Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 241, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 October 1915 — NOW SEE WAR ONLY AS GREAT SHOW AFFAIR [ARTICLE]

NOW SEE WAR ONLY AS GREAT SHOW AFFAIR

Parisians Take Interest in Struggle Only as a Magnificent Spectacle. PEN PICTURE OF FRENCH LIFE People Wake Pilgrimages to Points of Vantage Behind the Lines Where Gay Week-End Parties Are Held Chatter Shows - Trend of Thought. By GEORGE DUFRESNE. (International News Service.) Paris. —Parisians have become so used to the war that they are now taking great interest in it asYt magnificent spectacle. Daily crowds of French people and tourists from England and America make pilgrimages to points of vantage behind the lines, and gay week-end parties are held. The following letter comes from a hotel near Boulogne-Sur-Mer: “If you would focus the war, or that large part of it which is collected at the base, come to the hotel. • “In all wars, of course —from Scutari to Capetown—there is Just one hotel which is, so to say, a universal tryst, a sort of Charing Cross, where everyone meets eventually and in the end. It 1b a vanity fair, perhaps also a slough of despond and delectable mountain, where pilgrims of all types and two sexes jostle and nudge, where in a flood of khaki and brassards and woman’s uniforms some few civilians go astray, where the incoming and outgoing hero relaxes for a moment his heroism, where comedy prods tragedy in the ribs, where sentiment turns up holy eyes at quiet courage, and where all the medley of actors, interrupted in their parts by the hoots of steamers, the burr of hydroplanes and the tramp of route marches are apt to miss their cues in the fog of general rumor and incorrigible chatter. “Could anyone tell what sort of piece, in what country, he was askod to watch? Was he ‘assisting’ at his majesty’s, the comedie francaise, the empire, or—merely Armageddon? "Listen for a moment at random to some chattering groups. “ ‘Who would have thought of meeting you here?' “All the meetings begin like that; the one-armed colonel who hadn’t met his friend since Dongola in ’B4, or the infant cavalry subaltern who ran into his Eton friend’s second sister now tracing missing men at a base office, or the old, old, ex-major of something ending in Chester who exchanged questions with a famous statesman on the convalescence of their respective sons. And Thus They Chatter. “The greeting was followed in t* ’s particular instance by a flood of questions and answers. Who have you (f|gue to see? Is it the brother or the husband who is wounded# What! Not both! Impossible! Hurt the sam • eek! The two of them on different floors of No. 7 hospital? Both shrapnel, and in the shoulder? Dear me. Dear me. But if you are going

to be wounded, give me the shoulder. All shoulders do well. And what heroes they will be! Why am I here? Ch, I’m running a feed-the-brute stall. You know. Coffee and cigarettes and bread and butter at peace-and-plenty prices. Started with $25 capital in a waiting room. Now built bath houses and stalls regardless and feed ’em by the hundred. Oh, soldiers, all soldiers —of sorts. The difference is that all the fighters say, ‘Thank you, miss,’ and the base fellows are apt to grouse. The army had thoughts of killing us off. We started a year ago in September. They thqught about it till April and are now going the pace. However, they won’t kill me in a hurry. Might as well try to kill the Y. M. C. A., who do a roaring trade in the same business. We save a tragedy a day from bad temper and starvation and a score from drunkenness. But if any of your friends went to send us something, plump for boxing gloves and punch balls. Now wait half a moment while I watch my chauffeur —she cuts the bread and butter, you know —and we’ll have lunch. Idiom of Initials. “The room was full of people with amazing brassqrds on their arms, red, white, tricolor, and even green, and someone was' retelling the standard story of the newcomer who asked an habitue at the base how to go somewhere or other. The answer began glibly in the prevalent idiom of initials : “ ‘Oh, I should go to a T. C. 0., who will introduce you to the D. A. D. R. T., who will refer the matter to Q. H. Q., and then —’ But this was too much for the questioner. “ ‘Excuse me,’ he said, Tm off to have a B. and S.’ I "If he had gone on this mission at the moment he would have found two airmen, with their feet on the brass rail of the American bar, drinking an orange squash and discussing earnestly whether it was worse to be shelled in the air or the trenches. They decided in favor of the air. “ ‘l’m fairly terrified at shells on the ground,’ said one. ‘But in the air they don’t seem to matter.’ "From this they diverged to the obtuseness of certain aerial observers who had to see a battery from all angles and make figures of eight above it before they could decide whether it was not a mowing machine or a manure heap. However, in spite of the observers they were doomed to carry and the shrapnel that was always puncturing their wings but missing their tank and the ground fog and the new German air colossus, they were quite decided that the air was the place of places and their Job the picked job. And it Is a fact that of all the men of all types who pass through this vanity fair the airmen are the most distinct in type. The air has lent them its peculiar qualities of light, and breadth, as the sailor has borrowed the salt of his character from the expanses of the unharvested sea. > Wanted His Appetite, “With their noses on the same brass rail lay two great dogs, a lurcher with every air of aristocracy in his form and manner, despite his mixed ancestry, and a red Irish retriever. One of the masters had come out from bis county town to hunt down missing kits. The other had left the stock exchange to blossom into a train-con-ducting officer and wear a red brassard. “ ‘Just got an invitation to shoot grouse on the ?.Bth,’ said one; and a neighbor countered with a quotation from his wife’s letter, which he took from his pocket and redd. ‘lf you don't come home soon the patch of lithospermum will be over, and as our only gardener went off today to make fuses it’s likely to be the last you will see. Besides, your appetite is wanted Even the village can’t eat all the vegetables we plant.’ “He began to read the next sentence, but stopped with a Jerk, almost with a blush, and put the letter carefully in his pocketbook. "Then came stories of the dogs’ rival intelligences, and these were lost in a sea of chatter, of tittle-tattle mixed with the grimmest anecdotes of war in this way.

“ ‘Oh, she’s out for the limelight—and other things. Thinks she looks nice in a nurse’s kit.’ " ‘How anyone ever took the idea of giving that man the job, heaven knows. You know what he does in town?’ —and the voices sink. ; . . ‘Awful fun it was! Bits of Deutsches flying up the air—and they squeaked like rabbits when we cheered.’ Like Boy on Holiday. "The old soldier who spoke had the soft complexion of a boy and the hilarity of a schoolboy off —as indeed he was—for a holiday. “ ‘Things are bad. Take it from me. What! You don’t believe it? Well, will you bet me a pony to a fiver that the Deutsch are not in Calais before the end of October? Done with you. That’s a bet.’ “Then it was dissipating time, and the great ladies motored off to their new hospitals, and some went to work, and some went to bathe, and some to the boat, and some to the front; and all promised to do all sorts of things at that vague wonderful and evanescent date known as apres la guerre."