by John Baxter
“Sultry,” wrote Morand of the evening. “Not a breath of air; not a sound; under a lamp, Cocteau opens a notebook in which words in his large, naïve handwriting run on and jostle one another in keeping with today’s aesthetic.”
The poems saluted Garros and such aviators as Léon Morane, who invented the monoplane, with its unexpectedly thick and—to Cocteau’s eyes—ungraceful single wing. To him, the ingenuity of such men recalled that of Napoleon, one of whose symbols, appropriately, was the industrious, often airborne bee.
The real subject of Cap de Bonne-Espérance, however, was the thrill of flight as experienced with Garros during their shared ascents. The opening of the cycle conveys Cocteau’s breathless, almost incoherent wonder at a night flight over Paris.
Garros of you
Garros here
we
You Garros
Nothing else but black silence
To Morand, the pauses and gaps evoked air pockets; moments when the sky no longer supported the flimsy plane and its daring pilot.
Seeing the world from the air was still novel enough for Cocteau to be impressed by aerial photographs shown to him by Garros at the military airport of Villacoublay. They included images of Malmaison, the château of Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais.
A lunch at Villacoublay
One sees in a stereoscope
All the photographs
Malmaison
The lawn Bees
The harp of Josephine
a thick
wing broken.
You lived in her room
Dear creole
With heavy tread, mechanized war was bearing down on Paris. In November, near Cambrai, the British and Australians experimented with a new strategy. Four hundred British tanks attacked German positions, preceded by a “creeping barrage” of artillery and followed by infantry. In theory, high explosives would annihilate the enemy in his trenches. Tanks would plow them down, and infantry mop up the few survivors.
Nothing worked as expected. The barrage was badly directed. Many shells fell short, some among the advancing infantry. Tanks got stuck in ditches or mired in mud. The infantry, expecting to find demoralized enemy troops, had to fight for their lives. The attack forced a bulge in the German line, but the Allies were soon back where they started, except for 179 tanks destroyed, and 55,207 dead or wounded, against the enemy’s estimated 45,000.
Paris’s café strategists shook their heads. After seeing a newsreel of tanks in action, Cocteau, noting the way they reared up at hitting an obstacle, compared them to “a safe that falls from the top floor of a house, then stands on its hind legs like a dog and begs a sugar cube.” What next? Tanks and locomotives having sex, and giving birth to robot children?
For the first time, the war caused Cocteau to lose his temper. He raged against “this formless monster, which hops, flounders, tramples people in its clumsiness, eats them out of gluttony and vomits them right and left.” Among those it devoured was Roland Garros, who escaped from Germany, only to be shot down at Vouziers in the Ardenne just a few days before the end of the war.
37
The Zouave’s Trousers
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “Ulysses”
On October 24, 1917, Archie Baxter set foot for the second time on French soil when he stepped off the boat in Le Havre.
Ships filled the vast ugly harbor: some standing out, waiting to dock; others moored, holds open, hatch covers off, cranes dipping into their guts, winches hauling out bulging cargo nets. Many boats were American. Black soldiers working as longshoremen offloaded crates onto the dock and wrestled them into railway trucks already coupled to locomotives leaking steam, ready to pull out.
Archie’s experience of black men was limited to the few aboriginals who hung around the outskirts of Sydney, living in rough shelters, panhandling for cigarettes or beer. To him, these Americans were as exotic as flamingos; another promise of those different worlds he’d begun to glimpse the moment he made the decision to enlist.
Black French soldier guarding German prisoners
It was still warm, the banked heat of autumn, so the Americans had stripped to the waist. They sang as they worked, the syncopated, repetitive chants of the slave life they hoped had ended with the Civil War. French stevedores handling cargo next to them took no notice. Recruits from the African colonies had made black skin even more of a commonplace. They sang too: tribal chants whose similarity to the Americans’ work songs revealed their shared heritage.
Not that color made any difference to the French. Once they acknowledged you as citoyen, physical characteristics were of no significance. Whether a coolie from Cochin, a Zouave from Algeria, or a Spahi cavalryman from Morocco, you belonged to the culture of France, its art, its humor. When a Tommy wished to show skepticism, he might sneer, “Pull the other leg. It’s got bells on.” The poilu, to signify the ultimate in improbability, said, “Oui. Et la main de ma soeur dans les culottes d’un zouave.” Sure. And my sister’s hand in a Zouave’s trousers.
After waiting in line for an hour at the routing office, Archie got a chit to spend the night in town.
“We’ll send you up to the front with the next convoy,” said the corporal behind the desk. “Might be a couple of days. Until we get together enough of you to make it worthwhile.”
“Send us up where, corp?”
“None of your bloody business, mate. Report at HQ in town tomorrow. Next!”
With other Aussies off the same boat, Archie scrounged a lift into the center of town. The horse-drawn ambulance was returning empty after delivering wounded to a ship taking them back to Australia. The other new arrivals climbed into the back, under the canvas, finding room around the now-empty stretcher racks, but Archie, after one look at the bloody bandages littering the floor and a sniff of the mingled stink of disinfectant, unwashed bodies, and corruption, mounted the open front seat with the driver.
“G’day,” he said.
“G’day,” the driver replied.
As Australian etiquette went, it was a warm, even enthusiastic welcome.
The swaybacked chestnut pulling the ambulance made Archie realize how long it had been since he’d sat behind the complacent backside of a horse. Years. He hadn’t missed it. Twenty years of living with a barnyard, and particularly with pigs, cured him of any affection for farm animals.
The road was solid with traffic, as far as the eye could see. Most of it horse-drawn: ambulances in one direction, many with casualties sitting next to the driver or cross-legged on top; in the other direction carts and trucks loaded with munitions, supplies, the nourishment of war.
European roads were not made for heavy traffic. Tall trees, mostly poplars, lined this one on both sides. Beyond, fields ran off into the distance, disappearing from sight in the mist that hung perpetually over Europe’s plowed earth. Archie thought of Australia: the grass crisped brown, as if in an oven; the omnipresent hum of insects; the sky, white with heat; the sensation of sweat vaporizing on the skin. During a year in England, he’d forgotten what it was to be warm.
A dispatch rider on a motorbike roared down the center line between the two stationary lanes of traffic. Otherwise, nothing moved. After a few minutes, the driver put the reins down on the worn wooden seat and started to roll a cigarette. Sensing slackness, the horse twitched its head. Automatically Archie took the greasy leathers and tugged lightly. Reassured, the horse snorted and, without notice, dumped a load of turds onto the road.
Before they’d stopped steaming, Archie heard a scraping of spades below the wagon. Two kids in ragged hand-me-downs and wooden clogs were scooping the droppings into a bucket. Most houses had a manure heap filling the few square meters of space between the front wall and the ditch running along the edge of the road. This was still farmland, and fertilizer was wea
lth.
Striking a match on the wooden seat, the driver lit the cigarette, took a draw, then handed it to Archie. The smoke grated in his throat. Though the makings tasted only notionally of tobacco, he felt a diminishment of hunger and the beginnings of a buzz.
The driver nodded toward the ambulance halted on the opposite side of the road. The canvas was rolled back, probably to dissipate the smell that drove Archie up here to the front seat. Inside, as if in an insect nest, wounded men were exposed, swathed in bandages like larvae. Some lay silent and motionless on stretchers. Others lolled against bench seats. Some had their eyes bandaged; others a hand or foot.
“SIVs,” the driver said.
“Eh?”
“Self-inflicted.”
“How can you tell?”
“Haul enough of the buggers, you learn the signs.”
“All of them?”
“Most. And more of ’em every week.”
Every old stager had a recipe for a Blighty wound. The less imaginative blew off a toe or raised a hand above the parapet, hoping to be drilled by a German sniper without losing any fingers. Others ate the emetic ipecac or cordite from a rifle cartridge; it gave you shortness of breath and bad color, but it was easy to spot. A whiff or two of gas could burn your lungs or eyes badly enough to be invalided back but—with luck—do no permanent damage. An injection of petrol into the joint could make a knee or elbow swell, or, if under the skin, cause a nasty-looking ulcer. . . .
A powerful need to move seized Archie. He handed back the reins.
“Hoo-roo.”
Startled, the man said, “If you want a jimmy riddle, go ahead. We’re not moving.”
“No, it’s apples, mate. Good luck.”
He shook the man’s hand, dropped to the road and crossed to the other side, ignoring a horse that whinnied and showed its teeth, hoping for an apple or a carrot. Slithering down the embankment, he hopped the stagnant water in the ditch, filmed like a blind eye with algae, and scrambled up the other side. From the look of the few stalks of greenery mixed into the dug-over earth, the field had been under turnips until a few weeks ago.
Hands in his pockets, head pulled into the collar of his greatcoat, Archie wasn’t sure he’d been spotted leaving the road—or, if he had, that anyone would care. The Allied forces were leaking people. He sensed them evaporating, the way a hot wind sucks away the liquid beaded on a canvas water bag. About the narrow raised bank between this field and the next, there was a quality of the foretold that steered him toward the line of trees about a quarter of a mile away; trees that could only mean one thing.
38
The Stars and Stripes Forever
Hurrah for the flag of the free!
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.
JOHN PHILIP SOUSA, “The Stars and Stripes March”
The poster and bookplate painted by Charles Buckles Falls for the War Service Library manages to be at the same time playful and martial. The doughboy wears a tin hat and carries a carbine, but the weapon is slung over his shoulder, and in flagrant defiance of all rules of safety, its bayonet is fixed. Not that he could use it in case of attack, since his arms are filled with books, piled higher than his head. “This book,” explains the text of the bookplate, “is provided by the people of the United States through the American Library Association for the use of the soldiers and sailors.”
War Service Library bookplate
During the war, the American Library Association collected millions of books and shipped them to France. The library set up to distribute them still exists. Now the American Library in Paris, it’s located in the tree-shaded seventh arrondissement, where at each street corner one encounters the Eiffel Tower peering inquisitively into your business.
These days, computer terminals are more evident than books at the ALP, and the emphasis less on reading than lap sits for toddlers and seminars on investment opportunities, with a free glass of boxed Beaujolais afterward. But its complacency is less a sign of senescence than of success. The battle has long since been won. Large parts of twenty-first-century Paris have become as American as tarte aux cerises.
In retrospect, the American force sent to help the Allies in 1917 was an invading army as well. Europe, already half converted to an Americanized way of life by its seductive popular culture, and deeply in debt to its money men, was ready to embrace, as its avant-garde had already done, a world inhabited by Buffalo Bill, Pearl White, and Charlie Chaplin, in which one drank martinis and old-fashioneds, drove a Ford, snapped pictures with a Kodak, wound up a Victor gramophone, and danced the one-step and le fox to the music of James Reese Europe.
If one could specify a single moment in which Paris surrendered to that seduction, it came in August 1918.
Finally, Paris felt it could exhale the breath it had been holding for three years. The Paris-Geschütz, its usefulness at an end, had been hauled back to Germany. On the Amiens front, on the Marne, and in the Saint-Mihiel salient, the Germans were in retreat. Not so much because of the war news as the fact that it was the sort of thing one did in August, Etienne and Edith de Beaumont threw a garden party in their eighteenth-century town house at 2 rue Duroc.
The occasion was the premier performance of a work by young Francis Poulenc, a piece for baritone and piano quintet plus flute and clarinet, called La Rapsodie Nègre.
Its inspiration was the music for Parade. Poulenc was an admirer of Satie, to whom the piece was dedicated. The title tipped a wink at jazz and Africa, but the piece was actually a spoof—a setting of a poem by “Liberian poet Makoko Kangourou,” a name which, like the text—Honoloulou, poti lama!/honoloulou, honoloulou,/kati moko, mosi bolou, etc.—was patently fake.
The words were probably influenced by the “boomlay boomlay boomlay BOOM” and “Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you” of Vachel Lindsay’s poem “The Congo,” published in 1914 and subtitled “A Study of the Negro Race.” In turn, Scott Fitzgerald may have been harking back to this event when he had the band at Jay Gatsby’s party present “Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World that created a sensation at Carnegie Hall last year.”
By 1914, the heavy artillery of American cinema and popular music had already softened up the Europeans. After 1918, Hollywood would buy up the remains of the German and French film industries and stake a claim to the British. In 1925, it absorbed France’s design expertise as well by copying and merchandizing art deco, which France had introduced to the world at its Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.
But for the moment, the front on which it fought was jazz. James Reese Europe, chosen to form and lead the band of the 369th Infantry Regiment, the Harlem Hellfighters, had been a club owner in Harlem, a composer, and musical director for the exhibition dancers Vernon and Irene Castle. In France, his musicians traveled over two thousand miles, performing for British, French, and American military audiences as well as French civilians. They also made recordings for Pathé, planting the seed of jazz that would germinate after 1920 in the soil of France.
James Reese Europe and musicians
Following Europe’s death in 1919, stabbed in a trivial skirmish with a drummer in his band, a mourner said, “Before Jim Europe came to New York, the colored man knew nothing but Negro dances and porter’s work. All that has been changed. Jim Europe was the living open sesame to the colored porters of this city. He took them from their porters’ places and raised them to positions of importance as real musicians.” Just as importantly, he alerted them to the opportunities, social and musical, of France. Numerous African American performers who remained in Paris after the war or returned following their demobilization were living proof that he was right.
The American Library retains a few relics of its early years. One of them, an unwieldy bound volume, sits awkwardly in the sleek glass and aluminum decor. A librarian and an old friend, Simon Gallo, climbs a ladder to bring it d
own from exile on top of a shelf unit.
Multilingual, a collector of seventeenth-century bindings, Simon lived in Brazil and Italy before coming to Paris, He belongs to the same scholarly brotherhood as Neil in London and Peter van Diemen.
“We don’t get many requests for this,” he says as he helps me carry the book to a table in the reading room.
“I can tell.”
The yellowing newsprint is fragile. With too much exposure to light and incautious hands, the pages would become brittle and crumble, like an ancient scroll or papyrus.
Pershing had been in France only eight months when the first number appeared of the forces’ weekly newspaper, Stars and Stripes. Its staff included Harold Ross, who would go on to found and edit The New Yorker magazine; the future columnist Franklin P. Adams; sports journalist Grantland Rice; and Alexander Woollcott, destined to tramp like a wounded elephant through American culture as theater critic, humorist, playwright, and model for the irascible Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner.
Stars and Stripes ran until June 1919, its pages a priceless record not so much of war news—censorship restricted that—as of the preoccupations of the Americans who read and edited it. Foremost among these was food. None of the Allies took to French food—which, in any event, was difficult to find close to the front line. The restaurant-bars called estaminets learned that rosbifs and kangourous were not adventurous eaters. Rather than explaining French cuisine, it was easier to offer something they all enjoyed—fried eggs and chips. Patrons seldom complained, except about the price.
Americans were even more attached to their national diet. Under the headline “Cigarettes Are Here,” Stars and Stripes reported:
At bases in France there are 200,000,000 cigarettes waiting for transportation to haul them to the front. The Army recently commandeered a large percentage of the YMCA’s motor trucks. Here are some things for the Army to be delivered to the YMCA in France next month; 77 tons of chewing gum, 1325 tons of flour and 2850 pounds of sugar for cookie making, 167 tons of chocolate bars, 200 tons of jam, 94 tons of condensed milk, 31 tons of cough drops, 176 tons of chewing tobacco, 9 tons of plain soap, 17 tons of tooth paste, 6 tons of towels, 1½ tons of razor blades and 7 tons of playing cards.
