Part 18

The week had been fully occupied with the preparations for these two concerts, but notwithstanding the attendant excitements and elations I had periods of great despondency. The possibility of continuing my mission in France seemed less and less capable of fulfilment, partly owing to the tense military situation and partly because I did not seem to get the proper assistance from the Y. M. C. A. Mr. McLane and Mr. Sloane, at the head of affairs in New York, had given me their enthusiastic support, and I had sailed at their urgent request. They had cabled and written full instructions to the “Y” in France, and on my arrival Mr. Ernest Carter, the head worker, whom I liked exceedingly, had promised me the fullest co-operation. But he was evidently harassed and overworked and did not get the efficient help which he should have had in the running of so large an organization in war time. Many of the heads of departments were ex-clergymen or church and Sunday-school workers who were evidently inexperienced in the management of practical affairs. I am told that later on this condition was much improved and that the men who were subsequently sent out from America were chosen more for their business ability, but at the time I mention, the confusion at the headquarters in the Rue d’Agesseau was often great and there seemed to be insufficient co-operation between the different departments. In order to be able to travel around France unmolested I had to have a _carte rouge_, and this card it seemed impossible to obtain for me, notwithstanding all my proper and complete credentials as an American, as a musician well known all over our country, and, above all, as a _persona grata_ with the French Government.

A few days before my first concert I was informed that it was impossible to procure this card for me, and that therefore I could not be permitted to leave Paris. When I asked for an explanation, it was refused by a rather sanctimonious person who put his arm around me, called me brother, but expressed his regret at the unfortunate fact of my having been born in Germany. I swallowed my rage as best I could, but my chagrin was all the greater because in the meantime M. Casadesus and four other distinguished French artists had offered me their services to travel around with me in a motor-car and give concerts in our camps and hospitals. I finally obtained the information from a very nice young man who was in charge of the entertainment division of the “Y” that he understood that the objections came from the Intelligence Department of the A. E. F. I immediately called on Major Cabot Ward, the head of the Intelligence Division in Paris whom I had known in New York for twenty-five years. I showed him my various credentials, and he assured me that: “As far as the United States army is concerned, you are as free as air.” I returned with this information to the Rue d’Agesseau and was met by the same impenetrable wall of ignorance or ill-will; and, as my friends at the French High Commission had already assured me that as far as they were concerned all France was open to me, I seemed to be at my wit’s end how to unravel this riddle.

I finally called on my friend, Robert Bliss, counsellor of our embassy in Paris. I can never forget his kindness and helpfulness during this period. He and his charming wife had made their apartment the very centre of American life during those trying times. Mrs. Bliss had resolutely refused to leave Paris, and dispensed a generous hospitality at their apartment in the Rue Henri Moissan. When I told him of my troubles and that I, who had lived in America forty-seven years, should now be thus treated, he smiled and said: “We can do nothing for you at present, as you are still a part of the organization of the Y. M. C. A., but as soon as you get that uniform off, you will find every road open to you.”

That wretched uniform! It had annoyed me from the first moment I had put it on because the tailor to whom the “Y” had sent me had made a miserable job of it. It was too narrow between the shoulders, which is fatal for an orchestral conductor, and the trousers were a tragedy. But there was no time before sailing to order a better-fitting uniform, and as I had been told that I could not move an inch in France without it I had literally taken no civilian clothes with me! I had ordered some new clothes in Paris, but there was a tailors’ strike on and I was therefore, for decency’s sake, compelled to hold on to that uniform, much as I longed to divest myself of the symbol of the sacred triangle. However, I began to see daylight, and as I hoped by the following Monday or Tuesday to get my new civilian clothes, I decided to conduct the two concerts on Saturday and Sunday and then magnificently hand in my resignation. But I was not spared a last drop of bitterness, for on Saturday morning I received a visit from a very stupid and exasperating _officier de liaison_ of the Y. M. C. A., who proceeded to inform me that as I had been “born in Germany” and therefore could not obtain my _carte rouge_, the committee of the “Y” thought that I should not conduct the two concerts in their uniform. Again that accursed uniform! I was so enraged that I said I would either conduct in it or in my underclothes, that my resignation had already been written and would be presented on Monday, and that I insisted on an interview with Mr. Carter and his executive committee, as I wished them to know how I had been treated. I knew that Mr. Carter, poor man, had no knowledge of the entire affair, as he had been zigzagging around France all this time to the various posts and supply centres of the “Y,” trying to bring some kind of order out of chaos. He immediately accorded me a meeting, and when I told my story, made me an apology so ample and generous that I left him with none but the kindliest feelings and really regretted that he, a man of high ideals and spiritual power, should through the exigencies of war have been so overburdened with practical affairs. For a few of his aides I have nothing but absolute contempt, but there were many among the men workers and certainly the majority of the women who gave wonderful service and gladly suffered all kinds of annoyances and deprivations in order to help the soldiers, who were not all angels by any means.

But my real triumph was to come on the very Sunday morning of my concert when General Charles Dawes, of the American army, called on me at my hotel and, to my amazement, asked me whether I could come to the general headquarters of the A. E. F. at Chaumont, and confer with General Pershing regarding the possible improvement of our army bands. I could not believe my ears that so suddenly after my bitter experiences with the “Y,” the commander-in-chief of the American army in France had personally sent for me.

General Dawes was at that time at the head of the army supplies, with headquarters in Paris. A great lover of music, he had contributed largely to its cultivation in his own city of Chicago. He was an old and valued friend of General Pershing and I think that it was he who had suggested my name to him. I can never thank General Dawes enough for giving me, a musician and over fifty years of age, this wonderful opportunity to touch even the outer hem of the robes of the war goddess.

Needless to say, my despondent mood immediately changed to one of elation. I accepted the invitation with alacrity and arranged with General Dawes to go to Chaumont on the following Wednesday, July 17.

In the meantime the air had been full of rumors regarding the “Big Bertha” who had been conveniently silent ever since my arrival in Paris. It was persistently said that on Monday morning seventeen of these ladies bearing the same name would again begin a bombardment of Paris, and I confess that it gave me something of a shock, when, on the Monday morning after my concert while I was still luxuriating in bed—thinking with pleasure of the triumphs of the day before and with eager anticipation of my approaching trip to Chaumont—I suddenly heard a curious reverberation, different from the explosions of the Gothas or of the answering air-guns. It was the first greeting of Madame Bertha, and this greeting was repeated punctiliously every fifteen minutes throughout the day, the shells striking in Paris in different quarters.

It was interesting to watch the French people. After every shot, crowds of them would run into the streets, talking, gesticulating, and speculating where that particular shell had fallen. This would go on for thirteen or fourteen minutes and then all would scoot back into their shops and houses as they knew that the next shell was about due.

That evening I had been invited to dine at Mrs. Edith Wharton’s, at her lovely apartment in the Rue de Varennes. Just as I got to her door a Frenchman stopped and said to me that he had been at the concert on the preceding day. He then added: “I see that you are making the acquaintance of ‘La Grosse Berthe.’” Thinking that he referred to the return of the bombardment, I smiled assent, and then proceeded to Mrs. Wharton’s apartment. I found our great novelist with two other ladies, an American officer, and an American composer, my dear friend Blair Fairchild, who had been living in Paris for several years and was acting most ably as distributing agent for the money which our “Society of American Friends of Musicians in France” was sending over. The dinner proceeded as if we lived in times of deepest peace. It was served with punctilious efficiency, the flowers were charming, and the conversation delightful, and it was only when dinner was half over that I found out, quite casually, that what my French gentleman at the door had referred to was, that only two minutes before my arrival the last shell of the Big Bertha had fallen on the roof of the house opposite, demolishing it and parts of the upper story.

On the following Wednesday, July 17, I took the morning train for Chaumont, again comfortably clad in civilian clothes. I was met at the station by a young officer, Lieutenant Wendell, nephew of my old friend Evart Wendell, who took me to general headquarters and introduced me to Lieutenant-Colonel Collins, secretary of the General Staff, who explained to me in detail various points on which General Pershing desired information and assistance. I was then most comfortably put up at the guest-house, formerly a large private residence in the town, which had been taken over by General Pershing to accommodate his visitors. I was to dine at his château that evening, and spent a great part of the afternoon walking through the quaint old hill town situated on a high cliff overlooking the valley of the Marne. It was during this walk that I saw the only drunken American private during my three months’ stay in France. I was following a picturesque road leading out of the town into the country, when a colored boy in khaki reeled toward me and said: “’Scuse me, sah. Are you a Frenchman?” I said “No,” and he replied: “Then foh Gawd sake, will you please tell me whar ah can get a drink?” I answered: “No. You have evidently had enough already.” He tried to follow me and I, seeing two white soldiers approaching, turned to them, and said: “I think you had better take care of this boy. He has had too much to drink.” They briskly answered: “Certainly, sir.” But as they went up to him he kept peering at me and said: “I want to talk to that gen’leman. That’s Mr. Damrosch!” I laughed out loud, for here I was, over three thousand miles from home, and this boy, who perhaps had musical inclinations and had heard me conduct in some concert, recognized me even through the alcoholic vapors which surrounded him so thickly that one could have cut them with a knife.

One of the other visitors at the guest-house was General Omar Bundy, who commanded the first division and had come to Chaumont to receive the congratulations of the commander-in-chief on the splendid work of his division. He proved a delightful gentleman, and we chatted together very amicably as a motor-car took us that evening about five miles beyond Chaumont through most lovely country to the château surrounded by exquisite gardens and woods which General Pershing had taken for his personal residence. A scene of greater peace and tranquillity could not be imagined, and literally the only sign and symbol of war was the solitary sentry pacing up and down before the entrance, with bayonet fixed.

As this happened to be the first day of General Foch’s great attack in which he pushed the Germans back six miles, General Pershing, who had been at the front all day, had not yet returned, and General Bundy and I walked through the grounds in the lovely evening twilight for perhaps half an hour, when a motor-car drove up and our great commander-in-chief, accompanied by his aide, immediately came over to us and made us welcome in hearty and simple fashion. He reminded me that we had met at the Presidio in San Francisco during the great exhibition of 1915, and indeed I remembered it well, for shortly afterward he had been sent to the Mexican border in command of the troops, and while there had been overwhelmed by the terrible tragedy of the death of his wife and children, who were suffocated in a fire at night which destroyed their home at the Presidio.

So much has been written regarding the wonderful impression which General Pershing made in Europe on all who came in contact with him that it is not necessary for me to more than echo the general chorus of praise—soldierly, dignified, courteous, and simple in his bearing, wearing a uniform as only a man can who has been a soldier all his life.

We entered the house and shortly after sat down to dinner. The party consisted of the commander-in-chief, General Bundy, and a most delightful staff of eight officers—I being the only civilian. As such I expected and half hoped that the talk would be all about the wonderful success of the first day’s push by Foch, of which I had already heard enthusiastic rumors in the town, or of great military secrets, affairs of strategy, monster guns, thousands of airplanes, and new, mysterious machines of destruction. But, to my surprise, the conversation during almost the entire dinner was of music, of its influence in raising the spirits of the soldier, in giving him the right kind of recreation and the necessary relief from the monotony of camp work or the horrors of battle. General Pershing told me that after hearing some of the crack military bands of France and England he had been so overwhelmed by the consciousness of our inferiority that he was eager to know if something could not be done to improve the general standard of our army bands, and, more particularly, whether it might not be possible at least to take out the best players from among the bands then in France and to form a headquarters band of superior excellence, led by the best bandmaster among them, and in this way form a model which the others could endeavor to copy. This suggestion seemed to me excellent, and I asked how many bandmasters there were at present in France, as I would like to examine them as to their fitness. General Pershing said, with a smile, that there were over two hundred, but this did not phase me and I agreed to examine them all, provided that proper arrangements could be made for a fitting test of their qualifications. Various plans for such an examination were discussed and General Pershing finally decided to send them all to Paris in batches of fifty every week, together with a military band which should be stationed there for the following four or five weeks, thus giving me abundant opportunity to test their efficiency in conducting as well as in harmony and orchestration. It seemed to me at the time remarkable that, in the midst of war and with all its many immediate necessities weighing upon him, General Pershing should have had the acumen to perceive the value of music in war time and to interest himself in its improvement.

As I sat there, the memory of the hollow-cheeked Bandmaster Tyler who had stood next to me at the Fourth of July parade in Paris suddenly came back. I thought to myself that here I was, the only civilian at the table, and that therefore I might say anything I pleased without being put up against a wall at sunrise and shot, for at the worst they could only consider me as very ignorant of army customs. Therefore I watched for my opportunity and suddenly plunged in and spoke of my conversation with Bandmaster Tyler while we were waiting for our marines to march down the Champs-Élysées. I said that in my humble opinion it was a great mistake to use musicians as stretcher-bearers in battle, not that their lives as soldiers were any more valuable than those of any others in the army, but that a stretcher-bearer could be trained in a very short time while it took many months to train a bandsman; that the Canadian regiments had followed the same custom during the first months of the war, but the results had been so dire in destroying the bands and their usefulness, that the soldiers themselves had implored their commanding officers not to let their bandsmen be sacrificed in this way, as there was nothing so terrible as coming back after battle to a silent and therefore desolate camp. After I had finished my rather impassioned peroration, General Bundy and others heartily agreed with me, but General Pershing said nothing at all, and I felt that I had perhaps talked too much and _mal à propos_. But the following morning, as I was seated with Colonel Collins at general headquarters arranging the details of my examinations, he smilingly handed me an order from the commander-in-chief which had just arrived and which was to be sent to the division commanders, to the effect that “from now on bandsmen are not to be used any longer as stretcher-bearers except in cases of extreme military urgency.”

One of General Pershing’s remarks during the dinner is so characteristic that I repeat it here. He said: “When peace is declared and our bands march up Fifth Avenue I should like them to play so well that it will be another proof of the advantage of military training.” Subsequent developments and meetings with this interesting man further deepened the impression which he made upon me.

I returned to Paris and proceeded to make all necessary arrangements for the examinations of the two hundred bandmasters. Our army had leased a large hotel near the Bastille on the banks of the Seine, and a large room on the ground floor served admirably for my purpose. The band of the 329th infantry soon arrived and was quartered in this hotel, and every morning at 9.30 the examinations began and continued from Monday to Thursday at the rate of about fifty bandmasters a week, who arrived from all quarters of France—from the seaport towns, from the training camps, and some even from the very front line of the trenches. Fridays I would usually return to headquarters and report on my findings and begin recommendations, which gradually assumed greater and greater proportions as the magnitude of the work developed.

To assist me in this prodigious work, I engaged the services of M. Francis Casadesus, brother of Henri and a splendid musician. He examined the men as to their qualifications in instrumentation and in their general knowledge of the various instruments, while I examined them in the actual process of conducting and drilling a band. I would first let them bite their teeth into an overture like the “Oberon” of Weber, or a movement from a classical symphony, and then would let them conduct a composition of their own choice. I found very soon that while most of these young bandmasters were musically talented and ambitious, they had had no or but little opportunity for acquiring what we may call the technic of the baton. They had had no intensive disciplinary training such as our young officers from civilian life had received at Plattsburg and similar camps. Many of them did not know how to beat time properly, much less train a band in phrasing or rhythmic accuracy; and I soon saw that unless some opportunity was given them to learn at least the rudiments of their calling, the effort toward improving our bands would be useless. It therefore seemed to me that the quick formation of a bandmasters’ school was the only solution of the problem, and as our army had had the help of French military and aviation officers as instructors, loaned to us by the _Ministère de la Guerre_, I thought that a similar arrangement could be made, under which we might obtain the necessary musical instructors also from the French army, as nearly all the musicians of France were at that time in uniform.

I also discovered that some of the most important musical instruments which give mellowness and nobility to the tone of a band were almost utterly lacking. We had hardly any oboes, bassoons, French horns, or flügelhorns. I knew that some of the greatest masters of these instruments, first prizes of the Conservatoire of Paris, were serving in the French army, and immediately, through the _Ministère des Beaux Arts_, obtained their names and the regiments to which they belonged. On the following visit to Chaumont I proposed to General Pershing that we form a music-school at which fifty bandmasters could get the most intensive musical training and discipline for eight weeks, to be succeeded by a new batch of fifty, etc., and at the same time forty pupils each in oboe, bassoon, French horn, and flügelhorn could get a similar training of twelve weeks on their respective instruments.

General Pershing and his staff were delighted with the plan and I offered to procure the necessary instructors from the French army, promising General Pershing that the school would be in complete running order by October 1, provided a proper building could be obtained. The general asked me where I wished to place the school and offered me Longres, where several schools on the strategy of war were already in progress, but I claimed that the surroundings for my music-school should be of a more “peaceful and even academic character,” and suggested Chaumont. General Pershing smiled, but insisted that it was already overcrowded and that I would not be able to find a building large enough to house so great a number of instructors and pupils. He gave me full power, however, to see what could be done, and I set forth immediately with a French liaison officer—member of the French Military Commission at Chaumont, and in G-5, general headquarters, under which department the proposed music-school would come—who proved a most remarkable and valuable assistant in my work. He was Lieutenant Michel Weill, nephew of the owner of the well-known White House in San Francisco, and an enthusiastic musical amateur who, through his long residence in America, had acquired a knowledge of English and a sympathy for America only second to that for his own native land. He belonged to a delightful French officers’ mess at Chaumont, and they immediately made me a kind of honorary member and in most hospitable fashion invited me to their Lucullan repasts. As they were all enthusiastic lovers of music, I endeavored to repay them by pounding out Wagner, their supreme favorite, to their hearts’ content on an old upright piano placed in a little sitting-room next to their _salle à manger_.