National Affairs: The Legion Abroad

An army, about to invade a foreign land, invariably sends ahead of it small advance detachments to sound out the disposition of the enemy. Last week, though the U. S. had not declared war on France, a vanguard of 590 U. S. warriors landed at Cherbourg from the S. S. Republic and S. S. President Harding. They were met by the opposite of an enemy but the temper of their reception nevertheless furnished their alert commanders with hints of what the main contingent might look forward to next month.

Welcome. A year ago, General Pershing, Marshall Foch and many another highest endorser of American Legion’s proposed reunion in Paris on the tenth anniversary of the A. E. F.’s appearance on French soil, seriously doubted the wisdom of turning 15,000 Americans loose in a country where Americans had become distinctly unpopular. Was that unpopularity wholly erased —by the stabilization of the French franc, the debt negotiations, the visit of Heroes Lindbergh, Chamberlin and Byrd ?

Observers at Cherbourg last week watched the faces of French dock-hands, porters, innkeepers, thronging citizens. Yes, as the singing, shouting legionaries landed, with their tin hats now replaced by straws, their packs by suitcases, their guns by canes, cigars, toy horns, the faces of Cherbourg smiled genuinely, the faces of Cherbourg grinned, laughed aloud, yelled a welcome.

In Paris it was the same. Bustled to their hotels on the first evening by efficient staff workers, the advance legionaries at once put on some of those bright-colored caps which characterize a U. S. convention anywhere and tell the strange world whence the wearers hail. Then they issued into the evening streets, reconnoitred in restaurants, newsstands, dance halls, bars. Or they just ambled along the luminous boulevards grinning at one another, at Parisians, at Paris. Without the slightest hesitation, with thrown flowers, “Vive! Vive!” kisses and embraces, Paris grinned back. Unaware that any of their visitors would come so soon, the hosts made their welcome impressive by quiet, small-scale spontaneity.

Stories. Paris newspapers burst out with hospitable salvos at once. One story that made a deep im pression told of a legionary whose first act was to ask for the next train to Baccarat. “Why go there?” he was asked. “I was nursed,” he answered, “by a poor French family there, and I’ve got 10,000 francs for them, and can’t wait to get it into their hands.” Other stories described the emo tional reunions of French mothers with daughters and sons-in-law who had made them grandmothers of small Americans up to ten years of age.

Plans. While the legion’s van guard went out to show its wives its old battlefields, its comrades’ graves, planning went ahead for the parade, on Sept. 19, of 15,000 legionaries and 15,000 Frenchmen behind one-armed General Gouraud, onetime commandant of the A. E. F. now military governor of Paris.

The Trocadero, public assembly hall hard by the Eiffel tower, was made ready for the formal convention of 1200 delegates. State of ficials laid out the 3,500,000-franc reception fund which the French parliament lately supplied.

Some 400 cases of U. S. oranges were sent to a cool spot to wait for the day of the parade, when they will be handed out along the line of march to French children.

A radio broadcast “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the National Adjutant of the Legion, James F. Barton, announced that the legion aries were making “a sacred pilgrimage” for three purposes: to see the French, the battlefields, the graves. The radio broadcast “Over There.”

Special jails stood ready, freshly whitewashed and equipped, to cut the cost of exaggerated hilarity (if any) as low as possible. Instead of appearing before a French judge, over-hilarious legionaries (if any) were to be dealt with, in English, by three of their own officials at police headquarters. Plans for a military police corps were waived, forgotten.

Paper and ink lay ready to revive publication of The Stars and Stripes, old time A. E. F. newspaper.

Rates. Rooms for 30,000 persons were reserved at 1,300 hotels. Rates were published. Bottom round-trip prices, meals included, would be: legionary, from San Francisco, $300; from Manhattan, $175. These low figures were due to hotels, of the lowest grade certified by Legion and Paris officials, having worked out a weekly rate or $8, room & board. Steamer companies offered the run of their ships to passengers in any class. French railways cut their rates in half. German railways knocked off 25%.

Sour Note. Only one sour note was heard in Paris last week. The Legion’s constitutional preamble includes the phrase: “Leaders to combat the autocracy of both the classes and the masses.” L’Humanite, Paris Communist daily, evidently knew of this for, in the ” course of a Sacco-Vanzetti tirade, it digressed thus: “The insolent conversation of the American Legion should be repulsed. The revolutionary people of Paris will not tolerate great parades of troops of the Fascist Yankees. Against the Capitalist oppression, arise!”

Police had an eye to “the Revolutionary people of Paris.”

Warning. In Paris lives one American who, of all Americans, should know thoroughly his countrymen’s faults and the French temperament. He, squat, ebullient correspondent Edwin L. James of the New York Times, has at his disposal both a Rolls-Royce and a roughneck vocabulary. He can kiss a queen’s hand or chew cigars with a sergeant of any price glory. He is, above all, a demon reporter, psychological as well as material, and last week, knowing w -11 that the Legion’s advance guard was a very well behaved sample of what would follow, he dictated a masterly message for U. S. publication.

First he warned his countrymen that many things change in ten years. “Leaders heads have grown bald or grey; trim military figures have become fat on the other side of the water as well as on this side, and pretty ma’moiselles in their matronly lines will yield more than one disappointment to those who have carried pictures in mind if not in pocketbook. Many things change in ten years.”

Then he laid down a set of rules:

1) “It may not be necessary to mention it, but it is true that the French are a proud people. Therefore it would be well not to ask when a bill in francs is presented, ‘How much is this in real money?'”

2) “And visitors should not regard everyone as stupid who does not understand English. French is the language of France.”

3) “The delegates should not try to reform the French attitude toward men with black skin. They have, in France, all the legal and civil rights of white men—and that includes the privilege of having white wives and women friends. It is a mistake for Americans to try to change this.”

4) “It will serve no good purpose to argue about prices in hotels and restaurants.”

5) “And it ought not to be a part of the delegates’ mission to reopen the question of who won the War.”