VIVANDIERE RETURNS TO FRENCH ARMY

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 401, 9 July 1928, Page 13

VIVANDIERE RETURNS TO FRENCH ARMY

A TRADITIONAL FIGURE In future the conscript in the French Army will no longer be able to spend the time when he is supposed to be learning to be a soldier in doing duty as a “cuistot,” that is, in cooking the food of his comrades. The system has never been popular, except with the men who thus escaped drill, and with their friends, who got the tit-bits out of the pot, and both the cook and his cooking have always had a legendary reputation for dirtiness. Women, at the rate of one for every 400 men, are now to be engaged to do the job. The reform takes the imagination back to the cantiniere and the vivandiere, though the days are past of the dainty uniform, short skirt and gaiters, with a little cask of cordial on the hip, or the coquettish combination of skirt and parlourmaid’s apron over full military trousers, and topped by a laced and frogged tunic and a bearskin, such as are still to be seen in the books of military costume of the period of the Second Empire. Those quaint designs are even superannuated in comic opera, though they are, no doubt, still be seen occasionally in provincial fancy dress balls. Of course, the cantiniere was never responsible for cooking, any more than was the vivandiere. The latter, who was more often a vivandier, was, In fact, a trader, who obtained a licence to open a canteen and sell food and other things to the troops. She, or he, was an important personage, only to be found at army headquarters. It was the cantiniere who was really the traditional and picturesque figure. She was allowed by the colonel to open her canteen for her own profit, but was also in some sort on the strength of the battalion, and in wartime she became its one hospital nurse. She was usually the widow of an N.C.0., but she had to marry again before she could be appointed. At the time of the first Napoleon, the cantinieres performed many acts of bravery, and several of them were even made chevalieres of the Legion of Honour.