POLYGLOT PARIS

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 191, 8 May 1919, Page 7

POLYGLOT PARIS

A CITY OHIL NATIONS (By George A. Birmingham, in the "Daily Mail.") . • The drive from the station seemed surprisingly long; but my cab pulled up at last. 1 stepped into a pleasant house through a. door which stood 'hospitably open, I found myself in a club, ah Indian club. I was greeted, in Hindustani 1 suppose, by a nice-looking young

1 had no business thero. I did not want to be there. 1 only got there because a young woman in London, on which I loohshly relied, gave mo a wrong address. It took mo some time to get away again. •the Indian insisted on trying to help mo to find tho placo I wanted. Tho club boasted of a telephone, but neither his 1' rencli nor min© was readily intelligible to tho official at tho exchange. His Hindustani was dark to me, and he did not understand my English easily. However, wo pulled the. business through in the end; a creditable performance requiring tact, courtesy, and pntionco from all concerned, tho Indian, the telophono operator, and me. '

That was my first tasto of the polyglot Paris of to-day, a city filled witli peoples, nations and languages. Chiefly, of course tho strangers aro soldiers. I suppose that Paris 'shelters at tho present momont soldiers of every nation in sympathy witli tho Allies. A moro list of them would bo an exhausting thing to make and tiresome to read, like a dotailed description of somo great panorama picture.

But tho panorama itself was intensely exciting. I was thrilled in walking slowly along the Boulevard des Capucinos at night watching the men in uniform stream by me. British soldiers wore the least common, though our overseas troops —Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders—abounded. A few young officers and a stray, lonoly-looking private were saw from our own regiments. Nest to the French themselves and their amazingly. - picturesque colonial troops, the Americans are the most numerous. They swarm everywhere. Fighting men, men of the auxiliary services, and what Mr. Macpherson once called the "camp followers" of tho modern army, the agents of tho Y.M.C.A. There seems to be. a very large proportion of "camp followers" with tho American .forces, a much larger proportion than' thero is with ours. Pwhapa.it is only in Paris and at the great army bases that this is so. But tho casual observer certainly gets the impression that there can bo very few middle-aged men and women left in America notv, so many havo come to Europe either under the Y.M.C.A.. or the Roman Catholic variant of the Y.M.C.A., tho Knights of Columbus.

Perhaps the number of Americans in Paris seems larger than it really is because of the penetrating quality of the American voice and. the dominating nature of the language. There • is—there must be even- to-day—more French than American spoken in Paris, but in the parts of tho city chiefly frequented by strangers you hear more American. It drowns tho French. It simply obliterates tho English; but, of course, there is very little English 6poken. The Parisian, accustomed before tho war to wealthy, travelled, and almost cosmopolitan Amoricans, has discovered with surprise that the ordinary American lias a language of his own which is not English I was talking one day to a French girl who was serving as a clerk in an American office. "All!" she said, "what happiness to hear English spoken again I" 1 looked at her in some surprise. "Surely," I said, "you hear nothing else all day in this place?" "But no," she replied. "I hear American all day, and it is a language very difficult to understand."

On another occasion I congratulated a French sergeant, who was wearing the ribbon of our Military Medal, on the excellence of his English. He had learned it, so ho told me, when attached to tho Yorkshire Regiment near Cambrai. "But I fear," he said, "that I am forgetting it fast. You see now I havo to speak American always."

The Luro of London. Thero used to ho a saying current before tho war about good Americans going ito Paris when they die. Either the American taste in cities lias changed or else I did not meet any really good Americans, though I did meet many who were pleasant and friendly. Most of them want nothing better now' than, to get out ot Paris before they die. The citv of their dreams is London. Officers and men alkie want to go there. There seems to have arisen a feeling, new among untravelled Americans, that England is a kind of ancestral home, which it would not only be interesting but also, in the Latin sense, pious to visit. With this goes the discovery that the English are not by any means so elVeto us was generally supposed in America before the "I take off my hat to the English every time," a young officer said to mo one clay at lunch; "and I say there wasnt a bigger man in the war than Cavan. He had served under Lord Cavan in Italy, and ho pronounced the first syllable ot tho name as if it rhymed with "wave. "If 1 can get a fortnight's leave before I'm sent homo I'm going to spend it in London."

A Bill has been passed by the Legislature of the Philippine Islands for the appropriation of =£3,000,000 to provide for free schooling for ever:/ child,