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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