PLEASE do not think that because I have mainly dwelt thus far upon the women offenders that there are no American men in France who do not belong here, because that would be a wrong assumption. I merely have mentioned the women first because by reason of their military garbing—or what some of them fondly mistake for military garbing—they offer rather more conspicuous showing to the casual eye than the male civilian dress.

The men are abundantly on hand though; make no mistake about that! Some of them come burdened with frock-coated dignity as members of special commissions or special delegations; in certain quarters there appears to be a somewhat hazy but very lively inclination to try to run our share of this war by commission. Some, I am sure, came for the same reason that the young man in the limerick went to the stranger's funeral—because they are fond of a ride. Some I think came in the hope of enjoying an exciting sort of junketing expedition, and some because they were all dressed up and had nowhere to go.

As well as may be judged by one who has been away from home for going on five months now, the special-commission notion is being rather overdone. Individuals and groups of individuals bearing credentials from this fraternal organisation or that religious organisation or the other research society reach England on nearly every steamer that penetrates through the U-boat zone. Almost invariably these gentlemen carry letters of introduction testifying to their personal probity and their collective importance, which letters are signed by persons sitting in high places.

It may be that the English are thereby deceived into believing that the visitors are entitled to special consideration—as indeed some of them are, and indeed some of them most distinctly are not. Or then again it may be that the English are not aware of a device very common among our men of affairs for getting rid of a bore who is intent on going somewhere to see somebody and craves to be properly vouched for upon his arrival. In certain circles this habit is called passing the buck. In others it is known as writing letters of introduction.

At any rate the English take no chances on offending the right party, even at the risk of favouring the wrong one. When a half dozen Yankees appear at the Foreign Office laden with letters addressed “To Whom it May Concern” the Foreign Office immediately becomes concerned.

How is a guileless Britisher intrenched behind a flat-top desk to know that the August and Imperial Order of Supreme Potentates whose chosen emissaries are now present desirous of having a look at the war, and afterward to approve of it in a report to the Grand Lodge at its next annual convention, if so be they do see fit to approve of it—how, I repeat, is he to know that the August and Imperial Order of Supreme Potentates has a membership largely composed of class-C bartenders? Not knowing, he acts in accordance with the best dictates of his ignorance.

The commission or the delegation or the presentation, whatever it calls itself, is provided with White Passes all round. On the strength of these White Passes the investigators are at the public expense transferred across the Channel and housed temporarily at the American Visitors' ChÂteau. From there they are taken in automobiles and under escort of very bored officers on a kind of glorified Cook's tour behind the British Front. Thereafter they are turned over to the French Mission or to the American forces for similar treatment.

As a result they accumulate an assortment of soft-boiled and yolkless impressions which they incubate into the spoken or the written word on the way back home, after they have held a meeting to decide whether they like the way the war is going on or whether they do not like the way the war is going on. Always there is the possibility that as a result of the dissemination of underdone and undigested misinformations which they have managed to acquire these persons, though actuated by the best intentions in the world, may do considerable harm in shaping public opinion in America. And likewise one may be very sure a lot of pestered British and French functionaries are left to wonder what sort of folks the masses of American citizenship must be if these are typical samples of the thought-moulding class.

I am not exaggerating much when I touch on this particular phase of the topic now engaging me, for I have seen two delegations in Europe, of the variety I have sought briefly to describe in the lines immediately foregoing; and we are expecting more in on the next boat. There was no imaginable reason why those whom I saw should be in a country that is at war at such a time of crisis as this time is, but the main point was that they were here, eating three large rectangular meals a day apiece and taking up the valuable time of overworked military men who accompanied them while they week-ended at the war. How many more such delegations will sift through the State Department and seep by the passport bureau and journey hither during the latter half of 1918 unless the Administration at Washington shuts down on the game no man can with accuracy calculate.

Away down in the south of France I ran into a gentleman of a clerical aspect who lost no time in telling me about himself. He was tall and slender like a wand, and of a willowy suppleness of figure, and he was terribly serious touching on his mission. He represented a religious denomination that has several hundreds of thousands of communicants in the United States. He had been dispatched across, he said, by the governing body of his church. His purpose, he explained, was to inquire into the bodily and spiritual well-being of his coreligionists who were on foreign service in the Army and the Navy, with a view subsequently to suggesting reforms for any existing evil in the military and naval systems when he reported back to the main board of his church.

To an innocent bystander it appeared that this particular investigator had a considerable contract upon his hands. Scattered over land and sea on this hemisphere there must be a good many thousands of members of his faith who are wearing the khaki or the marine blue. It would be practically impossible, I figured, to recognise them in their uniforms for what, denominationally speaking, they were; and from what I had seen of our operations I doubted whether any commanding officer would be willing to suspend routine while the reverend tabulator went down the lines taking his census; besides, the latter process would invariably consume considerable time. I calculated offhand that if the war lasted three years longer it still would be over before he could complete his rounds of all the camps and all the ships and all the rest billets and bases and hospitals and lines of communication, and so on. So I ventured to ask him just how he meant to go about getting his compilations of testimony together.

He told me blandly that as yet he had not fully worked out that detail of the task. For the time being he would content himself with a general survey of the situation and with securing material for a lecture which he thought of giving upon his return to America.

I felt a strong inclination to speak to him after some such fashion as this:

“My dear sir, if I were you I would not greatly concern myself regarding the physical and the moral states of individuals composing our Expeditionary Forces. That job is already being competently attended to by experts. So far as my own observations go the chaplains are all conscientious, hard-working men. There are a large number of excellent and experienced chaplains over here—enough, in fact, to go round. They are doing everything that is humanly possible to be done to keep the men happy and amused in their leisure hours and to help them to continue to be decent, cleanminded, normal human beings. Almost without exception, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the officers are practically lending their personal influence and using the power and the weight of discipline to accomplish the same desirable ends.

“On the physical side our boys are in splendid condition. We may have bogged slightly down in some of the aspects of this undertaking, but there is plenty of healthful and nourishing food on hand for every American boy in foreign service. He is comfortably clothed and comfortably shod—his officers see to that; and he is housed in as comfortable a billet as it is possible to provide, the state of the country being what it is. While he is well and hearty he has his fill of victuals three times a day, and if he falls ill, is wounded or hurt he has as good medical attendance and as good nursing and as good hospital treatment as it is possible for our country to provide.

“Touching on the other side of the proposition I would say this: In England, where there are powerfully few dry areas, and here in France, which is a country where everybody drinks wine, I have seen a great many thousands of our enlisted men—soldiers, sailors and marines, engineers and members of battalions. I have seen them in all sorts of surroundings and under all sorts of circumstances. I have seen perhaps twenty who were slightly under the influence of alcoholic stimulant. As a sinner would put it, they were slightly jingled—not disorderly, not staggering, you understand, but somewhat jingled. I have yet to see one in such a state as the strictest police-court magistrate would call a state of outright intoxication. That has been my experience. I may add that it has been the common experience of the men of my profession who have had similar opportunities for observing the conduct of our fellows.

“It is true that the boys indulge in a good deal of miscellaneous cussing—which is deplorable, of course, and highly reprehensible. Still, in my humble opinion most of them use profanity as a matter of habit and not because there is any real lewdness or any real viciousness in their hearts. Mainly they cuss for the same reason that a parrot does. Anyhow, I could hardly blame a fellow sufferer for swearing occasionally, considering the kind of spring weather we have been having in these parts lately.

“As for their morals, I am firmly committed to the belief, as a result of what I have seen and heard, that man for man our soldiers have a higher moral standard than the men of any army of any other nation engaged in this war; and when in this connection I speak of our soldiers I mean the soldiers of Canada as well as the soldiers of the United States. Any man who tells you the contrary is a liar, and the truth is not in him. This is not an offhand alibi; statistics compiled by our own surgeons form the truth of it; and any man who stands up anywhere on our continent and says that the soldiers who have come from our side of the Atlantic to help lick Germany are contracting habits of drunkenness or that they are being ruined by the spreading of sexual diseases among them utters a deliberate and a cruel slander against North American manhood which should entitle him to a suit of tar-and-feather underwear and a free ride on a rail out of any community.

“There is absolutely nothing the matter with our boys except that they are average human beings, and it is going to take a long time to cure them of that. And please remember this—that, discipline being what it is and military restraint being what it is, it is very much harder for a man in the Army or the Navy to get drunk or to misconduct himself than it would be for him to indulge in such excesses were he out in civil life, as a free agent.”

That in fact was what I wanted to pour into the ear of the ecclesiastical prober. But I did not. I saved it up to say it here, where it would enjoy a wider circulation. I left him engaged in generally surveying.

Officers and men alike are invariably ready and willing to voice their gratitude and their everlasting appreciation of the help and comfort provided by those who are attached to lay organisations having for the time being a more or less military complexion; they are equally ready to score the incompetents who infrequently turn up in these auxiliary branches of the service. A man who is fighting Fritz is apt to have a short temper anyhow, and meddlesome busybodies who want to aid without knowing any of the rudiments make him see red and swear blue.

A general of division told me that when he moved in with his command to the sector which he then was occupying he was tagged by an undoubtedly earnest but undeniably pestiferous person who wanted everything else suspended until his purposes in accompanying the expedition had been satisfied.

“I was a fairly busy person along about then,” said the general. “We were within reach of the enemy's big guns and his aËroplanes were giving us considerable bother, and what with getting a sufficiency of dugouts and trench shelters provided for the troops and attending to about a million other things of more or less importance from a military standpoint I had mighty little time to spare for side issues; and my officers had less.

“But the person I am speaking of kept after me constantly. His idea was that the men needed recreation and needed it forthwith. He was there to provide this recreation without delay, and he couldn't understand why there should be any delay in attending to his wishes.

“Finally, to get rid of him, I gave orders that a noncommissioned officer and a squad of men should be taken away from whatever else they were doing and told off to aid our self-appointed amusement director in doing whatever it was he wanted done. It was the only way short of putting him under arrest that would relieve me of a common nuisance and leave my staff free to do their jobs.

“Well, it seemed that the young man had brought along with him a tent and a moving-picture outfit and a supply of knockdown seats. Under his direction the detail of men set up the tent on an open site which he selected upon the very top of a little hill, where it stood out against the sky line like a target; which, in a way of speaking, was exactly what it was. Then he installed his moving-picture machine and ranged his chairs in rows and announced that that evening there would be a free show. I may add that I knew nothing of this at the time, and inasmuch as the recreation man was known to be acting by my authority with a free hand no officer felt called upon to interfere, I suppose.

“The show started promptly on time, with a large and enthusiastic audience of enlisted men on hand and with the tent all lit up inside. In the midst of the darkness roundabout it must have loomed up like a lighthouse. Naturally there were immediate consequences.

“Before the first reel was halfway unrolled a boche flying man came sailing over, with the notion of making us unhappy in our underground shelters if he could. He found a shining mark waiting for him, so dropped a bomb at that tent. Luckily the bomb missed the tent, but it struck alongside of it and the concussion blew the canvas flat. The men came out from under the flattened folds and stampeded for the dugouts, wrecking the moving-picture machine in their flight. And the next day we were shy one amusement director. He had gone away from there.”

In the Army itself there are exceedingly few members of the Bejones of Tuxedo family, and this, I take it, is a striking evidence of the average high intelligence of the men who have been chosen to officer our forces, considering that we started at scratch to mould millions of civilians into soldiers and considering also how necessary it was at the outset to issue a great number of commissions overnight, as it were. Howsomever, now and again a curious ornithological specimen does bob up, wearing shoulder straps.

A party of civilians, observers, were sent to France by a friendly power to have a look at our troops. When they reached General Headquarters they were being escorted by a beardless youth with the bars of a second lieutenant on his coat. He also wore two bracelets, one of gold and one of silver, on his right wrist. He also spoke with a fascinating lisp. He went straight to the office of the officer commanding the Intelligence Section.

“Colonel,” he says, “I regard it as a great mistake to send me out here with this party. My work is really in Paris.”

“Well,” said the colonel, “you let Paris worry along without you as best it can while you toddle along and accompany these visiting gentlemen over such-and-such a sector. Oh, yes, there is one other thing: Kindly close the door behind you on your way out.”

The braceleted one hid his petulance behind a salute, his jewelry meanwhile jingling pleasantly, and withdrew from the presence. For two days in an automobile he toured with his charge, at a safe distance behind the front lines. On the evening of the second day, when they reached the railroad station to await the train which would carry them back to Paris, he was heard to remark with a heartfelt but lispy sigh of relief: “Well, thank heaven for one thing anyhow—I have done my bit!”

Without being in possession of the exact facts I nevertheless hazard the guess that this young person either has been sent or shortly will be going back to his native land. Weeding-out is one of the best things this Army of our does. It would be well, in my humble judgment, if folks at home followed the Army's example in this regard, but conducted the weed-ing-out process over there.

For men and women who can be of real service, who can endure hardships without collapsing and without complaining, who can fend for themselves when emergencies arise, who are self-reliant, competent, well skilled in their vocations, there is need here in France in the Red Cross, in the Y. M. C. A., in the Y. M. H. A., in the K. of C., in the hospitals, in the telephone exchanges, the motor service, the ambulance service and in scores of other fields of departmental and allied activity. If these persons can speak a little French, so much the better.

But for the camouflaged malingerer, for the potential slacker, for the patriotic but unqualified zealot, for the incompetent one who mistakes enthusiasm for ability, and for the futile commission member there is no room whatsoever. This job of knocking the mania out of Germania is a big job, and the closer one gets to it the bigger it appears. We can't make it absolutely a fool-proof war, but by a proper discrimination exercised at home we can reduce the number of Americans in Europe for whose presence here there appears to be no valid excuse whatsoever.

P. S. I hope they read these few lines in Washington.