Part 9 (1/2)

After General Petain's visit with the American troops, he recommended their training and their physique equally, and said: ”I think the American Army will be an admirable fighting force within a short time.”

This was also General Pers.h.i.+ng's day for learning--his first session with one of his most difficult tasks. He had to follow the example of General Petain, and kiss the children, and accept the bouquets thrust upon both generals by all the little girls of the near-by Vosges towns.

General Pers.h.i.+ng did better with the kissing as his day wore on, though its foreignness to his experience was plain to the end. But with the bouquets he was an outright failure. Graciously as he might accept them, the holding of them was much as a doughboy might hold his first armful of live grenades.

The camp's next distinguished visitor was Georges Clemenceau, the veteran French statesman who was soon to be Premier of France.

Clemenceau saw American troops that day for the second time, the first having been when, as a young French senator, he watched General Grant's soldiers march into Richmond.

He recalled to the sons and grandsons of those dusty warriors how inspired a sight it had been, and he added that he hoped to see the present generation march into Berlin.

When Clemenceau talked to the doughboys, however, he had more than old memories with which to stir them. He has a graceful, complete command of the English language, in which he made the two or three addresses interspersed in the full programme of his stay.

In one speech M. Clemenceau said: ”I feel highly honored at the privilege of addressing you. I know America well, having lived in your country, which I have always admired, and I am deeply impressed by the presence of an American army on French soil, in defense of liberty, right, and civilization, against the barbarians. My mind compares this event to the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed on Plymouth Rock, seeking liberty and finding it. Now their children's children are returning to fight for the liberty of France and the world.

”You men have come to France with disinterested motives. You came not because you were compelled to come, but because you wished to come.

Your country always had love and friends.h.i.+p for France. Now you are at home here, and every French house is open to you. You are not like the people of other nations, because your motives are devoid of personal interest, and because you are filled with ideals. You have heard of the hards.h.i.+ps before you, but the record of your countrymen proves that you will acquit yourselves n.o.bly, earning the grat.i.tude of France and the world.”

At the end of this speech General Sibert said to the men who had heard it: ”You will henceforth be known as the Clemenceau Battalion.” That was the first unit of the American Army to have any designation other than its number.

Another civilian visitor was next, though he was civilian only in the sense that he had neither task nor uniform of the army. He was Raymond Poincare, President of the French Republic, the leader of the French ”bitter-enders,” and sometimes called the stoutest-hearted soldier France has ever had.

President Poincare made a thorough inspection. He, too, began with the billets, but he was not content to see them from the outside. In fact, the first that one new major-general saw of him was the half from the waist down, the other half being obscured by the floor of the barn attic he was peering into.

President Poincare made cheering speeches to the men, for the force of which they were obliged to rely upon his gestures and his intonations, since he spoke no English. But his sense was not wholly lost to the doughboys. At the peak of one of the President's most soaring flights those who understood French interrupted to applaud him.

”What did he say?” asked a doughboy.

”He said to give 'em h.e.l.l,” said another.

Fourth, and last, of the great Frenchmen, and greatest, from the soldier point of view, was Marshal Joffre, Marne hero, who came and spent a night and a day at camp.

It was mid-October when he came, and weeks of driving rain had preceded him. In spite of their gloom over the weather, the doughboys were eagerly antic.i.p.ating the visit of Joffre, and they were wondering if the man of many battles would think them worth standing in the rain to watch.

A detachment of French buglers--buglers whom the Americans could never sufficiently admire or imitate, because they could twirl the bugles between beats and take up their blasts with neither pitch nor time lost--waited outside the quarters where the marshal was to spend the night. Half an hour before his motor came up the sun broke through the drizzle.

”He brings it with him,” said a doughboy.

Marshal Joffre was accompanied by General Pers.h.i.+ng, the Pers.h.i.+ng personal staff and Joffre's aide, Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Fabry, who was with the French Mission in America. There were ovations in all the French villages through which they pa.s.sed, and there were uproarious cheers when the party reached the American officers who were to be addressed by Marshal Joffre. In his short speech he said that America had come to help deliver humanity from the yoke of German insolence, and added: ”Let us be united. Victory surely will be ours.”

Later, after picked men had shown Joffre what they could do with grenades and bayonets, the marshal made a short speech to them, telling them of how his visit to America had cheered and strengthened him, and how even greater was the stimulation he had had from seeing the Americans train in France.

In a statement to the a.s.sociated Press he said: ”I have been highly gratified by what I have seen to-day. I am confident that when the time comes for American troops to go into the trenches and meet the enemy they will give the same excellent account of themselves in action as they did to-day in practice.”

Northcliffe came in December, with Colonel House and members of the House Mission. He wrote a long impression of his visit for the English at home, in which he said that the finest sight he saw was the American rifle practice, in which the United States troops did exceptionally well. Then he praised them for their mastery of the British type of trench mortar, for their accuracy with grenades and, most significant of all, for their able handling of themselves after the bombs were thrown, so that they should have a maximum of safety in battle. The doughboys had finally learned their hardest lesson.

Sir Walter Roper Lawrence, who was coming to America on a special war mission, went to camp in early December to see how the doughboys fared, so that he might report on them at home.

He had just inquired of General Sir Julian Byng, who had accidentally had the a.s.sistance of some American engineers at Cambrai, what they should be valued at, and Sir Julian had answered: ”Very earnest, very modest, and very helpful.”