John Passos - 1919

“But people like that… picking up a sailor in Scollay Square… so damn risky,” he said weakly.

Ned swung around towards him laughing easily and happily, “And you always told me I was a damn Backbay snob.”

Dick didn’t answer. He had dropped into the chair beside the table. He wasn’t sore any more. He was trying to keep from crying. Ned had lain down on the couch and was lifting first one leg and then the other above his head. Dick sat staring at the blue alcohol flame of the lamp listening to the purring of the teakettle until the last dusk faded to darkness and ashy light from the street began to filter into the room.

That winter Ned was drunk every evening. Dick made the Monthly and The Advocate , had poems reprinted in The Literary Digest and The Conning Tower , attended meetings of the Boston Poetry Society, and was invited to dinner by Amy Lowell. He and Ned argued a good deal because Dick was a pacifist and Ned said what the hell he’d join the Navy, it was all a lot of Blah anyway.

In the Easter vacation, after the Armed Ship Bill had passed Dick had a long talk with Mr. Copper who wanted to get him a job in Washington, because he said a boy of his talent oughtn’t to endanger his career by joining the army and already there was talk of conscription. Dick blushed becomingly and said he felt it would be against his conscience to help in the war in any way. They talked a long time without getting anywhere about duty to the state and party leader ship and highest expediency. In the end Mr. Cooper made him promise not to take any rash step without consulting him. Back in Cambridge everybody was drilling and going to lectures on military science. Dick was finishing up the four year course in three years and had to work hard, but nothing in the courses seemed to mean anything any more. He managed to find time to polish up a group of sonnets called Morituri Te Salutant that he sent to a prize competition run by The Literary Digest. It won the prize but the editors wrote back that they would prefer a note of hope in the last sestet. Dick put in the note of hope and sent the hundred dollars to Mother to go to Atlantic City with. He discovered that if he went into war work he could get his degree that spring without taking any exams and went in to Boston one day without saying anything to anybody and signed up in the volunteer ambulance service.

The night he told Ned that he was going to France they got very drunk on orvieto wine in their room and talked a great deal about how it was the fate of Youth and Beauty and Love and Friendship to be mashed out by an early death, while the old fat pompous fools would make merry over their carcasses. In the pearly dawn they went out and sat with a last bottle on one of the old tombstones in the graveyard, on the corner of Harvard Square. They sat on the cold tombstone a long time without saying anything, only drinking, and after each drink threw their heads back and softly bleated in unison Blahblahblahblah.

Sailing for France on the Chicago in early June was like suddenly having to give up a book he’d been reading and hadn’t finished. Ned and his mother and Mr. Cooper and the literary lady considerably older than himself he’d slept with several times rather uncomfortably in her doubledecker apartment on Central Park South, and his poetry and his pacifist friends and the lights of the Esplanade shakily reflected in the Charles, faded in his mind like paragraphs in a novel laid by unfinished. He was a little seasick and a little shy of the boat and the noisy boozing crowd and the longfaced Red Cross women workers giving each other gooseflesh with stories of spitted Belgian babies and Canadian officers crucified and elderly nuns raped; inside he was coiled up tight as an overwound clock with wondering what it would be like over there.

Bordeaux, the red Garonne, the pastelcolored streets of old tall mansardroofed houses, the sunlight and shadow so delicately blue and yellow, the names of the stations all out of Shakespeare, the yellowbacked novels on the bookstands, the bottles of wine in the buvettes, were like nothing he’d imagined. All the way to Paris the faintly bluegreen fields were spattered scarlet with poppies like the first lines of a poem; the little train jogged along in dactyls; everything seemed to fall into rhyme.

They got to Paris too late to report at the Norton-Harjes office. Dick left his bag in the room assigned him with two other fellows at the Hotel Mont Thabor and walked around the streets. It wasn’t dark yet. There was almost no traffic but the boulevards were full of strollers in the blue June dusk. As it got darker women leaned out towards them from behind all the trees, girls’ hands clutched their arms, here and there a dirty word in English burst like a thrown egg above the nasal singsong of French. The three of them walked arm in arm, a little scared and very aloof, their ears still ringing from the talk on the dangers of infection with syphilis and gonorrhea a medical officer had given the last night on the boat. They went back to the hotel early.

Ed Schuyler, who knew French on account of having been to boarding school in Switzerland, shook his head as he was cleaning his teeth at the washstand and spluttered out through his toothbrush, “C’est la guerre.” “Well, the fist five years’ll be the hardest,” said Dick, laughing. Fred Summers was an automobile mechanic from Kansas. He was sitting up in bed in his woolly underwear. “Fellers,” he said, solemnly looking from one to the other, “This ain’t a war…. It’s a goddam whorehouse.”

In the morning they were up early and hurried through their coffee and rolls and rushed out hot and cold with excitement to the rue François Premier to report. They were told where to get their uniforms and cautioned to keep away from wine and women and told to come back in the afternoon. In the afternoon they were told to come back next morning for their identity cards. The identity cards took another day’s waiting around. In between they drove around the Bois in horsecabs, went to see Nôtre Dâme and the Conciérgerie and the Sainte Chapelle and out on the street car to Malmaison. Dick was furbishing up his prepschool French and would sit in the mild sunlight among the shabby white statues in the Tuileries Gardens reading Les Dieux Ont Soif and L’Ile des Pinguins. He and Ed Schuyler and Fred stuck together and after dining exceeding well every night for fear it might be their last chance at a Paris meal, took a turn around the boulevards in the crowded horizonblue dusk; they’d gotten to the point of talking to the girls now and kidding them along a little. Fred Summers had bought himself a prophylactic kit and a set of smutty postalcards. He said the last night before they left he was going to tear loose. When they got to the front he might get killed and then what? Dick said he liked talking to the girls but that the whole business was too commercial and turned his stomach. Ed Schuyler, who’d been nicknamed Frenchie and was getting very continental in his ways, said that the street girls were too naïve.

The last night before they left was bright moonlight, so the Gothas came over. They were eating in a little restaurant in Montmartre. The cashlady and the waiter made them all go down into the cellar when the sirens started wailing for the second time. There they met up with three youngish women named Suzette, Minette and Annette. When the little honking fireengine went by to announce that the raid was over it was already closing time and they couldn’t get any more drinks at the bar; so the girls took them to a closely shuttered house where they were ushered into a big room with livercolored wallpaper that had green roses on it. An old man in a green baize apron brought up champagne and the girls began to sit on knees and ruffle up hair. Summers got the prettiest girl and hauled her right into the alcove where the bed was with a big mirror above the whole length of it. Then he pulled the curtain. Dick found himself stuck with the fattest and oldest one and got disgusted. Her flesh felt like rubber. He gave her ten francs and left.