Dinsmore Ely. Ely Dinsmore

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СКАЧАТЬ little moustaches. There are heavy featured Frenchmen, with coarse manners and rough attire. There are sallow-skinned Portuguese in dandy dress who have an air of dissipated ennui, and yet have a solicitous cordiality which makes them strange and out of place. There are dark-brown Moroccans and Turcos with red fezzes, Assyrian beards, and brass studded belts. The Russians, with their gray-green sweat shirts belted at the waist, their bakers’ hats with highly colored diadems in front, and their loose black knee boots, stand aloof and talk little, but with vim. They somewhat resemble Irish in their features; and in the heart of the crowd, pressing close against the doors, as eager and clamorous and more rough in action than all, are the Americans, pushing, scrambling, elbowing, to be first into the ordinaire. Only their inexhaustible good humor prevents one from criticizing them. Once inside, there is a great scramble for the head of the table. Men jump up on the benches and step on and over the tables with their muddy hobnailed shoes in a vain endeavor to arrange themselves favorably. Then enterprising mechanics, who get one franc per person per month for their service, bring in stacked pans of food. These are large receptacles of a gallon capacity, and there is one stack to each table. In the top pan is meat – usually beef cut in chunks, sometimes tough, sometimes tender, always nourishing, never savory. In the second are boiled or baked or French fried potatoes, or beans or carrots, or mélange, similar to succotash. In the third and largest container is soup, which tastes better by artificial light, and is always the same. A weak solution of beans and cabbage and potatoes with scraps of war bread afloat. This is seldom tasted, and passes on from week to week until it becomes richer from many cookings, and is finally eatable. At the end of the meal comes the dessert, and it is the redeeming feature. Each man has a good big spoonful of confiture– apple butter.

      The men at the head of the table have heaping platefuls of food; those in the middle get theirs level full; those at the end are dependent upon the foresight and generosity of those above them. But the food is wholesome and clean, and if a man eats to live it will nourish him satisfactorily. For those who live to eat, there are high-priced restaurants just over the fence which are run with the sole idea of getting the soldiers’ money.

      This morning an order was issued that thirty of the men in the Penguin class who have had less than thirteen sorties are to leave for Tours at two o’clock. That is another school. My changing to the morning class enables me to get seventeen sorties, so I remain here. I am glad for that, because it means starting to learn on a new kind of aeroplane.

      I could not make the facilities for printing pictures here suffice, so I have sent the films to Paris. It will be a couple of weeks before I can send them to you. I have taken very few pictures here, but intend to take some soon. The country hereabout is very beautiful and fertile; the sunsets have been simply glorious. The country is moist and rich in color. I am not much pleased with the group of men in this barracks and will change as soon as there is a vacancy in the one I like, but I sleep and read and walk. I am reading Catherine de’ Medici, by Balzac. It is rich in the history of Paris. Tell father to write me whenever he can. I wish you and father would get a little vest-pocket camera like mine and send me pictures whenever you can. I find that I have a passion for photographs. Those that I have I look at almost every day.

      It’s good to hear that you are enjoying yourself at Black Oak. I hardly think you will be able to be miserable because Bob and I are not with you. Send any newspaper clippings of interest.

      A man just came into the room with a rumor that sixty more men are to leave here in a couple of days, but does not say where they are going. At next writing I may be almost anywhere. Guess I’ll scout around and get some pictures right away. Well, much love to you, Mother dear, and to father, and to everyone else.

Your loving son,Dinsmore.Bourges (Cher), August 19, 1917.

      Dear Mother:

      Day before yesterday I got permission to come down to Bourges where the great cathedral of St. Etienne is. It is the third best cathedral in France, and is simply magnificent. I stayed till yesterday afternoon, and then returned to camp. Bourges is fifteen miles from Avord. Then I found we had repos and did not go to class till tomorrow evening, so I came right back to Bourges on the first train. I will have been in the town two days and a half – well, nothing could be better. The town is built upon gentle slopes which fall away from the cathedral in its center. Houses are here ranging from just before the war back to 1200 A.D., perhaps further. Hundreds of architectural treasures are hidden in its narrow streets. A town of 45,000, it contains more good architectural designs than Chicago. But the cathedral – oh, how wonderful! I went straight to it, led by its towers showing above the house tops, and when it came into full view I stopped still and held my breath. Ponderous, massive, standing elegant, magnificent, mounting upward, delicate, airy in the skies. It held me and pressed so upon my feelings. What was it? The wonderful spirit of endeavor and faith and love of a hundred generations trying to please their God. The genius of seven centuries bending its power to produce a single masterpiece and then the endeavor of one small human being to grasp all this and hold it in one glance – as the sound of a hundred thousand voices cheering their parting army. It made me want to cry. I walked all around it twice. I took pictures of it from every angle in case something should happen to it or me. Then I went in. Oh, why try? It cannot be described. No wonder they kneel. My thoughts whispered to each other in awe. Faint glows in rainbow hues from the gorgeously stained windows played in the distance among the forest of columns. Across the altar, which seemed like a dwarf shrine in a giant citadel six candles twinkled, as if to demonstrate the smallness of the life of man. There before the altar knelt a priest, small, with bowed head. Then there was a stir in the air, slight at first, but growing with rising and falling crescendo, and the monotonous drone of the chant echoed and reechoed among the columns till it filled the whole vault, and then died away into religious silence. I turned and mounted the winding stair into the bell tower, counting the steps – four hundred and six – four hundred and seven – oh, here was something that I could grasp and describe. There were four hundred and seven six-inch steps. The tower was two hundred and four feet high.

      The fine old warden of the keys told me he couldn’t take me over the place without a permit from the architect of the city, so I went to the architect’s home, only to find him out. When I returned to the cathedral, disappointed, the old man said that if I would return at nine in the morning he would take me through. At nine in the morning we started. We started up the tower and branched off at one of the little doors into the clerestory that led all around the inside of the church nave. Here we saw the organ. From here we mounted a dark, uneven passage within the walls which brought us out to the lowest stage of the roof, where the bases of the flying buttresses rest. We traversed the gutter, which was really a promenade, to the choir end of the cathedral. Here again we wound up a circular stairs within a great buttress pier and came out on the little narrow stair cut right up the flying buttress span to the main roof. Here we entered another little door, and found ourselves right in the garret over the altar. Under my feet was the great span of the main vault, and over my head the original joinery of the great peaked roof. In the darkness of the garret we passed great old windlasses for lowering the huge candelabra which hung in the nave. We traversed the garret to where through a little door a shaky scaffolding led over a deep pit to the tower of the prison. Here, again, was a huge chamber lighted by narrow slits in twenty-foot walls. We descended again and at every landing was a narrow cell which came to a point in a small slit which admitted light and indentation in the stone on which to sit. It was uncanny. It was a relief to come again to the day, where the bright sunlight played upon gargoyles and grotesques hiding in the carved stone.

      Such a feast of the imagination! I could sit down now and write a novel laid in the confines of that pile. Then a fellow whom I met and I went down and explored the crypt. There were unlit shrines and unaired vaults which ended by a wall one could not see over, and the air was cool and damp and so bad a match would not burn. We went out to breathe fresh air, and dream in the sun.

Your Son.Ecole d’Aviation, Tours, August 28, 1917.

      Dear Mother:

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