by John Baxter
The absinthe ban was an omen. As breweries and vineyards converted to making alcohol for military use, the quality and quantity of wine and spirits declined. Coffee, imported from Africa and the Caribbean, became unobtainable. Dried and pulverized chicory root, initially used to stretch coffee, completely replaced it.
Cigars disappeared. Cigarettes followed. Most poilus smoked pipes filled with a shag they called perlot or gros cul—big ass. Each soldier received a free weekly ration, but it became so adulterated that it could barely be coaxed into flame. “You should use it to thatch cottages,” suggested one soldier drily. “It would cut down on the work of the fire brigades.” Even matches, made to austerity standards, wouldn’t strike. Once the United States entered the war, the shortage of cigarettes became acute. A poster showed an obviously strung-out marine pleading with the folks back home: “I Need Smokes More Than Any Thing Else.”
In La Vie Parisienne for February 1915, George Barbier, known before the war for his fashion drawings and scenes of oriental exoticism, took a hard look at wartime Paris. In three images, he illustrated “The Parisienne in 1914.” In the first, she’s cavorting at a formal ball in a plumed hat and daring off-the-shoulder gown. The second shows her doing a spirited tango with a beau dressed in le smoking. In the third, she’s taking leave of him the next morning. She’s outfitted for the street, but he’s still in his pajamas.
“The Parisienne in 1915” is more sober. She indulges in charity, giving a coin to a beggar. We see only a patched cuff, but it’s enough to telegraph his need. Everywhere one looked in Paris, someone was asking for money. Panhandlers—usually refugees, plus a few deserters and draft dodgers—proliferated. So did sellers of charity badges. “I have been pestered by thousands of women selling flags for some charitable [sic] cause,” wrote a facetious correspondent to the trench newspaper The Wipers Times. “Yesterday, a forward female had the audacity to ask me to buy a flag to assist in the purchase of a blue body-belt for a bucolic Belgian. Only last Sunday I gave a franc to provide Warm Woollens for War-worn Walloons.”
The last of Barbier’s impressions is also the most revealing. It shows the Parisienne following one of the few patriotic pursuits appropriate to a lady of fashion—nursing.
In the first days of the war, U.S. ambassador Myron T. Herrick suggested to the French surgeon general that Americans in Paris form their own ambulance service. The general proposed instead that they convert a school, the Lycée Pasteur in the upmarket satellite suburb of Neuilly, into a five-hundred-bed military hospital entirely staffed by their own volunteers. He probably thought they would never be able to agree among themselves, and that the labor supply, if any, would quickly dry up. In fact, women flocked to Neuilly. One journalist wrote:
They came dressed in their best frocks and hats. The physician in charge was businesslike from the beginning.
“I want women who would come at eight o’clock in the morning and stick to the job all day long, and who can be counted upon to come every day.”
“I can come every day from two to four,” said one.
“I could never get away out here before ten in the morning,” said another.
“I can come mornings, but must leave at half past eleven,” said a third.
Suspecting the sincerity of some applicants, the doctor shrewdly asked, “Which ladies are available to nurse wounded officers only?” Two-thirds stepped forward—to be rebuked: all servicemen, other ranks and officers both, were entitled to the same care.
Worthy in theory, this wasn’t practical. Officers, wealthier and better educated, were bound to receive more careful attention from nurses, most of whom came from the same class. Poilus, resentful of this, sometimes expressed their dissatisfaction by greeting the arrival of amateur nurses on the ward with a coordinated cannonade of farts. Even when enlisted men welcomed visitors from the upper classes, the intellectual gap yawned. La Baïonnette showed a member of the Académie Française, the country’s highest repository of learning, struggling to talk to a private with the help of a poilu dictionary.
Enthusiasm for nursing diminished after the 1915 execution of British nurse Edith Cavell. The Germans were within their rights to condemn her. She never denied helping prisoners to escape and passing military information to the Allies. The British and French shot just as many, including the hapless Mata Hari. Cavell made an end worthy of Marlene Dietrich, who would play a female spy shot by a firing squad in the 1931 film Dishonored. Cavell’s execution inspired one of the most vivid artworks of the war, a 1918 painting by American George Bellows. It shows a slim, pale, almost ethereal figure descending into the yard where her brutish, slovenly captors wait to kill her. No less hagiographic, the best known of her many monuments, next to London’s Trafalgar Square, is engraved with her last-night-on-earth statement; “Patriotism is not enough, I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone.”
George Bellows. The Murder of Edith Cavell
In death, Cavell became what she had never been in life—a star. In Britain during the weeks following her death, enlistment in the armed forces doubled. Even so, a firing squad was not what every mother wished for her child, and the dilettantes melted away, diverted into less hazardous tasks, such as making baby clothes for the children of men at the front and knitting socks and sweaters.
Knitting was enjoying a vogue, thanks in part to Edith de Beaumont, who encouraged it as therapy for the wounded. With wool in short supply, she asked a friend in New York for help. After the New York Times published her letter, the countess was inundated with wool—all put to good use, as she summarized, somewhat in the condescending manner of Lady Bountiful, in a second letter, published in January 1916.
If you could only see the happiness and realize the service this has rendered—all the poor women to whom I have been able to give work, some of them mutilated, some having only one leg. The men, too, are working, those who are infirm. We teach these poor creatures how to knit, and they can make socks. Those who have been long months in bed, inactive, all their work goes to the front where it is most useful. A large convoy of wagons that my husband has organized is just leaving for Saloniki [Gallipoli], in which are quantities of warm woolen things, socks, and shirts for the wounded.
The fantasy of nursing . . .
. . . and the reality
The disappearing nurses were replaced in the wards by tough ladies, mostly French, who didn’t flinch from their often grim work. Hospital administrators weren’t sorry to lose the amateurs, particularly the pretty ones. The liaison of Ernest Hemingway and his nurse Agnes von Kurowsky that inspired A Farewell to Arms was hardly the last affair between patient and nurse. Just as its erotic opportunities drew Jean Cocteau to ambulance work, some nurses signed up with an eye to romance, even just sex. La Vie Parisienne showed a slim white nurse standing between two husky and grinning black Zouaves with the caption “A black-bread sandwich.”
As the French government, anticipating thousands of casualties, allocated millions of francs to their care, speculators smelled profit. By 1915, the French Red Cross was staffing fifteen hundred hospitals, and after that, the number only grew. Strapped for cash, owners of châteaux too expensive to heat and maintain offered them as hospitals, knowing their upkeep would be paid by the government. Abandoned by the Russian grand dukes and the crowned heads of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who had been their most reliable clientele, luxury hotels along the Mediterranean such as the Carlton and the Negresco became convalescent homes.
Profiteering knows no racial boundaries, but it suited France’s institutional anti-Semitism to suggest most speculators were Jews. For La Baïonnette in August 1917, Paul Iribe showed Jewish and black African gamblers scooping up their winnings in the casino that the nation had become. Elsewhere, a Jewish shopkeeper reports that, while most business is down, his “Maison X” is doing well. Maison X sells artificial limbs.
Exploiting the handicapped was a lucrative business at every level. The same July, police found “a moun
tain” of unworn but mismatched shoes in the apartment of a trader at the weekly market on boulevard Richard-Lenoir. He’d stolen them from displays in shoe stores, which only ever showed one shoe of a pair. Security was lax in such stores—who would want only a left or a right shoe? In fact, the man’s market business specialized in selling individual shoes to amputees.
The greediest exploiters of the wounded were not unscrupulous Jewish merchants but their own comrades, who looted the belongings of those careless enough to leave them unguarded. In particular, the male nurses and stretcher bearers of the Royal Army Medical Corps became so notorious for larceny that soldiers suggested the initials RAMC stood for “Rob All My Comrades.” According to historian Peter Stanley, one serviceman “lying ill on a stretcher at Boulogne, about to board a hospital ship for Britain, watched helplessly as an orderly sorted through his bag, taking his money and souvenirs.”
The novelist Colette was scandalized that people who contributed nothing to the war should have profited so much from it, and in particular from the care of the wounded. Her novel The Last of Chéri dissects the postwar decline of fashionable Paris, contrasting the complacency and greed of profiteers with the despair of those who returned from the war damaged in body or spirit.
That the speculators make their money from medicine seemed to her particularly cynical. In the novel, retired courtesans invest the proceeds of their dissolute lives in clinics and health resorts. The wife of former boy-toy Chéri manages a hospital partly owned by Americans, while his one-time protectrice, Léa, now middle-aged and overweight, has put her money into a mineral spa. Chéri, himself wounded at the front, is alone in pining for the gracious days before the war, and once he’s convinced they are gone forever, he shoots himself.
27
The Way to Kiss a Mary
While you’re living in the bright lights with the merry and gay
There’s a loving heart you’ve broken just to pass the time away
And she is more lonesome, more lonesome than you.
LOU KLEIN AND HARRY VON TILZER, “There’s Someone More Lonesome Than You”
The cooperation of French, British, and colonial soldiers that functioned in the trenches seldom worked so well at command level, where it clashed, screeched, and seized up periodically like a rusty machine. Many British and American officers regarded fraternization with the French as disloyalty, even treason. The poet e. e. cummings and a friend spent four months in a French prison camp after an officer decided cummings’s antiwar sentiments, his speaking French, and his friendship with French officers suggested he was a spy. Some Allied officers believed arrogantly that they were there to show the slovenly French how war should be fought. Lionel Lindsay, brother of Norman, drew a notably undiplomatic sketch in which a jovial koala bear in trim AIF kit and slouch hat consoles a bedraggled, battle-worn poodle wearing the tattered uniform of a poilu.
Well-meaning French people made things worse by attempting to explain concepts they didn’t understand. “The whole world knows the famous ‘Tipperary,’ ” wrote one journalist. ”Civilians think it’s a cheerful song, bouncy and gay. How wrong! It’s slow and melancholy, particularly when the voices descend about the middle of the refrain.” A Parisian music hall picked up on this idea and, inspired by the death of Edith Cavell, presented a dramatized version, sung mournfully as the singer is marched to her death. “Good-bye, Piccadilly,” she sobs as the shots ring out. “Farewell, Leicester Square!” The French audience couldn’t understand why Britons among them were laughing.
Australians and Frenchmen who managed to become friendly discovered more affinities than differences. “Mateship,” for example, had always been regarded as a uniquely Australian institution. That poilus could regard a pote, or pal, with similar esteem initially surprised Australians, then became the basis of an enduring understanding. An issue of La Baïonnette devoted to les potes contains numerous images redolent of Aussie mateship: soldiers spoon-feeding injured friends or sharing the last puffs of their pipe. Other sketches were more melodramatic. “Why did you jump in front of me when they fired?” asks a soldier of his wounded comrade. “Because you have kids,” he replies. In another, the sergeant demands of a corporal, “Why did you risk your life to save a dead man?” The man says, “He was my pote.” One didn’t need to explain such decisions to Australians. They would do the same for one of their mates and not think twice.
Prudish staff officers particularly disapproved of the complaisant French attitude to sex and banned the erotic magazines produced for its troops. They singled out La Vie Parisienne and the pinups of its most popular artist, Raphael Kirchner, an émigré from Austria and therefore, in their eyes, a potential fifth columnist. To Australians, this was yet another infringement on their already circumscribed liberty. One of them, Frank Molony, wrote in his diary:
In this morning’s orders, Kirchner [was] pronounced anathema, and La Vie Parisienne declared beyond the pale. In a word—trading with the French in indecent pictures and literature is forbidden. The “indecent pictures” referred to are of the French—photographs of the nude—and of beautiful courtesans certainly, so beautiful that only rarely can the terrible word “indecent” be used toward them, but the literature! Considering the only doubtful literature sold to the Troops by the Frenchies comes from well-established London publishers, this order is quite in keeping with their damned hypocrisy and pettiness.
La Vie Parisienne cover by Kirchner
Postwar novels, films, and songs like “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm After They’ve Seen Paree?” give the impression that numerous American servicemen took leave in Paris. In fact, very few Allied soldiers ever saw the city. They were given little enough leave to start with: five days a year, if they were lucky. Most Britons and Australians spent it in Britain, where they didn’t face the barrier of language, but Americans were forbidden to do so unless they had blood relatives there. As their bases were far to the east, in the Argonne and Savoie, doughboys were urged to take their leave in such regional centers as the sleepy spa town of Aix-les-Bains.
The first Americans to spend a furlough in Aix-les-Bains were taken straight from the front for that purpose and, to their collective surprise, whisked there en masse in a public relations exercise. The YMCA, which handled leisure activities for the American Expeditionary Force, orchestrated a lavish reception. The Aixois did their best to make the first contingent welcome. Flags were flying and locals cheered as the grubby and bemused doughboys paraded through town. Their hosts had even scraped together a baseball team; “the nine in white linen trousers, red jerseys, bare heads and knees and American flags tied about their arms stood with chattering teeth and trembling legs for two hours.” That evening, the former casino, now converted into a club for soldiers on leave, presented a show by vaudeville performers from London, and the African American musician and composer James Reese Europe, identified simply as “Europe,” led the band.
Stars and Stripes described the events under the optimistic headline “Fresh from Trenches to Delights of Aix.” Its reporter worked hard to boost Savoie, “that little wedge of pure beauty that keeps the Alps from slipping down into the broad plains of northern Italy.” He explained that both Queen Victoria and J. P. Morgan sampled the baths of Aix and enjoyed its hotels, seventy of which, with a little arm-twisting, had agreed to accept doughboys as guests.
The reporter insisted that Aix promised a pleasant, if not terribly dramatic leave: “hikes on the mountains, motor boat trips on the magnificent lakes, auto trips, billiards and other games, a library, reading, writing, and lounging rooms. As warm weather comes there will be added outdoor recreations—golf, tennis, squash.” Pleasant enough—but for a young soldier hoping to accumulate enough memories for a lifetime, a hot bath, a soft bed, and a good book were not what he was looking for.
Allied troops stationed farther west had a better chance of seeing Paris, but not before they were thoroughly indoctrinated. The historian James Curran wrote:<
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Upon arrival in Paris, Australian soldiers were taken directly to Caserne de la Pérpinière barracks for lectures on the dangers of VD and for distribution of prophylactics and treatment aids. This was also where leave passes were stamped to confirm arrival, which annoyed the soldiers, many of whom dodged the trip. It was unpopular for two reasons. First, the Anzacs resented the lectures concerning the horrible effects of venereal disease: they had already seen enough bodily mutilation in the trenches, and the sordid details in the lectures gave the impression that even the prospect of pleasure could be spoiled. Second, the lectures stole valuable time. Because Paris leave was so prized by the troops (even though it was usually for only four or five days, half the time allotted to London, or “Blighty,” leave) and also because it was initially open only to officers (whose pay it was thought could more easily cover the expense of Paris leave)—these incursions into an already truncated period of time infuriated the troops. Their response was to intensify their leave period, to compensate not only for the lack of time, but also for the possibly limited lifespan they faced as soldiers. For this, Paris would prove to be the perfect environment.
Those that did get there spent their time in Paris mostly visiting museums, parks, and monuments: the Louvre (when it was not closed for the duration), the gardens of the Tuileries, the Palais de Justice, the Bois de Boulogne, described by one soldier as “Paris’s Hyde Park,” the Eiffel Tower (though fenced off and adapted to radio transmissions), the cathedral of Notre Dame, even the military museum at the Hôtel des Invalides, and sometimes the Palace of Versailles.
