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Thursday, October 25, 2018

Luther Pittman's Letter from France to Franklin N.C. Family, Oct. 25, 1918

“Pays Visit to French Cathedral,” from the front page of The Franklin Times, Louisburg, N.C., Friday, Oct. 25, 1918. Luther Pittman was a former printer’s devil, an apprentice at the newspaper.

Says France Is a Most Beautiful Country with Fine People. . . Letter From Soldier Boy Mr. Luther Pittman

Below we have the pleasure of publishing for the benefit of our readers a letter received recently from a Franklin County boy in France.

Camp De Grasse, France
September 30
My Darling Mother:
Appended below you will find a few notes on France, very brief in detail, but at the same time I trust they will convey to you a faint imagination at least of the kind of country so many of us American boys are working and fighting for and trying to free from the ravages of a world war that has sapped the best manhood from so many allied nations.

The coast of France is thickly dotted with hills covered with green shrubbery and garden plots. Each hill in itself is a small village or rural settlement, composed of good fathers and loving mothers, the parents of bright happy children, home makers and home lovers. Traveling inward from the coast one notices that the land becomes more level and large farms divide the towns which are so numerous in France. There is a village in France for every country store in America.

It seems that Nature is the master artist here and the prevailing color is green. Alongside the roads, food paths and railroads of France are beautiful green hedges. The trees are grown in columns without a twig or leaf for a distance of 50 feet from the earth, every tall and stately with thick foliage at the very top, forming wonderful big arbors, a place of rest and comfort for the work weary, a path for love and lovers. Nature’s great whispering cathedral for her worshippers and a silent shrine for the idealist and dreamer.

Sunny France is God’s quiet, quaint masterpiece, a gift from the Divine to a worthy people.
The cities and towns of France are very old, being constructed when modern engineering was in its infancy. The streets wind and twist in a zig zag course. The buildings are old ??? Renown and never have I seen more beautiful architecture and the blend of the artistic displayed with more skill and intelligence. There are buildings here built by the Romans over 1,000 years ago. The cathedrals deserve especial mention. I have had the pleasure of visiting some of the oldest and I know what value is placed on them by the tourist and in what reverence they are held by the natives.

I arrived in a certain large city in France one Saturday night and on the following day I attended services in one of these old cathedrals. I was astonished and pleased by the outside appearance. A great magnificent stone structure as if it had been carved from a mountain of rock. Fantastic shapes and the weird forms or reptiles peeping over the ledges and windows with tongue hanging out and large, bleary tone eye. I stood gazing mystified wondering what peculiar sentiment in the artist prompted him to thus embellish the exterior of a structure dedicated to the worship of the Almighty. Suddenly I realized that it was that peculiar attachment of the artist to God, who is enabled to see beauty in everything, even in the hideous, creeping, crawling things, and passed on inside with the great throng of both French and Americans bent on one purpose of united worship. Mystified by the exterior, I was struck with awe by the beauty of the interior. The structure itself bears the date of 1170. Just to the left of the front entrance is a picture of Joan of Arc painted in the fourteenth century on her big white charger.

Casting my eyes on around the walls I beheld the likeness of our Savior going through the agonies of the crucifixion, while drinking the last bitter cup allotted to him while on earth. Underneath each picture carved in stone was a clock with the hands pointed to the different hours of the days in which he suffered the crucifixion and fulfilled the prophecy of the resurrection. It was beautiful, Mother, and wish so much you could have seen it.

These are not the only pictures dimly lighted by stained glass windows which somewhat mellows the agonies of our Christ and adds heightened beauty to the Virgin Mary, but these are the ones that appealed to me most, the others I will describe to you when I can once again hold you in my arms.
The pipe organ of this vast cathedral is nearly as large as the Louisburg Baptist church, supported by columns of stone on which rests statues of Christ with a halo of glory above his head. If you are in the rear of the church it is almost impossible to hear the speaker and the singing of the choir, cut off by the enormous supporting pillars of stone that upholds the interior, sounds like the droning of honey bees, the song of the flowing rivulet, the twitter of birds. It was like this in beauty to me, because I could not understand the words as the service was in the French language.

The pictures of the French are as wonderful as their buildings and I have seen some masterpieces of art in the great studios here that I wish I could describe to you, but just a few words more about the habits and the customs of the people, mother, and I won’t torture you any more this time with my lengthy letter.

There are very few men seen on the streets of the cities as the majority of them are at the front. Black is the prevailing color of dress. Nearly every family in France is in mourning for some lost husband, brother, or sweet heart. Of course the style of dress is known to you from it is from the French that we get our styles. A large per cent of the real poorer classes wear wooden shoes, and the little children sitting outside their little stone homes at even tide paint a picture of pathetic beauty with a stray kitten or little hungry dog in their laps.

The people are full of mercy and tenderness. Since my stay in France I have not seen a child slapped by its parents or an animal of any kind receive abuse at the hand of its master. They despise pain as a woman despises a rat. Pardon the comparison. The French will often tell you that the Americans do not know how to live. We are forever chasing the almighty dollar and very few of us ever spend a quiet evening by our own firesides, while they hate to leave home and seldom do except in case of necessity. They are great home lovers, and to my mind this is the reason and the secret of the greatness of France.

The farmers are rather antiquated in their method of battling the soil and the scythe and sickle is still their great reaper. There are very few four-wheel vehicles among the farmers, most of them using what we call the dog cart. Every morning an old woman serving bread can be seen pulling her own cart with the assistance of two faithful old dogs as helpers.

There is a wonderful virtue in the womanhood of this country ad they deserve praise and credit.
The following is the price I have paid for a few articles I have bought and according to the price the common little morsels at home are luxuries here. One peach, 16 cents, cantaloupe 60 cents. Eggs $1.10 per dozen, and everything else is in proportion.

In my next letter, mother I will write what the boys behind the lines are doing and the relative value of their services compared to those at the front. I don’t have much time to write but I will do the best I can. I ought to be in bed now.

No, don’t send me the News and Observer. We have American dailies printed right here in France but pay a compliment to Mr. Asher Johnson for me and send the good old home paper. The Franklin Times on which I had the pleasure of being office devil.

Pardon this terrible writing. I am using a French machine, and it is a little different from the American, and some characters that are needed are missing and some that we don’t need fill their places.

Give my best regards to all my old friends there and with a thousand hugs and kisses to your dear self, I am

Your loving son,
Luther

Martin L. Pittman, A.P.O. 717
Camp DeGrasse
American E.F., France

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