As ship after ship came in more troops marched to camp. The streets were filled with the clatter of the big boots of doughboys throughout the morning and well into the afternoon. There were American army mules, too, and although the natives had seen the animal before in French service, he attracted no end of attention. In his own particular army the mule seems more picturesque. He has never learned French. It seems to break his spirit, but he pranced and kicked and played the very devil under the stimulus of the loud endearments of the American mule drivers.
The French were also interested in a company of American negroes specially recruited for stevedore service. The negroes had been outfitted with old cavalry overcoats of a period shortly after the Civil War. They were blue coats with gold buttons and the lining was a tasteful but hardly somber shade of crimson. Nor were the negroes without picturesque qualities even when they had shed their coats and gone to work. Their working shirts of white were inked all over with pious sentences calculated to last through the submarine zone, but piety was mixed. One big negro, for instance, had written upon his shirt: "The Lord is my shepherd," but underneath he had drawn a large starfish for luck. A few daring ones had ornamented themselves with skulls and crossbones. To the negroes fell the bitterest disappointment of the American landing in France. Two Savannah stevedores caught sight of a black soldier in the French uniform and rushed up to exchange greetings. The Senegalese shrugged his shoulders and turned away from the flood of English.
"That," said one of the American darkies, "is the most ignorantest and stuck up nigger I ever did see." They were not yet ready to believe that the negro race had let itself in for the amazing complications of a foreign language.
Later in the day the town was full of the eddies which occur when two languages meet head on, for almost all the soldiers and sailors received leave to come to town. They wanted beer and champagne and cognac, chocolate, cake, crackers, pears, apples, cherries, picture postcards, sardines, rings, cigarettes, and books of French and English phrases. The phrase books were usually an afterthought, so commerce was conducted with difficulty. A few of the shopkeepers equipped themselves with dictionaries and painstakingly worked out the proper reply for each customer. Signs were much more effective and when it came to purchase, the sailor or soldier simply held out a handful of American money and the storekeeper took a little. To the credit of the shopkeepers of the nameless port, let it be said that they seemed in every case to take no more than an approximation of the right amount. Fortunately the late unpleasantness at Babel was not absolutely thoroughgoing and there are words in French which offer no great difficulty to the American. The entente cordiale is furthered by words such as "chocolat," "sandwich," "biere" and "bifstek." The difficulties of "vin" are not insurmountable either.