John Passos - 1919

Hurrying down the black sloping street outside he ran into some Australian officers who gave him a drink of whiskey out of a bottle and took him into another house where they tried to get a show put on, but the madam said the girls were all busy and the Australians were too drunk to pay attention anyway and started to wreck the place. Dick just managed to slip out before the gendarmes came. He was walking in the general direction of the hotel when there was another alerte and he found himself being yanked down into a subway by a lot of Belgians. There was a girl down there who was very pretty and Dick was trying to explain to her that she ought to go to a hotel with him when the man she was with, who was a colonel of Spahis in a red cloak covered with gold braid, came up, his waxed mustaches bristling with fury. Dick explained that it was all a mistake and there were apologies all around and they were all braves alliés. They walked around several blocks looking for some place to have a drink together, but everything was closed, so they parted regretfully at the door of Dick’s hotel. He went up to the room in splendid humor; there he found the other two glumly applying argyrol and Metchnikoff paste. Dick made a good tall story out of his adventures. But the other two said he’d been a hell of a poor sport to walk out on a lady and hurt her sensitive feelings. “Fellers,” began Fred Summers, looking in each of their faces with his round eyes, “it ain’t a war, it’s a goddam…” He couldn’t think of a word for it so Dick turned out the light.

COMING YEAR PROMISES REBIRTH OF RAILROADS

DEBS IS GIVEN 30 YEARS IN PRISON

There’s a long long trail awinding

Into the land of my dreams

Where the nightingales are singing

And the white moon beams

future generations will rise up and call those men blessed who have the courage of their convictions, a proper appreciation of the value of human life as contrasted with material gain, and who, imbued with the spirit of brotherhood will lay hold of the great opportunity

BONDS BUY BULLETS BUY BONDS

COPPERS INFLUENCED BY UNCERTAIN OUTLOOK

WOMEN VOTE LIKE VETERAN POLITICIANS

restore time honored meat combination dishes such as hash, goulash, meat pies and liver and bacon. Every German soldier carries a little clothesbrush in his pocket; first thing he does when he lands in a prisoncage is to get out this brush and start cleaning his clothes

EMPLOYER MUST PROVE WORKER IS ESSENTIAL

There’s a long long night of waiting

Until my dreams all come true

AGITATORS CAN’T GET AMERICAN PASSPORTS

the two men out of the Transvaal district during the voyage expressed their opinion that the British and American flags expressed nothing and, as far as they were concerned could be sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, and acknowledged that they were socalled Nationalists, a type much resembling the I.W.W. here. “I have no intention” wrote Hearst, “of meeting Governor Smith either publicly, privately, politically, or socially, as I do not find any satisfaction

KILLS HERSELF AT SEA; CROWDER IN CITY

AFTER SLACKERS

Oh old Uncle Sam

He’s got the infantree

He’s got the cavalree

He’s got artilleree

And then by God we’ll all go to Chermanee

God Help Kaiser Bill!

remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead

three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Récicourt

No there must be some way they taught us Land of the Free conscience Give me liberty or give me Well they give us death

sunny afternoon through the faint aftersick of mustardgas I smell the box the white roses and the white phlox with a crimson eye three brownandwhitestriped snails hang with infinite delicacy from a honeysucklebranch overhead up in the blue a sausageballoon grazes drowsily like a tethered cow there are drunken wasps clinging to the tooripe pears that fall and squash whenever the near guns spew their heavy shells that go off rumbling through the sky

with a whir that makes you remember walking in the woods and starting a woodcock

welltodo country people carefully built the walls and the little backhouse with the cleanscrubbed seat and the quartermoon in the door like the backhouse of an old farm at home carefully planted the garden and savored the fruit and the flowers and carefully planned this war

to hell with ’em Patrick Henry in khaki submits to shortarm inspection and puts all his pennies in a Liberty Loan or give me

arrivés shrapnel twanging its harps out of tiny powderpuff clouds invites us delicately to glory we happy watching the careful movements of the snails in the afternoon sunlight talking in low voices about

La Libre Belgique The Junius papers Areopagitica Milton went blind for freedom of speech If you hit the words Democracy will understand even the bankers and the clergymen I you we must

When three men hold together

The kingdoms are less by three

we are happy talking in low voices in the afternoon sunlight about après la guerre that our fingers our blood our lungs our flesh under the dirty khaki feldgrau bleu horizon might go on sweeten grow until we fall from the tree ripe like the tooripe pears the arrivés know and singing éclats sizzling gas shells theirs is the power and the glory

or give me death

Randolph Bourne

came as an inhabitant of this earth

without the pleasure of choosing his dwelling or his career.

He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey; there he attended grammar-school and highschool.

At the age of seventeen he went to work as secretary to a Morristown businessman.

He worked his way through Columbia working in a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proofreader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hall.

At Columbia he studied with John Dewey,

got a travelling fellowship that took him to England Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,

wrote a book on the Gary schools.

In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wagner and Sciabine

and bought himself a black cape.

This little sparrowlike man,

tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,

always in pain and ailing,

put a pebble in his sling

and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.

War, he wrote, is the health of the state.

Half musician, half educational theorist (weak health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn’t spoiled the world for Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog; Look at the yellow, it’s beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy man.) Bourne seized with feverish intensity on the ideas then going around at Columbia, he picked rosy glasses out of the turgid jumble of John Dewey’s teaching through which he saw clear and sharp

the shining capitol of reformed democracy,

Wilson’s New Freedom;

but he was too good a mathematician; he had to work the equations out;

with the result

that in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get unpopular where his bread was buttered at the New Republic;