Once there was a war

The languages spoken in the streets are fascinating. Rarely is one whole conversation carried out in just one language. Our troops do not let language difficulties stand in their way. Thus you may see a soldier speaking in broad Georgia accents conversing with a Foreign Legionnaire and a burnoosed Arab. He speaks cracker, with a sour French word thrown in here and there, but his actual speech is with his hands. He acts out his conversation in detail.

His friends listen and watch and they answer him in Arabic or French and pantomime their meaning, and oddly enough they all understand one another. The spoken language is merely the tonal background to a fine bit of acting. Out of it comes a manual pidgin that is becoming formalized. The gesture for a drink is standard. Gestures of friendship and anger and love have also become standard.

The money is a definite problem. A franc is worth two cents. It is paper money and comes in five, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, and one thousand franc notes. The paper used is a kind of blotting paper that wads up and tears easily.

Carried in the pocket, it becomes wet and gummy with perspiration, and when taken out of the pocket often falls to pieces in your hands. In some stores they will not accept torn money, which limits the soldier, because most of the money he has is not only torn but wadded and used until the numbers on it are almost unrecognizable. A wad of money feels like a handful of warm wilted lettuce. In addition there are many American bills, the so-called invasion money, which is distinguished from home money by having a gold seal printed on its face. These bills feel cool and permanent compared with the Algerian money.

A whole new tourist traffic has set up here. A soldier may buy baskets, bad rugs, fans, paintings on cloth, just as he can at Coney Island. Many GIs with a magpie instinct will never be able to get home, such is their collection of loot. They have bits of battle debris, knives, pistols, bits of shell fragments, helmets, in addition to their colored baskets and rugs. In each case the collector has someone at home in mind when he makes the purchases. Grandma would love this Algerian shawl, and this Italian bayonet is just the thing to go over Uncle Charley’s fireplace, along with the French bayonet he brought home from the last war. Suddenly there will come the order to march with light combat equipment, and the little masses of collections will have to be left with instructions to forward that will never be carried out. Americans are great collectors. The next station will start the same thing all over again.

The terraces of the hotels are crowded at five o’clock. This is the time when people gather to get a drink and to look at one another. There is no hard liquor. Cooled wine and lemonade and orange wine are the standard drinks. There is some beer made of peanuts, which does have a definite peanut flavor. The wine is good and light and cooling, a little bit of a shock to a palate used to bourbon whiskey, but acceptable.

On these terraces the soldiers come to sit about little tables and to meet dates. The French women here have done remarkably well. Their shoes have thick wooden soles, but are attractive, and the few clothes they have are clean and well kept. Since there is little material for dyeing the hair or bleaching it, a new fashion seems to have started. One lock of the hair is bleached and combed back over the unbleached part. It has a strange and not unattractive effect.

About five o’clock the streets are invaded by little black Wog boys with bundles of newspapers. They shriek, “Stahs’n Straipes. Stahs’n Straipes.” The Army newspaper is out again. This is the only news most of our men get. In fact, little news comes here. New York and London are much better informed than this station, which is fairly close to action. But it seems to be generally true that the closer to action you get, the more your interest in the over-all picture diminishes.

Soldiers here are not so much interested in the trend of war as the soldiers are in training camps at home. Here the qualities of the mess, the animosities with the sergeant, the price of wine are much more important than the world at war.

This is a mad, bright, dreamlike place. It is probable that our soldiers will remember it as a whirl of color and a polyglot babble. The heat makes your head a little vague, so that impressions run together and blot one another up. Outlines are hazy. It will be a curious memory when the soldiers try to sort it out to tell about after the war, and it will not be strange if they improvise a bit.

A WATCH CHISELER