ADVANCES IN SIGNALLING 227 



phone. This telephone service was of two kinds; namely, 

 internal telephone service within the army itself, and external 

 telephone service between the U. S. Army and other armies 

 or more specifically (i) external service between the U. S. 

 Army and officials of the French Army or civilian life, and (2) 

 internal service within the U. S. Army organization itself. 

 Those two services had to be handled in different ways. 



The first telephone exchange for external and internal service 

 was opened by the Signal Corps in Paris during June, 1917. It 

 served to connect the army offices with each other, and with 

 the French telephone system. American soldier operators had 

 no difficulty in making internal connections; since the English 

 language was exclusively used. When, however, connections 

 had to be made through a French exchange, it was necessary 

 for the operator to be familiar with the French language. In 

 fact, he had to be skilled in the use of French, for it is one 

 thing to be able to speak to a person face to face in a foreign 

 language and another thing entirely to speak to him at a dis- 

 tance, through the medium of the telephone. Although the 

 French people are notoriously tolerant and forbearing with 

 foreigners attempting to speak their language, the diplomatic 

 difficulties are enhanced when the mutilation of their language 

 occurs over a wire. A modus vivendi was reached by using 

 the relatively few French-speaking U. S. Army operators on 

 the external switchboard calls, and by the French using their 

 relatively few English-speaking operators on these same wires 

 at their switchboards. At the best, however, there was a good 

 deal of language difficulty in the external telephone service. 



To cope with the language difficulty over telephone wires 

 that had to convey both French and English speech, the Signal 

 Corps called in the aid of the American Telephone and Tele- 

 graph Co. in the States to furnish female operators who could 

 speak both French and English, for service with the army in 

 France. There were hardly any such bilingual operators in 

 the American service; so they had to be advertised for and 

 specially trained in the States before being sent to France. It 



