1919

Richard Ellsworth Savage

It was at Fontainebleau lined up in the square in front of Francis I’s palace they first saw the big grey Fiat ambulances they were to drive. Schuyler came back from talking with the French drivers who were turning them over with the news that they were sore as hell because it meant they had to go back into the front line. They asked why the devil the Americans couldn’t stay home and mind their own business instead of coming over here and filling up all the good embusqué jobs. That night the section went into cantonment in tarpaper barracks that stank of carbolic, in a little town in Champagne. It turned out to be the Fourth of July, so the maréchale-de-logis served out champagne with supper and a general with white walrus whiskers came and made a speech about how with the help of Amérique héroique la victoire was certain, and proposed a toast to le président Veelson. The chef of the section, Bill Knickerbocker, got up a little nervously and toasted la France héroique, l’héroique Cinquième Armée and la victorie by Christmas. Fireworks were furnished by the Boches who sent over an airraid that made everybody scuttle for the bombproof dugout.

Once they got down there Fred Summers said it smelt too bad and anyway he wanted a drink and he and Dick went out to find an estaminet, keeping close under the eaves of the houses to escape the occasional shrapnel fragments from the antiaircraft guns. They found a little bar all full of tobacco smoke and French poilus singing la Madelon. Everybody cheered when they came in and a dozen glasses were handed to them. They smoked their first caporal ordinaire and everybody set them up to drinks so that at closing time, when the bugles blew the French equivalent of taps, they found themselves walking a little unsteadily along the pitchblack streets arm in arm with two poilus who’d promised to find them their cantonment. The poilus said la guerre was une saloperie and la victoire was une sale blague and asked eagerly if les americains knew anything about la revolution en Russie. Dick said he was a pacifist and was for anything that would stop the war and they all shook hands very significantly and talked about la revolution mondiale. When they were turning in on their folding cots, Fred Summers suddenly sat bolt upright with his blanket around him and said in a solemn funny way he had, “Fellers, this ain’t a war, it’s a goddam madhouse.”

There were two other fellows in the section who liked to drink wine and chatter bad French; Steve Warner, who’d been a special student at Harvard, and Ripley who was a freshman at Columbia. The five of them went around together, finding places to get omelettes and pommes frites in the villages within walking distance, making the rounds of the estaminets every night; they got to be known as the grenadine guards. When the section moved up onto the Voie Sacrée back of Verdun and was quartered for three rainy weeks in a little ruined village called Erize la Petite, they set up their cots together in the same corner of the old brokendown barn they were given for a cantonment. It rained all day and all night; all day and all night camions ground past through the deep liquid putty of the roads carrying men and munitions to Verdun. Dick used to sit on his cot looking out through the door at the jiggling mudspattered faces of the young French soldiers going up for the attack, drunk and desperate and yelling à bas la guerre, mort au vaches, à bas la guerre. Once Steve came in suddenly, his face pale above the dripping poncho, his eyes snapping, and said in a low voice, “Now I know what the tumbrils were like in the Terror, that’s what they are, tumbrils.”

Dick was relieved to find out, when they finally moved up within range of the guns, that he wasn’t any more scared than anybody else. The first time they went on post he and Fred lost their way in the shellshredded woods and were trying to turn the car around on a little rise naked as the face of the moon when three shells from an Austrian eightyeight went past them like three cracks of a whip. They never knew how they got out of the car and into the ditch, but when the sparse blue almondsmelling smoke cleared they were both lying flat in the mud. Fred went to pieces and Dick had to put his arm around him and keep whispering in his ear, “Come on, boy, we got to make it. Come on, Fred, we’ll fool ’em.” It all hit him funny and he kept laughing all the way back along the road into the quieter section of the woods where the dressing station had been cleverly located right in front of a battery of 405s so that the concussion almost bounced the wounded out of their stretchers every time a gun was fired. When they got back to the section after taking a load to the triage they were able to show three jagged holes from shellfragments in the side of the car.

Next day the attack began and continual barrages and counter-barrages and heavy gasbombardments; the section was on twentyfour hour duty for three days, at the end of it everybody had dysentery and bad nerves. One fellow got shellshock, although he’d been too scared to go on post, and had to be sent back to Paris. A couple of men had to be evacuated for dysentery. The grenadine guards came through the attack pretty well, except that Steve and Ripley had gotten a little extra sniff of mustard gas up at P2 one night and vomited whenever they ate anything.

In their twentyfour hour periods off duty they’d meet in a little garden at Récicourt that was the section’s base. No one else seemed to know about it. The garden had been attached to a pink villa but the villa had been mashed to dust as if a great foot had stepped on it. The garden was untouched, only a little weedy from neglect, roses were in bloom there and butterflies and bees droned around the flowers on sunny afternoons. At first they took the bees for distant arrivés and went flat on their bellies when they heard them. There had been a cement fountain in the middle of the garden and there they used to sit when the Germans got it into their heads to shell the road and the nearby bridge. There was regular shelling three times a day and a little scattering between times. Somebody would be detailed to stand in line at the Copé and buy south of France melons and four franc fifty champagne. Then they’d take off their shirts to toast their backs and shoulders if it was sunny and sit in the dry fountain eating the melons and drinking the warm cidery champagne and talk about how they’d go back to the States and start an underground newspaper like La Libre Belgique to tell people what the war was really like.

What Dick liked best in the garden was the little backhouse, like the backhouse in a New England farm, with a clean scrubbed seat and a half moon in the door, through which on sunny days the wasps who had a nest in the ceiling hummed busily in and out. He’d sit there with his belly aching listening to the low voices of his friends talking in the driedup fountain. Their voices made him feel happy and at home while he stood wiping himself on a few old yellowed squares of a 1914 Petit Journal that still hung on the nail. Once he came back buckling his belt and saying, “Do you know? I was thinking how fine it would be if you could reorganize the cells of your body into some other kind of life… it’s too damn lousy being a human… I’d like to be a cat, a nice comfortable housecat sitting by the fire.”

“It’s a hell of a note,” said Steve, reaching for his shirt and putting it on. A cloud had gone over the sun and it was suddenly chilly. The guns sounded quiet and distant. Dick felt suddenly chilly and lonely. “It’s a hell of a note when you have to be ashamed of belonging to your own race. But I swear I am, I swear I’m ashamed of being a man… it will take some huge wave of hope like a revolution to make me feel any selfrespect ever again…. God, we’re a lousy cruel vicious dumb type of tailless ape.” “Well, if you want to earn your selfrespect, Steve, and the respect of us other apes, why don’t you go down, now that they’re not shelling, and buy us a bottle of champagny water?” said Ripley.

After the attack on hill 304 the division went en repos back of Bar-le-Duc for a couple of weeks and then up into a quiet section of the Argonne called le Four de Paris where the French played chess with the Boches in the front line and where one side always warned the other before setting off a mine under a piece of trench. When they were off duty they could go into the inhabited and undestroyed town of Sainte Ménéhoulde and eat fresh pastry and pumpkin soup and roast chicken. When the section was disbanded and everybody sent back to Paris Dick hated to leave the mellow autumn woods of the Argonne. The U.S. army was to take over the ambulance service attached to the French. Everybody got a copy of the section’s citation; Dick Norton made them a speech under shellfire, never dropping the monocle out of his eye, dismissing them as gentlemen volunteers and that was the end of the section.

Except for an occasional shell from the Bertha, Paris was quiet and pleasant that November. It was too foggy for airraids. Dick and Steve Warner got a very cheap room back of the Pantheon; in the daytime they read French and in the evenings roamed round cafés and drinking places. Fred Summers got himself a job with the Red Cross at twentyfive dollars a week and a steady girl the second day they hit Paris. Ripley and Ed Schuyler took lodgings in considerable style over Henry’s bar. They all ate dinner together every night and argued themselves sick about what they ought to do. Steve said he was going home and C.O. and to hell with it; Ripley and Schuyler said they didn’t care what they did as long as they kept out of the American army, and talked about joining the Foreign Legion or the Lafayette Escadrille.

Fred Summers said, “Fellers, this war’s the most gigantic cockeyed graft of the century and me for it and the cross red nurses.” At the end of first week he was holding down two Red Cross jobs, each at twentyfive a week, and being kept by a middleaged French marraine who owned a big house in Neuilly. When Dick’s money gave out Fred borrowed some for him from his marraine, but he never would let any of the others see her. “Don’t want you fellers to know what I’m in for,” he’d say.

At lunchtime one day Fred Summers came round to say that everything was fixed up and that he had jobs for them all. The wops, he explained, were pretty well shot after Caporetto and couldn’t get out of the habit of retreating. It was thought that sending the American Red Cross ambulance section down would help their morale. He was in charge of recruiting for the time being and had put all their names down. Dick immediately said he spoke Italian and felt he’d be a great help to the morale of the Italians, so the next morning they were all at the Red Cross office when it opened and were duly enrolled in Section 1 of the American Red Cross for Italy. There followed a couple more weeks waiting around during which Fred Summers took on a mysterious Serbian lad he picked up in a café back of the Place St. Michel who wanted to teach them to take hashish, and Dick became friends with a drunken Montenegran who’d been a barkeep in New York and who promised to get them all decorated by King Nicholas of Montenegro. But the day they were going to be received at Neuilly to have the decorations pinned on, the section left.

The convoy of twelve Fiats and eight Fords ran along the smooth macadam roads south through the Forest of Fontainebleau and wound east through the winecolored hills of central France. Dick was driving a Ford alone and was so busy trying to remember what to do with his feet he could hardly notice the scenery. Next day they went over the mountains and down into the valley of the Rhone, into a rich wine country with planetrees and cypresses, smelling of the vintage and late fall roses and the south. By Montélimar, the war, the worry about jail and protest and sedition all seemed a nightmare out of another century.

They had a magnificent supper in the quiet pink and white town with cêpes and garlic and strong red wine. “Fellers,” Fred Summers kept saying, “this ain’t a war, it’s a goddam Cook’s tour.” They slept in style in the big brocadehung beds at the hotel, and when they left in the morning a little schoolboy ran after Dick’s car shouting Vive l’Amerique and handed him a box of nougat, the local specialty; it was the land of Cockaigne.

That day the convoy fell to pieces running to Marseilles; discipline melted away; drivers stopped at all the wineshops along the sunny roads to drink and play craps. The Red Cross publicity man and the Saturday Evening Post correspondent who was the famous writer, Montgomery Ellis, got hideously boiled and could be heard whooping and yelling in the back of the staffcar, while the little fat lieutenant ran up and down the line of cars at every stop red and hysterically puffing. Eventually they were all rounded up and entered Marseilles in formation. They’d just finished parking in a row in the main square and the boys were settling back into the bars and cafés round about, when a man named Ford got the bright idea of looking into his gasoline tank with a match and blew his car up. The local firedepartment came out in style and when car No. 8 was properly incinerated turned their highpressure hose on the others, and Schuyler, who spoke the best French in the section, had to be dragged away from a conversation with the cigarette girl at the corner café to beg the firechief for chrissake to lay off.

With the addition of a fellow named Sheldrake who was an expert on folkdancing and had been in the famous section 7, the grenadine guards dined in state at the Bristol. They continued the evening at the promenoire at the Apollo, that was so full of all the petite femmes in the world, they never saw the show. Everything was cockeyed and full of women, the shrill bright main streets with their cafés and cabarets, and the black sweaty tunnels of streets back of the harbor full of rumpled beds and sailors and black skin and brown skin, wriggling bellies, flopping purplewhite breasts, grinding thighs.

Very late Steve and Dick found themselves alone in a little restaurant eating ham and eggs and coffee. They were drunk and sleepy and quarrelling drowsily. When they paid, the middleaged waitress told them to put the tip on the corner of the table and blew them out of their chairs by calmly hoisting her skirts and picking up the coins between her legs.

“It’s a hoax, a goddam hoax…. Sex is a slotmachine,” Steve kept saying and it seemed gigantically funny, so funny that they went into an early morning bar and tried to tell the man behind the counter about it, but he didn’t understand them and wrote out on a piece of paper the name of an establishment where they could faire rigajig, une maison, propre, convenable, et de haute moralité. Hooting with laughter they found themselves reeling and stumbling as they climbed endless stairways. The wind was cold as hell. They were in front of a crazylooking cathedral looking down on the harbor, steamboats, great expanses of platinum sea hemmed in by ashen mountains. “By God, that’s the Mediterranean.”

They sobered up in the cold jostling wind and the wide metallic flare of dawn and got back to their hotel in time to shake the others out of their drunken slumbers and be the first to report for duty at the parked cars. Dick was so sleepy he forgot what he ought to do with his feet and ran his Ford into the car ahead and smashed his headlights. The fat lieutenant bawled him out shrilly and took the car away from him and put him on a Fiat with Sheldrake, so he had nothing to do all day but look out of his drowse at the Corniche and the Mediterranean and the redroofed towns and the long lines of steamboats bound east hugging the shore for fear of Uboats, convoyed by an occasional French destroyer with its smokestacks in all the wrong places.

Crossing the Italian border they were greeted by crowds of schoolchildren with palmleaves and baskets of oranges, and a movie operator. Sheldrake kept stroking his beard and bowing and saluting at the cheers of evviva gli americani, until zowie, he got an orange between the eyes that pretty near gave him a nosebleed. Another man down the line came within an inch of having his eye put out by a palmbranch thrown by a delirious inhabitant of Vintimiglia. It was a great reception. That night in San Remo enthusiastic wops kept running up to the boys on the street, shaking their hands and congratulating them on il Presidente Veelson; somebody stole all the spare tires out of the camionette and the Red Cross Publicity Man’s suitcase that had been left in the staffcar. They were greeted effusively and shortchanged in the bars. Evviva gli aleati.

Everybody in the section began to curse out Italy and the rubber spaghetti and the vinegary wine, except Dick and Steve, who suddenly became woplovers and bought themselves grammars to learn the language. Dick already gave a pretty good imitation of talking Italian, especially before the Red Cross officers, by putting an o on the end of all the French words he knew. He didn’t give a damn about anything any more. It was sunny, vermouth was a great drink, the towns and the toy churches on the tops of hills and the vineyards and the cypresses and the blue sea were like a succession of backdrops for an oldfashioned opera. The buildings were stagy and ridiculously magnificent; on every blank wall the damn wops had painted windows and colonnades and balconies with fat Titianhaired beauties leaning over them and clouds and covies of dimpletummied cupids.

That night they parked the convoy in the main square of a godforsaken little burg on the outskirts of Genoa. They went with Sheldrake to have a drink in a bar and found themselves drinking with the Saturday Evening Post correspondent who soon began to get tight and to say how he envied them their good looks and their sanguine youth and idealism. Steve picked him up about everything and argued bitterly that youth was the lousiest time in your life, and that he ought to be goddam glad he was forty years old and able to write about the war instead of fighting in it. Ellis goodnaturedly pointed out that they weren’t fighting either. Steve made Sheldrake sore by snapping out, “No, of course not, we’re goddamned embusqués.” He and Steve left the bar and ran like deer to get out of sight before Sheldrake could follow them. Around the corner they saw a streetcar marked Genoa and Steve hopped it without saying a word. Dick didn’t have anything to do but follow.

The car rounded a block of houses and came out on the waterfront. “Judas Priest, Dick,” said Steve, “the goddam town’s on fire.” Beyond the black hulks of boats drawn up on the shore a rosy flame like a gigantic lampflame sent a broad shimmer towards them across the water. “Gracious, Steve, do you suppose the Austrians are in there?”

The car went whanging along; the conductor who came and got their fare looked calm enough. “Inglese?” he asked. “Americani,” said Steve. He smiled and clapped them on the back and said something about the Presidente Veelson that they couldn’t understand.

They got off the car in a big square surrounded by huge arcades that a raw bittersweet wind blew hugely through. Dressedup people in overcoats were walking up and down on the clean mosaic pavement. The town was all marble. Every façade that faced the sea was pink with the glow of the fire. “Here the tenors and the baritones and the sopranos all ready for the show to begin,” said Dick. Steve grunted, “Chorus’ll probably be the goddam Austrians.”

They were cold and went into one of the shiny nickel and plateglass cafés to have a grog. The waiter told them in broken English that the fire was on an American tanker that had hit a mine and that she’d been burning for three days. A longfaced English officer came over from the bar and started to tell them how he was on a secret mission; it was all bloody awful about the retreat; it hadn’t stopped yet; in Milan they were talking about falling back on the Po; the only reason the bloody Austrians hadn’t overrun all bloody Lombardy was they’d been so disorganized by their rapid advance they were in almost as bad shape as the bloody Italians were. Damned Italian officers kept talking about their quadrilateral, and if it wasn’t for the French and British troops behind the Italian lines they’d have sold out long ago. French morale was pretty shaky, at that. Dick told him about how the tools got swiped every time they took their eyes off their cars. The Englishman said the thievery in these parts was extraordinary; that was what his secret mission was about; he was trying to trace an entire carload of boots that had vanished between Vintimiglia and San Raphael, “Whole bloody luggage van turns into thin air overnight… extraordinary…. See those blighters over there at that table, they’re bloody Austrian spies every mother’s son of them… but try as I can I can’t get them arrested… extraordinary. It’s a bloody melodrama that’s what it is, just like Drury Lane. A jolly good thing you Americans have come in. If you hadn’t you’d see the bloody German flag flying over Genoa at this minute.” He suddenly looked at his wristwatch, advised them to buy a bottle of whiskey at the bar if they wanted another bit of drink, because it was closing time, said cheeryoh, and hustled out.

They plunged out again into the empty marble town, down dark lanes and streets of stone steps with always the glare on some jutting wall overhead brighter and redder as they neared the waterfront. Time and again they got lost; at last they came out on wharves and bristle of masts of crowded feluccas and beyond the little crimsontipped waves of the harbor, the breakwater, and outside the breakwater the mass of flame of the burning tanker. Excited and drunk they walked on and on through the town: “By God, these towns are older than the world,” Dick kept saying.

While they were looking at a marble lion, shaped like a dog, that stood polished to glassy smoothness by centuries of hands at the bottom of a flight of steps, an American voice hailed them, wanting to know if they knew their way around this goddam town. It was a young fellow who was a sailor on an American boat that had come over with a carload of mules. They said sure they knew their way and gave him a drink out of the bottle of cognac they’d bought. They sat there on the stone balustrade beside the lion that looked like a dog and swigged cognac out of the bottle and talked. The sailor showed them some silk stockings he’d salvaged off the burning oilship and told them about how he’d been jazzing an Eyetalian girl only she’d gone to sleep and he’d gotten disgusted and walked out on her. “This war’s hell ain’t it de truth?” he said; they all got to laughing.

“You guys seem to be a couple of pretty good guys,” the sailor said. They handed him the bottle and he took a gulp. “You fellers are princes,” he added spluttering, “and I’m goin’ to tell you what I think, see…. This whole goddam war’s a gold brick, it ain’t on the level, its crooked from A to Z. No matter how it comes out fellers like us gets the’s — y end of the stick, see? Well, what I say is all bets is off… every man go to hell in his own way… and three strikes is out, see?” They finished up the cognac.

Singing out savagely, “To hell wid ’em I say,” the sailor threw the bottle with all his might against the head of the stone lion. The Genoese lion went on staring ahead with glassy doglike eyes.

Sourlooking loafers started gathering around to see what the trouble was so they moved on, the sailor waving his silk stockings as he walked. They found him his steamer tied up to the dock and shook hands again and again at the gangplank.

Then it was up to Dick and Steve to get themselves back across the ten miles to Ponte Decimo. Chilly and sleepy they walked until their feet were sore, then hopped a wop truck the rest of the way. The cobbles of the square and the roofs of the cars were covered with hoarfrost when they got there. Dick made a noise getting into the stretcher beside Sheldrake’s and Sheldrake woke up, “What the hell?” he said. “Shut up,” said Dick, “don’t you see you’re waking people up?”

Next day they got to Milan, huge wintry city with its overgrown pincushion cathedral and its Galleria jammed with people and restaurants and newspapers and whores and Cinzano and Campari Bitters. There followed another period of waiting during which most of the section settled down to an endless crapgame in the back room at Cova’s; then they moved out to a place called Dolo on a frozen canal somewhere in the Venetian plain. To get to the elegant carved and painted villa where they were quartered they had to cross the Brenta. A company of British sappers had the bridge all mined and ready to blow up when the retreat began again. They promised to wait till Section 1 had crossed before blowing the bridge up. In Dolo there was very little to do; it was raw wintry weather; while most of the section sat around the stove and swapped their jack at poker, the grenadine guards made themselves hot rum punches over a gasoline burner, read Boccaccio in Italian and argued with Steve about anarchism.

Dick spent a great deal of his time wondering how he was going to get to Venice. It turned out that the fat lieutenant was worried by the fact that the section had no cocoa and that the Red Cross commissary in Milan hadn’t sent the section any breakfast foods. Dick suggested that Venice was one of the world’s great cocoamarkets, and that somebody who knew Italian ought to be sent over there to buy cocoa; so one frosty morning Dick found himself properly equipped with papers and seals boarding the little steamboat at Mestre.

There was a thin skim of ice on the lagoon that tore with a sound of silk on either side of the narrow bow where Dick stood leaning forward over the rail, tears in his eyes from the raw wind, staring at the long rows of stakes and the light red buildings rising palely out of the green water to bubblelike domes and square pointedtipped towers that etched themselves sharper and sharper against the zinc sky. The hunchback bridges, the greenslimy steps, the palaces. the marble quays were all empty. The only life was in a group of torpedoboats anchored in the Grand Canal. Dick forgot all about the cocoa walking through sculptured squares and the narrow streets and quays along the icefilled canals of the great dead city that lay there on the lagoon frail and empty as a cast snakeskin. To the north he could hear the tomtomming of the guns fifteen miles away on the Piave. One the way back it began to snow.

A few days later they moved up to Bassano behind Monte Grappa into a late renaissance villa all painted up with cupids and angels and elaborate draperies. Back of the villa the Brenta roared day and night under a covered bridge. There they spent their time evacuating cases of frozen feet, drinking hot rum punches at Citadella where the base hospital and the whorehouses were, and singing The Foggy Foggy Dew and The Little Black Bull Came Down From the Mountain over the rubber spaghetti at chow. Ripley and Steve decided they wanted to learn to draw and spent their days off drawing architectural details or the covered bridge. Schuyler practiced his Italian talking about Nietzsche with the Italian Lieut. Fred Summers had gotten a dose off a Milanese lady who he said must have belonged to one of the best families because she was riding in a carriage and picked him up, not he her, and spent most of his spare time brewing himself home remedies like cherry stems in hot water. Dick got to feeling lonely and blue, and in need of privacy, and wrote a great many letters home. The letters he got back made him feel worse than not getting any.

“You must understand how it is,” he wrote the Thurlows, answering an enthusiastic screed of Hilda’s about the “war to end war,” “I don’t believe in Christianity any more and can’t argue from that standpoint, but you do, or at least Edwin does, and he ought to realize that in urging young men to go into his cockeyed lunatic asylum of war he’s doing everything he can to undermine all the principles and ideals he most believes in. As the young fellow we had that talk with in Genoa that night said, it’s not on the level, it’s a dirty goldbrick game put over by governments and politicians for their own selfish interests, it’s crooked from A to Z. If it wasn’t for the censorship I could tell you things that would make you vomit.”

Then he’d suddenly snap out of his argumentative mood and all the phrases about liberty and civilization steaming up out of his head would seem damn silly too, and he’d light the gasoline burner and make a rum punch and cheer up chewing the rag with Steve about books or painting or architecture. Moonlight nights the Austrians made things lively by sending bombing planes over. Some nights Dick found that staying out of the dugout and giving them a chance at him gave him a sort of bitter pleasure, and the dugout wasn’t any protection against a direct hit anyway.

Sometime in February Steve read in the paper that the Empress Taitu of Abyssinia had died. They held a wake. They drank all the rum they had and keened until the rest of the section thought they’d gone crazy. They sat in the dark round the open moonlit window wrapped in blankets and drinking warm zabaglione. Some Austrian planes that had been droning overhead suddenly cut off their motors and dumped a load of bombs right in front of them. The antiaircraft guns had been barking for some time and shrapnel sparkling in the moonhazy sky overhead but they’d been too drunk to notice. One bomb fell geflump into the Brenta and the others filled the space in front of the window with red leaping glare and shook the villa with three roaring snorts. Plaster fell from the ceiling. They could hear the tiles skuttering down off the roof overhead.

“Jesus, that was almost good night,” said Summers. Steve started singing, Come away from that window, my light and my life, but the rest of them drowned it out with an out of tune Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles. They suddenly all felt crazy drunk.

Ed Schuyler was standing on a chair giving a recitation of the Erlkönig when Feldmann, the Swiss hotelkeeper’s son who was now head of the section, stuck his head in the door and asked what in the devil they thought they were doing. “You’d better go down in the abris, one of the Italian mechanics was killed and a soldier walking up the road had his legs blown off… no time for monkeyshines.” They offered him a drink and he went off in a rage. After that they drank marsala. Sometime in the early dawn greyness Dick got up and staggered to the window to vomit; it was raining pitchforks, the foaming rapids of the Brenta looked very white through the shimmering rain.

Next day it was Dick’s and Steve’s turn to go on post to Rova. They drove out of the yard at six with their heads like fireballoons, damn glad to be away from the big scandal there’d be at the section. At Rova the lines were quiet, only a few pneumonia or venereal cases to evacuate, and a couple of poor devils who’d shot themselves in the foot and were to be sent to the hospital under guard; but at the officers’ mess where they ate things were very agitated indeed. Tenente Sardinaglia was under arrest in his quarters for saucing the Coronele and had been up there for two days making up a little march on his mandolin that he called the march of the medical colonels. Serrati told them about it giggling behind his hand while they were waiting for the other officers to come to mess. It was all on account of the macchina for coffee. There were only three macchine for the whole mess, one for the colonel, one for the major, and the other went around to the junior officers in rotation; well, one day last week they’d been kidding that bella ragazza, the niece of the farmer on whom they were quartered; she hadn’t let any of the officers kiss her and had carried on like a crazy woman when they pinched her behind, and the colonel had been angry about it, and angrier yet when Sardinaglia had bet him five lira that he could kiss her and he’d whispered something in her ear and she’d let him and that had made the colonel get purple in the face and he’d told the ordinanza not to give the macchina to the tenente when his turn came round; and Sardinaglia had slapped the ordinanza’s face and there’d been a row and as a result Sardinaglia was confined to his quarters and the Americans would see what a circus it was. They all had to straighten their faces in a hurry because the colonel and the major and the two captains came jingling in at that moment.

The ordinanza came and saluted, and said pronto spaghetti in a cheerful tone, and everybody sat down. For a while the officers were quiet sucking in the long oily tomatocoated strings of spaghetti, the wine was passed around and the colonel had just cleared his throat to begin one of his funny stories that everybody had to laugh at, when from up above there came the tinkle of a mandolin. The colonel’s face got red and he put a forkful of spaghetti in his mouth instead of saying anything. As it was Sunday the meal was unusually long: at dessert the coffee macchina was awarded to Dick as a courtesy to gli americani and somebody produced a bottle of strega. The colonel told the ordinanza to tell the bella ragazza to come and have a glass of strega with him; he looked pretty sour at the idea, Dick thought; but he went and got her. She turned out to be a handsome stout oliveskinned countrygirl. Her cheeks burning she went timidly up to the colonel and said, thank you very much but please she never drank strong drinks. The colonel grabbed her and made her sit on his knee and tried to make her drink his glass of strega, but she kept her handsome set of ivory teeth clenched and wouldn’t drink it. It ended by several of the officers holding her and tickling her and the colonel pouring the strega over her chin. Everybody roared with laughter except the ordinanza, who turned white as chalk, and Steve and Dick who didn’t know where to look. While the senior officers were teasing and tickling her and running their hands into her blouse, the junior officers were holding her feet and running their hands up her legs. Finally the colonel got control of his laughter enough to say, “Basta, now she must give me a kiss.” But the girl broke loose and ran out of the room.

“Go and bring her back,” the colonel said to the ordinanza. After a moment the ordinanza came back and stood at attention and said he couldn’t find her. “Good for him,” whispered Steve to Dick. Dick noticed that the ordinanza’s legs were trembling. “You can’t can’t you?” roared the colonel, and gave the ordinanza a push; one of the lieutenants stuck his foot out and the ordinanza tripped over it and fell. Everybody laughed and the colonel gave him a kick; he had gotten to his hands and knees when the colonel gave him a kick in the seat of his pants that sent him flat to the floor again. The officers all roared, the ordinanza crawled to the door with the colonel running after him giving him little kicks first on one side and then on the other, like a soccerplayer with a football. That put everybody in a good humor and they had another drink of strega all around. When they got outside Serrati, who’d been laughing with the rest, grabbed Dick’s arm and hissed in his ear, “Bestie…. sono tutti bestie.”

When the other officers had gone, Serrati took them up to see Sardinaglia who was a tall longfaced young man who liked to call himself a futurista. Serrati told him what had happened and said he was afraid the Americans had been disgusted. “A futurist must be disgusted at nothing except weakness and stupidity,” said Sardinaglia sententiously. Then he told them he’d found out who the bella ragazza was really sleeping with… with the ordinanza. That he said disgusted him; it showed that women were all pigs. Then he said to sit down on his cot while he played them the march of the medical colonels. They declared it was fine. “A futurist must be strong and disgusted with nothing,” he said, still trilling on the mandolin, “that’s why I admire the Germans and American millionaires.” They all laughed.

Dick and Steve went out to pick up some feriti to evacuate to the hospital. Behind the barn where they parked the cars, they found the ordinanza sitting on a stone with his head in his hands, tears had made long streaks on the dirt of his face. Steve went up to him and patted him on the back and gave him a package of Mecca cigarettes, that had been distributed to them by the Y.M.C.A. The ordinanza squeezed Steven’s hand, looked as if he was going to kiss it. He said after the war he was going to America where people were civilized, not bestie like here. Dick asked him where the girl had gone. “Gone away,” he said. “Andata via.”

When they got back to the section they found there was hell to pay. Orders had come for Savage, Warner, Ripley and Schuyler to report to the head office in Rome in order to be sent back to the States. Feldmann wouldn’t tell them what the trouble was. They noticed at once that the other men in the section were looking at them suspiciously and were nervous about speaking to them, except for Fred Summers who said he didn’t understand it, the whole frigging business was a madhouse anyway. Sheldrake, who’d moved his dufflebag and cot into another room in the villa, came around with an I told you so air and said he’d heard the words seditious utterances and that an Italian intelligence officer had been around asking about them. He wished them good luck and said it was too bad. They left the section without saying goodby to anybody. Feldmann drove them and their dufflebags and bedrolls down to Vicenza in the camionette. At the railroad station he handed them their orders of movement to Rome, said it was too bad, wished them good luck, and went off in a hurry without shaking hands.

“The sons of bitches,” growled Steve, “you might think we had leprosy.” Ed Schuyler was reading the military passes, his face beaming. “Men and brethren,” he said, “I am moved to make a speech… this is the greatest graft yet… do you gentlemen realize that what’s happening is that the Red Cross, otherwise known as the goose that lays the golden egg, is presenting us with a free tour of Italy? We don’t have to get to Rome for a year.” “Keep out of Rome till the revolution,” suggested Dick. “Enter Rome with the Austrians,” said Ripley.

A train came into the station. They piled into a first class compartment; when the conductor came and tried to explain that their orders read for second class transportation, they couldn’t understand Italian, so finally he left them there. At Verona they piled off to check their dufflebags and cots to Rome. It was suppertime so they decided to walk around the town and spend the night. In the morning they went to see the ancient theatre and the great peachcolored marble church of San Zeno. Then they sat around the café at the station until a train came by for Rome. The train was jampacked with officers in pale blue and pale green cloaks; by Bologna they’d gotten tired of sitting on the floor of the vestibule and decided they must see the leaning towers. Then they went to Pistoja, Lucca, Pisa and back to the main line at Florence. When the conductors shook their heads over the orders of movement they explained that they’d been misinformed and due to ignorance of the language had taken the wrong train. At Florence, where it was rainy and cold and the buildings all looked like the replicas of them they’d seen at home, the station master put them forcibly on the express for Rome, but they sneaked out the other side after it had started and got into the local for Assisi. From there they got to Siena by way of San Gimignano, as full of towers as New York, in a hack they hired for the day, and ended up one fine spring morning full up to the neck with painting and architecture and oil and garlic and scenery, looking at the Signorelli frescoes in the cathedral at Orvieto. They stayed there all day looking at the great fresco of the Last Judgment, drinking the magnificent wine and basking in the sunny square outside. When the got to Rome, to the station next to the baths of Diocletian, they felt pretty bad at the prospect of giving up their passes; they were amazed when the employee merely stamped them and gave them back, saying, “Per il ritorno.”

They went to a hotel and cleaned up, and then pooling the last of their money went on a big bust with a highclass meal, Frascati wine and asti for dessert, a vaudeville show and a cabaret on the Via Roma where they met an American girl they called the baroness who promised to show them the town. By the end of the evening nobody had enough money left to got home with the baroness or any of her charming ladyfriends, so they hired a cab with their last ten lire to take them out to see the Colosseum by moonlight. The great masses of ruins, the engraved stones, the names, the stately Roman names, the old cabdriver with his oilcloth stovepipe hat and his green soupstrainers recommending whorehouses under the last quarter of the ruined moon, the great masses of masonry full of arches and columns piled up everywhere into the night, the boom of the word Rome dying away in pompous chords into the past, sent them to bed with their heads whirling, Rome throbbing in their ears so that they could not sleep.

Next morning Dick got up while the others were still dead to the world and went round to the Red Cross; he was suddenly nervous and worried so that he couldn’t eat his breakfast. At the office he saw a stoutish Bostonian Major who seemed to be running things, and asked him straight out what the devil the trouble was. The Major hemmed and hawed and kept the conversation in an agreeable tone, as one Harvard man to another. He talked about indiscretions and the oversensitiveness of the Italians. As a matter of fact the censor didn’t like the tone of certain letters, etcetera, etcetera. Dick said he felt he ought to explain his position, and that if the Red Cross felt he hadn’t done his duty they ought to give him a courtmartial, he said he felt there were many men in his position who had pacifist views but now that the country was at war were willing to do any kind of work they could to help, but that didn’t mean he believed in the war, he felt he ought to be allowed to explain his position. The major said Ah well he quite understood, etcetera, etcetera, but that the young should realize the importance of discretion, etcetera, etcetera, and that the whole thing had been satisfactorily explained as an indiscretion; as a matter of fact the incident was closed. Dick kept saying, he ought to be allowed to explain his position, and the major kept saying the incident was closed, etcetera, etcetera, until it all seemed a little silly and he left the office. The major promised him transportation to Paris if he wanted to take it up with the office there. Dick went back to the hotel feeling baffled and sore.

The other two had gone out, so he and Steve walked around the town, looking at the sunny streets, that smelt of frying oliveoil and wine and old stones, and the domed baroque churches and the columns and the Pantheon and the Tiber. They didn’t have a cent in their pockets to buy lunch or a drink with. They spent the afternoon hungry, napping glumly on the warm sod of the Pincian, and got back to the room famished and depressed to find Schuyler and Ripley drinking vermouth and soda and in high spirits. Schuyler had run into an old friend of his father’s, Colonel Anderson, who was on a mission investigating the Red Cross, and had poured out his woes and given him dope about small graft at the office in Milan. Major Anderson had set him up to lunch and highballs at the Hotel de Russie, lent him a hundred dollars and fixed him up with a job in the publicity department. “So men and brethren, evviva Italia and the goddamned Alleati, we’re all set.” “What about the dossier?” Steve asked savagely. “Aw forget it, siamo tutti Italiani… who’s a defeatist now?”

Schuyler set them all up to meals, took them out to Tivoli and the Lake of Nemi in a staff car, and finally put them on the train to Paris with the rating of captain on their transport orders.

The first day in Paris Steve went off to the Red Cross office to get shipped home. “To hell with it, I’m going to C.O.,” was all he’d say. Ripley enlisted in the French artillery school at Fontainebleau. Dick got himself a cheap room in a little hotel on the Ile St. Louis and spent his days interviewing first one higher up and then another in the Red Cross; Hiram Halsey Cooper had suggested the names in a very guarded reply to a cable Dick sent him from Rome. The higherups sent him from one to the other. “Young man,” said one baldheaded official in a luxurious office at the Hotel Crillon, “your opinions, while showing a senseless and cowardly turn of mind, don’t matter. The American people is out to get the kaiser. We are bending every nerve and every energy towards that end; anybody who gets in the way of the great machine the energy and devotion of a hundred million patriots is building towards the stainless purpose of saving civilization from the Huns will be mashed like a fly. I’m surprised that a collegebred man like you hasn’t more sense. Don’t monkey with the buzzsaw.”

Finally he was sent to the army intelligence service where he found a young fellow named Spaulding he’d known in college who greeted him with a queazy smile. “Old man,” he said, “in a time like this we can’t give in to our personal feelings can we…? I think it’s perfectly criminal to allow yourself the luxury of private opinions, perfectly criminal. It’s war time and we’ve all got to do our duty, it’s people like you that are encouraging the Germans to keep up the fight, people like you and the Russians.” Spaulding’s boss was a captain and wore spurs and magnificently polished puttees; he was a sternlooking young man with a delicate profile. he strode up to Dick, put his face close to his and yelled, “What would you do if two Huns attacked your sister? You’d fight, wouldn’t you?… if you’re not a dirty yellow dawg….” Dick tried to point out that he was anxious to keep on doing the work he had been doing, he was trying to get back to the front with the Red Cross, he wanted an opportunity to explain his position. The captain strode up and down, bawling him out, yelling that any man who was still a pacifist after the President’s declaration of war was a moron or what was worse a degenerate and that they didn’t want people like that in the A.E.F. and that he was going to see to it that Dick would be sent back to the States and that he would not be allowed to come back in any capacity whatsoever. “The A.E.F. is no place for a slacker.”

Dick gave up and went to the Red Cross office to get his transportation; they gave him an order for the Touraine sailing from Bordeaux in two weeks. His last two weeks in Paris he spent working as a volunteer stretcherbearer at the American hospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. It was June. There were airraids every clear night and when the wind was right you could hear the guns on the front. The German offensive was on, the lines were so near Paris the ambulances were evacuating wounded directly on the basehospitals. All night the stretcher cases would spread along the broad pavements under the trees in fresh leaf in front of the hospital; Dick would help carry them up the marble stairs into the reception room. One night they put him on duty outside the operating room and for twelve hours he had the job of carrying out buckets of blood and gauze from which protruded occasionally a shattered bone or a piece of an arm or a leg. When he went off duty he’d walk home achingly tired through the strawberryscented early Parisian morning, thinking of the faces and the eyes and the sweatdrenched hair and the clenched fingers clotted with blood and dirt and the fellows kidding and pleading for cigarettes and the bubbling groans of the lung cases.

One day he saw a pocket compass in a jeweller’s window on the Rue de Rivoli. He went in and bought it; there was suddenly a full-formed plan in his head to buy a civilian suit, leave his uniform in a heap on the wharf at Bordeaux and make for the Spanish border. With luck and all the old transport orders he had in his inside pocket he was sure he could make it; hop across the border and then, once in a country free from nightmare, decide what to do. He even got ready a letter to send his mother.

All the time he was packing his books and other junk in his dufflebag and carrying it on his back up the quais to the Gare d’Orleans, Swinburne’s Song in Time of Order kept going through his head:

While three men hold together

The kingdoms are less by three.

By gum, he must write some verse: what people needed was stirring poems to nerve them for revolt against their cannibal governments. Sitting in the secondclass compartment he was so busy building a daydream of himself living in a sunscorched Spanish town, sending out flaming poems and manifestoes, calling young men to revolt against their butchers, poems that would be published by secret presses all over the world, that he hardly saw the suburbs of Paris or the bluegreen summer farmlands sliding by.

Let our flag run out straight in the wind

The old red shall be floated again

When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned

When the names that were twenty are ten

Even the rumblebump rumblebump of the French railroad train seemed to be chanting as if the words were muttered low in unison by a marching crowd:

While three men hold together

The kingdoms are less by three.

At noon Dick got hungry and went to the diner to eat a last deluxe meal. He sat down at a table opposite a goodlooking young man in a French officer’s uniform. “Good God, Ned, is that you?” Blake Wigglesworth threw back his head in the funny way he had and laughed. “Garçon,” he shouted, “un verre pour le monsieur.”

“But how long were you in the Lafayette Escadrille?” stammered Dick.

“Not long… they wouldn’t have me.”

“And how about the Navy?”

“Threw me out too, the damn fools think I’ve got T.B…. garçon, une bouteille de champagne…. Where are you going?”

“I’ll explain.”

“Well, I’m going home on the Touraine.” Ned threw back his head laughing again and his lips formed the syllables blahblahblahblah. Dick noticed that although his face was very pale and thin his skin under his eyes and up onto the temples was flushed and his eyes looked a little too bright. “Well, so am I,” he heard himself say.

“I got into hot water,” said Ned.

“Me too,” said Dick. “Very.”

They lifted their glasses and looked into each other’s eyes and laughed. They sat in the diner all afternoon talking and drinking and got to Bordeaux boiled as owls. Ned had spent all his money in Paris and Dick had very little left, so they had to sell their bedrolls and equipment to a couple of American lieutenants just arrived they met in the Café de Bordeaux. It was almost like old days in Boston going around from bar to bar and looking for places to get drinks after closing. They spent most of the night in an elegant maison publique all upholstered in pink satin, talking to the madam, a driedup woman with a long upper lip like a llama’s wearing a black spangled evening dress, who took a fancy to them and made them stay and eat onion soup with her. They were so busy talking they forgot about the girls. She’d been in the Transvaal during the Boer War and spoke a curious brand of South African English. “Vous comprennez ve had very fine clientele, every man jack officers, very much elegance, decorum. These johnnies off the veldt… get the hell outen here… bloody select don’t you know. Ve had two salons, one salon English officers, one salon Boer officers, very select, never in all the war make any bloody row, no fight…. Vos compatriotes les Americains ce n’est pas comme ça, mes amis. Beaucoup sonofabeetch, make drunk, make bloody row, make sick, naturellement il y a aussi des gentils garçons comme vous, mes mignons, des veritables gentlemens,” and she patted them both on the cheeks with her horny ringed hands. When they left she wanted to kiss them and went with them to the door saying, “Bonsoi mes jolis petits gentlemens.”

All the crossing they were never sober after eleven in the morning; it was calm misty weather; they were very happy. One night when he was standing alone in the stern beside the small gun, Dick was searching his pocket for a cigarette when his fingers felt something hard in the lining of his coat. It was the little compass he had bought to help him across the Spanish border. Guiltily, he fished it out and dropped it overboard.