who had
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TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

been in quarantine for "ages" as they said and
who were feeling perfectly desperate for a
break in the monotony.

One of the "Y" women and a Red Cross
nurse came back to the dressing room of the
hut to tell me confidentially that the men had
worked until seven that night decorating a new
hall that they themselves had renovated and
painted and that they had been scheming for
days to "get up" a supper after the show and
would be heart broken unless we came. We all
looked at each other in despair for, in spite of
having had better living accommodations in the
S. O. S. than on any other part of the tour, the
depressed state of the men to whom we played,
or the great number of hospital shows, or the
constant rain or something or other had pulled
us down in a few days more than all the real
hardships at the front — and we were so tired,
as one of the girls put it, that our very souls
ached. The men of our unit tried to explain
this for us but the inevitable answer came back
— "Just come for a few minutes. They haven't
seen any girls for so long. It will do them so
much good." We knew the speech by heart
and we had often responded to it when we were
[141]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

longing and aching for our beds, and to-night
on the way out we had pledged ourselves to
each other not to give in to it again, and now we
were all ashamed to refuse them and also
ashamed to go back on our word to ourselves
and to each other.

I looked at the weaker of the two girls and
said : "Well, how about it ?" She answered that
she would do whatever the rest of us did.

The men of our unit argued, and truthfully,
that it was the girls that the boys wanted to see
and that they would never be missed and were
going home.

When we saw how hard the boys must have
(worked to decorate the barracks and with what
pleasure they watched each course of the sup-
per come onto the long tables we were glad
that we had not disappointed them but, Ye
gods, there were hundreds of them and they
had a band waiting to play dance music and
there were only three of us.

I shall never forget that dance — it seemed to
me I'd only been turned in one direction when
some one from out the long lines of uniforms
that penned us in would seize me and turn me
round in another direction and some one else
[142]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

would snatch me from him and step on me, and
then release me to another before he'd even
consoled me and so on and so on for hours and
here and there out of the corner of my eye I
could catch fleeting glimpses of a pink dress
and a tan coloured dress and I knew the same
thing was happening to the other two girls.

Some time later on we leaned backed in the
car too exhausted to speak. When we were
about half way home one of the girls said
wearily — "Well, I've only one life to give for
my country, thank God !"

And the next morning I thought my time
had come to give mine. The expected had hap-
pened— after dancing with men just recover-
ing from Flu and just taking it on — I'd got
one of the "going or coming" germs and it was
only by the aid of all my will power, Mr. Mor-
risey's rum, and Miss Brice's quinine, that I
was able to keep going until we had played our
last performance in the S. O. S. — temperature
104 — and fallen exhausted into the first train
that would get us back to Paris.

Three times we were booked out of Paris to
return to the front and as many times were we
stopped by delays in travelling permits, illness,
[143]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

this, that or the other, and before we could
make a fourth attempt came rumours of the ap-
proaching armistice and with the probability
of a rapid shifting of troops it was decided to
send no more entertainers north until some-
thing decisive could be learned so, as I had
predicted, we never again reached "the Front."
Instead, we played the remaining ten days
of our signed service in and around Paris, at
Long Champs once the fashionable racing
course, now converted into an army transporta-
tion headquarters, at the Palais de Glace, once
the old skating rink, now the "Y" Theatre, at
the Soldiers and Sailors* Club, the Pavilion
and other places, and while there was very little
thrill in playing under such normal conditions
there was at least the interest of daily and con-
flicting rumours from the front and one night
on our way home from the Palais de Glace
where we had played to twenty-five hundred
cheering men and seen so many New Yorkers
in the audience that we almost thought it a first
night, we met the French people surging
through the streets, their arms round each other
— and we were told that the Kaiser had been
dethroned and that Berlin was in the throes of
[144]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

revolution. There was an hour's pandemonium
in the streets of Paris and every one devoutly
hoped the Huns were wreaking upon the Kai-
ser some of the vengeance that we should have
liked to wreak on him.

And then came the morning of November
the llth when all ears were open for the sound
of the cannon that should proclaim the signing
of the armistice. I myself heard nothing, but
at noon boys began parading down the Avenue
de 1'Opera with flags — their hands on each
other's shoulders. By two o'clock the streets
were swarming with men, women and children,
marching aimlessly back and forth, hugging
and kissing each other and sometimes trying to
sing the Marseillaise.

At three o'clock when I looked down on the
Place de 1'Opera from the top of the Equit-
able Building, where I had joined friends, the
streets were a mosaic of black, blue and tan,
the red caps of the French soldiers with their
yellow cross bars standing out like sunflowers
amongst the more sombre colours of the sway-
ing masses of humans below us. Occasional ve-
hicles overladen with shouting soldiers made
[145]

GROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

their way here and there through the streets but
these were few and far between and there were
no bands or horns available to help out the
voices that were trying to sing. I

Across the street from us in front of the Rue
de la Paix, it soon became the fashion for
American and French soldiers, hands on shoul-
ders, to form in long lines and march into the
bar of the cafe for a drink.

We watched the crowds without finding
much variety in their antics until the wonderful
Paris twilight began to wrap the distant
steeples and turrets in mist. Opposite us the
victory group on top of the Paris Opera House
was silhouetted sharply against the sky and
just underneath it the siren that had sounded so
many alarms to terrified Paris in the four
dreadful years just passed, seemed to be brood-
ing on its lost occupation and I wondered how
many years it would be before all the "Cave de
Secours" signs would have disappeared from
over the cellarways that had so long offered
sanctuary to the fleeing.

With friends of the Marine Corps I drove
down to the Place de la Concorde out through
the Champs Elysee and into the Bois.
[146]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

The guns from the submarine on the Seine
were still booming their tidings of victory as
we neared the Arc de Triomphe. A proces-
sion of French men and women bearing the
flags and banners of the Allies swept through
the splendid opening and on toward the Bois,
singing the Marseillaise.

As we passed further into the Bois we saw
no one save here and there a pair of strolling
lovers, unmindful of any tumult, save that in
their own hearts. And ephemeral things, such
as war, and immortal things, such as love,
seemed once again, after four years of night-
mare, to slip into their rightful proportions to
each other.

The haze grew more dense, little lakes here
and there were barely discernible, the tall
groups of poplars, in some of the more open
spaces looked ghostlike and majestic against
the poorly lighted sky. And nature, as though
pitying the tired hearts and worn nerves of
its war-weary victims, wrapped lovers and lone
souls alike, in one of those soft enfolding nights
that seem to bless and restore.

We returned by way of "The Dolphin,"
found ourselves the only guests there, drank
[147]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

our tea, port, or champagne-cocktails with what
spirit of conquest we could muster, and reached
the edge of the Bois just as a searchlight shot
a long yellow stream of flame from the Eifel
tower. It was the first time the tower had been
lit since the war and it was the most lovely and
most thrilling moment of the day's demonstra-
tion.

The crowds were becoming more subdued
and less dense as we reached the hotel at the far
end of the Tuileries Gardens.

I had barely time to dress before our final
performance at the Pavilion and, in one way,
all the unit were glad to be playing, for each
one of them was too highly keyed by the day's
events to want to stay in doors.

The performance seemed like an anti-climax
after the one we had given the previous Satur-
day night at the Palais de Glace and both we
and our audience were eager to get into the
street again and be a part of the mob.

Both feigned enthusiasm, however, and at
last we sang our final chorus, as a unit, having
played to more than one hundred and twenty
five thousand American men in France.

So ended our last three months, as an official
[148]

TROUPING FOR THE TROOPS

unit, also the last three months of the war. In
spite of all efforts to hasten our departure from
America, Fate had timed our finish, to a day,
to the finish of the fighting in Franca

THE END

[149]

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