John Passos - One Man's Initiation, 1917

The waiter came with coffee and hot milk and little crisp loaves of bread.

“Oh, Paris is wonderful in the early morning!” said Martin.

“Indeed it is... Good-bye, little girl, if you must go. We’ll see each other again.”

“You must call me Yvonne.” She pouted a little.

“All right, Yvonne.” He got to his feet and pressed her two hands.

“Well, what sort of a time did you have, Howe?”

“Curious. I lost our friends one by one, left two women and slept a little while on the grass in front of Notre Dame. That was my real love of the night.”

“My girl was charming... Honestly, I’d marry her in a minute.” He laughed a merry laugh.

“Let’s take a cab somewhere.”

They climbed into a victoria and told the driver to go to the Madeleine.

“Look, before I do anything else I must go to the hotel.”

“Why?”

“Preventives.”

“Of course; you’d better go at once.”

The cab rattled merrily along the streets where the early sunshine cast rusty patches on the grey houses and on the thronged fantastic chimney-pots that rose in clusters and hedges from the mansard roofs.

The lamp in the hut of the road control casts an oblong of light on the white wall opposite. The patch of light is constantly crossed and scalloped and obscured by shadows of rifles and helmets and packs of men passing. Now and then the shadow of a single man, a nose and a chin under a helmet, a head bent forward with the weight of the pack, or a pack alone beside which slants a rifle, shows up huge and fantastic with its loaf of bread and its pair of shoes and its pots and pans.

Then with a jingle of harness and clank of steel, train after train of artillery comes up out of the darkness of the road, is thrown by the lamp into vivid relief and is swallowed again by the blackness of the village street, short bodies of seventy-fives sticking like ducks’ tails from between their large wheels; caisson after caisson of ammunition, huge waggons hooded and unhooded, filled with a chaos of equipment that catches fantastic lights and throws huge muddled shadows on the white wall of the house.

“Put that light out. Name of God, do you want to have them start chucking shells into here?” comes a voice shrill with anger. The brisk trot of the officer’s horse is lost in the clangour.

The door of the hut slams to and only a thin ray of orange light penetrates into the blackness of the road, where with jingle of harness and clatter of iron and tramp of hoofs, gun after gun, caisson after caisson, waggon after waggon files by. Now and then the passing stops entirely and matches flare where men light pipes and cigarettes. Coming from the other direction with throbbing of motors, a convoy of camions, huge black oblongs, grinds down the other side of the road. Horses rear and there are shouts and curses and clacking of reins in the darkness.

Far away where the lowering clouds meet the hills beyond the village a white glare grows and fades again at intervals: star-shells.

“There’s a most tremendous concentration of sanitary sections.”

“You bet; two American sections and a French one in this village; three more down the road. Something’s up.”

“There’s goin’ to be an attack at St. Mihiel, a Frenchman told me.”

“I heard that the Germans were concentrating for an offensive in the Four de Paris.”

“Damned unlikely.”

“Anyway, this is the third week we’ve been in this bloody hole with our feet in the mud.”

“They’ve got us quartered in a barn with a regular brook flowing through the middle of it.”

“The main thing about this damned war is ennui-just plain boredom.”

“Not forgetting the mud.”

Three ambulance drivers in slickers were on the front seat of a car. The rain fell in perpendicular sheets, pattering on the roof of the car and on the puddles that filled the village street. Streaming with water, blackened walls of ruined houses rose opposite them above a rank growth of weeds. Beyond were rain-veiled hills. Every little while, slithering through the rain, splashing mud to the right and left, a convoy of camions went by and disappeared, truck after truck, in the white streaming rain.

Inside the car Tom Randolph was playing an accordion, letting strange nostalgic little songs filter out amid the hard patter of the rain.

“ Oh, I’s been workin’ on de railroad

All de livelong day;

I’s been workin’ on de railroad

Jus’ to pass de time away.”

The men on the front seat leaned back and shook the water off their knees and hummed the song.

The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying on his back on the floor of the car with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly, rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-coloured puddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooning self-pity of the old coon song:

“ I’s been workin’ on de railroad

All de livelong day;

I’s been workin’ on de railroad

Jus’ to pass de time away.”

“Oh, God, something’s got to happen soon.”

Lost in rubber boots, and a huge gleaming slicker and hood, the section leader splashed across the road.

“All cars must be ready to leave at six to-night.”

“Yay. Where we goin’?”

“Orders haven’t come yet. We’re to be in readiness to leave at six to-night...”

“I tell you, fellers, there’s goin’ to be an attack. This concentration of sanitary sections means something. You can’t tell me ...”

“They say they have beer,” said the aspirant behind Martin in the long line of men who waited in the hot sun for the copé to open, while the dust the staff cars and camions raised as they whirred by on the road settled in a blanket over the village.

“Cold beer?”

“Of course not,” said the aspirant, laughing so that all the brilliant ivory teeth showed behind his red lips. “It’ll be detestable. I’m getting it because it’s rare, for sentimental reasons.”

Martin laughed, looking in the man’s brown face, a face in which all past expressions seemed to linger in the fine lines about the mouth and eyes and in the modelling of the cheeks and temples.

“You don’t understand that,” said the aspirant again.

“Indeed I do.”

Later they sat on the edge of the stone wellhead in the courtyard behind the store, drinking warm beer out of tin cups blackened by wine, and staring at a tall barn that had crumpled at one end so that it looked, with its two frightened little square windows, like a cow kneeling down.

“Is it true that the ninety-second’s going up to the lines to-night?”

“Yes, we’re going up to make a little attack. Probably I’ll come back in your little omnibus.”

“I hope you won’t.”

“I’d be very glad to. A lucky wound! But I’ll probably be killed. This is the first time I’ve gone up to the front that I didn’t expect to be killed. So it’ll probably happen.”

Martin Howe could not help looking at him suddenly. The aspirant sat at ease on the stone margin of the well, leaning against the wrought iron support for the bucket, one knee clasped in his strong, heavily-veined hands. Dead he would be different. Martin’s mind could hardly grasp the connection between this man full of latent energies, full of thoughts and desires, this man whose shoulder he would have liked to have put his arm round from friendliness, with whom he would have liked to go for long walks, with whom he would have liked to sit long into the night drinking and talking-and those huddled, pulpy masses of blue uniform half-buried in the mud of ditches.