CHAPTER XXV
HOW WE KEPT WARM

IN Paris the child of the people is a born artist. He has the instinct from his ancestors. His taste is formed and cultivated by what he sees around him—of the present as well as of the past—from the time he first begins to observe things. Inheritance and atmosphere influence him. One June day in 1917, our dear friend ThiÉbault-Sisson, art critic of the Temps, was lunching with us. He drew from his pocket a lot of photographs. They illustrated the best and most striking of the drawings by children in the primary schools of the city. M. ThiÉbault-Sisson had organized an exposition of children's drawings, done in their ordinary class work. The photographs were a surprise and a revelation. Having lived in Paris since the beginning of the war, I could appreciate the comments of a Parisian, proud of this eloquent showing of precocious talent. I accepted with alacrity his invitation to see the originals.

The outline, almost always enhanced by bright frank color, where the three notes of the flag played a perpetual leit-motif, was a feast for the eyes. In work of this character one expects to see the freshness and freedom of childhood. What I found that was unusual was the maturity born of suffering and intense emotion. In the drawings life in wartime was reflected with a naÏvetÉ that excluded neither precision nor vigor of touch. With compositions of the simplest and most studied character there was taste and a pretty feeling for color.

The most popular form of drawing was the poster. In one school the children were given the subject of calling upon the people to economize gas. One little girl made a few bold strokes outlining a gas-jet and wrote underneath, "Parisians—Economize Gas!" Asked to admonish the public to eat less bread, a boy of ten used a potato as a face. The eyes were almost human in their appeal. "Eat me please!" was written under the drawing. A further caption stated that it was the duty of patriots to save the bread for the soldiers. Sugar shortage inspired the idea of a sugar cone and the same cone cut in half. Under the former was "In 1914" and under the latter "—and now!" The best of these posters were reproduced by the thousand and put in tram-cars and railway stations. They did more to call us to order than all the grave affiches of the Government.

A dominating note, perhaps the strongest after that of the man on furlough or the poignant expression of emotions experienced when the news came that father would never return again, was the hunt for coal. Little observers, inventing nothing of this (for it was seen over and over again), pictured a coal wagon upon which two or three youngsters had scrambled and were helping themselves. Generously they were firing bits of the precious commodity to their little comrades. This was a drawing made from memory of things seen.

Winter in Paris is often mild: but early in 1917 came a protracted spell of zero weather that would have taxed the facilities of Paris in ordinary times. The coal shortage hit us at the worst possible moment. Transportation was tied up. The mines were not producing. Stocks became exhausted in a few days. The hunt for coal was cruel because it was mostly fruitless and because it imposed upon the children weary waits, hours at a time, in the street in snow and wind, with the thermometer down to zero.

Whoever saw the crowds massed in a long line in front of the coal depots, old men, women, children stamping their feet painfully, jostled, weeping or seized with mute despair at the curt announcement that there was nothing to do but return to-morrow, will never forget the worst calamity that fell upon Paris during the war. Children were hit by it more than all the rest, and in a certain sense more than by the loss of a father. For they suffered from it in their own flesh, in little hands chapped till they opened into deep cracks, in little fingers stiffened and swollen by monstrous chilblains, in frost-bitten feet. For six weeks the quest for coal was the ruling passion. It inspired the children to compositions all quite like each other in sentiment and all dominated by the conviction of an implacable fatality.

In common with most Parisians who lived in modern apartment-houses, we never had to think of heat. Like hot water, you just turned it on. To make an effort to have it no more entered into our scheme of things than to help with the stoking when we were on ship-board. How naturally one accepts the comforts and conveniences resulting from the work of others and the smooth moving of modern city life! At first we felt the coal shortage mildly. It meant piling on extra clothes and having our noses turn red and then blue, like the dolls with barometrical petticoats. The apartment was chilly, but we got up as late as we could. For once we blessed the school system in France which works the children so many hours that you wonder why the babies do not strike for an eight-hour day. As long as the municipality could supply them, schools were especially favored. After school hours and devoirs (we had a wood fire in one room), bed time soon came for the kids. We set the victrola going, and everybody danced until they forgot the thermometer.

A passage through the Louvre
A passage through the Louvre

Then we began to discover that coal means more than heat and light. We found out how many trades were obliged to say "no coal, no work." In a big city coal is certainly king, and not a limited monarch at that. Transportation depends on coal, and everything else depends upon transportation. One day there was a mass meeting of Paris laundresses. The Government had promised them coal upon payment in advance of a large part of the price. The order had been placed for weeks: no coal came. It meant livelihood to the laundresses and cleanliness to the rest of us. They had the Board of Health with them and the learned doctors of the AcadÉmie de MÉdecine. Think of the menace of weeks of accumulated soiled linen! It was all right for the papers to joke about abolishing starched shirts and cuffs and collars. That was a small part of the problem, affecting only men. The germs involved in not being able to wash were no joke.

Elderly people living alone and adult families calculated that it was cheaper to go to a pension than to keep house. In some cases it was the only feasible thing. People who had the means started to go south when conditions in Paris became intolerable. But with little children it was dangerous to attempt a journey in freezing cold trains.

Just when we had exhausted the little supply of wood we had laid in originally for the luxury of a wood fire we did not need, our propriÉtaire notified us that he could get no more coal for heating or hot water. And the same day an inspector called to place a maximum of gas (our only means of cooking) at less than half the amount we ordinarily consumed.

The law of substitution came into force. We had long been ridiculing the Germans for their ersatz ingenuity. Were we now to have to seek substitutes? Cooking is the most vital thing in life next to foodstuffs. Paris blossomed out with what I thought was an American invention, the fireless cooker. But they were called marmites norvÉgiennes. I suppose if we keep on digging at Pompeii we shall find them there. Everyone who could afford a marmite bought one. You could get them at all prices and sizes, and the newspapers published daily directions for using them. If you could not afford a fireless cooker or if you were unable to buy one (they soon gave out, of course), you took your hatbox from the Galeries Lafayette and stuffed it with newspapers and sawdust with just room in the middle for your soup-kettle.

But fireless cookers would not wash clothes. They would not give the necessary supply of hot water. The law of substitution has a limit. And what was to be the ersatz for fuel in heating? Gas? Your supply was already cut down. Electricity? Ditto. Both of these depended upon coal. Petroleum? The army had commandeered all the supplies for motor transport and airplanes. Wood alcohol? There was none to be had.

Then began the coal hunt for us. We had been pitying the poor. Now was our turn. Money was of no value. Other propriÉtaires had served the same notice. People with larger purses than ours were in the market for coal and wood. Our children began to suffer also in their own flesh.

My husband and his secretary gave up work and joined the coal hunters. They scoured the city in taxi-cabs. Herbert found a man who knew where there was a ton of anthracite for eighty dollars. He tracked it down and found that he was the tenth person applying for it that same afternoon.

Then the kiddies came down with measles. Keeping them warm in the way the doctor ordered was utterly impossible. All we could do was to give them more blankets. When the baby got congestion of the lungs and heat and hot baths meant the difference between life and death, I cast my eye over the apartment appraising the furniture. I no longer thought of how pretty my Brittany armoire was or how I loved my Empire desk. The cubic feet of wood was the sole criterion. Dining-room chairs went first into the fire in Hope's bedroom. The dining-room table, sawed into little blocks, heated the water for baths. Cupboard doors were taken off their hinges and converted into fuel. Herbert got a hand-cart and stood in line for his turn at a place where old lumber from torn-down houses was being sold. There was a crowd besieging it as if it were a gold-mine. It was, to the owners. The junk that had been there for years disappeared at fabulous prices in a few days, doors, clapboards, window-sashes, shutters, beams, flooring, even lathes.

When our fight for Hope's life became known, friends appeared bringing treasures. A prominent American manufacturer was at the door one morning. He had climbed six flights of stairs with a huge bag of bits of wood gleaned in his factory.

"We calculate pretty close," he said apologetically. "We do not have much waste in making roll-top desks."

"Don't ask me where I got this sack of coal," said another respectable Samaritan. I felt his guilt, confirmed when he told me the story afterwards of how he had stolen it from the back of a wagon. But I was not asking questions then!

Two burly policemen, unmindful of dignity and uniforms, deposited sacks of wood on my salon floor. They had come from the Commissariat in the Fifth Arrondissement. Monsieur le Commissaire, they explained, had said that the woman who was looking after so many Paris babies in her oeuvre must not be allowed to see her own baby die. They had agreed. This was the wood from their own office. Why not? For the first time I cried. Go through my experience, and you will understand how one can have a passionate love for the French. I am relating here just one little incident of help unsolicited that came in a crisis. I had never seen that Commissaire. How he knew my baby was ill was a mystery. But I have often experienced in my Paris life the impulsive generosity, carried out at inconvenience and sacrifice, of which this is an example. There were others who needed that wood as much as I did. But I was a foreigner who had been working for babies in the Commissaire's district. A point of honor was involved. Never will you find a Frenchman lacking when he feels a sense of obligation.

FranÇois CoppÉe wrote a beautiful story about a young French aristocrat whose life in the army had taught him that half of the world goes through life struggling constantly to obtain what the other half has without effort. Perhaps you have read "La CroÛte de Pain." After the war of Soixante-Dix the aristocrat could not bear to see bread wasted. One day he picked up a crust on the street, brushed off the mud with his handkerchief and set it on the side-walk where one who needed it would find it. And then he told his inquiring companion why. I shall always be like that with coal. For I can never forget how we kept warm in February, 1917.

CHAPTER XXVI
APRIL SIXTH

NEVER were Americans in France more perplexed about the state of feeling in the United States than at the beginning of 1917. The sinking of the Lusitania and other torpillages had brought forth note after note from President Wilson: but his spokesmen among the Democratic senators, especially Senator Hitchcock, were advocating measures to put an embargo on the export of arms and ammunition. If these men had succeeded, they would have helped Germany to win the war during 1916. Then President Wilson was reelected on the slogan, "He has kept us out of the war." Immediately after his re-election, Mr. Wilson began an attempt to make peace that seemed to us at the time distinctly unfriendly to the Entente. The idealism of President Wilson stirred us. But we were living too close to the war to see the advantage of a "peace without victory."

Our first intimation of a change of attitude in America came one day when L'Information, one of our papers that comes out at noon, published a cable-gram from Washington, stating that Secretary Lansing had declared that the reason behind President Wilson's interest in peace was that the United States felt herself on the brink of war. Herbert and I were walking home from our studios. He stopped to buy the paper that the boy on a bicycle was just giving our newswoman. Long experience had taught us that the noon paper never gave anything new. But one was always afraid to miss something. That's why afternoon papers are able to bring out so many editions. When we read this message, we realized that the President must be at the end of his rope, and that if Germany persisted in her intention to declare unlimited submarine warfare, our entering into the conflict was inevitable.

The news of the rupture of diplomatic relations arrived on a Sunday morning when the streets were full. The dispatches from Washington contained long excerpts from President Wilson's splendid speech. Relief rather than joy was the feeling we all had. We said to ourselves, "At last!" Some of our intimate French friends, when we discussed the break and the reasons the President gave for it, wondered why those reasons had not been valid long before. It was an echo of our own thoughts. But French and American were so happy over the new stand taken by the United States, over the new note in the leadership of President Wilson, that we did not allow ourselves to criticize the past. All was forgiven on that last Sunday of January. Over night President Wilson became the most popular man in France. And just one week before my Parisian friends had been reading his Senate speech of January twenty-second with a puzzled expression that turned into anger and indignation.

We had an excellent barometer of what the French bourgeois and universitaire was thinking in our dear old family doctor. Doctor Charon had come to us first in the Rue Servandoni days. Christine was sick one night for the first and only time in her babyhood. The young father and mother were scared to death. Doctor Charon, whom we had not known before, was called in. He assured us that there was nothing fatal. After that he came again for colds. He knew how to scold us and make us obey. Since then he has been the family friend and censor, entering into our life as only a doctor can do. He always stopped to chat a minute. His only son was at the war: he and his wife and two daughters were doing hospital work. I often felt that his heart was breaking. He suffered from the war in his soul, which was far worse than suffering in the flesh.

During the years of uncomfortable neutrality, Herbert and I tried to reassure Doctor Charon and make him see how impossible it was that all our compatriots, who had never been in France and knew nothing about France, could feel the way we did. But we often felt that he loved us despite the fact that we were Americans. On January 23, 1917, Doctor Charon talked to us at length about the Senate speech. The way President Wilson's mind worked was beyond him. He despaired of America. On January 30 he came in with a face transfigured, held out his arms, and kissed me. We both cried.

"I do not yet understand about your President," he said simply, "but you were right in telling me not to lose hope in him. To-day he is our prophet."

During the two years that followed, Doctor and Madame Charon, in common with all our French friends, had a revelation of the heart of America beating for France. They saw at close range our relief work. Not only did we give money without stint, but hundreds of Americans—who had never known France before—came over to show by tireless personal service that the friends of France were not limited to the Americans resident in France or to those who had some point of personal contact. In the end they realized that we were ready to be as prodigal with our blood as with our treasure. When my husband received his red ribbon, the Charons gave a dinner for us. Doctor Charon said: "I have one ambition now in life—to go to America."

As I have related in another chapter, February and March were tragic months for Paris. Zero weather and no coal made a combination that took our attention away from the evolution of public opinion across the seas. Germany stood firm, resisting the threats and disregarding the warnings of President Wilson's notes. But we had such an inherent mistrust of notes that we were not sure until the end of March that some sort of a modus vivendi would not be patched up, as after the Lusitania and the Sussex.

Were we even sure in the first week of April? Herbert told me to get out our flags that had been put carefully away since 1914. Although I was not as optimistic as my husband, I brought out the flags and mended them. I needed two for our studios. My voice trembled when I asked for the stars and stripes at the Bon MarchÉ. They had a large stock, mostly brand-new. They were counting upon the imminent event. The sales girl told me that they had sold more American flags in the last fortnight than those of the other Allies put together since the beginning of the war. She said it gleefully. The new broom was sweeping clean. With all my pride in my own country, I had my misgivings about too great a demonstration. Why did not the Government or some of the patriotic organizations make a propaganda to have the flags of the Allies ready for display everywhere with the American and French when the day arrived? I suggested this to my husband, who was a member of the Union des Grandes Associations FranÇaises. I knew how I would feel if I were a Britisher who had been there from the beginning. Would not the French show that wonderful characteristic of theirs, the sense of proportion?

But when the day arrived, my internationalism and cosmopolitanism, a gradual and unconscious growth, suddenly disappeared. It was a reversion to type. I became blatantly American again, and gloried in the fact that everywhere it was all Stars and Stripes. Why not? This was America's day. And ever since, despite the theoretical internationalism (or super-nationalism) I have advocated in common with my husband, I fear that practically I have been lapsing into a narrow nationalism. It is a curious phenomenon. I do not attempt to explain it.

On Thursday, April sixth, Herbert went to the American Club to lunch. Settling down to work had been hard that morning. We were feverishly awaiting the news. I was just starting lunch with the children when the telephone rang. Herbert's voice said, "Put out your flag," and then he hung up.

An hour later he came in a taxi-cab with Carroll Greenough, an American architect who lived near us. We went for his wife. Then the four of us did the Grands Boulevards, the Rue de la Paix, and the principal streets in the heart of Paris. As if by magic the American flag appeared everywhere. Paris had not waited for the poster of the Municipality, in which the President of the Municipal Counsel called upon his fellow citizens to pavoiser in honor of the new Ally. Americans though we were, we had never seen so many American flags. They expressed the hope which, though long deferred, had not made the heart sick.

We went to the Ambassadeurs for tea. The terraces were full. We watched the crowds passing up and down the Champs-ElysÉes. All that was lacking was the orchestra to play the Marseillaise and the Star Spangled Banner. There had been no orchestras in Paris since the beginning of the war.

But the music was in our hearts.

CHAPTER XXVII
THE VANGUARD OF THE A. E. F.

"WHAT class are yuh goin' to git?"

The voice came from a wee island of khaki in a solid mass of horizon blue. American soldiers! The first I had seen. The American army was to the French army as were these half dozen doughboys to the station full of shabby poilus. The Gare du Nord has many memories for me, happy and poignant, but this will always be the most precious. Shall I ever forget the ticket window around which our boys crowded? We had been saying "How long, O Lord, how long?" And now they were with us. I moved nearer to them.

"Why, there's classes—foist, second, and thoid—accordin' to what yuh pay—see?"

"Aw! What dya mean?"

"Buy fift' and we'll ride foist!"

I volunteered to help them count their change.

"She don't understand and neither do we," said one, hitching a thumb in the general direction of the girl behind the grating.

"Guess she's got mush in her brain."

"Or feathers!" laughed another.

It was not the class they would ride that was at the bottom of the trouble. I found that the boys wanted to go to Versailles. They had come into the Gare du Nord with baggage two days in advance of General Pershing and his staff. Their officer had given them an afternoon off, but told them that they were not to wander around Paris. He had suggested Versailles. This was the only station they knew, and so they were trying to get to Vers-ales. I took them to the Gare du Montparnasse and put them on their way. This really was not necessary. I soon discovered the American soldiers needed no interpreter. They always got to whatever destination they set their minds upon. But this little scene at the Gare du Nord was typical of the spirit of our boys during the two years they were in France. Instead of getting angry, they smiled and "joshed." In their very nature they had the secret of getting along with the French.

The afternoon of General Pershing's arrival, the streets around the Gare du Nord held a crowd the like of which I had not seen in Paris since the war began. It was the same at the Place de la Concorde. Rooms had been engaged for the Pershing party at the Hotel Crillon. The ovation at the Gare du Nord and along the route of the procession was remarkable. When General Pershing came out on the balcony of the Crillon it was a scene worthy of the occasion. Paris was not greeting an individual. France was welcoming America.

For the first time since the beginning of the war Paris celebrated. The danger that still menaced the city and the bereavements of three years were forgotten in the frenzy of joy over what everyone believed was the entry of a decisive factor. Since April sixth insidious defeatist propaganda had permeated the mass of the people. Seizing upon the failure of the Champagne offensive in April, which had caused mutinies in the army that could not be hushed up, German agents—often through unconscious tools—spread their lies among a discouraged people. America had declared war, yes, but she intended to limit her intervention to money and materials. No American army would risk crossing the ocean. The Americans, like the British, were ready "to fight to the last Frenchman."

Seeing was believing. Here were the American uniforms. The arrival of the first American troops, we were assured, would be announced within the next few days. Perhaps they had already landed at some port in France? To baffle the submarines we understood that the censorship must be vigorous. At any rate, an American general and his staff would not be in Paris without the certainty of an army to follow.

Another source of conviction was afforded us in the fact that on this day of General Pershing's coming Marshal Joffre made his first public appearance in Paris. Parisians had never had a chance before to acclaim the victor of the Marne.

The Americans set up their headquarters in two small hÔtels at the end of the Rue de Constantine, opposite the Invalides. Immediately the boys of the headquarters detachment marked out a diamond on the Esplanade des Invalides, and passers-by had to learn to dodge base-balls. The police did not interfere. Nothing was too good for the Americans. All Paris flocked to see for themselves the khaki uniforms and to learn the mysteries of our national game. There was always a crowd around the door of General Pershing's home in the Rue de Varenne.

The events of the next few weeks will always seem like a dream to me. The scene of the drama that has influenced so profoundly the history of the world was shifted from Paris. I went to Saint-Nazaire to see our boys land and later to their first training-camp in the country of Jeanne d'Arc. Many of them did not see Paris. Their idea of France was a long journey of days and nights in freight-cars, with interminable stops, and ending in small villages where they met rain and mud. But a fortunate battalion of the First Division had the honor of being the vanguard of the A. E. F. in Paris.

In an Old Quarter
In an Old Quarter

They were lodged in the Caserne de Reuilly. On the Fourth of July, declared a national holiday by grateful France, they paraded through the streets of our city. We were to become accustomed to American soldiers in Paris. But these first boys made a unique impression. The moment of their coming was psychological. Paris never needed encouragement more.

After this excitement we had another long and anxious wait of eight months. The Americans came each week, but in dribbles. Between Gondrecourt and the three ports of Saint-Nazaire, Bordeaux and Brest, it was necessary to construct the lines of communication while a great army in America was being gathered and trained. The defeatist propaganda started up again, the word was spread that the Americans were coming too slowly and that in France they were to be seen everywhere but at the front. Were not the French still holding the lines against odds and giving their lives, while the Americans were in safety? Despite the fact that General Pershing moved G. H. Q. from Paris to Chaumont in the Haute-Marne, the number of American soldiers in Paris, through the necessities of the S. O. S. increased rapidly. The Hotel MediterranÉe, near the Gare de Lyon, was the first large building taken over. Then the ElysÉe-Palace Hotel on the Avenue des Champs-ElysÉes was chartered. The American flag soon appeared over barracks, garages and other buildings in all parts of the city. You could go nowhere without seeing the American uniform, and our automobiles learned to drive as rapidly as the French. We got accustomed to hearing English spoken on the streets. The Red Cross, the Y.M.C.A., the Knights of Columbus, and the Jewish Welfare Board, established hotels and restaurants and reading-rooms and leased theatres. Our American Ambulance at Neuilly, taken over by the army, became only one of a number of hospitals.

Not until the spring offensive of the next year were the Americans able to come in large numbers. Then suddenly a single month brought as many as the nine preceding months. We had our half million, our million, our two millions.

The faith of the French in us revived with Cantigny and ChÂteau-Thierry. I am ahead of my chronology. But the men who first fell under the American flag were those who marched through the streets of Paris, on July Fourth, 1917. On parade they gave us hope. Fighting they gave us certitude of victory.