John Passos - One Man's Initiation, 1917

“I used to think that down home was the only place they knew how to live, but oh, boy ...” said Tom Randolph, breaking a little loaf of bread that made a merry crackling sound.

“It’s worth starving to death on singe and pinard for four months.”

After the hors d’oeuvre had been taken away, leaving them Rabelaisianly gay, with a joyous sense of orgy, came sole hidden in a cream-coloured sauce with mussels in it.

“After the war, Howe, ole man, let’s riot all over Europe; I’m getting a taste for this sort of livin’.”

“You can play the fiddle, can’t you, Tom?”

“Enough to scrape out Auprès de ma blonde on a bet.”

“Then we’ll wander about and you can support me... Or else I’ll dress as a monkey and you can fiddle and I’ll gather the pennies.”

“By gum, that’d be great sport.”

“Look, we must have some red wine with the veal.”

“Let’s have Macon.”

“All the same to me as long as there’s plenty of it.”

Their round table with its white cloth and its bottles of wine and its piles of ravished artichoke leaves was the centre of a noisy, fantastic world. Ever since the orgy of the hors d’oeuvres things had been evolving to grotesqueness, faces, whites of eyes, twisted red of lips, crow-like forms of waiters, colours of hats and uniforms, all involved and jumbled in the mélee of talk and clink and clatter.

The red hand of the waiter pouring the Chartreuse, green like a stormy sunset, into small glasses before them broke into the vivid imaginings that had been unfolding in their talk through dinner. No, they had been saying, it could not go on; some day amid the rending crash of shells and the whine of shrapnel fragments, people everywhere, in all uniforms, in trenches, packed in camions, in stretchers, in hospitals, crowded behind guns, involved in telephone apparatus, generals at their dinner-tables, colonels sipping liqueurs, majors developing photographs, would jump to their feet and burst out laughing at the solemn inanity, at the stupid, vicious pomposity of what they were doing. Laughter would untune the sky. It would be a new progress of Bacchus. Drunk with laughter at the sudden vision of the silliness of the world, officers and soldiers, prisoners working on the roads, deserters being driven towards the trenches would throw down their guns and their spades and their heavy packs, and start marching, or driving in artillery waggons or in camions, staff cars, private trains, towards their capitals, where they would laugh the deputies, the senators, the congressmen, the M.P.’s out of their chairs, laugh the presidents and the prime ministers, and kaisers and dictators out of their plush-carpeted offices; the sun would wear a broad grin and would whisper the joke to the moon, who would giggle and ripple with it all night long... The red hand of the waiter, with thick nails and work-swollen knuckles, poured Chartreuse into the small glasses before them.

“That,” said Tom Randolph, when he had half finished his liqueur, “is the girl for me.”

“But, Tom, she’s with a French officer.”

“They’re fighting like cats and dogs. You can see that, can’t you?”

“Yes,” agreed Howe vaguely.

“Pay the bill. I’ll meet you at the corner of the boulevard.” Tom Randolph was out of the door. The girl, who had a little of the aspect of a pierrot, with dark skin and bright lips and gold-yellow hat and dress, and the sour-looking officer who was with her, were getting up to go.

At the corner of the Boulevard Howe heard a woman’s voice joining with Randolph’s rich laugh.

“What did I tell you? They split at the door and here we are, Howe... Mademoiselle Montreil, let me introduce a friend. Look, before it’s too late, we must have a drink.”

At the café table next them an Englishman was seated with his head sunk on his chest.

“Oh, I say, you woke me up.”

“Sorry.”

“No harm. Jolly good thing.”

They invited him over to their table. There was a moist look about his eyes and a thickness to his voice that denoted alcohol.

“You mustn’t mind me. I’m forgetting... I’ve been doing it for a week. This is the first leave I’ve had in eighteen months. You Canadians?”

“No. Ambulance service; Americans.”

“New at the game then. You’re lucky... Before I left the front I saw a man tuck a hand-grenade under the pillow of a poor devil of a German prisoner. The prisoner said, ’Thank you.’ The grenade blew him to hell! God! Know anywhere you can get whisky in this bloody town?”

“We’ll have to hurry; it’s near closing-time.”

“Right-o.”

They started off, Randolph and the girl talking intimately, their heads close together, Martin supporting the Englishman.

“I need a bit o’ whisky to put me on my pins.”

They tumbled into the seats round a table at an American bar.

The Englishman felt in his pocket.

“Oh, I say,” he cried, “I’ve got a ticket to the theatre. It’s a box... We can all get in. Come along; let’s hurry.”

They walked a long while, blundering through the dark streets, and at last stopped at a blue-lighted door.

“Here it is; push in.”

“But there are two gentlemen and a lady already in the box, meester.”

“No matter, there’ll be room.” The Englishman waved the ticket in the air.

The little round man with a round red face who was taking the tickets stuttered in bad English and then dropped into French. Meanwhile, the whole party had filed in, leaving the Englishman, who kept waving the ticket in the little man’s face.

Two gendarmes, the theatre guards, came up menacingly; the Englishman’s face wreathed itself in smiles; he linked an arm in each of the gendarmes’, and pushed them towards the bar.

“Come drink to the Entente Cordiale... Vive la France!”

In the box were two Australians and a woman who leaned her head on the chest of one and then the other alternately, laughing so that you could see the gold caps in her black teeth.

They were annoyed at the intrusion that packed the box insupportably tight, so that the woman had to sit on the men’s laps, but the air soon cleared in laughter that caused people in the orchestra to stare angrily at the box full of noisy men in khaki. At last the Englishman came, squeezing himself in with a finger mysteriously on his lips. He plucked at Martin’s arm, a serious set look coming suddenly over his grey eyes. “It was like this”-his breath laden with whisky was like a halo round Martin’s head-“the Hun was a nice little chap, couldn’t ’a’ been more than eighteen; had a shoulder broken and he thought that my pal was fixing the pillow. He said ’Thank you’ with a funny German accent... Mind you, he said ’Thank you’; that’s what hurt. And the man laughed. God damn him, he laughed when the poor devil said ’Thank you.’ And the grenade blew him to hell.”

The stage was a glare of light in Martin’s eyes; he felt as he had when at home he had leaned over and looked straight into the headlight of an auto drawn up to the side of the road. Screening him from the glare were the backs of people’s heads: Tom Randolph’s head and his girl’s, side by side, their cheeks touching, the pointed red chin of one of the Australians and the frizzy hair of the other woman.

In the entr’acte they all stood at the bar, where it was very hot and an orchestra was playing and there were many men in khaki in all stages of drunkenness, being led about by women who threw jokes at each other behind the men’s backs.

“Here’s to mud,” said one of the Australians. “The war’ll end when everybody is drowned in mud.”

The orchestra began playing the Madelon and everyone roared out the marching song that, worn threadbare as it was, still had a roistering verve to it that caught people’s blood.