Within the year after

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I " Excuse, Please, the War " 1

II Inside the Gates at Versailles 10

CHAPTER I ( i

EXCUSE, PLEASE, THE WAE ' '

Pabis, June 23, 1919. <S\ TELEGRAM? It could not get there be- ■1 \. fore tomorrow, Madame. Maybe later. All telegrams zay must go through za military — you will be in Paris long time ahead of telegram. Zis train, it makes stop now because our coal is so bad. You must excuse, please — here it is still za war. Madame, you will excuse, please, za war? "

Leaning through the doorway of a compartment, at the village of Rue, where the steamer special, enroute from Boulogne-sur-Mer to Paris, had been sidetracked yesterday afternoon, I was imploring a train official to send a dispatch for me, when he apologized thusly for the war. In my best American-French I replied, " Never mind — that's all right — it has been my war as well as yours, and you need offer no apologies." For " Bleeding France," true to her breeding, regrets your inconveniences in getting through her war-scarred regions. Only now, instead of " C'est la Guerre " (It is the War), they remind you "C'est la Paix," (It is the Peace).

But all the inconveniences for the traveler going abroad in these months after the armistice are not in France. Mine began three months ago when I first applied for a passport to the State Department in Washington. Getting a passport is equivalent to a liberal education these days. Then every scrap of writing or printed matter I carried had to be examined and sealed up by the custom house officials in New York before I could go on board the steamer, including even my letter of credit and visiting cards, and the seal was not to be broken until I had been three hours at sea. For the peace is not yet signed and I crossed on a Dutch liner, having overlooked the fact, when my passage was booked, that Holland was neutral.

Landing in the picturesque harbor of Boulogne by tender in the quiet of the Sunday noon,

" EXCUSE, PLEASE, THE WAR "

I knew I was across at last when I saw on the dock a tubby French peasant woman in holiday attire, with the quaint Boulognese cap, a circle of stiffly starched, pleated muslin, like a wheel, around her plump face. Our passports had been examined minutely by French officials who came on board the liner in the early morning. On the dock our hand luggage had to be inspected before we were permitted to enter the train.

And right there, when my heels first touched French soil, it was a smiling-eyed American soldier who came to my assistance. For a space of three minutes I had taken my eyes from my suitcase, after giving it into the hands of a burly porter on the tender, and he had disappeared as if into thin air. The Yankee doughboy rushed to my aid. " Never leave your hand baggage out of your sight, ' ' was his warning, ' ' we are here to see that baggage is not stolen. ' '

In the crowded customs office on the pier there was great hurry and bustle. My inspection officer was a middle-aged Frenchwoman, tall and gaunt in black. I waited while she convinced a party of indignant men that it was expensive to bring cigars and tobacco into France. They paid a franc duty on each cigar — or she kept the cigars.

The steamer train to Paris had been heralded to have a restaurant car and so it did. But it was a very old car, owing to the necessity of utilizing any rolling stock left, and there was no communication between the diner and the remainder of the train. This meant that everyone must climb out at a station and dash along the platform to the diner. It was an exciting proceeding since there was always the risk that the train might move on without you. And being stranded on the French landscape was not alluring. Many passengers refused to leave their compartments and went without luncheon rather than take the chance. Poor coal and a tremendously heavy train for the miniature engine, together with sidetracking several times to allow troop trains to pass, prolonged what is usually a three hour journey to eight hours. But no one complained. It was good to get through at all, for much of the route lay through the Somme, that shell-rocked

" EXCUSE, PLEASE, THE WAR "

corner of the western theater of The War.

We had not left the peaceful harbor of Boulogne far behind when I first came face to face with The War. Trains of Red Cross cars had appeared and disappeared on the passing countryside, their emblems of mercy blazoned across the side doors of the coupes, for the foreign railway carriage is usually a series of coupes, holding six or eight passengers, and opening at the sides like a cab. These Red Cross trains stood on sidings or passed us swiftly. Sometimes it was a train of box cars, their open doorways filled with eager poilu or Tommy faces, waving uniform caps or figures huddled on the floor trying to find a comfortable position.

Then like a drop curtain, it appeared — a huge hospital camp — and beyond a cemetery. I never knew crosses could be placed so closely together — and the many, many rows! So this was Sunny France and what the war had meant !

But today when I gazed at the statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde — before the Hotel Crillon, the headquarters of the

American Commission to Negotiate Peace, where at this hour world history is in the making — the statue symbolical of the principal city of Alsace-Lorraine, that for fifty years stood here in the heart of Paris, draped in mourning, now gay with the colors of the Allies who freed her, and they told me that the iron chains that have shackled her since her separation from France are now to be removed — I felt that they who slept beneath those crosses in Picardy must know and rejoice that they did not make the supreme sacrifice in vain.

As we approached Amiens, the war came closer at every mile. In a peaceful village, nestling against a sunny slope, sometimes it was the corner of a building shot away, laying bare the mangled interior; again it was a top story blown off entirely. Often it was a great jagged hole torn into masonry that gave mute testimony to the advance of the merciless Hun. Paneless windows for blocks filled in the rest of the story.

Then quite as unexpectedly we came upon the trenches. In the bright June sunshine it was impossible to realize them. Like harmless ter-

" EXCUSE, PLEASE, THE WAR "

races they first appeared, as they arose in waves over the softly undulating country in the peaceful light of the summer Sunday afternoon. Over many the tender grass was timidly, bravely, trying to grow. Every few yards there was the sheltered doorway of a dugout, now deserted. This was where the soldiers had dug themselves havens of refuge during the recent days of that cruel modern warfare.

And there, now, the poppies had come. Oh, these poppies of Picardy — like the afterglow of the noble young lives that gave just such vivid blood to the Great Cause! Wide fields of them swayed, fanned by the June breeze! Their flaming color was like splashes of glowing coals against the deep green foliage. For miles and miles they colored the landscape. They dared to go up to the very doors of the dugouts. Once I saw — three red poppies set in the arid waste before a dugout entrance, proudly upright on their slim, green stems, nodding and smiling in the soft winds. It was not difficult to fill in the remainder of the picture, of a trio fighting there hand to hand. And now three glowing red poppies whisper of the hero souls who gave up the sunshine of life that peace might once again reign over this earth. I wish I might send to every American mother, whose son sleeps on the sunny slopes of France, the picture of those poppies as I saw them. In their living flame they seemed a soul part of those hardy young lives sacrificed. And every year as long as Time shall last the poppies will return to these battlefields, consecrated by the blood of our hero dead, as living symbols of the new Brotherhood of Man that has now reached around a world.

The train stopped at Amiens, and there in the roof of the depot platform, almost directly above our car, was a huge hole caused by a dropping shell. The depot life moved unheedingly around below it. French, English and American soldiers chatted in groups about the platform. And the sunlight streamed through the ragged hole above their heads.

Between Amiens and Paris the train ran closer and closer to the trenches. It is rolling country, resembling that of our Middle West. Were it not for the red roofed, quaint cottages, snuggled among the trees, one might have been

" EXCUSE, PLEASE, THE WAR "

on a road into Chicago, only for the swollen scars that seamed across the open fields, mute reminders of a land invaded. But already reconstruction has begun and it was good to see that many fields have been ploughed over in the trenched grounds in that sector of the Somme.

And so at nine o'clock in the summer twilight — they have the daylight saving hour here, — we slowly but surely steamed into Paris, through its seething, rushing, Gare du Nord or North Depot — into Paris — the Hub of the Peace Universe — at last!

CHAPTER II Paris, June 28

HOW I spent my first week in Paris pulling wires to get to the Peace Signatory ceremony at the Chateau of Versailles is a story in itself. Getting past St. Peter at the Pearly Gates must be easier. From fifth-under-secretaries and Y. officials up to our American Ambassador himself, the Honorable Hugh Campbell Wallace, to whom I had a personal letter of introduction from his old chum, Senator Saulsbury of Delaware — Hon. Wilbur Marsh of Waterloo, had given me a letter to him — I approached countless officials daily. I gathered that they felt it was presumption, to say the least, for a correspondent just arrived in Paris to Cherish such a hope. At the press bureau the ticket committee was wild-eyed, with 120 entitled to admission and place for but sixty. Finally, through Ray Stannard Baker, head of the American Press in Paris, at 11 o'clock on this morning of the signing clay I was given a precious pink card to the terrace.

A taxi was out of the question at that hour on this eventful day in Paris, so my cousin, Mme. Arthur Blad, took me in her car. I had been given at the press headquarters a letter of instructions regarding the route and a special yellow and green cocade, a yellow disk sticker with a green center, the marker to be glued to the front window or the wind shield of the car, to the left of the chauffeur. This cocade was the " laissez passer." Without it no car could proceed over the special reserved route, which lay through St. Cloud, the Ville d'Avray and up Picardy Hill.

It was 12:15 when we left Paris for the twenty-mile drive to Versailles. I had fastened my two American flags to the car much to the delight of one, Louis, who grinned in voluble French when I informed him that he was now a ' ' chauffeur Americaine. ' ' Out past the race track of the Longchamps, where the Grand Prix was to be run the next day, and across the Seine we sped to show our cards at the Paris gates and to be admitted to the route reserved for the guests to Versailles.

Now all the way, every fifty feet, on alternate sides of the smooth white road, stood a French soldier, holding a red flag. Only the fact that the flag was held downward permitted us to proceed. These soldiers were in the French horizon-blue uniform, always nattily picturesque, and they wore the blue helmets. A few had, slung over one shoulder, what appeared like blue life preservers. The Ville d'Avray is a charming little hamlet, nestling in wooded hills, with its old stone buildings, straight and severe, holding sentinel up each side of the steep road.

The city of Versailles (and you must pronounce it Ver-sigh-ee) was in gala attire. The flags of the Allies were fluttering everywhere. Eegiments of the Garde Republicaine in their gorgeous uniforms, resplendent with gold trimmings, set off by wide saber belts of white and epaulets of scarlet and gold, with their nodding -red plumed helmets, looked like storied ' ' knights of old. ' ' A deep hedge of blue clad troops, both cavalry and infantry, lined the way through which the cars of the peace delegation approached the chateau.

Paris-American papers are frank in saying that the ceremony itself lacked picturesqueness — just a few frock-coated men signing the great document with modern fountain pens on a table fitted up with modern inkstands and blotters. But they claimed it was amply compensated by the majestic setting of the scene from the Court of Honor. Probably never, even in the days of the Grand Monarch, did the Place d'Armes, the open parade ground before the palace, present a more imposing sight.

Our instructions included the parking of the car in the Eue de Reservoir, which by this time looked like an auto show. From there we approached the group of harassed guards stationed twenty feet from the high iron gates. It was about 2 :30 when we were permitted to enter. With all the red tape in regard to nameinscribed tickets, there was a crush at the entrance moment.

Once inside the gates I blinked my eyes as I recognized the great paved courtyard, so familiar in picture to all of us, with the heroic, mounted statue of Louis xiv ' * Louis Quatorze " high on a stone platform in the center, the huge court enclosed by the palace buildings.

Hardly had we found a place behind the single line of blue clad troops that circled the vast courtyard when the order of "Attention " brought them into a motionless ring of horizon blue. There were shouts of " Vive Clemenceau" and the car of the French premier came into view and passed before us.

It was, above all, a Clemenceau crowd, for he is the idol of France today. Every time the dapper, little, white haired statesman appeared he was given an ovation. ' ' They are all Clemenceau fans," an American soldier put it. For France knows Clemenceau waited forty-eight years for this hour when he could deal out retribution to the Huns for their wrongs to Alsace-Lorraine. It was peculiarly significant that here, in this very palace he was entering, in the selfsame room where he had heard Bismarck arrogantly proclaim the German Empire and Wilhelm i its first kaiser, that M. Clemenceau should be the dominating figure at the moment when Germany met her just deserts at the hands of the allied nations of the world, and the German Empire disappeared ignominiously.

The automobile of President Wilson followed that of the French Premier and the crowd paid him homage with salvos and cheers. Marshal Foch was enthusiastically acclaimed. The cars of the delegates of the Allied world followed swiftly and as their flags, fluttering from the wind shields, were recognized they were cheered.

I wonder, now, what Louis the Fourteenth would have thought had he been there in the center, in place of his bronze statue, to see this assemblage of diplomats come from the far ends of the earth to sign a peace that shall mean security for France. I wonder how he would have looked upon this new altruism that brought two million free men across the seas, not in conquest, but for the sake of humanity. And now the distinguished head of their nation was within his palace gates, come to see that justice shall prevail for all the earth. Surely it would have been bewildering for the eighteenth century to comprehend. And yet Lafayette came to us in our great hour of need ! The cars rolling swiftly toward the chateau doors proved the words ' ' Every man has two countries ; his own and France. ' '

At a signal, the horizon-blue line of soldiery in the ring around the courtyard gave way and we hurried with the guests across the immense stone square, over the base of the statue 's pedestal, through an arcade, and out into the famous gardens of Versailles. In the beautiful sunken gardens, where the hoop-skirted belles and satin-clad, powder-wigged, beaux of the days of royalty promenaded and flirted in the Junes of bygone centuries, I stood today a part of the throng of several hundred spectators beneath the high windows of the Hall of Mirrors where in a few moments was scheduled to occur the the " greatest event in history," the signing of the " New Charter of Humanity."

Just in front of us was a line of the brilliantly garbed Garde Republicaine. Across the driveway ahead the warm June sunshine fell upon a miniature lake, the basin of Apollo, one of the great fountains of the chateau. Here we

Motor car of President Wilson crossing the Court of Honor to the entrance of the Hall of Mirrors for the Signing of the Peace of Versailles.

At Versailles Chateau, before the Hall of Mirrors at Peace Signing.

waited for a sign from the arched, silent windows of the Galerie de Glace that the dove of peace had alighted, after fonr long years of frightful war. Gradually the crowd moved nearer until it surrounded the fountain pool. I stood just across the paved terrace from the high columned windows when the boom of the first cannon at 3:50 gave the glad news that there was peace again on this earth.

Eight huge airplanes that had been circling restlessly over the palace and grounds for an hour, since the entry of the peace delegation, swooped lower to drone their song of victory from the clouds. Birds flew about them. The fountains in the gardens burst into play, the first time since the war began. Together M. Clemenceau, Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson, a few moments later, emerged from the doorway through which the German delegates had entered and the crowd closed around them as they crossed the terrace to view the cascade of the fountains.

The French crowd is delightfully naive. Everywhere women, girls and even men carried folding camp chairs and, when the monosyllabic guards would allow thera to go no farther, they quietly unfolded their camp chairs and rested calmly until the next advance, or stood upon them to gaze over the sea of heads. No one resented these chairs — they made room for them as they envied them. At the climax moment when the first of the 101 guns sounded a pretty French mademoiselle of eighteen, mounted on a camp stool at my side, was contentedly munching a sandwich — and she kept right on eating it.

Later an American officer commenting on the incident, to me said, ' ' The French people know these ceremonies take hours so they come prepared to stay. They've got the right system. I've been out here since the beginning and couldn't get inside the gates. No, haven't seen a thing and came all the way from camp for it." We were part of a small group waiting in the little street before the Senate chamber, where our car had been parked, when it was whispered that President Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George who had been strolling about the chateau grounds had entered the arched doorway to the Senate. So the American added

' ' Right here I stay till I drop — they must come out sometime." And there we were joined by a few hundred more, eager to get a closer view of the Big Three.

There was a cry of ' ' Clemenceau ' ' and the smiling face of (i The Tiger," as the French affectionately call him, appeared at the window above us, framed in his white hair. Then President Wilson was seen in the window with what they call in Paris his ' ' Victory smile. ' ' The Hon. Arthur James Balfour, easily recognized from his pictures, waited near us in the narrow cobbled street, where presently M. Deschanel, president of the French Chamber of Deputies, joined him to chat as they waited for their motor cars, both distinguished figures in their black frock coats and high silk hats. And here came, too, the delegates of many nations from Brazil to Japan.

Gaily caparisoned regiments of soldiery moved in glittering columns across the parade grounds, cavalry with waving pennons and infantry with the sun glinting on their bayonets, making a brave spectacle, as we started back on the road to Paris at six o'clock.

And so the New Peace came to earth and byits very simplicity dominated the sumptuous splendor of its setting. Here in the palace of the French kings we were leaving, almost in the shadow of the tomb of Napoleon, the plenipotentiaries of the leading nations of the world had, in a simple ceremony of less than an hour, signed and sealed a document to make this old earth safe for democracy — not pridefully, but simply and reverently, as befit the sad memories of France and Belgium.

With full hearts Ave came back to grateful, happy Paris, making ready to celebrate the Peace Night.

Chapter III To Chateau Thierry, Belleau Woods, Soissons, Rheims

Paris, July 3.

THERE are three ways in which I could begin.

I should begin at the end, like this: I have just seen a rainbow spanning the tortured Valley of the Marne. A perfect bow of promise it was, arched from the sky, its both ends, " where there is always a pot of gold " plainly visible as they dipped into the fertile meadows by the roadside. And I saw tiredeyed people, returned to the broken fragments of what had once been home, clearing away debris to begin life over. They were neither bitter nor buoyant — just quietly accepting the fortunes of war; looking ahead, not backward. For slowly, but surely, this mutilated valley is coming back.

Or I might begin at the beginning and tell how, over the phone, at noon yesterday, Hon.

Chas. Rawson of Des Moines, head of the Y. M. C. A. foyer at 12 Rue d'Aguesseau (the place familiar to every American soldier who came to Paris) said to me : " If you can be ready by 4 o 'clock, Mr. Bickham, our Paris director, who is motoring to Chateau Thierry and Rheims in his private car, will take you along. ' '

But the way I want to begin, if it would not be too startling is this :

Last night I slept in Chateau Thierry!

To be entirely truthful I spent the night in Chateau Thierry, since sleep would hardly have been possible to anyone with a grain of imagination after the first sight of this great American shrine in France.

Quartered in the remnants of a handsome, old, residence, now the headquarters of the U. S. Army Y, in their apartment specially ' ' reserved for ladies," I tried to keep from thinking back one short year ago, when just across the Marne, that flows past the high-porticoed doorway — and the Marne, remember, is only about half as wide as a city block — just on the opposite bank of that motionless stream, in the second story of the row of old buildings facing us, seventeen of our American machine guns played on the Hun horde that doggedly and determinedly held the town on this side of the river. I tried not to picture what must have been the scenes in this very same, shrapnelpitted, mansion when the bridges out there were blown up by our American engineers and the Germans saw their doom. I tried not to think of the ride we had taken at nightfall to Belleau Wood, now and hereafter designated on French military maps as the Forest of the Marine Brigade, and of the pile of pine coffin boxes against the Mairie fence at Torcy, where the G. R. S., the Graves Registration Service of our American Army, is still searching for our hero dead, to inter their remains in American cemeteries.

I say I tried not to think of these things, because they were hardly a good sleep potion, and our day ahead was destined to be a strenuous one, over that sector of French soil engraved indelibly in every American heart, the triangle marked off by Soissons, Rheims and Chateau Thierry. For it was here that America made her first dramatic entry into the war.

Here American divisions played a stellar role in the great counter offensive that was the crucial turning point, and here raged, for three historic months last summer, such fighting that in the end gave glorious victory to the Allies.

In justice to us much-maligned American 11 kickers " abroad I want to record right here that Mile. Axler, the French girl who accompanied me from Paris, was the first to object to the primitive accommodations, since they are scarcely prepared to care for tourists at Chateau Thierry. ' ' Look, there are no sheets on the cots ! ' ' was her horrified exclamation. The door had just closed behind the Y canteen girl who had ushered us up the stairs and through the entrance, chalk-marked " Reserved for Ladies," with the apology "It is the best we have. " " You forget, ' ' I reminded the French girl, ' ' your country has been in war. ' ' And she, a born Parisienne, had shown me how she had held her hands over her ears when the Big Bertha shells crashed into Paris.

Lying there on the gray-blanketed army cot, with the moon shining through the big double window over the ghostly ruins beyond, the wheezy piano sounding from the dance hall below, I recalled an incident in the Times office a week before I left. He was a young soldier and he had stooped stiffly to pick up a scrap of paper from the floor. " This weather makes my wounds bother me," he had remarked. ' ' Where did you fight ? " I asked. His answer was "Chateau Thierry." Then, simply, he related it, with the simplicity of the greatest heroism. ' ' Asked my Captain if I could go over and stop that Boche gun that was firing at us. I had been lying in a miserable shell hole for hours and the chap next to me was dead. Captain said ' yes ' if I'd choose eight men to go with me. We went all right. I was the only one to come back. Oh, we got that Boche gun, we did — and the whole nest. ' '

And here in Chateau Thierry, which takes its name from the eighth century chateau, a remnant of which still remains — here in a quaint little old house, La Fountaine, the master of fables, was born back in 1621. They tell how, when the Allied troops entered the town, they found La Fountaine 's cellar transformed into a handsome dugout, the abandoned, half -drunk liquors and cigars revealing how hasty had been the leave taking of the officers hiding there from allied shells. I wonder if the fertile brain of La Fountaine, who preached his philosophy to mankind through the mouths of animals, could have conceived the philosophy of this new brotherhood that brought men from the far corners of the earth to save his besieged city, this ancient citadel on the Marne.

Chateau Thierry has been the stumbling block of a hundred wars. It is scarred with endless invasions that through the many centuries have aimed at Paris as their goal, but it has always blocked the way. And here in the late Maytime of a year ago and into early June, American troops successfully headed off the biggest and last drive for Paris. The best of American blood flowed through its cobbled streets and into the silent blue waters of the Marne on the last day of May, 1918. Here Americans will always come to live over again the scenes where their sons, the youth, the ardor and the courage of the New World, turned the tide of battle for the discouraged allied host. Here sounded the knell of defeat for

TO CHATEAU THIEERY

Might and came the first chime for the cause of Right triumphant.

It was after six o'clock, owing to some auto trouble, before we started from Paris in the chill July evening. The tonneau of the car was heaped with packages of cigarets, supplies and reading matter for the isolated Gr. R. S. camps in the 200 miles we were to cover, a tour of inspection the Paris director makes weekly.

Out past the great Paris abattoir we sped, through the high Pantin gate and over the Paris-Metz road, hurrying through the suburbs that cluster close to the very gates of Paris. Through the village of Claye, passing barracks that held many American soldiers during the war. Here the Y. M. C. A. was for months located in an old stable.

The War came out to meet us before we had motored many miles. The grave of the first French soldier to give his life in 1914 was marked there by the roadside, very near to his beloved Paris, that one soldier out of every six in France gave his life to save. And a little farther on the graves of a French and a German soldier faced one another on the left of the road.