The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl

My village has red roofs. When I first came to France and saw that the villages were two kinds; those with red roofs and those with grey, I prayed le bon Dieu that mine should be a red-roofed one. Heaven was kind. Every little house in town is covered with rose-colored tiles. We came here yesterday from Paris. Our orders, which were delivered to us in great secrecy, read: Report to Mr. T——, Divisional Secretary, Bourmont, Haute Marne; then followed a schedule of trains. That was all we knew except that some one told us that at Bourmont it had rained steadily all fall.

“It cleared off for several hours once,” concluded our informant. “But that was in the middle of the night when nobody was awake to see.”

Bourmont is a city set upon a hill, a hill that rises so sharply, so suddenly, that no motor vehicle is allowed to take the straight road up its side, but must follow the roundabout route at the back. Already we have heard tales about our hill; one of them being of a lad belonging to a company of engineers stationed here, who in a spendthrift mood, being disinclined to climb the hill one night after having dined at the café at its foot, bribed an old Frenchman with a fifty franc note to wheel him to the summit in a wheelbarrow. The Frenchman, for whose powers one must have great respect, achieved the feat eventually, the spectators agreeing the ride a bargain at the price.

Two-thirds of the way up the hill on the steep street called grandiosely Le Faubourg de France we have our billet, at the home of Monsieur and Madame Chaput. These are an adorable old couple; Madame a stately yet lovably gentle soul, Monsieur le Commandant, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War and member of the Légion d’Honneur. His wonderful old uniforms with their scarlet trousers and gold epaulets rub elbows with my whipcord in the wardrobe.

Outside, the Maison Chaput resembles all the other houses which, built one adjoining another, present a solid grey plaster front on each side of the street. Like all the rest it has two doors, one opening into the house and one into the stable, and like every other house on the street the doors bear little boards with the billeting capacity of house and stable stenciled on them, so many Hommes, so many Off. (for Officiers). It is told how one lad after walking the length of the street exclaimed;

“Gee! Looks as if this were Dippyville. There’s one or two off in every house!”

Another boy gazing ruefully at the sign on his billet door, groaned;

“Twelve homes! Why, there ain’t one there!”

One stable door nearby wears the legend in large scrawling letters; “Sherman was right.” At first the owner was furious at this defacement of his property, but when someone explained the significance of the words to him, he became mollified and even took a pride in them.

“Where are you stopping?” asks one boy of another.

“Me? Oh, at the Hotel de Barn, four manure-heaps straight ahead and two to the right.”

The distinguishing feature of the Maison Chaput is the corner-stone. This shows as a white stone tablet at one side of the door. On it is carved “Laid by the hand of Emil Chaput, aged one year. Anno. 1842.” It is the same Emil Chaput who with his tiny baby hand “laid” the corner-stone who is now our genial host.

“It is droll,” said Madame; “When strangers come to town they must always stop and read the corner-stone. They think the tablet is placed there to mark the birthplace of some famous man.”

The Gendarme and I,—Madame has christened G—— my companion the Gendarme on account of her vigorous brisk bearing,—live in the Salle des Assiettes, at least that is what I have named it, for the walls of the room which evidently in more pretentious days served as a salle à manger, are literally covered with the most beautiful old plates. Not being a connoisseur I don’t know what their history is nor what might be their value; I only know that they are altogether lovely. The designs are delicious; flowers, insects, birds, little houses, Chinamen fishing in tiny boats, interspersed with spirited representations of the Gallic cock in rose and scarlet. I exclaimed over them to Madame, whereat Monsieur, candle in hand, bustled across the room and called on me to regard one in particular.

“_Ça coute_,” he averred proudly, “_quarante francs!_”

Since that moment I have been vaguely uneasy. What if, in a moment of exasperation, I should throw an ink-bottle at the Gendarme’s head, and—shatter a plate worth forty francs!

Our room is the third one back. The front room is kitchen, dining and living room. The in-between room is quite bare of furniture, lined all about with panelled cupboards, and quite without light or air except that which filters in through the opened doors. In one of these cupboards Monsieur le Commandant spends his nights. When the hour for retiring comes, he opens a little panelled door and climbs into the hole in the wall thus revealed, leaving the door a crack open after him. When we pass through on our way to breakfast we hurry by the cupboard with averted faces. The family Chaput are not early risers.

Already Madame has taken us into her warm heart. She will be our mother while we are in France, she tells us. Everything about us is of absorbing interest. When the Gendarme exhibited her wardrobe trunk, she was fairly overcome.

“_Ah, vive l’Amérique_,” she cried, clapping her old hands, and, “_Vive l’Amérique!_” again.

Bourmont, it seems, is army Divisional Headquarters. It is also headquarters for this division of the Y. There is a hut here, a warehouse, and headquarters offices, employing a personnel of sixteen or seventeen. By tomorrow the Gendarme and I will know what our work is to be.

Bourmont, November 28.

I have a canteen; the Gendarme, who has had some business training, is to work in the office. My canteen is in Saint Thiebault, the village next door. In the morning I go down the hill, past the grey houses built like steps on either side—some with odd pear trees, their branches trained gridiron-wise flat against the fronts,—over the river Meuse, here a sleepy little stream, to Saint Thiebault. On the way I pass lads in olive drab with whom I exchange a smile and a hello, villagers bare-headed, in sabots, and poilus in what was once horizon blue. In Paris the uniforms were all so beautiful and bright, but here at Bourmont one sees the real hue, faded, discolored, muddy, worn. The soldiers, middle-aged men for the most part, slouch about, occupied with homely, simple tasks, chopping wood and drawing water. One feels there is something painfully improper in the fact that they should be in uniform; they should, each and every one, be propped comfortably in front of their own hearthsides reading l’Echo de Paris, in felt slippers while their wooden shoes rest on the sill outside. And yet these very ones, I think as I look at them, may be the defenders of Verdun, the victors of the Marne, the veterans of a hundred battles!

The Bourmontese, who are proud and haughty folk, and call themselves a city though they number only a few hundred souls, look with disdain on the smaller village of Saint Thiebault, Saint Thiebault des Crapauds they call it, Saint Thiebault of the Toads. Approaching Saint Thiebault one sees two unmistakable signs of American occupancy; first, a large heap of empty tin cans and then the Stars and Stripes fluttering from a flag pole in the centre of the village. For Saint Thiebault is Regimental Headquarters and it is the boast of the old Colonel that wherever the regiment has gone that flag has gone too. Down the main street of the town I go, past the drinking fountain placarded; “Do not drink, good only for animals,” but at which, nevertheless, the doughboys frequently refresh themselves, cheerfully risking death, not to mention a court-martial, in order to get a drink of unmedicated water; and out along the Rue Dieu until I turn off the highway just beyond the village wash-house. The wash-house, known to the French as la Fontaine, is a beautiful little building like a tiny stone chapel, with tall arched windows filled with iron grills. Through the centre runs a long oblong pool; at its brim the women kneel to do their scrubbing, handsome peasant wenches many of them, with fresh, high coloring. Often one sees a soldier leaning against the grill, engaged in some attempt at gallantry through the bars. Sometimes one even glimpses a form in olive drab kneeling by the side of one of the peasant girls, he scrubbing his socks, and she her stays, while she gives him a lesson in French and in laundering à la Française. When the Americans first came to Saint Thiebault they had only a small-sized guard-house. Then came one historic payday when after months of penury the troops were paid. That night the accommodations at “the brig” proved inadequate and the wash-house had to be requisitioned for the over-flow. This was well enough until the lodgers fell to fighting among themselves and so fell headlong into the pool. Then such a hullabaloo broke loose that the whole camp turned out to see who had been murdered.

Back of the wash-house lies a group of long French barracks, and here lives Company A of the —— Regiment, infantry and “regulars.” Beyond the mess-hall is the hut, a French abri tent with double walls. Ducking under the fly, one finds oneself in a long rectangular canvas room, lighted by a dozen little isinglass windows. The room is filled with folding wooden chairs and long ink-stained tables over which are scattered writing materials, games and well-worn magazines. Opposite the door, at the far end, is the canteen counter, a shelf of books at one side, a victrola and a bulletin board, to which cartoons and clippings are tacked, on the other. Back of the counter on the wall, held in place by safety pins, are the hut’s only decorations, four of the gorgeous French war posters brought with me from Paris. There are two stoves resembling umbrella-stands for heating in the main part of the hut and behind the counter another, about the size and shape of a man’s derby hat, on which I must make my hot chocolate. For lights at night I am told that occasionally one can procure a few quarts of kerosene and then the lamps that stand underneath the counter are brought out and for a few days we shine; but usually we manage as our ancestors did with candle-light. Our candlesticks form a quaint collection; some are real tin bourgeois brought from Paris, some strips of wood, some chewing-gum boxes, while others are empty bottles, “dead soldiers” as the boys call them. As for the bottles, I am particular about the sort that I employ and none of mine are labeled anything but Vittel Water. Others I observe are not so circumspect,—yesterday I chanced in at a canteen in a neighboring village kept by a Y man; on a shelf three “dead soldier” candlesticks stood in a row and their labels read; Champagne, Cognac, Benedictine! For the rest, the hut is equipped with a wheezy old piano, a set of parlor billiards, and a man secretary. It is invariably dense with smoke, part wood and part tobacco, and usually crowded with boys.