John Passos - One Man's Initiation, 1917

“I shall go to Spain ...” A piece of shrapnel ripped past Martin’s ear, cutting off the sentence.

“Name of God! It’s getting hot... Spain: I know Spain.” The artilleryman jumped up and began dancing, Spanish fashion, snapping his fingers, his big moustaches swaying and trembling. Several shells burst down the road in quick succession, filling the air with a whine of fragments.

“A cook waggon got it!” the artilleryman shouted, dancing on. “Tra-la la la-la-la-la, la-la la,” he sang, snapping his fingers.

He stopped and spat again.

“What do I care?” he said. “Well, so long, old chap. I must go... Say, let’s change knives-a little souvenir.”

“Great.”

“Good luck.”

The artilleryman strode off through the woods, past the portable fence that surrounded the huddled wooden crosses of the graveyard.

Against the red glare of the dawn the wilderness of shattered trees stands out purple, hidden by grey mist in the hollows, looped and draped fantastically with strands of telephone wire and barbed wire, tangled like leafless creepers, that hang in clots against the red sky. Here and there guns squat among piles of shells covered with mottled green cheese-cloth, and spit long tongues of yellow flame against the sky. The ambulance waits by the side of the rutted road littered with tin cans and brass shell-cases, while a doctor and two stretcher-bearers bend over a man on a stretcher laid among the underbrush. The man groans and there is a sound of ripping bandages. On the other side of the road a fallen mule feebly wags its head from side to side, a mass of purple froth hanging from its mouth and wide-stretched scarlet nostrils.

There is a new smell in the wind, a smell unutterably sordid, like the smell of the poor immigrants landing at Ellis Island. Martin Howe glances round and sees advancing down the road ranks and ranks of strange grey men whose mushroom-shaped helmets give an eerie look as of men from the moon in a fairy tale.

“Why, they’re Germans,” he says to himself; “I’d quite forgotten they existed.”

“Ah, they’re prisoners.” The doctor gets to his feet and glances down the road and then turns to his work again.

The tramp of feet marching in unison on the rough shell-pitted road, and piles and piles of grey men clotted with dried mud, from whom comes the new smell, the sordid, miserable smell of the enemy.

“Things going well?” Martin asks a guard, a man with ashen face and eyes that burn out of black sockets.

“How should I know?”

“Many prisoners?”

“How should I know?”

The captain and the aumonier are taking their breakfast, each sitting on a packing-box with their tin cups and tin plates ranged on the board propped up between them. All round red clay, out of which the abri was excavated. A smell of antiseptics from the door of the dressing-station and of lime and latrines mingling with the greasy smell of the movable kitchen not far away. They are eating dessert, slices of pineapple speared with a knife out of a can. In their manner there is something that makes Martin see vividly two gentlemen in frock-coats dining at a table under the awning of a café on the boulevards. It has a leisurely ceremoniousness, an ease that could exist nowhere else.

“No, my friend,” the doctor is saying, “I do not think that an apprehension of religion existed in the mind of palæolithic man.”

“But, my captain, don’t you think that you scientific people sometimes lose a little of the significance of things, insisting always on their scientific, in this case on their anthropological, aspect?”

“Not in the least; it is the only way to look at them.”

“There are other ways,” says the aumonier, smiling.

“One moment...” From under the packing-box the captain produced a small bottle of anisette. “You’ll have a little glass, won’t you?”

“With the greatest pleasure. What a rarity here, anisette.”

“But, as I was about to say, take our life here, for an example.” ... A shell shrieks overhead and crashes hollowly in the woods behind the dugout. Another follows it, exploding nearer. The captain picks a few bits of gravel off the table, reaches for his helmet and continues. “For example, our life here, which is, as was the life of palæolithic man, taken up only with the bare struggle for existence against overwhelming odds. You know yourself that it is not conducive to religion or any emotion except that of preservation.”

“I hardly admit that... Ah, I saved it,” the aumonier announces, catching the bottle of anisette as it is about to fall off the table. An exploding shell rends the air about them. There is a pause, and a shower of earth and gravel tumbles about their ears.

“I must go and see if anyone was hurt,” says the aumonier, clambering up the clay bank to the level of the ground; “but you will admit, my captain, that the sentiment of preservation is at least akin to the fundamental feelings of religion.”

“My dear friend, I admit nothing... Till this evening, good-bye.” He waves his hand and goes into the dugout.

Martin and two French soldiers drinking sour wine in the doorway of a deserted house. It was raining outside and now and then a dripping camion passed along the road, slithering through the mud.

“This is the last summer of the war... It must be,” said the little man with large brown eyes and a childish, chubby brown face, who sat on Martin’s left.

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Everyone feels like that.”

“I don’t see,” said Martin, “why it shouldn’t last for ten or twenty years. Wars have before...”

“How long have you been at the front?”

“Six months, off and on.”

“After another six months you’ll know why it can’t go on.”

“I don’t know; it suits me all right,” said the man on the other side of Martin, a man with a jovial red rabbit-like face. “Of course, I don’t like being dirty and smelling and all that, but one gets accustomed to it.”

“But you are an Alsatian; you don’t care.”

“I was a baker. They’re going to send me to Dijon soon to bake army bread. It’ll be a change. There’ll be wine and lots of little girls. Good God, how drunk I’ll be; and, old chap, you just watch me with the women...”

“I should just like to get home and not be ordered about,” said the first man. “I’ve been lucky, though,” he went on; “I’ve been kept most of the time in reserve. I only had to use my bayonet once.”

“When was that?” asked Martin.

“Near Mont Cornélien, last year. We put them to the bayonet and I was running and a man threw his arms up just in front of me saying, ’Mon ami, mon ami,’ in French. I ran on because I couldn’t stop, and I heard my bayonet grind as it went through his chest. I tripped over something and fell down.”

“You were scared,” said the Alsatian.

“Of course I was scared. I was trembling all over like an old dog in a thunderstorm. When I got up, he was lying on his side with his mouth open and blood running out, my bayonet still sticking into him. You know you have to put your foot against a man and pull hard to get the bayonet out.”

“And if you’re good at it,” cried the Alsatian, “you ought to yank it out as your Boche falls and be ready for the next one. The time they gave me the Croix de Guerre I got three in succession, just like at drill.”

“Oh, I was so sorry I had killed him,” went on the other Frenchman. “When I went through his pockets I found a post-card. Here it is; I have it.” He pulled out a cracked and worn leather wallet, from which he took a photograph and a bunch of pictures. “Look, this photograph was there, too. It hurt my heart. You see, it’s a woman and two little girls. They look so nice... It’s strange, but I have two children, too, only one’s a boy. I lay down on the ground beside him-I was all in-and listened to the machine-guns tapping put, put, put, put, put, all round. I wished I’d let him kill me instead. That was funny, wasn’t it?”