Part 21

"He was a serious case, and so they humored him and let him keep his souvenirs, and when I saw them take him out to a base hospital this morning, he still had them strapped to him, with a grin on his face like a darky eating watermelon."

"What did you say his name was?" I asked.

"Rosenbaum," the boy replied. "Rosenbaum from New York."

"Say, if they'd only recruit a regiment like that from America, we'd send the whole German army back to Berlin naked," added another soldier who was standing near.

Then we all had another good laugh, which in its turn disturbed the old men playing checkers on the bench under the trees back of Notre Dame. But the soldier who told me the story added thoughtfully a truth that every one in France knows.

"At that, I'm tellin' you, boy, there aren't any braver soldiers in the American army than them Jewish boys from New York. I got 'o hand it to them."

"Yes, we all do," I replied.

This good-natured raillery goes on all over the army, for it is a cosmopolitan crowd, such as never before wore the uniform of the United States, and each group, the negro group, the Italian group, the Jewish group, the Slav group, the Western group, the Southern group, the Eastern group, all have their little fun at the expense of the others, and out of it all comes much sunshine and laughter, and no bitterness.

The Jewish boy loves to repeat a good joke on his own kind as well as the others. I myself saw the letter that a Jewish boy was writing to his uncle in New York, eulogizing the Y. M. C. A. He was not an educated lad, but he was a wonderfully sincere boy, and he pleaded his cause well. He had been treated so well by the "Y" that he wanted his uncle to give all his spare cash to that great organization. This is the letter:

"DEAR UNCLE:

"This here Y. M. C. A. is the goods. They give you chocolate when you're goin' into the trenches and they gives you chocolate when you're comin' out and they don't charge you nothin' for it neither. If you are givin' any money don't you give it to none of them Red Crosses nor to none of them Salvation Armies, nor to none of them Knights of Columbuses; but you give it to them Y. M. C. A.'s. They treat you right. They have entertainments for you and wrestlin' matches, and they give you a place to write. And what's more, Uncle they don't have no respect fer no religion.

"Yours,

"BILL."

Yes, France is full of Silhouettes of Sunshine. There was the eloquent Y. M. C. A. secretary. And while he didn't exactly know it, he too was adding his unconscious ray of light to a dull and desolate world.

The Gothas had come over Paris the night before, and so had a group of some one hundred and fifty new secretaries. The Gothas had played havoc with two blocks of buildings on a certain Paris street because of the fact that the bombs they dropped had severed the gas-mains. The result did have a look of desolation I'll have to admit. So far the new secretaries had done no damage.

Now there is one thing common to all the newly arrived in France, be they Y. M. C. A. secretaries, Knights of Columbus workers, Red Cross men, or just the common garden variety of "investigators," and that is that for about two weeks they are alert to hear the bloodiest, most drippy, and desolate-with-danger stories that they can hear, for the high and holy purpose of writing back home to their favorite paper, or to their wives or sweethearts, of how near they were to getting killed; of how the bombs fell just a few minutes before or just a few minutes after they were "on that very spot"; of how the raid came the very night after they were in London or Paris; of how just after they had walked along a certain street the Big Bertha had dropped a shell there; of how the night after they had slept in a certain hotel down in Nancy the Germans blew it up. We're all alike the first week, and staid war correspondents are no exception to the rule. It gets them all.

I came on my friend telling this crowd of eager new secretaries of the damage that the Gothas had done the night before. There they stood in a corner of the hotel with open ears, eyes, and mouths. Most of them were on their toes ready to make a break for their rooms and get all the horrible details down in their letters home and their diaries before it escaped them. They were torn between a fear that they would forget some of the horrid details and for fear some other fellow would get the big story back home to the local paper before they could get it there. When I came in, this nonchalant narrator was having the time of his young life. He was revelling in description. Color and fire and blood and ruin and desecration flowed from his eloquent lips like water over Niagara.

When I got close enough to hear, he was at his most climactic and last period of eloquence. He made a gesture with one hand, waving it gracefully into the air full length, with these words: "Why, gentlemen, I didn't see anything worse at the San Francisco earthquake."

In three seconds that crowd had disappeared, each to his own letter, and each to his own diary. Not a detail must escape. How wonderful it would be to describe that awful destruction, and say at the end of the letter: "And this happened just the night before we reached Paris."

Only the vivid artist of description and myself remained in the hotel lobby, and having heard him mention San Francisco, my own home, I was naturally curious and wanted to talk a bit over old times, so I went up to the gentleman and said: "I heard you say to that gang that you hadn't seen anything worse at the San Francisco earthquake, so I thought I'd have a chat about San Francisco with you."

"Why, I was never in San Francisco in my life," he said with a grin.

"But you said to those boys, 'I didn't see anything worse at the San Francisco earthquake,'" I replied.

"Well, I didn't, for I wasn't there. I just gave them guys what they was lookin' for in all its horrible details, didn't I? Ain't they satisfied? Well, so am I, bo."

This story has a meaning all its own in addition to the fact that it produced one of the bright spots in my experiences in France. That eloquent secretary represents a type who will tell the public about anything he thinks it wants to know about the "horrible details" of war in France, and facts do not baffle his inventive genius.

One characteristic of the American soldier in France is his absolute fearlessness about dangers. He doesn't know how to be afraid. He wants to see all that is going on. The French tap their heads and say he is crazy, a gesture they have learned from America. And they have reason to think so. When the "alert" blows for an air-raid the French and English have learned to respect it. Not so the American soldier.

"Think I'm comin' clear across that darned ocean to see something, and then duck down into some blamed old cellar or cave and not see anything that's goin' on! Not on your life. None o' that for muh! I'm going to get right out on the street where I can see the whole darned show!"

And that's just what he does. I've been in some twenty-five or thirty air-raids in four or five cities of France, and I have never yet seen many Americans who took to the "abris." They all want to see what's going on, and so they hunt the widest street, and the corner at that, to watch the air-raids.

One night during a heavy raid in Paris, when the French were safely hidden in the "abris," because they had sense enough to protect themselves, I saw about twenty sober but hilarious American soldiers marching down the middle of the boulevard, arm in arm, singing "Sweet Adelaide" at the top of their voices, while the bombs were dropping all over Paris, and a continuous barrage from the anti-aircraft guns was cannonading until it sounded like a great front-line battle.