Their task was to film the work of the Allied women. More than 20,000 American women served overseas during the war—10,000 as nurses in the army and navy and a few thousand under the auspices of the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army. Several hundred women were telephone operators with the Army Signal Corps and still others served as doctors, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, dentists, therapists, decoders, and in a myriad of other roles.27
Most of the one thousand professional entertainers who joined the war effort were connected to either the Overseas Theater League or the YMCA and over half were women. Cobina Johnson sang opera, the artist Neysa McMein sketched the soldiers, and Eleanor Robson gave dramatic readings. Frances just missed Elsie Janis, who had left France after more than three solid months of several shows a day and was now in London, heading the cast of Hello, America. In between performances, Elsie visited the injured in English hospitals.
Even though she had been in France off and on for over two years, Elsie was unable to sign up for the usually obligatory six months of service because of intermittent stage commitments. Since she never officially enlisted, Elsie was one of the few entertainers allowed to travel in “street clothes” instead of a uniform and she picked up the nicknames “The Regular Girl” and “The Sweetheart of the A.E.F.”28
Her popularity with the troops was unrivaled and she appeared before as many as 5,000 soldiers at a time, singing songs, telling her stories, and doing impersonations from the top of a shed, the caboose of a train, or whatever elevated, flat surface was available. Her astute sense of mimicry combined with several intense weeks of language lessons gave her a fluency in French with a “superb accent” that helped spread her renown to all the Allied soldiers. Almost always accompanied by her mother, Elsie Janis was credited with seeing more of the front than any officer.29
When live entertainment was not available, women delivered the film and ran the projectors for the hundreds of movies that were shown to the soldiers. Frances witnessed the popularity of movies time after time; they were shown in warehouses, airplane hangars, on battered portable screens, or projected against the wall of a building in the village square where townsfolk crammed in around the soldiers. “Charlie and Doug” were the two favorites, but anything showing familiar sights from home—the Statue of Liberty, a Chicago department store, or San Francisco’s Golden Gate—created a sensation and bolstered morale. Toward the end of the war German propaganda films left behind by the retreating army became a prime attraction.30
Frances traveled to and from Paris for a few days at a time, usually arriving on or near the front after a battle to witness doctors and nurses doing what they could for the injured in the shattered villages and burying the dead. She was struck by how thoroughly exhausted the Europeans were after four devastating years of war.
“The vastness, the immensity, the awfulness of what I saw as I kept moving along with the front line engagements was utterly beyond my powers of comprehension, let alone my ability to describe or scenarioize [sic]. . . . I could not write of the war, of the agonies, of the bravery of our boys or the things they endured—I simply couldn’t do it.”
Still, she continually worked on ways to shape their film into a cohesive story and whenever the truck wasn’t too bumpy or the candle still had a flame, she took her notes and occasionally turned to writing comedy vignettes “for relief from the strain.”31
More and more soldiers were being sent to the front, but the 143rd Field Artillery company remained in Brest. Fred’s frustration built as time and again his company was held back to train the new recruits that kept landing. He managed to visit Frances in Paris in the middle of October, but a massive air raid prevented them from enjoying the brief interlude. A Paris school was bombed during the raid and dozens of French children were killed. This reality of the war hit Frances harder than hearing the guns of the front; nothing was sacred and she was learning it firsthand.
She was preparing to leave Paris on the last day of October when Fred arrived with the news that his regiment was finally leaving for the front. She was relieved he hadn’t gone sooner and kept her worries to herself. For several years, everyone had been saying that the war couldn’t last much longer and now rumors abounded of German retreats and armistice, but still the war raged on.
The German occupation remained strong in some areas, but in the Alsace and Lorraine territories they had almost “melted away.” Her orders were to attach herself to the Signal Corps and the Red Cross units heading there to tend the wounded Allies abandoned in prison hospitals as the Germans retreated, but when she arrived at the caravan departure site, her division had gone. All the remaining trucks, ambulances, and cars were filled with doctors, nurses, and equipment. She was debating what to do next when an officer told her, “You’ll have to turn back.”
“As ‘turning back’ was not in my life’s pattern, I walked past the long line of trucks filled with supplies until I came to the only one where the seat beside the driver, a Sergeant, was unoccupied. At that moment, a bugle call signaled for the caravan to leave. Just as the driver of the truck was about to start his motor, I scrambled aboard. ‘You’re in for a tough ride,’ was all he said.”32
It was a nightmare of a ride. Once-prosperous towns were rubble; destruction was everywhere. Bomb shells had created holes the size of craters in the roads and made them a maze to maneuver. The heavier trucks fell behind as they passed the battlefields where millions of young men had lost their lives.
Fires set by the Signal Corps to protect the convoy from rats were blazing when they finally approached Verdun. The silhouette of the half-destroyed walls of the town’s cathedral reminded her of a Doré illustration from Dante’s Inferno.
Mary’s latest letter had helped convince Frances that the end of the war was near because the studio bosses had told them to lighten up on the “Kill the Kaiser” plots and start making romantic comedies again. Still, it would be hard to turn the tide of the anti-German sentiment that had swept the country—what one journalist called “the ecstasy of hate that gripped the American people.”
Perhaps that was how some back home saw the situation, but in the ruins Frances found a small child’s shoe and she knew she would never see the world quite the same again.33
She slept fitfully in the truck and, before dawn, the caravan was moving away from Verdun. Downed bridges mandated creative detours and the rain that had been intermittent the day before was pouring now. The roads became impossible to traverse and truck after truck pulled to the side, waiting for the weather to clear. Frances and her sergeant kept going until late in the afternoon when a pothole broke one of their axles. Too impatient to wait for help, Frances decided to start walking toward Luxembourg. After several hours darkness was descending and her initial confidence turned slowly to fear. She became acutely aware of the smell of death all around her that even a downpour of rain could not erase.
Cold and soaked through to the bone, she was wondering why she had left the truck when the lights of a motorcade flashed behind her. Frances stepped out into the middle of road, holding out her hands so they do could nothing but stop. She saw a general’s star on the windshield and as apprehensive as she had been walking alone, she found herself with a new set of fears. A deep, angry voice came from the dark interior of the car: “Good God, an American woman. Let me see her pass.”
She put her papers into the outstretched hand and a flashlight shining on her also revealed several shadowed men and the bristling eyebrows of the man who was reading her papers.
“Lieutenant Frances Marion. Where do you think you are going?”
“To Luxembourg, sir,” she replied with a salute.
“Not
