Sweethearts of the A.E.F.

Elsie Janis was a comedian who sang, danced, and cartwheeled her way into the hearts of American soldiers. The “Sweetheart of the A.E.F.” was also one of the most popular American entertainers of the early twentieth century.  Janis visited First World War hospitals and military camps, sharing laughter and music with thousands of doughboys, and by March of 1918 she had already given over 400 performances.*

Elsie Janis entertains the troops

From her impersonations of Charlie Chaplin to her frequently repeated shout to the troops, ““Do I come from Ohio? By damn yes!” Janis touched her audiences with “an American performance, by an American girl, done in an American way, the first of its kind to be seen by most of the audience in many months.”**

Whether it was Elsie Janis, the women of Belgium, or sweethearts back home, women often gave soldiers the motivation to fight.  The American military newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, championed Janis as “an oasis of color and vivacity in the midst of a dreary desert” proclaiming, “Elsie Janis is as essential to the success of this Army as charge of powder is essential to the success of a shell. More entertainment by her and ‘the likes of her’ and less instruction by people who take themselves seriously—that’s one formula for winning the war!”†

Letters from women back home were equally important to the troops.  One soldier wrote to his sweetheart, “I get a lot of peace thinking about you.  I like to think of the good times we used to have and dream of the good times to come when I get home again.”††

Idealized views of women powerfully influenced the morale of soldiers; Harry L. Parker was a young American lieutenant who saw humor in the situation.

Popular song, 1917

Left Behind

I got a letter from

My girl. She said,

“I love you.

When the mud is

Thick, and

You have a large pack on

Your back

And you are hungry

And tired

Think of me.

I love you.”

And one day we were

On the march.

The mud was

Thick. And

I had a large

Pack

On my back

And I was

Hungry

And tired, when

I fell to thinking

Of her.

And

A lieutenant

Gave me

A swift kick

And set me to

Double timing

To

Catch up.

            —Harry L. Parker

The poem’s title evokes the left-right-left of the soldier’s marching cadence, the girl he left behind, and his own lagging pace.  As well, the poem’s uneven line lengths suggest the faltering pace of the man’s attempts to march in step with his company, as they echo his exhaustion and disjointed thoughts. But the awkward line breaks are also what give the poem its whimsical humor. They highlight his sweetheart’s romantic words –“Think of me” and “I love you” – and then contrast these with the grueling realities of war: “Pack” and “Hungry.” 

What bridges the gap between the tensions of war and the soldier’s dreams of his girl? An officer’s swift kick to the man’s “left behind” recalls him to his place and sends him double timing to catch up with his unit.  With gently ironic humor, the poem states that individual soldiers are ordered to discard their personal motivations and instead to surrender themselves to the army and its agenda.  

Clemson year book, 1914

Lieutenant H.L Parker (later promoted to Captain) was a doughboy from South Carolina who attended Clemson College, where he was voted “Wittiest” and “Most Original” in his graduating class.  Joining the American Expeditionary Force, he served in the supply department of the Stars and Stripes.  Harry Parker survived the war. In 1924, he earned a doctorate from the University of Paris and began a long and distinguished career as an entomologist and expert in the control of biological pests.

He died in Cannes in 1979, and colleagues remembered his intelligence, quick wit, and “joie de vivre” – as well as noting an intriguing detail from his personal life.  Harry Parker did not return home to a sweetheart in South Carolina, but rather in 1923, he married Henriette Charraire, a young French girl. Their marriage lasted for over fifty-five years, until Henriette was left behind at his death.

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*”Elsie One of Us While War Lasts.” Stars and Stripes, 29 March 1918, p. 7.  

**“Elsie Janis Here to Delight AEF: Musical Comedy Star Has Already Set New Handspring Record.” Stars and Stripes, 8 March 1918, p. 6.

†”Elsie.” Stars and Stripes, 15 March, 1918, p. 4.

††Elmer Lewis to Goldie Little, personal letter quoted in Richard, S. Faulkner, Pershing’s Crusaders: The American Soldier in World War I, University Press of Kansas, 2017, p. 536.

I Sit and Sew

Detail of WWI recruiting poster

Referring to your memorandum of February 12^th, relative to the appointment and training of colored nurses for colored soldiers, at the present time colored nurses are not being accepted for service in the Army Nurse Corps, as there are no separate quarters available for them and it is not deemed advisable to assign white and colored nurses to the same posts.

            — W.C. Gorgas, Surgeon General, U.S. Army, Feb. 14, 1918*

As America mobilized for war in 1917, political rallies, recruiting events, posters, and news editorials reminded them of why they were joining the bloodiest conflict the world had yet known: they were fighting to make the world safe for democracy.  But an editorial appearing in the New York Tribune voiced the concerns of many Americans and challenged that premise:

Democracy implies equality of privilege and equal obligation of service.  If we fight for this for the world in general we ought to be prepared to practice it among ourselves.  At present we mingle democracy with discriminations.  All the elements of our citizenship do not stand on the same level.**

Crisis, March 1918

The editorial denounced the inequities and harsh treatment that black soldiers were regularly experiencing, but it failed to mention that black women who attempted to assist in the war effort were also the victims of prejudice. Hired for factory work at salaries considerably below those paid to white women performing the same jobs, black women were also frequently barred from volunteering as canteen and aid workers. Perhaps most concerning was the treatment of black nurses. Emmett J. Scott, Special Advisor of Black Affairs to the Secretary of War, sent a memo denouncing the War Department’s discriminatory policies:

 It is difficult for me to understand why some colored nurses have not been given an opportunity to serve. This vexing question is being put to me almost daily by colored newspaper editors, colored physicians, surgeons, etc., who are constantly bombarding my sector of the War Department, inquiring what has been done, and urging that something should be done in the direction of utilizing professional trained and efficient colored nurses.***

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a poet, playwright, journalist, and political activist. During the war, she was the only black woman to serve on the Women’s Committee of the Council of Defense (organizing women’s groups and supporting women’s war efforts), and she was active in the Circle of Negro War Relief, establishing a local chapter to provide assistance to black soldiers and their families.†  

 In 1918, her war poem “I Sit and Sew” was published in the A.M.E. Church Review.

I Sit and Sew

I sit and sew – a useless task it seems,

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams –

The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,

Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken

Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,

Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath –

But – I must sit and sew.

I sit and sew –  my heart aches with desire  –

That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire

On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things

Once men. My soul in pity flings

Appealing cries, yearning only to go

There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe  –

But  – I must sit and sew.

The little useless seam, the idle patch;

Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,

When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,

Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?

You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream

That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,

It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?

            —Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Stifled, despairing, yet dreaming, a woman occupies her hands with a mundane domestic task while her heart and mind yearn to leave for the battlefields.  She is not naïve in imagining a glorious war. This woman knows of the “wasted fields” on which lie “writhing grotesque things/ Once men.” It is in fact because of these men who are “Pitifully calling me” that she longs to travel to “that holocaust of hell,” to assist the wounded where they “lie in sodden mud and rain.” But—as is repeated three times in the poem—she is condemned to wait, to sit, to sew.

Crisis, August 1918

In 1920, Dunbar-Nelson’s lengthy essay “Negro Women in War Work” appeared in Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War.††  Her essay describes how “Into this maelstrom of war activity the women of the Negro race hurled themselves joyously. They asked no odds, remembered no grudges, solicited no favors, pleaded for no privileges. They came by the thousands, hands opened wide to give of love and service and patriotism” (375).

And yet as Dunbar-Nelson acknowledges, “The problem of the woman of the Negro race was a peculiar one….There were separate regiments for Negro soldiers; should there be separate organizations for relief work among Negro women? If she joined relief organizations, such as the Red Cross Society, and worked with them, would she be assured that her handiwork would reach black hands on the other side of the world, or should she be great-hearted and give her service, simply for the sake of giving, not caring who was to be benefited?” (376).

Dunbar-Nelson’s essay asserts that black women “did all that could be done—all that they were allowed to do” (377), but they were blocked from fully supporting their troops.  Like Emmett J. Scott, she found the order excluding black nurses from overseas service deeply troubling: “Colored women since the inception of the war had felt keenly their exclusion from overseas service. The need for them was acute; their willingness to go was complete; the only thing that was wanted was authoritative sanction” (378).

The African American community feared that without black nurses, black soldiers would receive inadequate medical care. Social codes forbidding intimacies between the races were likely to prevent white women from nursing black soldiers, and segregated hospital facilities were likely to offer substandard medical care. The concerns were real: during the war, black soldiers died at a disproportionately higher rates due to poorly staffed, segregated hospitals.†††

The poem “I Sit and Sew” testifies to the complex intersections of gender and race in America.  In the conclusion to her essay “Negro Women and War Work,” Dunbar-Nelson praises black women for not only their war service, but their persistent hope in the face of discrimination:

She shut her eyes to past wrongs and present discomforts and future uncertainties. She stood large-hearted, strong-handed, clear-minded, splendidly capable, and did, not her bit, but her best, and the world is better for her work and her worth (397).

Crisis, May 1919

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*Emmett J. Scott, Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, Homewood Press, 1919, p. 448. 

**“Race Prejudice and the War.” The Chicago Defender, 24 Nov. 1917, p. 12 (thanks to Vinny for this reference).

***Scott, Official History, p. 451.  The memo was sent by Emmet J. Scott to Dean F.P. Keppel, Office of the Secretary of War, dated 28 Feb 1918. 

†Sandra L. West, “Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (Alice Ruth Moore), ” p. 93.  Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Aberjhani and Sandra L. West, Infobase, 2003.

††Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “Negro Women in War Work,” pp. 374-397. Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, edited Emmett J. Scott, Homewood Press, 1919.

†††Emmett J. Scott, “Did the Negro Soldier Get a Square Deal?” pp. 429-430. Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, edited Emmett J. Scott, Homewood Press, 1919.

Burning Beehives

Burning Beehives

Portrait of Edmond Rostand by Pascaud, 1901

In August of 1914, the Germany army invaded Belgium and pushed into France. Almost immediately there arose French reports of German war atrocities, including accounts of rapes, massacres, and the burning of villages. These were later published in Documents Relating to the War, authored by the French Commission to establish acts committed by the enemy in violation of the law of nations (1915).*  The book was translated and reprinted numerous times during the war, appearing in English in The New York Times Current History of the European War (1917).  In Documents, one eye-witness tells of a curé who was arrested in the village of Fraimbois.  Confronting German officers, the village priest asked why they had burned his beehives and received the reply, “What do you expect? It is war!”

Edmond Rostand, best known for his play Cyrano de Bergerac, shaped the story into a poem that merges history, fable, and patriotic political commentary.**  An excerpt of the poem appears below; it can be read in its entirety in French Poems of the Great War, translated by Ian Higgins.

Burning Beehives

How pleasing: straight away, they burned some beehives…

 

Image from film More than Honey

O bees, tumbling, buzzing gold in the blue air,

As long as you’re aloft they haven’t triumphed,

O last little glimmer from the golden age!

‘But why ever are you burning my bees?’

The curé of Fraimbois asked the German brute.

‘That’s war!’ replied the General. – Yes, war as waged

By the horde on the buzz and pride of freedom.

Why, then, did they burn this hive of straw?

Because the hive at work intoned a psalm

As it fashioned what resembled sunbeams.

And earlier, remember, on entering Brussels,

The Chiefs had issued orders to their thugs

Fraimbois, France

To trample the flowerbeds underfoot.

As janissaries† rush to please their vizier,

So the soldiers joyed to stamp down the flowers.

That they should blithely now be burning beehives

Is simple logic: it is but one short step,

One goose-step, from trampled flowers to bees in flames.

How they flared and crackled in the blue air,

And dropped! A fine sight; and the perfumed wax

Streaming black! And then, burn a beehive,

And up in smoke go famous names as well—

Plato, Vergil, La Fontaine, Maeterlinck—

Alongside the bees, as if to fade away,

A further fading out of humanism

To mark the triumph of the feldgrau lout.

French vintage postcard 

The bee is spirit visible in light,

A drop of honey risen on two wings!

How might it ever find forgiveness from

Such clods? The bee is instant choice, sureness

Of touch and taste: briefly floating, exploring—

Then aim, effort, balance, judgement, skill!

And when the human mind in wonderment

Sees, deep in a hive, its own destiny

Mysteriously sketched out by pure instinct,

To serve the Hun it is disinclined! Rather

This sweet, free order than their Discipline!
Yes, hives murmur. – All murmuring will

At once be shriven, purged and burnt alive!

…………………………………………

‘But why,’ the poor priest asked, ‘why burn my beehives?’

Pleasing, then, that to the bees’ good shepherd

The Burner of bees said ‘That’s war.’ –Their war, yes,

But what of ours?

            In those first, tragic days,

When our troops were moving north to Belgium,

It is told that French armoured cavalry

Rode through a Flemish village – I forget

The name – their horses festooned with roses,

French cavalry, Paris 1914

Singing, as they rode, the Marseillaise –

But through their teeth, mouths closed, simply humming;

And it was magnificent.  And this hum

Of Latin anger from across all those flowers,

Wordless, and gestureless, was the growl

Of mind and soul, it was conscience, and reason;

The sound of storm and oratory, pious,

Threatening, and with a fierce, golden

Calm.  Not a single mouth was seen to move,

As though it were the flowers themselves that hummed.

And those who heard it, eyes filled with tears, thought

To hear, in the reddening evening dust,

Some kind of strange Marseillaise hummed by bees…

Thus, with purity and purpose, did our men

Transmute their warlike anthem into a swarm’s hum,

As north they rode, prepared for ambush, prepared to die

For beehives and to save the honey of the world!

            --Edmond Rostand, trans. Ian Higgins

Opening with the bitter irony, the poem condemns the German troops for their rush to destroy life and beauty. In maliciously burning the bees, the invading army has killed the “last little glimmer from the golden age” and launched the world into the chaos and horror of modern, industrialized war.  

French postcard, © Library of International
Contemporary Documentation

Not only has Rostand associated bees with religious martyrs and the enchantment of the natural world (“the hive…intoned a psalm/ As it fashioned…sunbeams”), but bees are one of the oldest symbols of French royalty and power, dating from the Merovingian rulers of the 5^th century and adopted by Napoleon as the emblem of his reign. Repeatedly, the poem links the industrious, selfless bees with France and its army: both bees and French troops hum with the “buzz and pride of freedom,” and both are associated with democracy, culture, industriousness, and peace.

Rostand argues that to burn a hive is to annihilate the ideals expressed by philosophers and authors who wrote of the winged insects: bees settled on Plato’s lips when he was a child; Virgil describes his hopes for Rome’s political renewal in “The Bees”; La Fontaine’s fable “The Hornets and the Bees” praises the bees for their practical approach to conflict resolution, and Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee celebrates their “harmonious concord.”

In burning the hives, the Germans have shown themselves to be opposed to all that the bees represent. The poem depicts German troops as earth-bound clods and brutes who joyfully trample flowers and transform all they touch to ugliness. The grey-clad soldiers blithely watch as perfumed beeswax rises in black smoke and as the bees themselves, like a “drop of honey risen on two wings,” flare, crackle, and fall to the ground.  

Rostand’s poem does not object to the war.  Instead, it commends the poilu for their “purity and purpose.” As they hum the Marseillaise, their national anthem, the men of France are “prepared to die/ For beehives and to save the honey of the world.”†† 

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*Documents relatifs á la guerre, by Commission instituée en vue de constater les actes commis par l’ennemi en violation du droit des gens.

**For other patriotic and nationalistic war poems, see “Hymn of Hate,” “New Year’s Wishes to the German Army,” “Going to the Front,” “A Litany in the Desert,” and “America at War.”

†Elite troops of the Ottoman Sultan -  his household bodyguards (dating from 14^th century).

†† Katharine Tynan’s poem “Telling the Bees” is another poem that relates bees to the Great War.

Their only crime

“Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible.  The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence and discretion, his lack of civic and professional conscience and for his tendency toward undue familiarity. The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.”

            —“Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops,” sent August 7, 1918 from Colonel J.L.A. Linard with the A.E.F. to the French Army. Later published by W.E.B. DuBois in the Crisis, May 1919, pp. 16-18.

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.

Over 350,000 black Americans were inducted into the American Army during the First World War, but units were strictly segregated by race, and black soldiers were assigned to hard labor and low status jobs (such as the grave digging, exhumation, and reburial work of the war). Few black units saw combat; an exception were the units who were assigned to the French military, where they fought with bravery and distinction. In the American Army of the First World War, racism was not only accepted, but often enforced. 

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. has been described as a “forerunner of the African American cultural renaissance of the 1920s,”* and the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance notes that his poetry and one-act play On the Fields of France  provide an important contribution to First World War literature.  Cotter’s poem “O Little David, Play on Your Harp” uses a well-known African-American spiritual to frame the oppression and misery of war, genocide, and racism.  You can listen here to a 1919 recording of the song performed by Lt. Noble Sissle and Lt. James Reese Europe of the 369^th Harlem Hellfighters.

O Little David, Play on Your Harp

O Little David, play on your harp,
That ivory harp with the golden strings
And sing as you did in Jewry Land,
Of the Prince of Peace and the God of Love
And the Coming Christ Immanuel.
O Little David, play on your harp.

A seething world is gone stark mad;

And is drunk with the blood,
Gorged with the flesh,
Blinded with the ashes
Of her millions of dead.
From out it all and over all
There stands, years old and fully grown,
A monster in the guise of man.
He is of war and not of war;
Born in peace,
Nurtured in arrogant pride and greed,
World-creature is he and native to no land.
And war itself is merciful
When measured by his deeds.
Beneath the Crescent
Lie a people maimed;
Their only sin—
That they worship God.
On Russia’s steppes
Is a race in tears;

Crisis, June 1918

Their one offense—
That they would be themselves.
On Flanders plains
Is a nation raped;
A bleeding gift
Of “Kultur’s” conquering creed.
And in every land
Are black folk scourged;
Their only crime—
That they dare be men.

O Little David, play on your harp,
That ivory harp with the golden strings;
And psalm anew your songs of Peace,
Of the soothing calm of a Brotherly Love,
And the saving grace of a Mighty God.
O Little David, play on your harp.

            —Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr.

The celebratory refrain of the Negro spiritual contrasts sharply with a “seething world” that has “gone stark mad.”** Spiraling out of control, the world at war is drunk on blood, sated by the decaying bodies of the dead, and blinded by the ashes of destruction. 

Yet bigger than the war and more terrible than even its slaughter, a monster “of war and not of war” towers over all. This fiend, born in peace, raised by pride, and fed by greed, is a citizen of every nation, and he wears a human disguise. In the Ottoman Empire (“beneath the Crescent”), he has directed the massacre of the Armenians; in Russia’s pogroms, he has murdered thousands of Jews; and he has brutally commanded German atrocities in occupied Belgium. Cotter’s poem unites these victims of deadly prejudice with blacks who are whipped and beaten “in every land”; their only crime is daring to believe themselves fully human. 

Many black Americans hoped the war that was to “make the world safe for democracy” would also address the racism that was prevalent in America. In “O Little David,” Cotter challenges his audience to acknowledge that the enemy within, the “monster in the guise of man,” is as terrible a foe as any to be encountered on the battlefields of Europe. 

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*James Robert Payne, “Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Oxford, 2001, p. 90.

**The subject of the song, however, is relevant to the poem’s message. David’s harp playing was commanded by King Saul, who employed the boy to soothe his mad rages (I Samuel 16), and the young shepherd shocked Israel’s army with his courage and skill in fighting the colossal Goliath (I Samuel 17).