We have now discovered France. Our first impression of that fair but voluble land is one of amazement that the inhabitants should be able to speak such a difficult language so fluently. Even the children can do it.
Later, we modified that opinion—either because we found that the French tongue was not so difficult as we had imagined, or more probably because we had learned that in France a knowledge of French is not so indispensable—at any rate, in war-time—as we had imagined. Indeed, we found the French language quite as intelligible as some of the English rural dialects. Contrariwise, the French appeared to understand our mode of expression much more readily than some of our English hosts.
For instance, if you ask an English railway porter for such a simple thing as the check-room or the news-stand, he will simply gape at you; whereas, if you stride into a French country hotel and hold up one finger—naturally one has to employ gesture just a little with the Latin races—and say “Oon room!” in a firm voice, the proprietor will comprehend at once, and smilingly hand you a key right away. One can only ascribe this instant sympathy to the freemasonry of a common democratic ideal. Or it may be that a room is the only thing which a hotel proprietor could expect a stranger carrying a grip to ask for.
However, this by the way. The main point is that we are at last in France—France, the land of the Great Adventure, for which our ardent dreams and hard training have been shaping us for months past.
Still, at first sight it is not too easy to realize that we are there at all; for the surroundings in which we found ourselves on landing might have been lifted bodily from Hoboken.
Speaking of Hoboken, we note that the prevailing slogan of the moment, posted on barrack walls, painted on transport wagons, even blazoned in stencilled letters across the wind-shields of Staff automobiles, is: _Heaven, Hell, or Hoboken by Christmas!_ To this pious aspiration one ardent spirit has added, in smaller lettering: _But let it be Hoboken, please, via Berlin!_
Certainly, the Armies of Invasion, both friendly and hostile, have transformed France, each in its own way. The Hun in the east has effected his share of the transformation in his own way, by fire, rapine, and pillage. But the British and Americans in the west have left a mark just as unmistakable and, it is to be hoped, more enduring. A great army cannot disembark upon the soil of another people’s country without importing a great deal of its own personality at the same time. That accounts for the foregoing reference to Hoboken. The amount of portable property that we have brought with us is enormous. There were days, not far distant, when a soldier subsisted upon the country wherein he found himself. During the Shenandoah Valley campaign Stonewall Jackson’s men lived on unripe corn and green apples, for the very good reason that there existed no means of providing them with anything else. Throughout the centuries this fact has kept expeditionary forces down to reasonable numbers; the size of an army was limited to the capacity of the country to support it. But modern science has changed all that. Canned meat has revolutionized warfare far more surely and permanently than the aeroplane or the submarine. It is now possible, by modern methods of food preservation and transportation, to arm practically a whole nation and maintain it continuously and comfortably in the field thousands of miles from its base of supplies. That is why France is the most overcrowded and best-fed country in the world to-day.