John Passos - One Man's Initiation, 1917

“It’s idiotic to feel like that. Put them to the bayonet, all of them, the dirty Boches. Why, the only money I’ve had since the war began, except my five sous, was fifty francs I found on a German officer. I wonder where he got it, the old corpse-stripper.”

“Oh, it’s shameful! I am ashamed of being a man. Oh, the shame, the shame ...” The other man buried his face in his hands.

“I wish they were serving out gniolle for an attack right now,” said the Alsatian, “or the gniolle without the attack ’d be better yet.”

“Wait here,” said Martin, “I’ll go round to the copé and get a bottle of fizzy. We’ll drink to peace or war, as you like. Damn this rain!”

“It’s a shame to bury those boots,” said the sergeant of the stretcher-bearers.

From the long roll of blanket on the ground beside the hastily-dug grave protruded a pair of high boots, new and well polished as if for parade. All about the earth was scarred with turned clay like raw wounds, and the tilting arms of little wooden crosses huddled together, with here and there a bent wreath or a faded bunch of flowers.

Overhead in the stripped trees a bird was singing.

“Shall we take them off? It’s a shame to bury a pair of boots like that.”

“So many poor devils need boots.”

“Boots cost so dear.”

Already two men were lowering the long bundle into the grave.

“Wait a minute; we’ve got a coffin for him.”

A white board coffin was brought.

The boots thumped against the bottom as they put the big bundle in.

An officer strode into the enclosure of the graveyard, flicking his knees with a twig.

“Is this Lieutenant Dupont?” he asked of the sergeant.

“Yes, my lieutenant.”

“Can you see his face?” The officer stooped and pulled apart the blanket where the head was.

“Poor René,” he said. “Thank you. Good-bye,” and strode out of the graveyard.

The yellowish clay fell in clots on the boards of the coffin. The sergeant bared his head and the aumonier came up, opening his book with a vaguely professional air.

“It was a shame to bury those boots. Boots are so dear nowadays,” said the sergeant, mumbling to himself as he walked back towards the little broad shanty they used as a morgue.

Of the house, a little pale salmon-coloured villa, only a shell remained, but the garden was quite untouched; fall roses and bunches of white and pink and violet phlox bloomed there among the long grass and the intruding nettles. In the centre the round concrete fountain was no longer full of water, but a few brownish-green toads still inhabited it. The place smelt of box and sweetbriar and yew, and when you lay down on the grass where it grew short under the old yew tree by the fountain, you could see nothing but placid sky and waving green leaves. Martin Howe and Tom Randolph would spend there the quiet afternoons when they were off duty, sleeping in the languid sunlight, or chatting lazily, pointing out to each other tiny things, the pattern of snail-shells, the glitter of insects’ wings, colours, fragrances that made vivid for them suddenly beauty and life, all that the shells that shrieked overhead, to explode on the road behind them, threatened to wipe out.

One afternoon Russell joined them, a tall young man with thin face and aquiline nose and unexpectedly light hair.

“Chef says we may go en repos in three days,” he said, throwing himself on the ground beside the other two.

“We’ve heard that before,” said Tom Randolph. “Division hasn’t started out yet, ole boy; an’ we’re the last of the division.”

“God, I’ll be glad to go... I’m dead,” said Russell.

“I was up all last night with dysentery.”

“So was I... It was not funny; first it’d be vomiting, and then diarrhoea, and then the shells’d start coming in. Gave me a merry time of it.”

“They say it’s the gas,” said Martin.

“God, the gas! Turns me sick to think of it,” said Russell, stroking his forehead with his hand. “Did I tell you about what happened to me the night after the attack, up in the woods?”

“No.”

“Well, I was bringing a load of wounded down from P.J. Right and I’d got just beyond the corner where the little muddy hill is-you know, where they’re always shelling-when I found the road blocked. It was so God-damned black you couldn’t see your hand in front of you. A camion’d gone off the road and another had run into it, and everything was littered with boxes of shells spilt about.”

“Must have been real nice,” said Randolph.

“The devilish part of it was that I was all alone. Coney was too sick with diarrhoea to be any use, so I left him up at the post, running out at both ends like he’d die. Well ... I yelled and shouted like hell in my bad French and blew my whistle and sweated, and the damned wounded inside moaned and groaned. And the shells were coming in so thick I thought my number’d turn up any time. An’ I couldn’t get anybody. So I just climbed up in the second camion and backed it off into the bushes... God, I bet it’ll take a wrecking crew to get it out...”

“That was one good job.

“But there I was with another square in the road and no chance to pass that I could see in that darkness. Then what I was going to tell you about happened. I saw a little bit of light in a ditch beside a big car that seemed to be laying on its side, and I went down to it and there was a bunch of camion drivers, sitting round a lantern drinking.

“’Hello, have a drink!’ they called out to me, and one of them got up, waving his arms, ravin’ drunk, and threw his arms around me and kissed me on the mouth. His hair and beard were full of wet mud... Then he dragged me into the crowd.

“’Ha, here’s a copain come to die with us,’ he cried.

“I gave him a shove and he fell down. But another one got up and handed me a tin cup full of that God-damned gniolle, that I drank not to make ’em sore. Then they all shouted, and stood about me, sayin’, ’American’s goin’ to die with us. He’s goin’ to drink with us. He’s goin’ to die with us.’ And the shells comin’ in all the while. God, I was scared.

“’I want to get a camion moved to the side of the road... Good-bye,’ I said. There didn’t seem any use talkin’ to them.

“’But you’ve come to stay with us,’ they said, and made me drink some more booze. ’You’ve come to die with us. Remember you said so.’

“The sweat was running into my eyes so’s I could hardly see. I told ’em I’d be right back and slipped away into the dark. Then I thought I’d never get the second camion cranked. At last I managed it and put it so I could squeeze past, but they saw me and jumped up on the running-board of the ambulance, tried to stop the car, all yellin’ at once, ’It’s no use, the road’s blocked both ways. You can’t pass. You’d better stay and die with us. Caput.’

“Well, I put my foot on the accelerator and hit one of them so hard with the mudguard he fell into the lantern and put it out. Then I got away. An’ how I got past the stuff in that road afterwards was just luck. I couldn’t see a God-damn thing; it was so black and I was so nerved up. God, I’ll never forget these chaps’ shoutin’, ’Here’s a feller come to die with us.’”

“Whew! That’s some story,” said Randolph.

“That’ll make a letter home, won’t it?” said Russell, smiling. “Guess my girl’ll think I’m heroic enough after that.”

Martin’s eyes were watching a big dragonfly with brown body and cream and rainbow wings that hovered over the empty fountain and the three boys stretched on the grass, and was gone against the azure sky.