Paris at the End of the World

by John Baxter

  The Chinese embassy on Avenue George V, just off the Champs-Elysées, must have appeared provocatively prosperous to the city’s hungry Chinese students. Sixty of them invaded it that August, to find the ambassador enjoying his dinner. The sight of all that food was too much. They politely ate his meal, then emptied the kitchen. The ambassador, who had been inclined to shrug off their plight, hastily cabled Beijing for additional funds to feed hungry nationals.

  Police commandeering private cars, 1914

  In Montparnasse, foreigners rallied round to support one another. The Russian painter Marie Vassilieff was more systematic than most. According to Nina Hamnett, “she started dinners in her studio at one franc fifty, with one Caporal Bleu cigarette and one glass of wine thrown in. We all went every evening and Modigliani too. A Swiss painter did the cooking.” Along with other British nationals, Hamnett scraped together enough money to get to Dieppe, where ferries left for England. As none were running, the Brits were stuck there, often completely broke. Hamnett stayed in a cheap hotel with a whole girls’ school, trapped on their way back from a tour of Switzerland. She lived on bread and cheese until boats began to run again. Arriving in Folkestone, she didn’t have the money for a train to London. Fortunately, the British capacity for handling domestic disaster was unimpaired; stranded passengers were given tickets and billed later.

  In the first fervor of what looked like imminent victory, the hastily organized national groups that paraded with the French reservists had looked noble and inspiring. That rosy impression faded in the darker days of December as the ministry of war realized that amateurs, however well-meaning, might be more trouble than they were worth. Accordingly, it informed all foreigners who wished to fight that they would have to join the Foreign Legion, but that, in any event, enlistment couldn’t begin until all French reservists were settled into their units.

  In response, some formed private militias, hoping that disciplined well-drilled recruits would be more attractive to the army. Stranded Americans welcomed news of an American Volunteer Corps, members of which would be paid and, more important, fed. Recruitment began in a shop front under the colonnades of the Palais Royale. Today these former gardens of Prince Louis Philippe II, head of the Bourbon family, are a place of serene beauty, housing the Ministry of Culture and some of the most expensive boutiques in Paris. In 1914, however, the arcades surrounding them had deteriorated into a seedy backwater of crooked gambling clubs and a “meat rack” for prostitutes. Nevertheless, there was space in the gardens for troops to assemble, and for the American Volunteer Corps to parade and drill.

  A journalist looking for the Corps’ headquarters found it “crowded in between the shops of questionable jewelers and questionable booksellers.” A limp American flag hung outside. Inside, three men distributed application forms to potential recruits. Some of the latter frowned over questions like “Why are you volunteering?”

  “Because you love France,” the journalist suggested, “and want to help in preserving her as the beacon-light of civilization?”

  The recruit gratefully wrote this down, was signed up, and ordered to present himself at 8:00 a.m. every morning for drill. Only then did he ask the most important question.

  “When is the grub going to begin on this deal?”

  The American Volunteer Force faded away when the French army opened applications for the Foreign Legion. Tens of thousands applied, but only six hundred Americans were accepted. The small number suggests a calculated snub, particularly since it included men from South American countries and a few African Americans who chose not to enlist in the U.S. Army, since they were not, during the early days of the war, allowed into combat but used almost entirely as laborers. Among those accepted by the Legion was Eugene Bullard, a former boxer from Ohio who later became the first African American air ace.

  Other than the trickle of volunteers for ambulance and other noncombatant services, the United States would stay out of the war for three years. In 1914, those Americans destined to become its most famous combatants hardly knew the war was taking place. General John Pershing, later to command the American Expeditionary Force, was patrolling the Mexican border, chasing bandit Pancho Villa. He only took over the AEF when his predecessor died suddenly. Future air ace Eddie Rickenbacker hadn’t even learned to fly. Alvin York was a drunken logger and railway worker in the backwoods of Tennessee. When he registered for the draft in 1917, the man who would become a legend for silencing 32 machine guns, killing 28 Germans, and capturing 132 more, cited religious objections to the war, scrawling laboriously on the recruitment form “Don’t Want To Fight.”

  For three years, the promise of American manpower, industry, and above all money hung tantalizingly on the horizon, inspiring Europeans to both desire and despair. “God damn them!” wrote one exasperated critic. “Are they ever coming in? With their beautiful vainglorious talk. When is it reasonable to think the Americans will be able to put in that immense army of three million, fully equipped, each man with a hair mattress, a hot water bottle, a gramophone and a medicine chest?” It wasn’t until German submarines began systematic attacks on its shipping that, in April 1917, the United States reluctantly went to war. Even then, it was many months before its troops were ready to fight in France. Until they did, they clashed with British and Australian troops already fighting for two years or more and aggrieved by Russia’s withdrawal. An Australian gunner wrote home in November 1917:

  What do you think of Russia. The rotters have left us in the muck. They are worse than our strike leaders. Never mind Wait till the “Yanks” start. According to their guessing etc they intend to finish the business when they start. They can’t beat our boys anyhow & they take care to keep their guessing to themselves when any are about. Half a dozen got poking muck at one of our infantry boys & he bogged right in & mixed things up till they cleared out.

  Meanwhile, American volunteers drove ambulances or ammunition trucks and observed the war like the tourists who would follow them after 1918. Malcolm Cowley described a moment when his unit found itself caught between French and German artillery. They took refuge in the grounds of an old château while shells roared overhead, “as if we were underneath a freight yard where heavy trains were being shunted back and forth.” Cowley’s evocation of the moment, except for the implication of some remote risk of injury and death, would not be out of place in any memoir of travel in rural France.

  We looked indifferently at the lake, now empty of swans, and the formal statues chipped by machine-gun fire, and talked in quiet voices—about Mallarmé, the Russian ballet, the respective virtues of two college magazines. On the steps of the château, in the last dim sunlight, a red-faced boy from Harvard was studying Russian out of a French text-book. Four other gentlemen volunteers were rolling dice on an outspread blanket. A French artillery brigade on a hillside nearby—rapid firing 75s—was laying down a barrage; the guns flashed like fireflies among the trees.

  If only someone had thought to bring a guitar.

  19

  G’day, Digger!

  Fellers of Australier,

  Blokes an’ coves an’ coots,

  Shift yer bloody carcases,

  Move yer bloody boots.

  Gird yer bloody loins up,

  Get yer bloody gun,

  Set the bloody enermy

  An’ watch the buggers run.

  C. J. DENNIS, The Austra-Bloody-Laise

  And what about Archie?

  Michael had been right about the National Archives in Canberra. It was almost embarrassingly simple to download a copy of Archie’s military dossier, though decoding the twenty-page file of multicolored forms, peppered with rubber stamps and minutely annotated in often unreadable handwriting, would have challenged an Egyptologist.

  Troop ship leaving Australia, 1916

  Poring over these documents with a magnifying glass, I did discover that, on October 7, 1916, Archie boarded His Majesty’s Australian Transport Ceramic with five hundred other vol
unteers, for the voyage to Britain.

  In a ritual that became familiar for all passenger ships leaving Australia, hundreds of relatives and friends gathered on the dock, each clutching one end of a long colored paper streamer held by a loved one on board. Pulling away, the ship stretched the streamers until they parted, the torn ends fluttering into the murky water of the harbor—a foretaste, though none could know it, of the mud and slush of the Somme.

  By the standards of troop transportation, the Ceramic was superior. Only four years old, Belfast-built, she had speed enough to outrun German submarines, and two 4.7-inch guns to defend herself. All the same, the voyage was no tropical cruise. More than sixty years later, I came to Britain in almost the same way, creeping across southern oceans in a ship that seemed barely to move. Archie took even longer—forty-six days, against our thirty. We went east, stopping in Fiji, Acapulco, Miami, and both ends of the Panama Canal. The Ceramic headed west, along the hard-luck route dictated by places where they could take on coal: around the southern coast of Australia, across the Indian Ocean to Colombo, then through the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, or alternatively, via Capetown and Sierra Leone, but in both cases up the Atlantic coast of France to dock in Plymouth.

  “We have to put our watches back about twenty minutes every day,” wrote one soldier. “They alter the time on the ship at midnight so we get that much longer in bed.”As each degree of longitude added a little to darkness and deducted it from the next day’s dawn, Archie may have felt, as I had, a sense of Europe creeping over him like a thrilling sickness. He would have lain sleepless at night in his stifling bunk, only to nod off during the day—probably during droning lectures designed to keep out of mischief the wilder element among the volunteers.

  The behavior of the Aussies rattled British officers. “They acted as if they were on holiday,” said one—which, to many Australians, they were. Historian James Curran points out that

  foreign wars have performed a valuable historical purpose in closing the cultural distance between Australia and the world. Between 1914 and 1919, Australian soldiers visited well-known tourist destinations such as Colombo, Cairo, London, Paris, Edinburgh, Belgium and Rome. At various stages they trained in the shadow of archetypal tourist landmarks such as the pyramids at Giza and Stonehenge. They documented their travels for those back home, bought postcards, took photos and collected souvenirs.

  Some volunteers had been itinerant shearers or fruit pickers in civilian life. To them, the army was a handy way to see the world at government expense. Others had migrated to Australia and looked on enlistment as a free ticket back home. Some were criminals. Every military unit attracts bad characters, but the AIF had more than most. Plenty of petty thieves recognized the opportunities for larceny in the confusion of war. Most of these volunteered without coercion, though some did so under pressure from a judge who offered the choice of enlistment or prison.

  Boxing match on board Ceramic

  Seldom having taken an order in their lives, these men sneered at military discipline. Each troop ship had a prison, or “clink.” They were never empty. Fights were common. Sometimes officers exploited enmities, giving two men boxing gloves and letting them duke it out for the entertainment of the rest, but generally the fights were bloody bare-knuckle affairs, private and vicious. Most involved theft. Systematic looting, known as “ratting,” was commonplace. Any item left unguarded even for a few minutes could disappear, and soldiers learned to carry their valuables everywhere.

  Two-up school, 1920s

  Gambling was rife. One officer described his vessel as “a regular Monte Carlo.” Large sums changed hands at round-the-clock sessions of Housie Housie, aka Bingo, and Crown and Anchor, a Royal Navy favorite that used special dice and a baize mat marked out in squares for betting.

  Nothing, however, trumped Two-up. As simplistic as a nursery game, Two-up has evinced an inexhaustible appeal to Australians at war. Two coins are flipped in the air, and bets laid on whether they land heads or tails uppermost. With its blanket spread on the floor, two big copper pennies with their “tails” sides marked with a white cross for easy identification, the wooden “kip” used to flip them, a “cockatoo” to keep watch, and the ritual shouts of “Come in, spinner!,” the clandestine Two-up school is as emblematic of Australian service life as American craps.

  Public gambling remains illegal in Australia, but on Anzac Day police ignore the Two-up schools that spring up behind every pub. In wartime, wise commanders also turned a blind eye, even when dishonest “tossers” rang in double-headed pennies, used superior mental arithmetic to shade the odds, or employed “stand-over men” or enforcers to extract their winnings. Better for an officer to be thought too lax, a “good bloke,” than to be labeled a spoilsport, a “wowser,” particularly since Australians took unkindly to discipline anyway.

  In their eyes, a commander didn’t lead by right of military law and the chain of command but with the approval of his men—an approval earned through experience. Of Australian soldiers, Peter Stanley wrote, “they could be led but not driven; would obey but also question. They would exercise their judgement; needed to be told not just what to do but why. They demanded a degree of freedom foreign to essentially regular armies like that of Britain.”

  Australian attitudes to authority were embodied in the song “Waltzing Matilda.” Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson wrote it in 1895, and by 1914 it was well on the way to becoming an informal national anthem. Paterson was inspired by an incident in the 1894 strike of shearers. Notoriously anti-authority, they clashed with “squatters,” ranchers who opposed trade unions. The owner of Dagworth station in Queensland led three policemen in a chase after Samuel “Frenchy” Hoffmeister, an agitator who had burned down his shearing shed. Cornered, Hoffmeister is supposed to have committed suicide, though a descendant of the dead man challenged that account in his own colorful brand of English.

  The shearers camp nicknamed him as “Frenchy” was out of ignorance from his origines of being a german really from “Alsass Lorrein” and Berlin Germany where his family took him to live as a child! The Shearers (some couple men) of Murdered Samuel by shooting him in the open mouth while the other held him and then threw the pistol of “thiers” down by his side against that tree where his body was propped against until discovered!!!! So they got off with plain MURDER those bastard unionist because the police didnt do their jobs properly.

  Paterson recognized the iconic power to Australians of a rebel who would kill himself rather than submit to authority. He made Hoffmeister a wandering tramp, a “jolly swagman,” who kills a “jumbuck,” or sheep. Ordered by the squatter and troopers to show what’s in his “tucker bag,” he quixotically leaps into the “billabong,” the waterhole, and drowns.

  Australian conceptions of discipline first clashed with British military law during the Boer War. After an ambush in which two hundred men died, a general called the All-Australian Victorian Mounted Rifles “a damned fat, round-shouldered, useless crowd of wasters; a lot of white-livered curs.” When three soldiers answered back, then deserted, they were court-martialed and sentenced to be shot. British soldiers could be executed for more than a dozen crimes, but the Australian army didn’t impose the death sentence. After a near-mutiny, General Kitchener commuted the sentences, then rushed the men back to Australia before they could serve them.

  He was not so lenient with Harry “Breaker” Morant, bush poet, noted horse breaker, and a lieutenant in the Bushveldt Carbineers. Morant captured some Boers he believed had killed a comrade, and summarily shot them, as well as some complicit witnesses, under what he claimed was an unwritten rule condemning hostiles found wearing items of British uniform. At his court-martial, the British denied any such rule existed. Morant responded sarcastically that, in that case, he’d applied his own “Rule 303”—the caliber of the Lee-Enfield rifle. Memories of Morant’s fate were still fresh when the first Australian volunteers sailed for Europe. On the Ceramic, the issue w
ould have been as immediate as was the loss of Alsace to the French.

  At every refueling port, scores of men disobeyed orders and sneaked ashore to find booze and women. In Colombo, capital of the future Sri Lanka, hundreds climbed down mooring ropes and were soon reeling drunkenly and, in some cases, half-naked through the town, though what really scandalized British officers was a rumor that a colonel dining at the Grand Oriental Hotel had found himself sharing a table with an Australian private and a stoker.

  Rounded up the next day, the men showed no remorse. Too numerous for the clink, they were corraled on deck awaiting discipline, from where they derisively harmonized on “Rule Britannia,” emphasizing the line that “Britons never ever ever shall be slaves.” Some men never came back on board, bribing a local to hide them until the ship sailed. By the end of the war, four times more men had deserted from the AIF than from any other Dominion force.

  Boredom and frustration led to clashes between the British and the Australians, who, at six shillings a day, were paid twice what a British Tommy received and were eager to spend it. Tempers frayed even more when, as happened increasingly, troops were ordered to shovel coal in African ports when local labor was short, were debarked before arriving in Europe, or, once they got there, held in reserve in so-called rest camps, where they did nothing all day but drill.

  In December 1914, the first Australian volunteers, instead of going on to Europe, were kept in Egypt to relieve British troops guarding the Suez Canal. Cairo’s brothel district, the Harret el Wasa’, aka The Wazza, offered one of the few places to let off steam. In April and July 1915, already weary of the heat, the flies and the sand, they trashed establishments where they’d been cheated or robbed. The Australian government paid off the Egyptians and hushed up the disturbance, but similar clashes occurred wherever bored Australians were kept from what they saw as their rightful recreation.