The citizen-Republican. (Scotland, Bon Homme County, S.D.) 1???-19??, 1917-11-01
When Americans Went BY in Paris
Dorothy Garfield Fisher, in Everybodys Magazine.

DorothyC Garfield Fisher, in Everybodys Magazine. M $50
We stopped finally just before the turn into the little Rue dc
Plcpus, where Lafayettes tomb is situated, and waited for the troops
to come.
When they arrived, they were walking boquets, having been
showered with flowers all along the way. Every button had a flower
stem twisted around it, their hats were all wreathed, and every rifle
barrel had a boquet on it. The officers in front had their saddles
banked with flowers, and what was even more significant of the
warmth of the welcome given to them was that their Anglo-Saxon
men whom we had seen on the Rue de Rivoli, slouching along with a
rapid, powerful American gait, without a glance to right or left, were
lngs OF friendlness with the people who rushed out from the side to
give them more flowers and to shake their hands and to touch the
big American flag which they carried.
We were swept along by this crowd, and were not at all sorry to
find ourselves, all three of us, marching rapidly beside The soldiers in
the midst of the dense crowd Of working people who accompanied
them, filling the street soGdly from the houses on the one side to the
houses on the other side.
listened with all my ears, as you can imagine, to the comments
that were made, and as everybody was talking at the top of his voice,
to be heard above the din, [ caught a good many, some Of them
amusing. A great many times they said: "Oh, lis sont fameux'-
they're fine. [ heard several times: How tall and thin they are p
Once or twice, with a hearty emphasis, almost of admiration:
Heavens, how ugly they are.' (And this was really true. 1 didn't
realize, until I saw a mass of them together, how the Lincoln type Of
powerful, raw boned, sincere uginess has persisted in many Ameri-
cans) and of course a thousand time give les po1us d'Amerique."
One working woman walking in front of me, carrying a baby.
kept saying: cit makes me want to cry when / see their flag here
and an old man said: Il hope there is German spy on every street
corner"
But what pleased me most of all was what a middle aged. middle
class woman on the street car going home said to me after she noticed
Johns uniform. She said: EVERY time / see the American flag it
makes me think: mo, the Germans were wrong. Ideals are the reaIest
things there are
The flowers were still showering down just like something YOU
read about. / never saw it before. The soldiers were really walking
on flowers and had their arms full besides. A big rose fell into Sallys
hands, and I called to her, above the roar of the cheering, to give it to
the American soldier by whose side she was trotting and to tell him
she was a little American girl. She handed it to hin but was too
shy to say anything, SO I called out to him: 1T is an American child. -
I saw his lips moving as he called the attention of the other men in
his line, and as they marched they all leaned forward with a very
friendly look of surprise and pleasure at Sally. I suppose in that
utterly foreign crowd it must have seemed very strange to them to
see a child of their own nationality"