Chapter VII: Our Boys Discover the Past

“Voilà,” said the old French general who sat opposite me in the Bordeaux express, “behold the prettiest sight in France.” He pointed through the open door of the compartment to two soldiers who were standing in the corridor smoking their after-luncheon cigarettes.

One of the soldiers wore a horizon blue uniform, a little worn and stained with hard usage, although the boy was barely twenty-one. The other soldier’s uniform was brand new O. D. cloth, made in America. The two stood beside the window, their arms entwined, looking at the lovely valley of the Loire and teaching each other their respective languages.

“Sammee,” said the French soldier, “how you say ‘_donnes moi une allumette_’?”

“You say ‘gimme a match.’ But listen here, Gaston, cut out the Sammie. Forget it.”

“What you mean ‘forget it,’ Sammee?” persisted the _poilu_, accepting the match. The lesson went on, and I agreed with the old general that the sight of French and American youths associating on affectionate terms and learning each other’s familiar argot was indeed agreeable.

One of the stock arguments of the pacifists in trying to make war out an unmixed evil is that it sets back education. I am sure that many American mothers have had misgivings on this point, and have deplored the necessity of interrupting their sons’ college life. But I want to assure them that their sons are learning more in France than any college could have taught them. They are learning French, for one thing, at least all the enterprising ones are. Not the foolish, academic sort of thing they study in high school and college, the object being to read Molière and the classics, but the living language.

A striking illustration of the difference in the two methods was afforded me during a trip into the war zone. In the party was one of our intelligence officers and a French woman writer of unusually broad education. The American officer spoke very little French, the woman writer spoke only a few broken sentences of English, and they had to be constantly interpreted to each other. One day, in the course of the conversation, it transpired that the officer before joining the colors had been a high-school professor of French, and that the woman had for five years drawn a good salary as a teacher of English.

The American soldier in a few months can, if he wants to, gets a practical knowledge of the French language that will be a business asset to him all his life. Most of the soldiers appreciate this, and the free classes offered in all the Y. M. C. A. centers are well attended. They learn in the classes, and they learn even more by association with French soldiers and civilians.

My soldier son knew not a word of the language when he enlisted, but when I saw him in France he was using it fairly well. I congratulated him on his new acquisition, and he laughed and said: “There’s an awfully pretty girl in a café the fellows up our way patronize, and she doesn’t know any English.”

It is not only the French language that our soldiers are learning, but French history as well. The part of central France occupied by our army is a storied treasure house of history. No part of France is more French. It abounds in castles, châteaux, museums, pointed towers, dungeon cells and torture chambers, ancient churches and crumbling city walls. Even the farms, centuries old, some of them, show the remains of past defenses.

To our boys, fresh from the new prairies of Iowa and Dakota, or the still virgin forests of Oregon and Washington, this past they are surrounded by is the most romantic and wonderful thing that ever came into their lives. They can hardly believe it is real.

Even to those soldiers who come from the older sections of the United States the sight is thrilling. In the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace, in Paris, built by Henry of Navarre for his second wife, Marie de Medici, stands a stately marble fountain, moss-grown and mellow with time. The date cut in the marble is 1620.

I had this pointed out to me by a soldier from Massachusetts. “Think of it,” he exclaimed, “the very year when our oldest aristocracy, the Pilgrim fathers, were cutting down trees for their first log huts and their rude stockades, these French people were making beautiful things like that fountain.”

Long before that they were building beautiful things. Down in the southernmost part of our territory in France stand the ruins of a magnificent castle, the one where Edward the Black Prince took refuge when he was being pursued by that French king with whom he was contesting the crown of France in thirteen hundred and something. With two young naval officers I explored the place one warm spring day, and we were actually awed by the achievement of those builders of olden days.

The castle was not only strong, it was noble and fine in all its masses. “It makes you proud of your Norman ancestors,” said one of the American officers, a Virginian.

You can not go into one of the old Gothic churches or cathedrals on Sunday or week-days without meeting American soldiers, caps in hand, gazing silently at twelfth century Madonnas and saints, or tombs of medieval bishops. The miracle and charm of Gothic architecture is not all that draws our boys to the old churches. The sense of time and antiquity possesses them. It is something entirely new and wonderful to them to realize that the world went on, that people lived and loved and thought about themselves as modern and up-to-date centuries before Columbus discovered America.

In a certain French city, where I made friends with many American soldiers, a group of university professors are making it their business to escort our soldiers over the place, giving them historical talks. This is a very old city, one in which the Romans had a considerable occupation. The ruins of an immense circus built by them still stands in the midst of modern houses and shops. Its masonry is so solid that a ton of dynamite would be required to dislodge it.

At the time of the French revolution it was practically intact, but its use as a fortress and the pounding of cannon against it turned it into the picturesque ruin it is to-day. Our soldiers are exploring that old circus and realizing the grandeur that was Rome more keenly than if they were cramming Latin back home.

“You positively mustn’t miss the mummies,” I was told by my soldier friends in this same city. So one day I went with two boys to see the mummies. There is an ancient church built, centuries ago, outside the city walls, when the town was just beginning to outgrow its walls. The excuse for the walls had not disappeared, however, and local wars and forays among the feudal gentry beat hard on that church. Several times during the years the church was burned to the ground, but it was always rebuilt according to its original plans.

The last time it was rebuilt was about a hundred and fifty years ago, and it was when the excavations were being made that the famous mummies were discovered. They were dug up out of one of the oldest corners of the churchyard and must have passed from life in the fourteenth or the fifteenth century. Something in the chalky nature of the soil preserved them from disintegration, and they remain still rather disagreeable and grewsome likenesses of their original selves.

To see them we descended a flight of worn stone steps into the inky darkness of a crypt. An old, old crone of a woman, herself half a mummy, led the way, a sort of a dark lantern in her hand. She has told the story of the mummies several times a day for so many years that she could probably recite it without troubling herself to wake out of a nap. She can even recite it in a jargon which remotely resembles English.

The mummies, about twenty of them, are hung up like so many old clothes, around the walls of the crypt. Some are mere parchment shells of bodies, others retain rags of clothing, and even rings. The old, old crone turned her lantern on the mummies, one by one. Here was a priest, she said, you could tell by his soutaine. Here was a woman who had died in childbirth, her tiny baby buried with her. Here was a whole family, mother and four children, who had died of poison, perhaps mushrooms. This man was hanged. You could tell--“Ugh! Let’s look at the next one, _ma mère_,” we implored. The next one was worse, a cataleptic, buried alive.

“What in the world makes you want to look at such things?” I asked when we emerged, in time to meet another group of soldiers bent on the same errand.

“Why,” they said, “don’t you think it is terribly interesting to look at people who actually lived five hundred years ago? Those mummies are worth a franc any day.”

Two Sundays before I left France I spent the afternoon in the Hotel des Invalides, where Napoleon lies in his granite tomb, now completely buried in sandbags. In spite of that fact, however, the chapel was filled with American soldiers gazing raptly at the tomb they could not see, but which they knew held the ashes of the great conqueror.

More soldiers were in the large courtyard, now a museum of captured Germans guns, cannon, “minnies” and shattered airplanes. There are the burned and charred skeletons of several Zeppelins, and in the very center of the collection, as if its captor, the remains, nearly intact, of Guynemer’s favorite fighting plane, his “Old Charles” which brought so many German flyers to earth. This plane, white, with a scarlet symbolic bird in flight painted on its body, is decorated like a shrine, with a constantly renewed tribute of fresh flowers.

The American boys who wandered through the courtyard and long galleries of the Invalides that day were on their way to the front, and were spending every precious minute of their stay in Paris storing up impressions. I watched them studying with intent faces the marvelous collection of armor, some of it restoration work, but most of it the actual harness of kings and knights of old. Soldiers of all the ages, Greek, Roman, Gaul, Frenchmen of the age of chivalry, are represented in the collection. The whole history of warfare.

“When they are giving us tin hats why didn’t they give us things like these?” sagely remarked one soldier. “These protect the eyes.”

“But, gee!” exclaimed another, pausing in front of a “tin hat” the size of a garbage bucket and several times as heavy, “wouldn’t you like to catch a Hun with one of them things on?”

Where the American soldiers lingered longest that day was in the gallery sacred to the relics of Napoleon. His camp bed is there, and they exclaimed at the smallness of the great soldier. There were also his camp chair, his writing table and books, scores of personal belongings, uniforms and decorations. The walls are covered with paintings of his battles and the stirring events of his life.

You’ll never get those soldiers to agree that war sets education back. Our soldiers are learning at first-hand in France what they would never have learned so well at home, the great, big thing we are fighting for in this war, what in all ages the flower of manhood have fought and died for--better life, and more freedom for the generations next to come.