Don
Martin diary entry for Wednesday, May 8, 1918:
Went to Boucq with [Edwin] James [New York Times]. Got nothing. Whole front quiet. Got some oil
today and now I have a lamp instead of a candle to write and read by. It is a
big improvement. Spent part of the evening at the club with Percy Noel of the
Chicago News.
Weather rainy and raw.
The following upbeat, patriotic - and lengthy - story, about what the American troops that had arrived in France were doing and the French reaction to their presence in France, was written, maybe on May 8, dated May 10, and mailed to New York. It appeared in the June 16 Sunday edition of the New York Herald.
American
Troops Slated for Three More Months’ Training Go Into Line
Great
Movements of General Pershing’s Men Indicate They Will Take Much More Important
Part in Present Offensive Than Was Expected
By DON
MARTIN.
[Special to
the Herald.]
WITH THE AMERICAN ARMY IN
FRANCE, May 10
Americans in France who are
familiar with the gigantic things Uncle Sam is doing here sometimes wonder if
the people who are subscribing for Liberty Loans and giving their full moral
support to the national government fully realize what their money and their
support are making possible over here is France.
The rule of the army is that
Americans must not boast. In simpler, backwoods language, Americans must saw
wood and let the other guy do the talking. Consequently the folks back home get
only fragmentary pictures of what Uncle Sam, three thousand miles away, is
accomplishing.
Forests in places have
been cleared away to make room for sidings. Immense structures have come almost
like magic out of the ground. Railway tracks have been laid so swiftly that one
could almost see them extend themselves. To see a thousand hardy, eager young
Americans working in an isolated part of France is a sight to be encountered
many times any day. And the work has just begun.
Building
Lines of Communications
Only a few weeks ago while
driving along a well known highway of eastern France I saw young engineers
surveying along a distance of perhaps twenty miles. They were young college
men. A few days later they were thirty miles further along the road, and where
they had been were gangs of men digging holes and unloading coils of wire from
trucks. Next day tamstack poles were scattered along the route. What I saw
along this fifty mile strip was merely a duplication of what was going on in
every fifty mile sector all the way from the coast to the front line. Now there
is a fully equipped American telephone line with ten wires. It is part of the
line of communication.
This is just an incident in the
enormous programme of organization and preparation which the United States is
carrying out. If we lack perhaps in the long military experience of some of the
other nations, no one can accuse Americans of backing on quick organization and
achievement in construction work. France is marveling at the speed with which
our engineers and their bands of men have progressed with their mammoth tasks.
She knows now, although she never really doubted, that the United States is in
the war to a finish and is determined to prosecute it with the same vigor she
has every other conflict she has ever engaged in.
Although no one could ever
have accused the people of France of being indifferent to what the United
States was doing for the cause of civilization, one must to-day recognize the
enthusiasm of the people of all parts of France for the Americans. There has
been no change of heart, but there has been a marked change of outward
manifestation.
American soldiers, as Secretary
Baker predicted, have been pouring into France for several weeks. They are
distributed in villages where until now no American was ever seen. The French
people, who in many parts of the nation are as provincial as the dwellers in
the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and West Virginia, now realize that
America is here. They are having their first glimpse of what an American looks
like, and they have looked and have been pleased.
Little is published in the
French newspapers about the arrival of the Americans. Little is printed about
the Americans at all. An idea of what the average French resident of a small
town thinks may be gained from the following: -- In a village which sits just
off a main road and looks to-day as it probably looked five hundred years ago,
I asked a leading resident, a stalwart, intelligent farmer, how many men he
thought the United States had in France.
“Oh, I suppose about ten
thousand,” he replied.
I asked another resident, a younger
man, who keeps a butcher shop.
“I hear there are to be a million next year,”
he answered.
Their knowledge, or lack
of it, is the exact equivalent of the misinformation of the Americans in
France. If an American could go around to the American camps giving authentic
information as to just how many fighting men the United States now has in
France, he would find listeners as eager as a flock around a New England
village gossip who has returned with news of the handsome young girl who ran
away to the city some months ago.
One has to but visit the
villages of France to know that the number is large. One has but to see the
gigantic barracks being erected here and there along the line of communications
to realize that stupendous things are in the immediate future. At one point
thirty one story frame buildings, each 100 feet in length, were built in two
weeks. Now they are filled with soldiers going through intensive training for
service at the front.
So, as the Americans are
gradually coming to realize that somewhere back home there has been wonderful
speed and efficiency in getting men across the Atlantic, the people of France
are beginning to understand that Uncle Sam has a vast army here already. How
much of it will participate in the great battle which started on March 21 and
is still going on, no one can foretell. It is known only that American troops
have been moving about recently and that many troops which were slated for
three months’ additional training behind the battle lines were found to be in a
state of such perfection that they were ready to meet any emergency.
French
Rejoice: Americans in Line
Americans were sent to the big
front not long after the battle began. Official announcement to that effect was
made. Publication of this fact caused a feeling of exultation to sweep over
France. Everywhere one could hear the French saying: --
“America is now in the
line.”
Americans had been in the front
line long before that, but not in the front line of the biggest battle of the
war. The French newspapers commented widely on the matter and later gave great
prominence to the statement of General Pershing that anything America has is at
the disposal of France for what use she wished to make of it.
This may
be referring to what Pershing said when he went to meet Foch on March 27:
"I have come to tell you that the American people would consider it a
great honor for our troops to be engaged in the present battle. I ask you for
this in their name and my own." (Andrew
Carroll, My Fellow Soldiers,
p172, Penguin Press, 2017)
This was regarded by France as the most
generous and patriotic offer ever made by one nation to another, and if
anything were needed to prove the magnanimity and sincerity of the United
States that offer did it. Since it was announced, and since American troops
have been constantly on the move, American flags have appeared from windows in
a thousand places in France where they never were seen before; shops in the
tiniest villages have stocks of small American flags to sell and the peasants,
usually indifferent, stop in the fields and in front of their homes to gaze at
the Americans passing by.
There is nothing studied
about it. It is spontaneous. Realities having taken the place of promises, the
people of France are overjoyed. They never feared the result of the big battle
now going on. Possibly they worried sometimes about the capacity of a nation
bled as France has been bled to continue indefinitely if years were required to
give the Germans the licking they deserve. But now they are flushed with
optimism and confidence, and they are swelled with pride and a new love for
America.
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