Read Ebook: The Uncensored Letters of a Canteen Girl by Morse Katharine Duncan

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Ebook has 1368 lines and 97282 words, and 28 pages

FOREWORD

To M. D. M. and M. H. M:

Written with the thought of you in my mind, these letters are first of all for you, and after that for whoever they may concern, being a true record of one girl's experience with the A. E. F. in France during the Great War.

Bourmont, France, Nov. 24, 1917.

"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 caf? 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.

"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."

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.

Bourmont, November 28.

The first night after the Chief had taken me over to call at my canteen and I had had one cursory glance at them, I came back feeling that my hut contained the roughest, toughest set of young ruffians that I had ever laid eyes on. The second night I came home and fairly cried myself to sleep over them--they seemed so young, so pitiful and so puzzled underneath their air of bravery, so far away from anything they really understood and everybody that was dear to them. It was Cummings in particular I think who did it for me. He owns to seventeen but I would put fifteen as an outside estimate. A mere boy who hasn't got his growth yet, with soft unformed features and a voice as shrill as a child's, I am sure he ran away from home to go to war just as another lad might have run away to see the circus. Although the regiment is a regular army organization, a large part of the men were raw recruits only last summer, a fact which causes the old-timers, whose service dates from Border days or before, no little regret.

"This Man's Army ain't what it used to be," they complain; "it's getting too mixed."

The "veterans" have a stock saying which they employ to put the youngsters in their places: "Call yourself a soldier do you? Why I've stood parade rest longer than you've been in the army!"

This is sometimes varied, when the speaker happens to be the tough sort, by; "Huh! I've put more time in the guard-house than you have in the army!"

Tonight a boy came up to the counter and asked: "Goin' to serve hot chocolate tonight?"

"Sure thing!"

"Then I guess I won't go out and get drunk."

It's going to be hot chocolate or die in that hut every night after this!

Bourmont, November 31.

I don't like my uniform. I don't like women in uniform anyway. I suppose it is because one is so used to the expression of a woman's personality in dress that when she dons regulation garb she seems to lose so much. And then to really carry off a uniform requires a flair, a dash, a swagger, and such are rarely feminine possessions. The consensus of opinion seems to bear me out.

"Of course I think women in uniforms look very snappy," confided a lad to me today; "but somehow they don't look like women to me!"

Besides the suit and cape I had made in Paris, they gave me two canteen aprons, aprons such as French working women wear, voluminous, beplaited, made in Mother Hubbard style. Now there is one point on which I am resolved. They can court martial me, they can send me home, or they can lead me out and shoot me at sunrise, but they cannot make me wear those aprons! What's more, the very first minute that I have to myself I'm going to cut them up and make them into canteen dish-cloths.

Bourmont, December 3.

This French money is the very plague; not because it is French but because it is so flimsy. It may perhaps measure up to the national standards, but it fails utterly to meet American requirements; the difference lying chiefly in the fact that the French don't shoot craps. It comes into the canteen in all stages of disintegration.

"She's kinder feeble. Will she pass?" inquires a lad anxiously.

"With care maybe, and the help of a little sticking plaster," I reply; and getting out the roll of gummed paper kept handily in the cash-drawer, I proceed to patch up the tattered bill.

"Guess this one must have been up to the front; it's all shot to pieces," another lad apologizes; then, at my casual references to shooting craps, grins guiltily. "But say now, ain't it the rottenest money you ever did see?" "The United States ought to teach these Frenchies how to make paper money," remarks a third; while still another adds; "When I'm to home I write to my girl on better paper than that."

Sometimes the bills come in as a mere mass of crumpled tatters; then one must play picture-puzzle piecing it together. Sometimes they are beyond repair; for at times you will receive two halves of different notes pasted neatly together, or at other times one with the corner bearing an essential number lacking. The French banks refuse to pay a cent on their paper money unless it is just so.

"I'm sorry, but that bill's no good," you will occasionally have to tell a boy. Usually he will grin cheerfully as he stuffs it back into his pocket.

"Oh well, I'll pass it along in a crap game."

Then too, the boys have no respect for foreign money and so handle it carelessly with an obvious contempt that is irritating to the French.

"Tain't real money," they declare.

The paper francs and half-francs they call "soap coupons."

"Why, you might just as well be spendin' the label off a stick o' chewin' gum!" they jeer.

Next to the paper money that comes to pieces in their fingers, the boys detest the big one and two cent coppers. Known to the navy as "bunker-plates," in the army they pass as "clackers." "You get a pocket-full o' them things and you think you've got some money, and all the time it ain't more than ten cents altogether," they grumble.

"I can't be bothered carryin' that stuff around," they declare when I beg them to pay me in coppers. "I always throw 'em away or give 'em to the kids." A prejudice which greatly complicated the matter of making change until I had an inspiration. Now I give them their small change in boxes of matches or sticks of chewing gum.

In contrast to their disdain for this foreign currency the boys cherish to a degree that is half funny, half pathetic, any specimens of "real money" that they are lucky enough to possess.

"Say, I had an American dollar bill in my hand the other day,--I felt just as if the old flag was waving over me!" And another lad; "Saw a U. S. Dollar bill today. Oh boy! but it looked a mile long to me!"

If anyone displays an American greenback at the counter a little riot is sure to ensue. All the boys nearby crowd about, feast their eyes on it, touch it, pat it, kiss it even.

"Lemme see!" "Ain't she a beauty?" "That's the real stuff!" "Say, how much will you sell her for?"

Even the half-dollars, quarters and dimes are precious.

"You don't get that one," they say as they pull a handful of change from their pockets. "That's my lucky piece. I'm savin' that there little ol' nickel to spend on Broadway."

French money, Belgian money, Swiss money, English money, Spanish money, Italian money, Greek money, Canadian money, Luxembourg money, Indo-Chinese money, money from Argentine Republic, and yesterday a German mark even, all come across the counter and go into the till without comment. But when any American money comes in I always feel badly over it. For, be it a crisp five dollar bill, an eagle quarter or only a buffalo nickel I know it signifies just one thing,--bankruptcy.

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