They were conveyed to London on a Royal train. The officers were put up at the Savoy as guests of the nation and the enlistedmen housed among the Beefeaters in the Tower. The general and his staff were received at Buckingham Palace. They attended services at Westminster Abbey. They were greeted by Lloyd George and wined and dined at the War Office. After a dizzy round of receptions, luncheons and state dinners, they found themselves one dewy June morning boarding the channel boat for France.
“At Boulogne wharf,” Major Harbord wrote in his diary, “a drove of French officers, a few Britishers (for Boulogne is a British debarkation port), scores of newspaper men, and a regiment of French soldiers with their funny little steel helmets, and whiskers of various types …” The band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the Americans stood at attention “for several days,” it seemed to Major Harbord, “while they played it over and over. Even the General who stands like a statue growled at the number of times they played it.” Next came the “Marseillaise,” “and then, our hands having broken off at the wrist, we stood up to the gangway while a dozen fuzzy little Frenchmen came up. Each saluted the General and made a little speech and then sidestepped and was replaced by another until each little man had made his speech.”
The last was a French brigadier with a sweeping mustache that hid great scars on his chin. His right arm was gone below the elbow. This was General Pelletier, who, having lived two years in San Francisco, was detailed, on account of his knowledge of English, to Pershing’s staff.
“He is a brave, simpleminded, gallant old fellow,” noted Harbord, “now rapidly becoming an embarrassment to us, his rank having to be constantly considered … He has a bunch of attachés, for, like the British cousins, many French officers are keen to serve with the Americans. A Lieutenant Colonel Comte de Chambrun, great grandson of Lafayette, and husband of Nicholas Longworth’s sister, is one of them. He is an artilleryman and speaks good English, and a great deal of it.”
Though eager to reach Paris and go to work, Pershing and his little group were detained in Boulogne all morning. As a matter of course they were taken to visit the ancient castle on the hill. In Europe the past was still present. At every pause somebody made a speech about it. Like good Americans most of them had never given a thought to history. Now they found the word historique ringing in their ears. They were returning, a hundred and forty years later, the visit of Rochambeau and Lafayette. Their arrival was un moment historique.
They finally discovered the reason for the delay. Their train was being held so that they could make their entry into Paris after working hours, when the streets would surely be crowded. The French, too, were out to squeeze every bit of propaganda value out of the arrival of Pershing’s tiny detachment. Pétain had been telling his troops: we must wait for the Americans. The Americans were here.
Worn out with oratory the general closed himself in his compartment for a nap while the members of his staff sat, in the unfamiliar compartments with their crocheted headrests, jiggling with the rhythm of the rails, looking out of the grubby train windows at the gray skies, the great stone walls, the thatched and slate roofs, the lacy steeples, the ancient towers encrusted with lichen and moss, and the green fields, the carefully tilled gardenplots, the parklike hills of northern France. Red poppies bloomed everywhere. It seemed a picturebook world, with only an occasional string of brown British lorries, or field guns on the move, or a staffcar cruising along poplarlined stone roads to give a hint of war.
As they drove out of the Gare du Nord, after endless delays while the French protocol officers decided who would ride with whom in which car or carriage, they were met by a storm of cheers.
“The acclaim that greeted us,” wrote Pershing, “as we drove through the streets en route to the hotel was to me a complete surprise. Dense masses of people lined the boulevards and squares. It was said that never before in the history of Paris had there been such an outpouring of people. Men, women and children absolutely packed every foot of space, even to the windows and housetops. Cheers and tears were mingled together and shouts of enthusiasm fairly rent the air. Women climbed into our automobiles screaming ‘Vive l’Amerique,’ and threw flowers till we were literally buried. Everybody waved flags and banners. At several points the masses surged into the streets, entirely beyond control of the police.”
When they arrived at the Hôtel de Crillon, General Pershing was forced to appear again and again on his balcony to salute the enormous crowds massed in the Place de la Concorde. He let himself be carried away by the enthusiasm of the moment to the point of endeavoring to address the French Journalists, crowding into the lobby of his suite, in their own language. The journalists had trouble hiding their smiles behind their notebooks. “After a sentence or two I concluded in my mother tongue,” noted the general. Pershing’s French became a byword among the irreverent.
He was putting himself out, sometimes awkwardly because it went against the grain, to make a good impression on the French public; as when, at his chief of staff’s suggestion, he spoiled a new pair of gloves by shaking hands, for the benefit of the photographers, with the engineer and the fireman of the train which had brought him into Paris. But he was determined not to be taken in, no, not by anybody.
“I guess our man will hold his own,” noted Harbord, just after seeing him off on a visit to the front with General Pétain and Minister of War Paul Painlevé, who were repeating the arguments Joffre had used in Washington to induce him to send in American units as replacements into French divisions. “He knows the probable attempt in advance and he has his teeth set.”
General Pershing’s first care, on arriving in Paris, was to find quarters where he could put his outfit to work. Two dwelling houses were rented on the rue Constantine opposite the vast buildings of the Invalides, where Foch had his niche as chief of the French general staff; and the fusty old rooms were fitted up as improvised offices. There the field clerks were installed at their desks. Benches were dragged into the halls for the enlistedmen who were to serve as orderlies and messengers and guards. Cubbyholes were partitioned off for the colonels and majors and captains and lesser fry on whom would fall the detailed work of inventing an army, a staff system, and supply services capable of conducting a campaign four thousand miles from the home base. It was an operation without precedent in the annals of war.
For his own quarters Pershing, whose uniform was about to be embellished with the four stars of a lieutenant general, so that he might keep his head up amid the panoply and glitter of the European military, accepted from Ogden Mills, a wealthy scion of New York society who was serving as a captain of infantry, the loan of his Paris residence. This was a magnificent Left Bank mansion set in gardens dating from the early years of Louis XV. The Americans were to learn to live in the European style.