 Chapter 1 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter In these travels in Europe, I shall ask you to explore a new continent. The old Europe died with the World War, and then a new Europe was born. It did not rise phoenix-like from the ashes, but is still in its swaddling close, sprawling about on the floor and trying to grow. Like our own dear babies at home, it shows new aspects each day, and the changes are many and frequent. The social conditions are different. The new woman is rising to an equal plane with the man, and the new man thinks and acts differently from what he did in the past. The nations have new relations to us, and in spirit and fact, we are fast becoming part and parcel with them, sharing in their troubles and borrowing the features in which they excel. Our social and business relations are growing closer, and with railway, steamship, and airplane joined to telegraph, cable, and radio, the world is becoming more and more one vast family where distance apart cuts no figure. And so we are going abroad to visit our cousins on the other side of the water. We have the largest ship ever built, and it will take us only six days to cross the Atlantic. Wakefield in his trips from the blue bed to the brown. Landing in France we shall hire automobiles and move at will over the country, now on the farms, now in the cities, and now on the battlefields, where our troops took a life part in the world war. We shall spend some time in Paris and other industrial centers and then cross over to visit our busy Belgian friends. We shall stop a while in Brussels and Antwerp, go out to see the new library of Louvet, built by Americans, and pass through historic Bruges and Ghent. Our first view of Holland will be from an airplane, after which we shall come down to Earth and take trips along the treeline canals, inspecting the wonders of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, and the quaint villages of the Zyder Z. A step farther will bring us to the low, flat lands of the Danes, with its luxuriant pastures, helpful hens, and cooperative farms. We shall visit Copenhagen, the seaport guarding the Baltic, and then go northward to the fjords of the Scandinavian peninsula. Here we shall stop in Christiania, the capital of Norway, and motor a while through its woods and farms before going to Sweden, where our journey ends in Stockholm, the island city of Europe. In these travels, as always, I have tried not to philosophize and do not predict. I have attempted only to give plain, homely pictures of what I have seen, and if these please the reader, I shall be amply repaid. Chapter 2 of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter I feel that I am the modern Columbus. At the end of the 15th century, the great Genoese started west across the Atlantic and discovered America. In the youth of the 20th century, I am starting across the Atlantic to discover the new world of Europe. Columbus had a fleet of three little vessels. His flagship, the Santa Maria, was only 90 feet long and 20 feet wide, and its displacement was about 35 tons. My ship is the majestic, the biggest boat that has plowed the sea since God divided the waters. It is more than double the length of the arc of old Noah and thrice its depth from the hurricane deck to the keel. It is just about 1700 times the size of the flagship of Columbus. To be exact, it has 56,000 gross tonnage, is 956 feet long, 100 feet wide, and a little more than 100 feet deep. But figures mean nothing except to an Einstein, an Isaac Newton, or a Humphrey Davy. Let me give you some concrete comparisons. Take the Woolworth building in Lower New York. Let the genie who moved Aladdin's palace in the wink of an eye, lift it up and lay it lengthwise beside us out here in mid-ocean. The majestic is almost 200 feet longer, and its cubic contents are, I should say, greater. When the Central Park obelisk was brought from Egypt to New York, it filled the steamer on which it was carried. You could put the Washington Monument, the greatest of all obelisks on the deck of the majestic, and there would still be 200 feet between its aluminum tip and the prow, and a light distance from its base to the stern. Noah's Ark, estimating the qubit at 18 inches, was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and the Bible says it had only three stories. This flagship of mine has nine decks, and if a 10-story apartment house could be built on its keel, the roof would not reach the base of the smokestacks. Two such arcs could be laid lengthwise inside the majestic, and there would still be three decks above and three decks below. The captain tells me it takes a nine-mile walk to see all of the ship. I'm sure he is right, for I make a Sabbath day's journey every time I go from my room to my meals. Just an item or so to emphasize these dimensions. Take a look at the great anchors which are dropped to steady the ship in the harbors. Beside them the anchors of Columbus's ships were fish hooks. Indeed, the majestic anchors might serve as fish hooks for the gods, the lines being cables of wrought steel, each link of which could encircle a Georgia melon. The majestic has one anchor at each side of her prow, and a third, the largest of all, sticks right out of the nose of the ship. Their total weight is 35 tons, and their stems are twice the thickness of a telegraph pole. In order to show you their size, I've had myself photographed standing on the biggest one. It is so heavy that it would take 30 horses to haul it over the road. I am out in the open on the prow of the ship hanging, as it were, in the air, higher above the keel than the roof of a six-story building, 40 feet below the hurricane deck, and 60 feet above the level of the blue sea below. I am not a human fly, and I will leave it to your imagination as to how the picture was taken. Columbus made his famous journey with sails. This ship is driven by turbines that equal the power of 100,000 horses, all working at once. Take out your watch and feel its weight. Mine weighs five ounces. This ship weighs 56,000 tons, and every bit of it is built like a watch. I went in an elevator with the chief engineer down through story after story of the marvelous machinery, and put my hands on the steel wheel that controls the mighty force speeding the majestic through the waves faster than a racehorse can trot. We are making 25 miles an hour, as I write, and our possible speed is 30 or more. Still, with a twist of the wrist, I could stop the ship, and with another twist started going. The captain on the bridge has a thought, and the touch of a button will turn this machinery as he directs. The majestic is now cutting the billows at a mile every two minutes, a rate that would take away the breath of Columbus. He sailed from the Canary Islands to the West Indies in 33 days. The first time I crossed the Atlantic to Europe, I took the largest steamer afloat. That was in my salad days before my red mustache had sprouted. We were eight days going from New York to Liverpool. Today about the same trip has been made by airplane in 24 hours. While the majestic has made the passage between New York and shareboard in five days, six hours and 13 minutes. Where I the witch of Endor, I would raise the spirit of Columbus as she called for that of Samuel for Saul. And I venture that Columbus, when he saw the wonders surrounding him on this great ship, would be more disquieted than was that old prophet of Israel. I should like to show Columbus what makes the force that drives the majestic. It is a power that was unknown until almost 400 years after the Santa Maria was launched. It is oil drawn from the rocky boughs of old Mother Earth. We have 8000 tons of it aboard and are burning more than 30 tons every hour or half ton a minute. The oil is sprayed into the furnaces and the turning of a screw starts the flow. If the ship were fueled like the old style 20th century steamer, it would need 500 additional men to shovel in the coal and dump out the ashes. Fuel oil is now used on all the great liners. It propel ships of our Navy from submarines to super dreadnoughts. And it is the need of such oil that is causing the struggle between the powers for the control of the petroleum fields of the world. I should like to see the ghost of Columbus looking at the magic lights on this steamer. We have 15,000 incandescent bulbs that shine every night. And there are great golden globes set into the ceilings of the Palm Court, the ballroom, and the dining room. A city of 40,000 people could be supplied with lights by our dynamos. And almost every one of these golden golf balls gives out more light rays than all the grease pots or lamps of fish oil, which tried vainly to conquer the darkness of the Santa Maria. Electricity is the slave of the lamp on the majestic. It makes the sun shine at midnight. It does also the cooking and the heating. It runs the elevators from deck to deck. And in case we strike an iceberg or collide with another ship, it will drop the lifeboats down to the sea. It will close in an instant the many watertight doors of the vessel. This electricity even penetrates the waters of the swimming tank, turning their emerald green into the richest of gold, and making the pretty girl bathers look like so many ivory mermaids as they play about in its rays. Indeed, accepting the lifeboats, there's hardly a thing aboard this vessel that suggests the ships of Columbus. The huge monster is made of steel and its armor is a steel shell about as thick as your thumb, which keeps out the water. At the level of the sea and below, this shell is double with an airspace between so large that a big dog could crawl through it. But higher up there is only the single steel skin enclosing the vast complexity of machinery and furnishings. There's nothing on the steamer that recalls the bluff old skipper and the sailors of the days of John and Sebastian Cabot and America's Vespucious. The captain of the ship is a retired Commodore of the British Navy who has been knighted by his king, notwithstanding his titles, he is more simple and unpretentious than the steward who takes care of my room. I have chatted with Sir Bertram on the bridge and in the chart room, and he has no more fuss and feathers about him than any of the other fishing captains I have met in a lifetime of travel. And now let us look at the parlors. When one walks up the gangway of the modern liner, he comes into a floating hotel with elevators that glide noiselessly up and down with walls of ivory whiteness and with frescoed and decorated ceilings upheld by great columns like marble. On B-deck, eight stories above the steel keel, there are three spacious rooms that run the width of the steamer and cover the length of a short city block. They are walled with plate glass windows looking out upon the wide sea. These rooms are from 26 to 30 feet high and are fitted up with furniture worth a king's ransom. At one end is the palm court filled with real palms whose fronds kiss the ceiling. They are set in tubs as big as hog's heads and are bedded in flowers growing out of the earth around their roots. Indeed, Columbus might sit among these tropical trees and imagine himself in the West Indies. Beyond the palm court is a restaurant where if he is not satisfied with the table dote in the dining room, three decks below, one can dine at a dollar a bite. Opposite, across a wide lobby is the lounge, which is almost as long as was the deck of the Santa Maria. At one end of the lounge is the stage large enough to accommodate a dozen musicians. And there the orchestra plays for the dances that we have every evening. It is for all the world like the supper room of a New York hotel with a big dancing space in the center. At night, 300 or 400 people sit in the upholstered chairs on the red velvet carpet that surrounds the dance floor. And men in evening dress and richly clad women move over the floor. That is one of the scenes I should like to show to Columbus. The gowns worn by the dancers are as a rule of silk or filmy chiffon. The stuffs are so sheer that a full dress weighs less than a pound. But that dress is worth more than its weight in gold. If anyone should doubt this, here are the figures. An ounce of gold is worth $20 and a pound avoire du poit would be 16 times that or $320. Many of the gowns seen on this floor every night cost more. And yet one might squeeze them up in one hand and ram them into a tumbler. Nevertheless, some of the girls on this ship don a new dress every evening. But all this is vanity. In the words of King David, yay, it is lighter than vanity. Christopher Columbus, with the odor of the salt junk and slum gullion of four centuries ago in his nostrils, would be more interested in the housekeeping arrangements of this mighty ocean hotel. I shall take his spirit with me down a half dozen stories and show him the kitchens, the butchers and the bakers, and the storerooms filled with supplies enough to feed fat these 5,000 people who have brought their greedy stomachs aboard. I have not space to tell how Columbus cooked for his men, but the ranges for preparing the chops and the steaks on this vessel are as big as a dining table seating a dozen and are kept red hot by electricity. In addition, there are the open fires for cooking roasts and game upon spits, as it was done by Robin Hood and his band in Sherwood Forest before the days of Columbus. And there are great steel kettles for soup, each of which holds as much as a bathtub and breathes out steam like a factory. The spirit of Columbus would see a hundred lamb chops on the stove at one time. And in the bake shops, biscuits and rolls shoveled out of ovens into baskets, each holding four bushels. The majestic cook 6,000 pounds of meat every day. It bakes its own bread, mixing a barrel of flour at a kneading. And it cuts the bread by machinery so fast that one loaf of 72 slices was chopped up in just 30 seconds by the ticks of my watch. I despair of describing the storerooms. One of them has 6,000 wild birds hung up in a temperature 12 degrees below freezing. As I shivered among them, the steward told me he had on hand 1,000 quail, 1,000 pheasants and 500 snipe. His partridge is number 750, to say nothing of 500 wild ducks, ptarmigan and grouse, in genuine Egyptian quail, which I dare say are of the same family as those which fed the Israelites in their Sinai wanderings. I had one of these quail for breakfast this morning. It made me think of a reed bird. It was about as big as the hand of a baby. But let us leave the kitchens and give the ghost of Columbus a look at the linen rooms. The weekly laundry of a ship like this would cover the Santa Maria so that it would be only a needle and a haystack of linen. If it were spread out on the fields of your farm, it would cover every inch of 50 acres. And if upon the roofs of New York, it would make white hundreds, yes, thousands of houses. If hung upon clotheslines, there would float in the breeze 8,000 bedspreads, 10,000 blankets, and 77,000 towels. There would be also 10,000 tablecloths, 45,000 napkins, and more than 5,000 aprons required for the cooks and stewards, as well as doilies and ship's lingerie of one kind and another. The blanket stretched on one line would reach 15 miles, the sheet 16 miles, and the tablecloths and napkins just about as far as from Washington to Baltimore. No washing is done on the ship, yet none of the table linen is used more than once. I don't know what the weekly wash costs, but I am sure it is at one with the other expenses of a great modern steamship. The liner deluxe floats upon dollars, and the thousands of us who cross the Atlantic must pay the bills. These boats are the last word in luxurious travel. The majestic, for instance, has a suite costing $7,000, and its occupants pay for their passage at the rate of about $50 an hour for six days spent on the water. For the price of a working man's house, they get a drying room, a sun porch, two bedrooms, a maid's room, and three baths. The charge includes passage for four persons. Indeed, I can tell you that it takes much more money to go to Europe these days than it did only a decade ago. Then the minimum first-class fare on the great ocean liners was $125, and there were comfortable ships from New York to Liverpool with a minimum charge of $75. I have crossed on a second-class liner, that is, a steamer without any first class for $55, and I once came from London to New York on such a ship for $35. On that trip, I had room board and the voyage for $3.5 a day, or less than the room rate at any of our best-city hotels. Today, the minimum first-class passenger on a liner deluxe is around $275, and that of the second class is $150 or more. And besides, there are an infinite number of incidental expenses. We have more than 2,000 passengers aboard, and I venture $1,200 at least have paid $1.5 for the use of a deck chair. At that rate, on every voyage, the ship will net $1,800 for its chairs alone. Think of paying $275 as the rent of a furnished home on the ocean for six days, and then being charged $1.50 to sit on your veranda. Furthermore, I have been told that I am expected to give $2 more as a fee to the deck steward who folds up this chair every night and unfolds it again in the morning. He does not even move it about, for each passenger is given a place for his chair and is expected to stick to it. And then the other fees that the steamship publicity literature informs the traveler are proper during the voyage. We are told that the average passenger on a big liner is expected to spend $30 in tips. The table steward will be satisfied with a $5 bill, although some pay half as much more or even twice as much. The room steward's fee is another $5. The bath steward should have $0.25 every time you take a bath. The library steward must have quite as much for each book and sheet of note paper he fetches. And the smoking room steward expects a percentage on your profits at pool bedding or poker and the cost of your drinks. The elevator boys can on $0.75 to a dollar each. The lounge steward hopes for a bit more and none but a penny pincher would think of refusing a dollar or so for the band. I forgot to mention the dog steward who takes care of your bull terrier or police dog in the kennels on board. We have a score of such passengers, some of them with longer pedigrees than those of their masters. One ought to give a fee also to the attendant who chalks out the diagrams for shuffleboard or stretches the net across which one plays tennis with his enamorata of the voyage. A fee is also due to the lady's swimming instructor, viewer of her sex, and if not you hand over a sum to the muscular half-naked masseur who rubs you down after your plunge in the pool. The physical director in charge of the gymnasium on the hurricane deck also has an itching palm and there is a multitude of others whose hungry eyes will fairly hypnotize the dollars out of your pockets as you are leaving the ship. Speaking of money, how the heart of Columbus would swell if he could see the fortune seemingly squandered under his eyes. You remember his trials and disappointments in persuading Queen Isabella of Spain to finance his adventure? The Queen kept him waiting for years and in despair he had left the court on his mule for France when he was brought back with the word that she would furnish the money. And do you know how much she put up? All told the cash was only sixty seven thousand five hundred dollars. A little more than small change for the millionaire financier of today. She took this amount from her own treasury and borrowed sixty thousand dollars additional making her total investment one hundred and twenty six thousand five hundred dollars. Added to this Columbus put in about an eighth part of the whole. An eighty thousand dollars was subscribed by the citizens of Palos, the port from which the fleet started forth on that memorable voyage. The ships and their outfits cost two hundred and thirty six thousand dollars. I take these figures from Fisks, the discovery of America and he believes them too large. It comprised the total expense of that trip of discovery. Now let me give you some ideas to the cost of my flagship the majestic. It was constructed by the Germans at much lower wages than those of today and if built now would cost between twenty and twenty five million dollars. In order to pay any kind of profit on the investment she must earn for every round trip nearly twice the cost of the fleet which Columbus took across the Atlantic. This ship can hardly last more than twenty five years so that in addition to its ordinary profits it has to earn enough to cover depreciation of about one million dollars a year. End of chapter two. Chapter three of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Betty B. Our mortgage on France. Cherbourg on the English Channel is the French port of call for all the American lines and we stepped out in France within less than six days after leaving New York. Most of our passengers went by rail to Paris direct a comfortable trip of a few hours but I have come across country to however to start my motor car journeys at the mouth of the Sen. This port is the natural gateway for freight from the Atlantic not only to Paris but to all France Switzerland Southwestern Germany and the countries beyond. It vies with Marseille in its tonnage and upon its stocks are landed more than three quarters of the cotton and the bulk of the machinery fuel oil and breadstuffs we sell to the French. The sugar of Cuba the coffee of Puerto Rico and Brazil the silk and other goods brought from the Orient through the Panama Canal and grain and hides from South America come here. A fishing village in the times of the Romans however began its development when Francis the first was king but it was built up largely by Napoleon Bonaparte it is now one of the well-equipped entrepot of Western Europe. The entrance to the harbor is narrow and easily fortified but within our 200 acres of great basins where the huge vessels can lie at the wharves and discharge their cargos into the warehouses or load them on trains or canal boats for all parts of Europe. The distance to Paris by the Sen is only 123 miles and a caravan of boats and barges is always moving that way. The city has eight miles of docks including one reserved for private yachts and a dry dock more than 1000 feet long and deep enough to accommodate vessels drawing 44 feet. It has also a floating dry dock taken from the Germans at the close of the world war and such good port facilities that it will steadily grow. But before we start on our travels I want you to look at France as an American asset. By our loans of the world war we hold a mortgage upon her of more than four billion dollars. This money came out of your pocket and mine when we put our savings into the liberty bonds to meet the interest upon which we shall keep on paying taxes for a long time to come. The sum of our loan to France is so large that it equals $200 from every family in the United States and as good business people we ought to know the security upon which our mortgage is based. If you had a $200 mortgage on a lot or farm in your neighborhood would you not want to look at the property and know something about the man or woman to whom you made the loan? That is just our position as to France and that is what I would have you remember in reading these chapters on France as I find her. To begin with what is France by and large and just where does it lie? I shall first take up the Republic in Europe for that is the heart of your mortgage. France in Europe with Alsace and Lorraine and the other patches it got as a result of the war contains a little more than 200,000 square miles. It is just about equal to Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana and Missouri put together. It is more than one-fifteenth as big as the main body of the United States and it is a very respectable part of all the dry land on the globe. The scientists have measured the globe and I figure that if the dry land were all gathered together into one block and divided into 260 acre farms one acre in every one of these farms would belong to France in Europe. But now let us take in addition the colonial possessions including those added to France by the world war put them together and they equal more than five million square miles. They are about one-eleventh of all the land on the earth so that if the division were made into 11 acre fields France would own one acre in every such field. Our mortgage grows better and better. France has in Asia alone a country more than 10 times as large as South Carolina. She has in Guyana on the north coast of South America and in the West Indies more land than in 10 states the size of Pennsylvania and her little islands in the Pacific Ocean are larger than Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined. Her biggest possessions are in Africa where she has including the vast areas she got from the Germans almost one-third more territory than is comprised in the whole continent of Europe and more than one and a half times as much land as we have in the United States not including Alaska. Although there are large tracts of fertile soil in colonial France some of her colonies are not of great value. I have set my foot upon nearly every one of them and much of the land is not worth more than a sand spit on the ocean. The desert of Sahara although it has oases which combined are equal in area to the state of Ohio is for the most part barren and the jungles of the French Congo and the overflowed lands of Cambodia at the mouth of the Saigon River are not very much better. Much of the soil of these colonies is in such a poor condition and occupied by such semi-civilized and mixed peoples black brown and yellow that I should not like to see uncle Sam take them over in lieu of his mortgage besides they are scattered far and wide over the world with stormy oceans between. It is different with this France from where I am writing indeed if the gods should order a cannibal feast and served up all mother earth as the pièce de résistance France would be the best slice of the tenderloin roast she is protein all the way through or if I may be allowed to change the figure she's one of the great clocks of cream on the skim milk of the globe moreover her position is such that the cream can be taken and made to bring easy money situated here at the crossroads of Europe with England just over the way and perhaps soon to be joined to her by a tunnel under the channel with Holland Belgium Scandinavia and Germany as northern customers and with Switzerland Italy and Spain ready to buy at the south Francis besides only six days from America over the main traveled ocean highways and now let us test the cream for the butterfat it contains it is so rich that I could fill a chapter of this book in describing each globule with the new territory she got by the Treaty of Versailles France obtained more coal iron and water power her citizens are of the thriftiest and most industrious of the human race the soil of France is so fertile and so well farmed that it has been feeding the people since Julius Caesar invaded Gaul Germany and England are dependent on their imports of foodstuffs from abroad and today the British are really spoon-fed by us if the new world stopped her supplies the bread and meat for three months the fat body of John bowl would shrink to a shadow before the war France raised 94 percent of her oats and about all of her sugar within a few years after the war her yield of wheat per acre was the highest ever noted in the country and the crop was much better than the average annual production just preceding the German invasion another important item in figuring the value of the French obligations to us is the thrift of the people there is no nation that gets more out of its soil the French lead the world as good farmers every crop they produce grows more to the acre than is grown on land of the same character in any part of the United States where our farmers average only 14 bushels of wheat the United States over the French raised 20 bushels on land that is no richer not a square inch goes uncultivated I rode 200 miles yesterday and I could number on my fingers and toes the fences I passed the waste of our fence corners with the unused space on each side is eliminated I believe that if France had the land of our fence corners she would raise enough from it to pay five percent annually on the vast amount she owes us even the roadways are made to yield money there are no brush nor weeds lining the highways there are no cattle running at large the grass beside the roads is cut with the scythe and used for feed and nearly every road grows trees of one kind or another each of which is made to earn its own living end of chapter three chapter four of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter this LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by Betty B through Normandy by motor car our trip from the channel to Paris is taken while the harvest is ripening most of the way is through Normandy a land given up to meadows grain fruit and stock raising the country is one crazy quilt of agricultural riches the patches of which are sewed together with hedges of the greenest of green the patches are represented by wheat oats hay and alfalfa which are interspersed with orchards and truck gardens near the big towns the fields are clean except for the bright red poppies showing here and there out of the green there is no wasteland anywhere the soil has been tickled and it laughs with the harvest here they are cutting the hay using great scythe as in the days of our forefathers they load the hay into carts drawn by huge Norman horses or put it up in symmetrical cocks that are twice as tall as those of our farmers and will surely shed rain i notice especially the cattle and the sheep they pepper the meadows with white and black spots growing smaller and smaller as they near the horizon normandy is one of the best cattle regions of france from its mill comes the camembert cheese and the province is a big dairy for both paris and london as i look i am reminded that france is now raising enough meat to feed almost her whole people i see fine oxen hauling carts over the roads and i'm told that britney has record cows which produce from five to seven pounds of butter per week i have not had a bit of bad butter during any of my travels in france and now take a look out of the tail of your eye as we fly in our motor car through some of the farming lands of the once devastated regions in another chapter we shall go leisurely stopping the automobile where we please to study the country this is just a snapshot we are riding at something less than one mile per minute through what i believe to be the most wonderful agricultural display on the face of the globe i've seen nothing like it in other parts of europe or in north america south america or asia the country is one great blanket of crops without fences or weeds or any marked divisions to separate the fields and the different shades of green alone show where one ends and the next one begins all seem to be equally rich every patch is like the best show acre of one of our agricultural experiment stations and this is so a field small and large and for hundreds of miles on each side of the roadway the wonderful roads make our travel easy centuries before railroads had been invented and long before america was discovered the kings of france began to build highways it is now more than 500 years since the country first had public roads and a regular service for the inspection and repair of its bridges it has been building roads from that time to this and has enough inside the republic if joined together to reach from the earth to the moon with sufficient leftover to make eight lincoln highways clear around the globe the national roads of france could reach almost round the earth at the equator and its state roads or those kept up by the departments could the atlantic be bridged might form six lines of communication between new york and paris each wide enough for two motor cars to pass the country roads alone measure three hundred and seventy five thousand miles on all this great road system there are no tolls to pay it makes me blush when i think of my motor rides over the ruts from my country place in virginia where there is a toll gate every five miles and no toll is less than 25 cents this is in the blue ridge mountains almost within sight of the washington monument i have ridden around paris within a light radius of the eiffel tower and no tolls are charged the roads are like stone floors evenly laid and one can go on high over the steepest of hills everywhere i go i see great piles of crushed stone laid up on the roadsides i say laid up for the stones or broken rocks are of even sizes and they are stacked in pyramids or wind rows each stone seeming to have its particular place stray bits of stone are not allowed to cumber the roadway which is kept as smooth as the paving on a street in the city at intervals one sees also piles of belgian blocks hoarded up each block is four times the size of an ordinary brick and is evenly cut these blocks are used for the coping which walls each side of the road and keeps back the grass most of the new roads are of macadam on the old road bed but there are also miles of these belgian blocks laid together as on our brick roads in the states in some places asphalt is used but as a rule the highways are of stone or macadam so far i've seen none of concrete there are but few towns of the united states that have pavements as good as these country roads of the republic of france as a result one or two horses or yoke of oxen can haul in a two-wheeled cart twice the load of hay or grain drawn by a four-horse team in america france is issuing bonds for making these roads in the belief that it pays a nation better to have debts and prosperous farmers rather than to have no debts while the farmers spend so much to get their goods to the markets that they are kept poor indeed as tristram shandy would say they do these things better in france another thing they do better is lining their highways with trees in our motor car rides we go for miles between stately poplars some of which are as big around as a flower barrel and as tall as a four-story house the branches of the trees meet above us overshading the roadway and we can look on and on between two walls of green to the patch of blue sky in the distance japan prides itself on the wonderful avenue which stretches for 15 miles along the road to the beautiful temples of nico that road is shaded by giant cryptomereas france has hundreds of avenues quite as wonderful many of which recall to me the rows of royal palms in rio di genaro especially those of rio's botanical gardens one may still see the damage done these trees by the shells of the Germans and it makes one's heart swell to ride through the battlefields now once more under crops the trees are in fairly good condition for quite a distance then dead stumps ranging from the height of a man to that of a telephone pole break the symmetry of the line and scar the landscape the tops of the stumps are like gigantic toothbrushes for the wood was simply shredded by the shells of the big guns but see it is darkened we are flying in our automobile over roads where the trees shut out the sun there are woods at the right and the left and the only breaks are long alleys or roads cut at regular intervals we are passing through one of the great forests of france how beautiful it is how well kept and how thrifty there are no leaves on the ground and the undergrowth of young trees is rich each one seems to be nursed there are no broken limbs and no logs clutter the earth france has vast tracks of such forest and square mile for square mile far more timber than the united states notwithstanding the fact that not more than a hundred years ago the eastern part of our country was covered with forests we have been wasting our timber as a drunk and sailor wastes money during his few hours on shore france has been saving hers she plants more trees every year and allows none to be cut until it is just right for the market she will probably have a good her suit covering of woods when uncle sam's head is as bald as an egg end of chapter four chapter five of france to scandinavia this labor box recording is in the public domain recording by betty b how france was made new ninety thousand dollars for every family in washington seventy five thousand dollars for everyone in los angeles fifty five thousand dollars for everyone in cleveland or boston that is what each city would have could it divide up the sum france has spent in rebuilding since the world war left a great part of her country in ruins the amount is more than nine thousand millions of dollars it equals three thousand dollars for every soul in chicago or paris fifteen thousand dollars for every man woman and child in buffalo and more than that for every citizen of san francisco or pittsburgh nine billion dollars means also an enormous amount of hard work had adam had that sum when he started to earn his living by the sweat of his face and had there been one thousand additional men outside of the garden of eden all endowed with perpetual life he could have kept that gang working at five dollars a day from then until now and still have had enough over to pay himself good wages as boss at methusia had nine billion dollars when he was sixty nine years of age he could have employed ten thousand men at one thousand dollars a year each for nine centuries reforming the world and perhaps preventing the flood in which at the age of nine hundred and sixty nine he was drowned the money laid out equals twenty three hundred dollars per acre for all of the six thousand square miles of the devastated territory and so far i believe almost every dollar has been honestly spent one can see the results of the work in the substantial farms houses buildings factories and roads which will last for ages to come france has mixed her money with brains and good business and is built well for the far future take the matter of forests at the end of the war a half million acres had to be replanted or repaired a third of a million acres had been so utterly ravaged that it will require a half century to bring them back to their normal france is doing her reforestation on a gigantic scale she has set out tens of thousands of trees one hundred million Douglas fir seeds or enough to reforest forty thousand acres were furnished by the president of the american forestry association in the som department alone the program involved planting 30 000 acres in new trees the last week i've been motoring over the region laid waste by the world war dictating descriptions and making photographs of the new farms new factories and new buildings that have sprung phoenix-like from the ashes i've had my secretary at my elbow taking my notes and a young harbour junior who got his early schooling in france interpreting my talk with the people in addition the government has given me a guide an army officer who was wounded and gassed a dozen times by the germans and who knows the battlefields as you know the palm of your hand we started at res and rode back and forth making many detours and going through chateau theory along the chimande dame by soison saint quentin aras albert and a score of other cities and towns traveling through the valleys of the marne the ayn the was and the som and ending our journey here at leal in the department of the nord some of the time we were so close to the frontier that i could have thrown a stone from france to belgium and again as far south as the germans got in their russias toward paris before that i had traveled through other parts of the battlefields so that i have as it were almost the whole of recreated france in my mind's eye i said recreated france for the country i have seen is a new france that has risen more rapidly out of the ruins than did san francisco after the earthquake or chicago or baltimore after their fires we thought those works of rebuilding enormous compared to the great work that has been achieved here they were like fitting together the toy house of a baby the reconstruction is so vast and so rapid that i despair of making you realize the marvels that began to spring up even before the peace treaty was signed villages cities and factories appeared like magic where were the most terrible ruins mines which were blown up and flooded have been pumped out and are working again under the mighty shaft houses which have risen above them farms once cut up by shell holes and covered with a net of barbed wire are now smooth and as clean as your garden and laden with crops new roads and railways now run where there were deep gashes and piles of twisted steel indeed the work recalls that mighty event of thousands of years ago when god divided the light from the darkness and in the space of six days laid the foundations upon which man has been building since then but before i describe what has been done let me give you a glimpse of the region before the germans began their work of destruction in the first place the devastated country runs through northern france from the north sea to the rine reaching south almost to paris it comprises 6 000 square miles it is one sixth as big as indiana and two-thirds the size of massachusetts it embraces 10 of the richest departments or states of the republic of france and 136th of its territory divide france into fields of 36 acres each and one acre in every field was fought over collect all its people and one in every six lived in this battle scarred region and that sixth paid more than 16 percent of the taxes the actual number was about twice as many people as there are in philadelphia or as many as there are in chicago detroit and cleveland combined appreciate how dense was the population of this area let us compare it with that of indiana which contains less than 3 million hoosiers you could multiply its population by nine and it would still be less thickly settled than was this section before destruction fell upon it like a thunderbolt from the skies we have more people to the acre in rhod island than in any other part of the union there are 600 for every square mile these 10 departments had 800 per square mile which equals a family of five for every four acres and that notwithstanding the fact that there are in our sense of the word no large cities or towns four of the states or departments were almost as busy as the region around pittsburgh they were beehives of factories and foundries of steelworks and glassworks and great textile mills from under their surface came 90 percent of the iron ore and more than half of all the coal produced by france they made more than three-fourths of the pig iron in the whole of the devastated region not one tenth as big as missouri there were 11 000 factories out of which came 95 of the woollen goods and 60 of the cottons which france made for export and domestic consumption this region produced also seven tenths of the beet sugar consumed by the people it had more than 25 000 industrial establishments representing one-third of the wealth of the french in the mills about 900 000 men were at work and 150 000 men were employed in the mines several hundred thousand were engaged in spinning and weaving now look at the conditions just after the armistice when france began to count up its losses when the germans left the population of the 10 departments had so shrunk that there were only two out of every five people left take two out of every family in boston, washington, Cincinnati, st louis, cleveland and philadelphia and those cities would be reduced to the condition of this territory at the close of the war 1000 communes or counties had been completely desolated and 2000 more had suffered great damage out of the hole only 374 were left intact in some of the departments not a single village was spared and in the four principal ones 290 000 houses were completely demolished 164 000 torn by projectiles and more than a quarter of a million seriously injured in one way or another one of the great calamities was the ruin of the water supply these french villages relied largely on wells or hydrants on the corners of the streets there is no running water in the home of the average french peasant he goes to the village well or to the hydrant to get the water he drinks and uses in cooking i've seen men women and children drawing water in every town i have passed through in the devastated regions about 30 000 wells had been totally destroyed over 25 000 had been poisoned and more than 100 000 had to be cleaned up in addition it was necessary to clean out 5000 acres of ponds and so many streams that if they were joined together they would fill a canal longer than the distance from Kansas City to Paris thousands of acres of farmlands were entangled in a network of barbed wire fast areas which had been plowed up by shells were as hilly as a prairie dog village and other tracks had holes so big that each would make a grave for an elephant the mass of earth thrown out would equal the cubic contents of our national capital at washington about 8 million acres of land two-thirds of which had been under the plow were thought to be ruined a huge territory had been sown with projectiles some of them live shells which blew up and killed so many children who played about in the fields that when the work of reconstruction began the little ones had to be guarded and kept away from the workers the dugouts and the trenches formed a great network that had to be filled there were 333 million cubic meters of these enough to equal a ditch a yard wide a yard deep and more than 240,000 miles long if old mother earth had a waste belt of dry land you might have dug a ditch around her three feet wide and six feet deep and the work of filling that ditch would be just about one fourth that of filling the dugouts left here in France as to the roads most of which had been in as good condition as the best tourist routes of new england there were so many destroyed that joined together they would have made 10 automobile highways from new york to seattle on these roads about 5 000 bridges and viaducts were torn down and broken up and of the magnificent trees lining the highways vast numbers were cut off by shells chopped down with the axe or so battered that they look like the dead forest in the dismal swamp of virginia the same sort of destruction befell the railways enough tracks to lay a road from boston to the mississippi river were torn up and after the armistice 1500 bridges and tunnels needed rebuilding and now just a word is to the factories and mines two-thirds of the coal pits of the departments of the north and pa de calais had been blown up or flooded and 220 had to be bored over again the concessions of lens liévin, courtre, marchin and drocours had been totally ruined most of the power plants had been systematically plundered and of 200 gas factories 150 were damaged 90 of the textile industries valued at something like 10 million dollars were wiped out and glassworks and chemical works to forfeit that amount were destroyed and so i might go on for an hour more giving you new figures of how france suffered in the war the story is one horrible tale of devastation such as the world has not seen since the 17th day of november along about 2300 bc when god sent the flood and destroyed every living thing upon earth accepting the men birds beasts and creeping things corralled in the ark of old noah what we are more interested in is the work of recreation this has gone on so rapidly that even the french do not realize the enormous changes that have taken place in the states through which i have toured large parts of the country remind one of the frontier towns of our west which spring up in gold mine stampedes or oil rushes save that these new buildings of france are substantial and put up to stay one looks far and wide over farms richer than those of the mississippi valley which at this writing are covered with crops far exceeding in their profit per acre anything we know in america one sees everywhere on the landscapes the red tile roofs of farmhouses and of cities and villages the laws prohibit any buildings of wood and all roofs must be of tile slate or steel some of us lie awake all night before we decide to build a new barn france has built more than 10 000 almost in one job and they are all roofed with gray slate or red tiles the lands brought back by the plow are more than one eighth the size of ohio and that state has no soil so fat the crops are bigger than ever the last wheat yield showed an increase of eight million bushels over that of the previous year the oat and hay crops were enormous before the war there were in round numbers on the farms overrun by the germans about 900 000 cattle and more than half as many horses donkeys and mules of sheep and goats there were almost a million and the hogs were one third as many nearly all of these were destroyed or carried away over the rind today those farms have almost a half million cattle and an equal number of sheep goats and pigs while new livestock is being brought in every day i have seen flock after flock of sheep watched by shepherds and great numbers of cows tied by long ropes to steaks feeding on grass which reach to their knees the cows are allowed to eat only that set before them and they cut off a field foot by foot as though it were mowed with the scythe there are no fences whatever and a cow will feed upon clover going only the length of her rope while within smelling distance just beyond our wheat and oats sometimes running as high as 40 bushels to the acre after she has eaten her allotted area close to the ground the stake is moved and she cuts down a new patch let me take you across country and show you some of the new farms of northern france we are in a panhard limousine with the army officer and the chauffeur on the front seat we are going over a road as hard as stone and as smooth as a floor occasionally we see windrows of barbed wire still lying by the sides of the road while here and there it is cocked up like hay in the fields or made up into bales to be sold as old iron each bale is about a foot thick two feet wide and three long it weighs 125 pounds and brings four dollars a ton i can't tell you how much of this barbed wire there was but it covered tens of thousands of acres and it will probably be years before it is all out of the way the greater part of the wire has been taken from the land that can be farmed and the only places where it still lies in any quantity are in the red zone made up of the worst ravaged of the battle areas it equals 3 000 farms of 100 acres each it will cost more than it is worth to redeem it and so the government has bought the land from the peasants to plant it with trees there's no possibility of making it into farmland for another generation because it will take from 50 to 100 years for the leaf mold from the forest to create a new top soil as we go on with our ride we look out at right and left through the trees the carpet of crops reaches on and on to the wooded horizon the fields are of all shapes and sizes and each is as smooth as the newly woven stuffs from the silt mills of liong here and there in this beautiful blanket a town is rising out of ruins and patches of great barns with their roofs of red tile stand high over the green the fields are of many colors and just now the declining rays of the sun have turned them to velvet there are green sugarbeats and purple alfalfa there are patches of golden ripe wheat lemon-hued oats and the dark brown newly plowed land now and then we pass a place where the red poppies are trying to conquer the gold of the wheat the poppies are about the only weeds to be seen and we ride on and on through what seems a vast garden i am surprised at the good farming i see all over france in our agriculture every third man is a sluggered his fields are half plowed and weeds line the road sites his meadows are peppered with blue thistle or daisies in the france i am seeing every patch is clean and of even richness the whole nation is working for the new france especially on the farms everyone in the family is out in the fields and they work from sunrise to sunset i see many women at work they hoe and weed the beets and the turnips they labor in the hay fields loading the carts and they push wheelbarrows filled with all sorts of farm produce over the roads they even do much of the rough work of building this afternoon i saw four lusty maidens throwing bricks from one to another on the top of a great brick pile outside one of the towns a little farther on a bareheaded old woman was pushing a wheelbarrow and in the fields by the side of the roads boys of 12 and 14 were aiding the harvesters the same sort of hard work is going on in all the towns and the cities the municipalities are buzzing like bees after swarming and men and women and boys are toiling long hours at their various jobs i spent yesterday in our mentir going through some of the rebuilt cotton and linen factories there the city lies within a pistol shot of the border of belgium at the outbreak of the war it had 40 spinning and weaving mills these were all destroyed much of their machinery as well as all of the copper and brass feedings was carried over the Rhine into Germany some of the smokestacks were blown up so that they fell on the buildings and thus aided in their destruction what happened there was typical of the ruined industrial centers the region is almost altogether given up to textiles before the war more than two-thirds of the woolen spindles of France were in the invaded districts and a great part of the linen spindles and looms the Germans took away more than a half million linen spindles and four million cotton spindles they sent home 15 000 cotton looms and a greater number of looms suited to linens they destroyed about 32 million dollars worth of combing machinery and spinning machinery to the value of another 12 millions they blew up or carried away the machinery of the bleaching dying and ironing plants it is said that the loss in the textile industries alone total upward of two billion dollars i should like to give you a picture of one linen factory which i visited at armentier new buildings have risen out of the debris and the spinning and weaving establishment installed is such as any town in new england might be proud to own the mill covers several acres the walls are a brick and glass and the roofs of glass and red tiles the smokestack is a mosaic of red and white bricks and as a whole the establishment is very artistic before the war that mill employed about 800 men but its director tells me that the new and more efficient machinery means much greater output with less labor in one of the weaving rooms covering i should say half an acre i found the looms all in place and above them a thicket of leather and rubber belts forming a network covering the whole some of the looms were weaving cloth 25 feet in width and others fine linens not a yard wide i saw some looms on which girls were weaving the fine linens used in our country and some which were turning out hanji cloth for lightweight suits for american men the director says his exports at present are largely to the south american countries he deprecates our tariff which affects the franco american trade during my trip through the devastated region i have seen something of the beet sugar industry the loss there was more than 100 million dollars and the distilleries breweries and other agricultural industries were damaged to the extent of hundreds of millions more from armentier i went into the rubik's turquoise district another great textile center which was practically destroyed and saw something of the reconstructed plate glass and chemical factories of shoni siri and saint goben all of these industries have come back rapidly indeed the recovery of industrial france has proved one of the wonders of our 20th century world i can sum up the whole in one sentence all france is at work the people are cheerful and they have faith in their future they are all saving money and they believe that god lives end of chapter five chapter six of france to scandinavia by frank g carpenter this is a libra vox reporting all libra vox recordings are in the public domain recording by betty b bringing back the coal mines i am riding today in lens in the center of the coal mining region before it was almost annihilated by the germans the town had 32 000 people the rows of new brick houses built for the miners show its recovery these homes were constructed for half what they were cost in the states the foundations are of stone and the bricks are better than any we have had in washington for years the roofs are of red tile fit for a millionaire's home yet a two-story two-family house costs less than 2400 dollars the same sort of work has gone on everywhere and that with efficiency methods and standardized workmanship every town was laid out anew according to the general plan and the houses were built with due regard to advanced sanitation these are comparatively new things in france so too is the extermination of the mosquitoes which spread malaria over the devastated region at the time of the war and just after this region was covered with ponds and water-filled shell holes each of which bred mosquitoes all these holes were filled and the mosquitoes were wiped out by means of kerosene in the plans for the new lens generous spaces for playgrounds and parks were provided and the best sites for public buildings and monuments carefully chosen this is true in all of the new towns and in cities of 20 000 people or more no structure can be put up without the approval of the mayor every town works out its own plan but almost follow the new regulations for buildings the inevitable result is a northern france even more beautiful than before the towns have widened their streets and planted new parks in leal the walls and fortifications surrounding the old city have been torn down to give 600 acres of new public playgrounds while back of the ancient cathedral at rest the plans call for a big garden for the use of the people as i look over some of the items of the new construction i can get a faint idea of where this vast amount of money has gone at one time the government ordered 100 000 doors and 90 000 windows and the same purchase included three million hinges and hundreds of thousands of faucets it bought iron beds four feet wide by the tens of thousands and a single order was given for 12 000 school desks and seats all this expenditure has been met by the national treasury while the war was still on the government decided that it would pay in full all of the war damages to individuals and towns and demand the money back from the enemy every loss was to be paid for no matter how it occurred this included furniture machinery deterioration bills for troops quartered in the homes of the people and the money required to bring the farms back to their old state of cultivation the law providing for these measures is so long that it would fill about 10 columns of an ordinary newspaper in rebuilding the factories and restoring the mines the government furnished a large part of the capital all of which is supposed to be repaid in the sum received for reparations if the money is advanced by private parties the government pays the overhead and five percent on such advances until it could repay the whole it has bought machinery as fast as possible for the various factories it has purchased most of the farms and located many new boundaries according to the real estate laws of France property must be equally divided among all the heirs this has resulted in tens of thousands of farms no bigger than an american garden and one man may have in one region a hundred different patches which he has either bought or inherited in the new locations such ownerships have been as far as possible consolidated and many small farms made into one by means of exchange indeed reconstruction is added enormously to the economic value and beauty of france but all this takes work and with a million and a half men lost by the war france is still short of manpower labor has been brought in from italy spain algeria and tunas i see poles and russians among the workmen and the street markets are crowded with people of all races and tongues the mayor here a delightful kind-faced old man who went with me over the town was in office before its destruction he was carried off to belgium by the germans and was the first to get back to the ruins when the enemy left his wife had remained in lens when he returned he found his city a mass of crushed bricks and mortar his great power plants had been reduced to a debris a broken machinery while the mines and their workings had been systematically ruined by high power explosives the pumps had to work day and night to remove millions of cubic feet of water accumulated in the mine pits to keep out the inflowing streams many of them have been lined with concrete walls at a cost of something like $300,000 a pit the homes for the thousands of men employed in the coal mines about lens are far better than any of the miners homes i know in our country with the exception of those in the minnesota iron region back of diluth they are the prophets of the municipalities from the least mining lands are so great that they have better school buildings and public improvements than in any other part of the united states here each miner has a little garden where he can raise vegetables enough for his family coal electric light and water are free and the only lack perhaps is a bathroom the average house of this country is without a bath the mining corporation puts up a community bathhouse for every neighborhood and gives free medical service to the miners and their families the houses belong to the company and are rented to the miners for about a dollar per family per month before the war the mines about lens produced about one-tenth of all the coal output of france their annual yield was some four million 500 000 tons then the mine owners employed 18 000 men who occupied 8 000 houses when the war ended every mine was destroyed and there were only 30 houses left standing this story is told as to how the destruction was started the founder of the company was asked to go out with some officers and soldiers the request was of course a command he was led to the finest of his mines and as one of the Germans pressed a button he saw plants worth millions go into the air with the noise of the terrible explosion set off for the purpose it is wonderful how much concrete has been used in the construction this is true of all sorts of buildings and even of the telegraph and telephone poles lining the roads of northern France these poles are 30 or 40 feet high about a foot thick one way and eight inches the other they are usually made with great diamond shaped holes running from the bottom to the top to decrease their weight I suppose they seem very substantial the mine buildings are brick stone and concrete the machinery is essentially modern and beautifully finished most of it comes from England and France I climb to the top of one of the structures and watch the coal as it rows out of the mines it is hoisted in elevators by steel cables wound over great drums the cars come up two at once and at the same time two others go down the loads are dropped into bins from which the coal falls by gravity into the cars to the railroad tracks below as I stood in the shaft house I talked with the director of this great mining company which as I have said formerly furnished one-tenth of all the French coal he's a fair type of the men responsible for remaking France he's absorbed in pushing the work ahead and it is only by questions that one learns from him what was done by the Germans and what the French are doing now France is not a great producer of coal before the war her output equaled only about one-fifteenth of our coal production it was not one-sixth the output of Germany nor one-seventh that of Great Britain it did not supply all of the domestic need and something like 24 million tons were annually imported most of the mines were owned by private companies operating on a large scale those invaded by the Germans employed 100,000 workers or as many as those of all the other French mines put together the destruction began with the first days of the war and continued up to the armistice as soon as the Germans came in they forbade any measures being taken to drain the mines or protect the workings in 1917 they started systematic devastation which continued until the end of the war all the pits were dynamited and flooded to such an extent that about one-fifth of the coal production of France was cut off the soldiers went from shaft to shaft blowing up the works and leaving behind not a single engine boiler or train the electric machinery was taken out and at the end of three years the destruction of the lens mines was practically complete before the Germans left they set off more explosives and practically destroyed all the coal mining machinery of the invaded territory the work of reconstruction began as soon as the French were able to get hold of the region the government organized a commission of invaded mines and through a purchasing syndicate placed orders for pumps and electrical machinery to get out the water the work went steadily on as more territory came into the hands of the French two years after the armistice 19 of the worst damaged shafts had been enclosed in cement and a year later more than 50 million cubic yards of water had been taken out the most difficult and dangerous part of the work was in the restoration of the underground tunnels these have a total length of more than 1800 miles or enough to reach from San Francisco to Omaha they often contain asphyxiating gases and the water soaked wells are liable to cave in. End of chapter six Chapter seven of France to Scandinavia by Frank G. Carpenter this labor box recording is in the public domain recording by Betty B. American Footsteps on French Battlefields today I shall show you some moving pictures of America's service and sacrifice in the war zones of France I am in the front seat of a French automobile with the crank of the big camera beside me riding the scenario while we travel along as the finished reel is unwound you will see the most interesting of the sights that we pass our speed will be rapid for these French chauffeurs are ye who's who drive furiously but we shall jump from place to place without regard to geography and stop where we please increasing the text on the screen as human interest directs many feet of our film will give views of the country just now it is carpeted with alfalfa, wheat, oats, rye, crimson clover and beets and embroidered with red poppies as big as a teapot and is of all the colors God made for the changing hues of his footstool we shall find few blots on the landscape every field road and forest is dressed up to the nines and the whole is like a new Paris gown I love my own country but I do not see how any Frenchman can help loving France the patches of devastation accentuate the beauty of the recreation on the chalky hillsides of the red zone shell holes are still left and near the battlefields the trees are like a dead forest in Alaska where the fire has swept through some places are as barren as the Sahara by the roadside or the trunks of trees cut down by the Germans or it may have been by the allies themselves for military reasons this is an old Picardie where the Somme river flows this department is a plateau in some places 500 feet high it is a blanket of gravel and clay with chalk underneath we can see the mine craters which are the white of the chalky subsoil in one chalk bank along the roadside above some bales of barbed wire I counted six shells as we ride on we pass through village after village some are miserable some prosperous but the meanest is the beloved home of a peasant who lived there before the war wiped out the town and he is bound to come back the government offered new land and new houses where the people would be better off than before but many of them refuse to leave take for instance Beloy-en-Santerre the village near where Alan Seeger was killed you will remember his poems among the best written during the war and especially the one beginning I have a rendezvous with death it was at Beloy-en-Santerre that death met him the town was reduced to a mud hole not worth rebuilding instead the government offered each of its families 10 acres of land with good barns and buildings in a more fertile region not far away a number of the peasants would not accept preferring to live in shacks and dugouts until they could save enough to put up new homes houses of brick and stone have gone up in the fields of wheat and oats each of which contains 50 acres or more are being worked on the cooperative plan the town folk own a tractor and other farm machinery in common and are producing larger crops than before the war the new village is much like the old one except that it must conform to the building regulations laid down by the government the French peasant does not want modern houses and abominates the big windows and the sanitation which our people advise as a result the government has had to insist that none of the towns adopted by Americans or others shall be rebuilt except in accordance with the official plans i have talked with miss bell Skinner of Holyoke Massachusetts who spent something like a quarter of a million dollars in restoring the little town of hatton chateau in the department of the moose it was there that the men digging the foundation discovered a great pot of coins which they gave to miss Skinner the coins were the savings of a french peasant of centuries ago they were of all denominations and some of them were coined in the middle ages it was one of the numismatic finds of the century and miss Skinner has given some of the ancient pieces of money to the national museum in paris and just here i wish to end the film with a tribute to alan seger and to two other young americans who best typify the spirit of our youth during the world war seger was a child of four when i first met his father and mother in mexico city and was just 28 when in a bayonet charge on the german trenches at beloy en saunterre he was killed in the first weeks of the war he enlisted in the french foreign legion in which he fought to the day of his death reared in the lap of luxury schooled in the united states and france a graduate of harvard and closely associated with the leading intellectuals of paris before the war came he had become known as a poet through his juvenilia of delicate health and without experience or knowledge of hardships he jumped into the thick of active field service slept in the trenches did sentry duty and fought again and again until the hour of his rendezvous with death some of his most wonderful poems were written on the very eve of the day on which he was killed and his work will endure as one of the literary landmarks of the war the royalties from his collected poems have already amounted to many thousands of dollars most of the sum mr and mrs seger had given to the bell letter branch of the american library in paris and the remainder they are donating to the libraries established for the french by the american committee for the devastated regions the french have so appreciated alan seger that they have given 300 000 francs to put up as a monument to the foreign legion a statue of seger executed by one of the leading sculptors of france the place de zutazouni where president wilson lived while at the peace conference was chosen as the site of this monument the spirit of alan seger lives in his poem i have a rendezvous with death i have a rendezvous with death at some disputed barricade when spring comes back with rustling shade and apple blossoms fill the air i have a rendezvous with death when spring brings back blue days and fair god knows to her better to be deep pillowed in silk and scented down where love throbs out in blissful sleep pulse nigh to pulse and breath to breath where hushed awakenings are dear but i have a rendezvous with death at midnight in some flaming town where spring trips north again this year and i to my pledged word am true i shall not fail that rendezvous it is now one year since i motored from paris out to a little american cemetery not far from chateau theory where under a plain wooden cross lie the remains of joys kilmer who wrote the most beautiful poem ever made to a tree many of you have like me committed it to memory it reads i think that i shall never see a poem lovely as a tree a tree whose hungry mouth is pressed against the earth's sweet flowing breast a tree that looks at god all day and lifts her leafy arms to pray a tree that may in summer wear a nest of robins in her hair upon whose bosom snow has lain who intimately lives with rain poems are made by fools like me but only god can make a tree the cemetery where kilmer lies is beautifully kept the grass is green over his grave but there is no tree within a quarter of a mile and the sun beats down upon the hundreds of small white crosses standing there sergeant kilmer's grave is surrounded by the crosses of little known soldiers and it was only by accident that one of our party found it and brought us to the spot as i looked at that cross i thought of young kilmer's poem in which he painted the agony of our savior on calvary and thus made the less of his own sufferings as a soldier my shoulders ache beneath my pack lie easier cross upon his back i march with feet that burn and smart tread holy feet upon my heart men shout at me who may not speak they scourge thy back and smote thy cheek my rifle hand is stiff and numb from thy pierced palm red rivers come lord thou did suffer more for me than all the hosts of land and sea so let me render back again this millionth of thy gift amen could any man leave a better monument than that on the same day i saw the grave of quentin roosevelt and bowed my head over the remains of the son of our greatest american since abraham lincoln young roosevelt lies on the side of the hill near where he fell with his fighting airplane there are forest trees nearby and a beautiful monument which the french keep decorated with flowers stands over his grave end of chapter seven chapter eight of france to scandinavia by frank g carpenter this libre vox recording is in the public domain recording by betty b paris at work come with me and take a look at paris at work we are accustomed to viewing a city as one only a pleasure and fashion and art spiced with such exhibitions of vice as are nowhere else to be seen the truth is that these are only the froth on the surface the bubbles that sparkle in the champagne the real paris is serious and sensible home loving and modest and engrossed beyond all other great centers in getting a living and laying a nest full of eggs for the future during my many visits here i have yet to find a quarter in which work is not going on the streets are thronged with traffic tram cars and great motor buses with fronts like locomotive snow plows are jammed with laborers and clerks going to and from the shops taxi cabs rushing like fury whizz in and out amid big motor trucks loaded with boxes and bales great farm carts in from the country and drawn by two or three huge pershoran horses fight for their places among donkey wagons and motorcycles even men are harnessed up and dragging goods through the streets the vehicles are legion and all move on the run it makes no difference in what quarter of the city whether on the boulevards or the side streets there is no safety for the foot passengers and the visitor is on the continual dodge to avoid being run over by paris at work few people have any idea of the enormous work done in paris the city is looked upon as the center of deity and fashion not only for france but for other nations as well and it is common saying that all the world comes to paris to shop the american sees a crowd of loafers old and young strutting up and down the boulevards and the fashionable well-dressed throng of ladies and gentlemen driving on the Champs-Élysées and in the Bois de Boulogne and things said this is Paris the real Paris is a great beehive of industry with tens of thousands of individual workshops and great factories outside making steel and iron machinery railway and building materials airplanes and automobiles only this week i visited one establishment which covers more than 120 acres and has 16 000 hands as busy as nailers it has 70 acres of buildings and is rushed with orders it makes automobiles trucks and buses tractors motorcycles and almost everything that goes upon wheels with gasoline as a fuel i refer to the great Renault factory which turns out an expensive high-class car during the war it had tens of thousands of men employed on munitions and motor transportation now it is turned from the sword to the plow share and with standardized methods manufacturers for peace there is another motor car factory known as the Citroën devoted to cars like our flivers only of a lower horsepower and with a much finer body it is running to its capacity yet cannot supply the demand other war factories are making typewriters farming machinery furniture paper or building materials for recreated france in Paris itself there are numerous manufacturing centers each ward having its own branch of industry one district for instance has leather shops and carriage shops and another is devoted to making new bodies and designing equipment for automobiles at Grinnell there are chemical works and at st. Denis, Clichy, Saint-Owl and Pantin are sugar refineries breweries and boot and shoe factories Paris specializes in luxury products such as jewelry dresses furs and costly novelties the city manufacturers also clocks and bronzes find porcelains wallpapers and tapestries it is famous for its embroideries dress trimmings and artificial flowers and it has dyeworks glassworks and chemical factories indeed Paris makes everything under the sun from pins to locomotives from buttons to flying machines and from gloves to beautiful gowns it has more than 20,000 women who are engaged on parts of ladies dresses and they turn out a product worth about 10 million dollars a year it has thousands working on corsets not only for Paris but for all parts of France and for shipment abroad it has 5,000 furniture shops each employing three or four hands the furniture does not compare in durability with ours made by machinery but it is exquisitely carved and a great deal is gilded there are 2,000 shops here making watches to the value of five million dollars per annum and other thousands making article de Paris which means notions and fancy goods of all sorts including jewelry artificial flowers and dainty bits of leather horn bone and ivory in fact the French are producing almost anything one can imagine and they make everything well no wonder Paris is the world's great shopping center of course one of the biggest and best known industries here is the making of millinery and gowns for the rich and fashionable just now the best market is the united states and every american woman who passes through carries home Parisian frocks and hats those who have several should watch out for the customs according to our tariff laws no person can bring into the united states more than 100 dollars worth of new unworn clothes without paying duty the inspectors examines one baggage and there's no way of avoiding the tax without lying smuggling today is more difficult than it was in the past formerly thousands of rich americans came to Paris once a year to replenish their wardrobes and the wealthiest often went back with eight or ten trunks filled with dresses many would not even wear the dresses before sailing and others would put on a half dozen different frocks in a day discarding each in a few minutes in order to declare that it had been worn some sewed old labels into their gowns and there were other schemes to make the new things look old it costs one hundred dollars or more to get even a woolen gown made by one of the best Paris dressmakers and costumes of velvet or silk range from 200 dollars upward lower prices may be put on the bills which the tourists take home but our customs officers are watchful and such frauds are usually detected Paris sets the fashions for all over the world most of our large stores send over their buyers for gowns hats and other Paris specialties to be sold the next season these buyers will take home only one dress or hat of a kind to show in the windows and then seek orders for copies such articles are called models and making them is a regular business they are designed by the great artists in the famous dressmaking houses where there are exhibitions to which the american buyers are invited by card these occasions are quite ceremonial and beautiful women employed for the purpose walk back and forth wearing the gowns while the buyers pick out those they think will appeal to the american market one famous dressmaker this year showed his creations at a supper given in a beautiful garden where the mannequins walked out among the tables later there were exhibitions of the same models for individual purchasers and copies are subject to sale or export by the establishment in which they originate one can pay almost anything she places for a fine gown in Paris the great dressmakers are artists in charge artist prices for their specialized skill the average french woman however does not patronize them nor does she set foot on the rue de la paix except to go window shopping among the gorgeous jewels displayed on each side of the street indeed she hardly knows where worth callot jenny or paquin are unless by some lucky chance she has an invitation to their exhibitions of new styles each season she never thinks of buying hats or gowns at the big houses if she is fairly well off she studies the style books and photographs of the frocks designed by these masters and then goes to her own little dressmaker who lives three or four flights up on a court in a back street together they plan out and copy the famous model she chooses in this way she gets her dress for one fourth the price an american woman told me this week how she waited in a dressmaking establishment while one of the paris society leaders the wife of a prominent french newspaper owner explained to the dressmaker just how many steel buttons there were to be on each side and how many loops of ribbon were to be tacked on the back of the gown she had ordered the lady had been to a worth exhibition and picked out the design but the little dressmaker made the costume the other day i went with my daughter who has been living in paris the last two years to buy a new gown she's learned thrifty methods in france and the establishment we visited had no sign facing the street it is just like one of thousands once come the clothes not of the actresses or the wives and daughters of rich profiteers but of the french women in moderate circumstances who must now make every frank count we directed our taxi to a narrow street in the business section of paris the dressmaker lived on a court and we climbed up three flights of stairs because the house had not even one of the pill boxes that serve as elevators in many french business buildings madame marie met us with a smile she brought out her models and her pictures of the new fashions the material of the dress had already been chosen and the wholesale dealer had sent in a bolt of lovely brown velvet to be tried for the effect then the little fitter mademoiselle jean was called in and under her magic the beautiful creation grew before our eyes like the mango tree of the hindus jean threw an end of velvet over my daughter's shoulder she put a pin here and made a tuck there and presto they're sprang into being a copy of one of the most famous dresses recently designed by one of the masters a twist of another kind of material formed a draped sleeve and within five minutes we had in the mirror the gown as it would look when completed the french seldom have patterns in each dress is made as it were on its future wear i am told it is the same with fine headgear there are ready-made hats such as one sees in the windows but the artistic paris milliner builds his hat on the head of the buyer the scissors clip out the lines most becoming and with a plentiful supply of pins a bend in this place and a twist in that the trick is done end of chapter eight chapter nine of france to scandinavia by frank g carpenter this libre vox recording is in the public domain recording by betty b shops large and small nothing shows so well how paris is working as a visit to the shops there are tens of thousands of stores all full of goods and all busy the store windows are a museum of fine stuffs novelties and new creations some tiny shops have displays worth a fortune i stopped this afternoon on a fashionable street before a store not much bigger than a piano box in whose little window was a display of wristwatches such as i venture to say you cannot find in new york or chicago behind the plate glass against the background of black velvet were scores of watches each as small as a postage stamp and many but little thicker one the size of my thumbnail had a face of platinum encircled with diamonds and the bracelet to which it was fastened was of pearls exquisitely set had i a sweetheart i would have walked from berlin to paris to buy it for her other watches were fastened to ribbons of silk some were set in pearls and some hung on bracelets decorated with diamonds in a window farther on i saw a collection of nothing but cigarette cases gold and silver and diamond strewn in another that of a famous dressmaker was a doll dressed as a model it advertised a new costume and the face was so artistically cast that the doll might hold an honored place in almost any museum the shop windows here are better dressed than those of america in the larger establishments they can hardly compete with new york but in the little places they are far more artistic than ours this is true of even the meanest shops in out of the way quarters of paris take a fruit store each rosy cheek peach lies in a bed of white cotton strawberries as big as hen's eggs are each placed on a green leaf and half a dozen blue plums or three or four bunches of grapes are laid out on the table as though for a banquet it is the same in the grocery stores where squashes and turnips green beans and peas are piled up as at one of our country fairs and the chickens in game are dressed with their heads tucked under their wings the chickens lie on their breasts with a little printed price mark pinned to the center of each rosy back they are clean enough to kiss and i do not wonder they sell these displays are all hidden in the evening the stores which open at about nine a.m. close at seven p.m. when every window is covered with a shutter that slides down from the top making a wall of sheet iron over the front at the same time the clerks leave crawling out through a little door in the iron about a yard high a long procession of women and men issuing fourth single file almost like so many dogs they straighten up immediately however and walk off so gently that one would never imagine they had been working all day Paris has a hundred small shops and factories where chicago or philadelphia has one the French are a nation of individualists and every little store has its specialty the business of such stores is often run by the whole family the wife does not think herself too good to keep the books serve the customers or in fact manage the shop when her husband is out and the children of more than school age help too in fact the whole family is bound up in the little shop as a cooperative enterprise and in it they live the greater part of their home life the French women are capable and many a war widow is running a shop formerly kept by her husband and running it well too but there are also department stores some of which cover acres and compare favorably with those of the states here the volume of business is enormous and the buildings are thronged in the small shops there are often no price marks but in the department stores the goods have tags with plain figures and the foreigner need not be on his guard against paying more than he should the clerks everywhere are uniformly courteous and almost always well dressed the sales women where only black and the floor walkers have long coats like those of the old-fashioned preacher many of the clerks have luxuriant whiskers for in France the hair grows on man's face I may say also on his head where we Yankees have seven bald heads where the French have one there are quite as many young beards as old ones and some of the middle-aged salesmen who have served me looked as though they had never been shaved I like to study the whiskers they are beautifully combed and now and then parted in the middle thousands of men wear mustaches and some have such fierce looking ones they make me think of porthos or dartanian insulted and ready to fight there are several department stores here that do a business running into the tens of millions of dollars a year one of these the bullmarshay is run on the cooperative principle with the salespeople among the stockholders I understand the shares are steadily increasing in value from year to year and that every clerk in the establishment gets a percentage above the amount paid him as wages the bullmarshay was founded by the son of a hatter named busico who began in a small way but who gradually built up the business into one of the greatest in all Paris busico married a working girl and after he died his wife took the business when she died she made a will leaving it to her employees and assistants all employees are fed free of charge they have a luncheon at noon which is much like our dinner it consists of soup meat vegetables and a dessert there were 1,000 men at the tables the other day when I entered the dining room and several hundred women at meals in the room adjoining the dining hall which is 600 feet long covers about half an acre and has 80 windows I noticed that each clerk had a bottle of wine at his place and that everyone had coffee at the close of the meal from the dining rooms I was taken into the kitchens where at least a score of cooks scullions and butchers were at work when the whole store takes mutton chops for dinner the meat is cooked in grills which open and shut just like a waffle iron if you would take two iron barred garden and hinge them together so that they could be laid on the coals you might have something like one of these grills each will hold 100 chops and 600 steaks or chops can be boiled in 12 minutes 1700 pounds of potatoes are fried at the same time and 1400 eggs can be boiled at once connected with the Beaumarchais are lodging houses for the women employees who are given rooms linen heat and food free of charge all employees after five-year service have an interest in what is called the busico provident fund consisting of a certain amount of the profits of the house proportionate to the salary received four percent interest is paid on the accumulations of this kind and this is added to the capital after a woman has been employed for 15 years or a man for 20 he or she can withdraw this capital or the same right is given upon reaching 50 years of age if a girl marries however she may draw the entire amount of her capital irrespective of the term of service in addition to this there is another fund which provides pensions for such employees as have worked in the store for 20 years or have reached old age the wages paid are i understand about the same as those of other establishments but the employees receipts largely depend on the amount of their sales regular commissions on such sales being given in many respects it seems to me that the merchants of paris have poor business methods the average store has neither cash register nor cash carrier nor even a cashboy or girl when one makes a purchase the clerk must carry the article to the three or four bookkeepers who sit behind a counter at one end of the store here she shows the goods and her sales slip to a bookkeeper who copies the items and prices in his ledger with pen and ink just yesterday i bought at the bazaar of the hotel de veal a basket trunk as big as a writing desk the frail girl who sold it to me bent half double as she shoved it along through the aisles over the floor of the room which covered a quarter of an acre till we arrived at the bookkeepers on the opposite side of the store i took out my watch and found that it took me just 20 minutes to have the purchase recorded in order the goods sent to my hotel there's always a long queue of customers about the bookkeepers and this clogs the business indeed it seems to me that paris often uses three people to everyone in new york or boston and that the stores make buying a good deal of a burden end of chapter nine chapter 10 of france to scandinavia by frank g carpenter the sleeper vox recording is in the public don main how paris keeps house nearly all french city dwellers live in apartments with few exceptions there is no such thing as the individual house even the rich are mostly confined to one floor although this may have gorgeous parlors bedrooms and all the other quarters of a fine residence such apartments have an infinite number of rooms equipped with large mirrors and walls decorated with stucco designs which often surround panels of satin or silk the furniture is more elaborate and less substantial than ours indeed i tremble whenever i sit down on one of those guild frame spider-legged chairs for fear it will collapse and bring me to the floor and then the upholstery the colors are so delicate that i feel like spreading my handkerchief over the place where i sit the french woman's ideal of a well furnished parlor seems to be that it should have a great deal of furniture including many lamps and bric-a-brac of all shapes and sizes filling every inch of available space on piano table and mantel as i look around me in one of these homes i am reminded of the terrified darky who was out plowing when the charleston earthquake occurred he dropped on his knees and cried out oh lord come quick to say i'm no place for children one of the difficulties in renting an apartment in paris is having the proper record made of the furniture not only must every chair sofa and table every bit of bed linen and china and even the smallest kitchen utensil be listed but one should note the bric-a-brac item by item and give the condition of each piece at the time of the renting taking an inventory of the smallest apartment usually lasts several hours since every scratch on a chair every worn space on the upholstery and every spot on the cushion must be itemized or upon expiration of the lease a heavy penalty is imposed for any damage done by the tenant if the clock is in running order it must be itemized as own marsh which means that it is going and the same is true of every bit of machinery a careful american housekeeper here has told me her troubles in settling with her landlord on leaving she had rented a furnished apartment her servants were excellent and consequently the agent could find practically no damage he went over the inventory examining every dish knife fork plate and spoon he peered around under the furniture running his fingers along the polish surface for scratches suddenly he spied a magazine lying on the sofa ah he said as he threw up his hands and rushed across the room he lifted the magazine thinking he would find a big grease spot beneath it alas there was nothing and his face fell in despair in fact i am told some landlords look upon scratches and grease spots as financial assets they are slurred over and fines collected from succeeding tenants who have omitted to note them in making their leases in addition to the rent a fixed sum is charged for cleaning an apartment this item is often left out of the lease but it equals five percent of the rent and is a large part of the janitor's wages indeed except for his lodging the janitor gets very little out of the landlord the french janitor is quite as powerful and dictatorial as his brother in the united states and it is well to keep on his good side where he can omit to deliver your letters and can say you are out when visitors come furthermore you are obliged to have him turn on the light in the hall when you ring the bell upon coming in late that matter of light is another economy at night the lower front door of every french apartment building is as dark as a pocket an electricity is so controlled by a mechanical device that the lights burn only long enough for you to get to your floor this is about three or four minutes the janitor turns them on at your ring they go out of themselves the electric current is weaker than in america in many apartments one cannot use an electric iron and an electric heater at the same time among the surprising economies of the french apartment is the elevator or the lack of it the american embassy is in a fashionable apartment house in an excellent location the american who calls upon our ambassador is lifted from story to story in a tiny little elevator not as big around as a hog's head with two seats in the corners it will not accommodate more than two persons at one time my daughter rented last summer the apartment of a bombay princess who lived in the suburbs of paris the princess had gone to a watering place for the health of her husband and the flat was let furnished it was on the fourth floor of a magnificent house but the circular elevator was actually no bigger than a flower barrel when two persons got in they seemed to be almost embracing i always looked twice before i entered this elevator was operated by a push button but that is nothing for even at some paris hotels where they are charging six dollars and upwards for a day for rooms the elevators are run by push buttons and the guest does the pushing in the ordinary apartment house the elevators are used only in going up you are supposed to walk down where this saves the juice in many apartment houses there are no elevators and six-story buildings are now being built with nothing but stairs to the various floors i am on the fourth story in my hotel here in paris and i have time the elevator going up it takes just two minutes or 30 seconds per floor at the same rate it would take an hour to go to the top of the walworth building and back fuel is saved as carefully as electric current there's no such thing as waste of wood or coal many of the railway companies run their engines with coal dust pressed into briquettes or bricks coal dust made into balls the size of eggs is used for cooking as well as for house heating and great fires in paris wood is sold by the bundle and the ordinary woodyard is a little store about eight or ten feet wide facing the street the wood and kindling being piled up on shelves it is estimated that france spends almost 70 million dollars a year for wood it is so costly that except for kindling it is burned only by the rich a great deal of gas is now being used for cooking especially in the larger establishments the people hardly know what it is to be warm in the american sense of the word and the luxury of a fire is dispensed with except in the coldest weather other things which we take for granted in america are done here on a most stingy basis for example americans claim that the pipes of the plumbing are too small and that they are usually out of order that is certainly the case in this room where i am writing which cost me six dollars a day and then the tips there is a continual dribble of franks and soos every time your doorbell rings you would best get ready a fee for someone will expect it for the alleged service he has performed the boy with the telegram or the postman with a special delivery letter will want at least two and a half cents the grocery man will expect a ten cent tip and the messenger from the big department store should have the same at new years everyone who has served one in any way during the year comes to the door of the house and frankly asks for a present moreover they get it the man who sweeps the street in front of the house the mechanic who greases the elevator shaft and the girl who delivers the milk as well as the janitor and all his family connections every mechanic who makes repairs must have his tip and the taxi driver is cross unless one adds ten percent to the amount shown on the meter there are many queer features in these french apartment houses one is that the renters often install their own gas and electricity the landlords insisting that the pipes be put outside the walls lest they leak at the close of such a lease the tenant takes the fixtures with him or sells them to the incoming tenant in most cases the heating arrangements are bad steam and hot water heat are unknown to many a french household and some apartment houses are still built without electric lights in comparison with ours the cheaper dwellings are like pitching coops they are small flats in which cupboards have been built into the wall to save room the door to the cupboard looks as if it leads into another room but upon opening it one finds a bed within there the children sleep the floors of these apartments are good and often kept shining with iron shavings which look like excelsior just one more item about these french homes i first saw this novelty at leon but i am told it is quite common throughout the country it has been nicknamed the judas slit and is a little brass plate about the size of a playing card with slits a 16th of an inch wide across it this is tacked over a hole in the door in such a way that a person within can peep through and without being seen can tell who is knocking before she decides whether to be home or not if she does not want to receive she slips away and the servant at her side gives word that she is not at home i do not know that this is less honest than the judas kisses which our ladies give to unwelcome callers or the honey tones they send over the telephone wires end of chapter 10