John Passos: One Man's Initiation, 1917

“Oh, the poor boys, we saw so many go up,” came the voice, dry as the rustling of the wind in the vine-leaves, of the grey old woman who stood leaning against the schoolmaster’s chair, looking out through a gap in the trellis at the rutted road so thick with dust, “and never have we seen one of them come back.”

“It was for France.”

“But this was a nice village before the war. From Verdun to Bar-le-Duc, the Courrier des Postes used to tell us, there was no such village, so clean and with such fine orchards.” The old woman leaned over the schoolmaster’s shoulder, joining eagerly in the conversation.

“Even now the fruit is very fine,” said Martin.

“But you soldiers, you steal it all,” said the old woman, throwing out her arms. “You leave us nothing, nothing.”

“We don’t begrudge it,” said the schoolmaster, “all we have is our country’s.”

“We shall starve then...”

As she spoke the glasses on the table shook. With a roar of heavy wheels and a grind of gears a camion went by.

“O good God!” The old woman looked out on to the road with terror in her face, blinking her eyes in the thick dust.

Roaring with heavy wheels, grinding with gears, throbbing with motors, camion after camion went by, slowly, stridently. The men packed into the camions had broken through the canvas covers and leaned out, waving their arms and shouting.

“Oh, the poor children,” said the old woman, wringing her hands, her voice lost in the roar and the shouting.

“They should not destroy property that way,” said the schoolmaster... “Last year it was dreadful. There were mutinies.”

Martin sat, his chair tilted back, his hands trembling, staring with compressed lips at the men who jolted by on the strident, throbbing camions. A word formed in his mind: tumbrils.

In some trucks the men were drunk and singing, waving their bidons in the air, shouting at people along the road, crying out all sorts of things: “Get to the front!” “Into the trenches with them!” “Down with the war!” In others they sat quiet, faces corpse-like with dust. Through the gap in the trellis Martin stared at them, noting intelligent faces, beautiful faces, faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those of sobbing drunkards.

At last the convoy passed and the dust settled again on the rutted road.

“Oh, the poor children!” said the old woman. “They know they are going to death.”

They tried to hide their agitation. The schoolmaster poured out more wine.

“Yes,” said Martin, “there are fine orchards on the hills round here.”

“You should be here when the plums are ripe,” said the schoolmaster.

A tall bearded man, covered with dust to the eyelashes, in the uniform of a commandant, stepped into the garden.

“My dear friends!” He shook hands with the schoolmaster and the old woman and saluted the two Americans. “I could not pass without stopping a moment. We are going up to an attack. We have the honour to take the lead.”

“You will have a glass of wine, won’t you?”

“With great pleasure.”

“Julie, fetch a bottle, you know which... How is the morale?”

“Perfect.”

“I thought they looked a little discontented.”

“No... It’s always like that... They were yelling at some gendarmes. If they strung up a couple it would serve them right, dirty beasts.”

“You soldiers are all one against the gendarmes.”

“Yes. We fight the enemy but we hate the gendarmes.” The commandant rubbed his hands, drank his wine and laughed.

“Hah! There’s the next convoy. I must go.”

“Good luck.”

The commandant shrugged his shoulders, clicked his heels together at the garden gate, saluted, smiling, and was gone.

Again the village street was full of the grinding roar and throb of camions, full of a frenzy of wheels and drunken shouting.

“Give us a drink, you.”

“We’re the train de luxe, we are.”

“Down with the war!”

And the old grey woman wrung her hands and said:

“Oh, the poor children, they know they are going to death!”

Martin, rolled up in his bedroll on the floor of the empty hayloft, woke with a start.

“Say, Howe!” Tom Randolph, who lay next him, was pressing his hand. “I think I heard a shell go over.”

As he spoke there came a shrill, loudening whine, and an explosion that shook the barn. A little dirt fell down on Martin’s face.

“Say, fellers, that was damn near,” came a voice from the floor of the barn.

“We’d better go over to the quarry.”

“Oh, hell, I was sound asleep!”

A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion.

“Gee, that was in the house behind us...”

“I smell gas.”

“Ye damn fool, it’s carbide.”

“One of the Frenchmen said it was gas.”

“All right, fellers, put on your masks.”

Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled strangely with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of the stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched the flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept up a continuous hammering drumbeat. Over their heads shells shrieked at two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the village on the other side of the valley.

“Damn foolishness,” muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice. “Why don’t those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep?... They must be tired like we are.”

A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that they saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.

Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft of a tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against the mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men chatting in the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he worked. Now and then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shell trundled through the air overhead; after its noise had completely died away would come the thud of the explosion. It was like battledore and shuttlecock, these huge masses whirling through the evening far above his head, now from one side, now from the other. It gave him somehow a cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under some sort of a bridge over which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro.

The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was a small brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns of a long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and peered about in every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again and began talking briskly.

“We are exactly four hundred and five mètres from the Boche... Five hundred mètres from here they are drinking beer and saying, ’Hoch der Kaiser.’”

“About as much as we’re saying ’Vive la République’, I should say.”

“Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn’t it? It’s quieter here than in Paris.”

“The sky is very beautiful to-night.”

“They say they’re shelling the Etat-Major to-day. Damned embusqués; it’ll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine.”

Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred and five mètres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris was the latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseous stench. Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that had been a cook shack. That was just behind the second line trenches that zig-zagged in and out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along the crest of a little hill. The other day he had been there, and had clambered up the oily clay where the boyau had caved in, and from the level of the ground had looked for an anxious minute or two at the tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened soil in the direction of the German outposts. And all along these random gashes in the mucky clay were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after clotting of clay, men with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain and fear and boredom as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the trenches and the shell-holes.