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A Soldier's Mother in France

WHERE THE LONG TRAIL LED

On the lapel of my coat I wear a little pin, a pin with a single star, ruby red on a bar of white. My only son is a member of the American Expeditionary Force in France. More than a million American women wear pins like mine. Some have two stars, three, even four, and every one covers a heart heavy with anxiety and foreboding. That little service pin which mothers wear, fathers, too; sisters, sweethearts, wives, is a symbol of sacrifice. It should be something more than that.

My star has come to mean love of country far surpassing the mild patriotism of other days. It means confidence and courage for whatever in these tragic times I shall need courage. It means pride in the young manhood of America and hope unbounded for the future of America, which lies in their hands. Before I went to France I wore my service pin for one soldier--my son. I wear it now for the American army. If I can, by writing of that army as I have just seen it in France, lessen a little for other women the burden of anxiety and dread I shall count my journey worth while.

I went to France as a correspondent, a reporter, to write about the war. I was sent, not because I am a woman, but in spite of the fact, and merely because my editors believed that I could handle that particular job. My letter of credentials to the French Foreign Office said that I had reported the Russian revolution for my paper and that I was now assigned to France with the view of informing readers in the United States as to participation of United States troops in war and the political situations of the allied countries in the war.

I hope that my editors' confidence in me was not entirely misplaced and that I did not quite fall down on my job. But what I experienced in France and what I brought out with me were not exactly what I had expected. I went to France as a correspondent, deeply interested in my work, but very soon after I arrived and almost with my first contact with our marvelous new army I forgot all about my work. I forgot that I was in France after military and political facts.

I forgot that I was a correspondent. I was conscious only that I was a mother. The mother of a boy in France. I was one in heart with a million other American women I have never seen and will never see; one with every woman in the land who wears a service pin.

Where they are, how they live, who their comrades are, how they work and play, what they are learning, how they get along with their strange new neighbors, the French people, and what the war is doing to their minds and souls, as well as their bodies. I wanted, fervently, to know all this about one soldier, and I believed that the other women would like to know about their own.

Our soldiers are more than three thousand miles away from home, and they have gone on a terrible errand. We know less about war than any other women in the world, but we know that it is a brutal, pitiless, bloodthirsty business. We know that bodies perish in war, and sometimes souls, which is worse. Going over in the steamer a horrible story was told me, a story which turned out to be quite untrue, but which when I heard it cost me a sleepless night. It was to the effect that vice was so rampant in all the armies that a whole shipload of hopelessly diseased Australian soldiers had recently sailed from England. The hospitals had salvaged many, it was said, but these men, who had left home clean, wholesome, decent boys, were now being sent back to die, physical and moral wrecks. Some, it was certain, would commit suicide during the voyage.

I spent three months in France, traveling over most of the considerable territory occupied by the American forces. I visited something like twenty-five camps, small ones, large ones and immense ones, where the men are training, where they are being made into experts in special lines of fighting; where they are at work building miles of wharves, warehouses, cold storage plants, barracks and hospitals; where they are laying railroads and dredging rivers; where they are performing marvels of constructive work necessary to the life of an army far removed from its base.

What we Americans have to help us bear what is coming in the next few months is the knowledge that our losses are going to be as few as possible. Life is to be safeguarded as far as human agencies can devise. Our army is organized for that. Men are not to be sacrificed unnecessarily. The best science in the world is being mobilized to save suffering and to heal wounds. Sickness and accident are being guarded against. Drunkenness and immorality are under strictest ban.

Some of this I was privileged to hear from the man who perhaps more than any other individual is responsible for the lives and the souls of our men in France, General Pershing. I saw him twice, once briefly in Paris, where he talked to me five minutes before leaving for an allied war council at Versailles, and once at length in his headquarters in a quaint old town which is the general headquarters of the staff of our army in France.

General Pershing is the least formal of any great officer I have ever seen, with the notable exception of "Papa" Joffre, but generals are all very important personages and have to be addressed with circumspection. I wanted very much to say to General Pershing, but of course I didn't, that after seeing him I felt a whole lot easier about my especial soldier. A more human commanding officer, one more concerned about the last detail of the life of the enlisted man, I am sure never lived. He spoke of the soldiers as a father speaks of his sons, with pride and passionate concern.

Proud of their commander also may the American people be, and over and above all, proud of the cause for which the American soldiers fight and for which they are ready to die. Not in the whole history of the world has a more righteous war been fought. I do not think the majority of Americans yet dream of the depth of depravity contemplated by the men who brought about the war. We have heard of German atrocities and we have shuddered at the recital.

But the plan and object of this war on the part of those Prussians who are responsible for it constitute the worst atrocity of all, for the plan was the murder of Christian civilization and the object was the enslavement of mankind.

I have seen some of the effects of a partial success of the German war lords' plan, and I, the mother of a soldier on the French front, say to the mothers of other soldiers that I would be ashamed to have him anywhere else. Not long before leaving France I saw him for a short hour, a simple enlisted man in a humble post of duty. The spring wind blowing over the devastated and ravished plains bore the roaring of artillery plainly to our ears. Every day since then those guns have roared nearer, and now that part of France is closed to civilians.

The next message that came out of the sector where the Americans hold the line brought mourning and tears to many women. And yet I can truthfully say that I would be happier to have my son dead in France, sleeping in a soldier's grave beyond the sea, than to have him alive and safe, shirking his duty in a bullet-proof job at home.

I do not believe that in the years to come there is going to be much happiness for the men who are shirking, nor for the women who may be encouraging them to shirk. The shirkers are going to play a very pitiful part in the national life of this country after the war. The men who come home will be the rulers of America's future destiny. They will be the strong builders of our greatness. They are learning in this war how to build.

I ADOPT THE AMERICAN ARMY

Looking back over my three months in France, most of the time spent in visiting American military camps, some experiences stand out above all others. One, a precious personal experience, gave me my first insight into the splendid idealism and individual worth of the enlisted men of our army. I had gone to France a newspaper correspondent, without a single plan, without even a hope of seeing my soldier son. I had no intention of using my privileged position to seek him out. I did not know where he was, nor did I ask.

The American soldier abroad is theoretically still in America. He gets his letters through an American branch post-office in Paris, and they are sent to him in care of his regiment and his company, with no more definite address than "American Expeditionary Force." My son knew my Paris address, but he could not, even had he wished to do so, tell me his.

With a few thousand more impatient youngsters my boy had enlisted before the draft, fearing that he might draw a late number. He signed up on the day when I sailed for Russia, and he was in France nearly two months before I returned to the United States. Thus our separation had been a longer one than was usual in this war. So when he wrote me in February that he had been given a week's leave and hoped to be sent to Aix-les-Bains, I hoped so too most fervently, because I had been ordered to Aix-les-Bains to write the story of the first vacation of our soldiers.

I arrived two days after the first contingent of men, the dried mud of the trenches caking their uniforms and their worn boots, had marched to music and cheers through the flag-draped streets of Aix. I drove directly from the station to the headquarters of the provost marshal, and asked if a certain private soldier was in town, and if so where. He was there, and a sympathetic young man in uniform of the military police searched the lists for the record of his hotel. It is part of the intelligent care taken of our soldiers overseas that even on their permissions, or leaves from duty, the highest authorities know exactly where they live and how. No mother need worry lest her son get lost in France. He can't get lost.

I waited for him to come up-stairs, but he did not come. I decided that he had gone directly to the dining-room, so I went down-stairs and into the big room, every table of which was filled with uniformed men, eating, laughing and talking.

It was the boy. I was so overwhelmed at the sight of him that I could not take more than a step into the room. I could not speak. Something of my intense emotion must have reached him, for he looked up, saw me, and in one bound was beside me with his arms wide, just as when I used to visit him unexpectedly at school. "Mother, mother!" he cried. Instantly at the word the noisy talk and laughter stopped dead, and every man in the room sprang to his feet. It was not a tribute to me, but to their own mothers at home. Right there I adopted the American army.

I am proud to say that a small section of the American army, all of it in that hotel, adopted me. Some were too shy to come up and be introduced, but I had broad smiles whenever I met any of them, and always, when I entered the dining-room, the same chivalric greeting.

I talked with hundreds of soldiers during that week in Aix-les-Bains, and in the little town of Chamb?ry, two miles distant, also a vacation center for our men. It is not mere boasting to say that they are, man for man, the most amazingly fine-looking soldiers in the world. They average rather larger than the English, and broader and more muscular than either English or French.

They are remarkably intelligent. Their eyes and ears are wide open to learn all they can of the wonderful land of France, and especially of the historic past which lives in old ch?teaus, ruined castles and Roman remains all over France. Aix-les-Bains, as every one probably knows, is in Savoy, which was once an Italian state, but which voted itself French sometime in the eighteen-fifties. In Chamb?ry is an ancient ch?teau which was the seat of the former dukes of Savoy. It is a picturesque old pile, built in the thirteenth century and still habitable.

Those American soldiers overran the ch?teau, climbed the corkscrew stone staircase to the top of the tallest watch tower, swarming over the ivy-clad walls, exploring every corner of the place. They speculated on probable methods of warfare and defense in the thirteenth century, and quarreled cheerfully as to how long their regiment could have held the ch?teau against the assaults of the other fellows' regiment. They had more fun with that ch?teau than any of its original owners ever had.

They climbed mountains around Aix, taking delight in all-day hikes above the early spring snow line. They seemed thrilled at the thought that they, fresh from Iowa, North Dakota, Georgia, Texas, were actually looking across the valleys and hills at Mont Blanc and the Alps. Bicycles could be rented for about fifteen cents an hour, and hundreds of men spent their time exploring the country around. In the late afternoons and evenings they gathered in the big magnificent casino, now under lease to the Y. M. C. A., and delightfully swapped experiences.

In Aix I saw the beginning of what I believe is going to be a never-ending friendship and understanding between the American people and the French. You have heard, no doubt, about how the French double the prices of everything as soon as an American soldier enters a town. Some French shopkeepers have done this, of course. The American soldier seems to be rolling in wealth, and he rarely even counts his change. The temptation to overcharge a man who throws down a fifty franc note in payment for an apple, carelessly inquiring "Is that enough," must be pretty strong. But let me tell you that avarice is not the ruling passion of the French, and their dealings with the American soldier are often marked with consideration most extraordinary.

Vacations do not come cheaply to the American soldier in France, at least the stay at Aix-les-Bains was not cheap. Every man who went there was supposed to have a minimum of one hundred and fifty francs, or twenty-seven dollars, in his possession. When he registered at the office of the provost marshal he drew a slip of paper with the name of a hotel on it. To that hotel he was obliged to go. The tariff varied from ninety-three to one hundred and twenty-eight francs for the week, and this sum, seventeen dollars and sixty-four cents to twenty-three dollars and four cents, had to be paid in advance.

A few of the soldiers failed to get this into their heads before coming, and there was considerable borrowing in the first few days. Lucky were they who had friends from whom to borrow. One tall shy youth from Georgia, I think it was Georgia, came to the Y. M. C. A. with a pathetic tale of tragedy based on the fact that he had arrived in Aix with only eighty francs in his pocket. He had probably never been twenty miles from his home village before he went to France with his regiment, and here he found himself shut out from his hotel in a strange European town, with thirteen dollars and sixty cents less than he needed to support existence.

"The poor infant!" she exclaimed. "So far away from home and only eighty francs. Wait, monsieur, until I consult my husband."

Soon she came back smiling. "It is all right, monsieur," she said. "The big infant may stay the week for eighty francs. We also have a son under the colors. May some one be a little kind to him when he needs it."

This story, I believe, is more truly typical of the spirit of the French people toward our men than any tale of extortion, however true.

SEEING AMERICA OVER THERE

Vacation days are always swift flying, but that vacation week I spent in Aix-les-Bains with my soldier son broke all the records for brevity. The day of departure came almost before I realized that we had been fortunate enough to meet. We left Aix within a few hours of each other, my train first. I had a last glimpse of the boy standing on the station platform waving his cap and smiling. How is it that we can smile at such moments? Perhaps only because we are a little something more than dust, because we have aspirations, dim and dreaming though they may be, beyond mortal life and love. So we went our ways toward our separate duties, he to the front, I to the rear. His task was to fight, mine to write. If he could go to his work with a smile, then I could too. And I did.

I want to visualize to the American people who have sons and brothers and husbands in this war the immensity of the work the men have undertaken. Not only the work of fighting, but of building and preparation. Fighting furnishes the most spectacular and tragic aspect of war. But that is not all there is to the great game. War is a stupendous business enterprise. It is a feat of engineering beside which the building of the Panama Canal looks like a mere pastime. When I started out to see America, as it had established itself in France, I did not dream of the greatness I was to encounter, a greatness which has fairly staggered and inspired those of our allies who have seen it.

The first anniversary of the American entrance into the world war was the occasion of what almost might be called special American editions of most of the large English and French newspapers. Columns of space in these papers were devoted to encomiums of praise of our enterprise, our ingenuity, our manifold and miraculous accomplishments in the space of twelve short months. Miraculous was a word most frequently used, miraculous and astounding.

It is too bad that the people of the United States can not at present be told all of the amazing feats of building, engineering, transportation and railroad construction which have so impressed the allies abroad. It would inspire and encourage them to know it, but unfortunately it is necessary to keep as many of the details as possible a secret from Germany. Before the fateful August day in 1914, when the vast German army started on its march across doomed Belgium, the war lords knew the French railroad system as well as they knew their own. They had maps of every foot of railroad in the French republic. They had an accurate catalogue of French rolling stock, and they knew exactly the number and capacity of railroad manufacturing and repair shops. They probably knew the railroad men of the country down to the last patch on an engineer's overalls.

But the Germans do not know what has happened to the French railroad system since April 6, 1917, the date of our entrance into the war. Of course we do not want them to know, but I don't mind telling them that what has happened deserves the adjectives lavished on us by the English and French newspapers. I have been over hundreds of miles of that part of the French railroad system which moves our men and their supplies from ocean ports to the fighting front, and I agree with Secretary Baker when he said, on his departure from France, that what had been accomplished was inspiring to behold.

I shall never forget a Sunday that I spent at a railroad station in a town in central France. The town, which can not be named, is a small and not very important manufacturing city, but it is now one of the important junctions in the chain of railroads leading from the southwestern and northwestern seaports to the battle-front of the northeast.

The day was Sunday, just three days after the great push of March twenty-first began. I was returning to Paris after a visit to certain large aviation fields in the neighborhood, and got off at this junction for luncheon and a change of cars. Few French trains now carry restaurant wagons, and travelers, except on express trains, have to carry luncheon baskets or depend on station buffets.

The trains moving northward were laden with soldiers, horses, guns, airplanes, ammunition wagons, food, supplies of every conceivable description. Trainload after trainload of horses, eight to a car with four men, generally asleep on the hay in the middle space of the car. The horses, beautiful, tragic creatures, going to almost certain destruction wrung the heart to see. They gazed out at the flying landscape and the cheering station crowds with big, soft, uncomprehending eyes. How I wish we did not have to use horses in war. Of course the lives of men are far more valuable, but the men at least know why they fight and die.

Trainloads of men, so many that within an hour I had ceased to count them, rolled through that junction. Men from England, Frenchmen hurriedly recalled from leave in their southern homes. All ages. I saw French boys who must have been eighteen, but who looked younger by two years, and I saw men who might have been grandfathers. These older men do not often fight. They serve meals in the trenches and perform other non-combatant services. All France--all--is mobilized for some kind of service.

More often than not the trains did not stop. Once as a train was rolling through the station a soldier called to me asking for the newspaper I held in my hand. Of course I gave it to him, sprinting along the platform at a lively rate. The next time I saw a train coming I ran to the newsstand and bought three francs' worth of pa

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