John Passos - 1919

somebody got hold of a photograph of Captain Paxton Hibben laying a wreath on Jack Reed’s grave; they tried to throw him out of the O.R.C.;

at Princeton at the twentieth reunion of his college class his classmates started to lynch him; they were drunk and perhaps it was just a collegeboy prank twenty years too late but they had a noose around his neck,

lynch the goddam red,

no more place in America for change, no more place for the old gags: social justice, progressivism, revolt against oppression, democracy; put the reds on the skids,

no money for them,

no jobs for them.

Mem Authors League of America, Soc of Colonial Wars, Vets Foreign Wars, Am Legion, fellow Royal and Am Geog Socs. Decorated chevalier Order of St. Stanislas (Russian), Officer Order of the Redeemer (Greek), Order of the Sacred Treasure (Japan). Clubs Princeton, Newspaper, Civic (New York)

Author: Constantine and the Greek People 1920, The Famine in Russia 1922, Henry Ward Beecher an American Portrait 1927.

d.1929.

EUROPE ON KNIFE EDGE

Tout le long de la Thamise

Nous sommes allés tout les deux

Gouter l’heure exquise.

in such conditions is it surprising that the Department of Justice looks with positive affection upon those who refused service in the draft, with leniency upon convicted anarchists and with something like indifference upon the overwhelming majority of them still out of jail or undeported for years after the organization of the U.S. Steel Corporation Wall Street was busy on the problem of measuring the cubic yards of water injected into the property

FINISHED STEEL MOVES RATHER MORE FREELY

Where do we go from here boys

Where do we go from here?

WILD DUCKS FLY OVER PARIS

FERTILIZER INDUSTRY STIMULATED BY WAR

Anywhere from Harlem

To a Jersey City pier

the winning of the war is just as much dependent upon the industrial workers as it is upon the soldiers. Our wonderful record of launching one hundred ships on independence day shows what can be done when we put our shoulders to the wheel under the spur of patriotism

SAMARITAINE BATHS SINK IN

SWOLLEN SEINE

I may not know

What the war’s about

But you bet by gosh

I’ll soon find out

And so my sweetheart

Don’t you fear

I’ll bring you a king

For a souvenir

And I’ll get you a Turk

And the Kaiser too

And that’s about all

One feller can do

AFTER-WAR PLANS OF AETNA EXPLOSIVES

ANCIENT CITY IN GLOOM EVEN THE CHURCH BELLS ON

SUNDAY BEING STILLED

Where do we go from here boys

Where do we go from here?

It was at Fontainebleau lined up in the square in front of Francis I’s palace they first saw the big grey Fiat ambulances they were to drive. Schuyler came back from talking with the French drivers who were turning them over with the news that they were sore as hell because it meant they had to go back into the front line. They asked why the devil the Americans couldn’t stay home and mind their own business instead of coming over here and filling up all the good embusqué jobs. That night the section went into cantonment in tarpaper barracks that stank of carbolic, in a little town in Champagne. It turned out to be the Fourth of July, so the maréchale-de-logis served out champagne with supper and a general with white walrus whiskers came and made a speech about how with the help of Amérique héroique la victoire was certain, and proposed a toast to le président Veelson. The chef of the section, Bill Knickerbocker, got up a little nervously and toasted la France héroique, l’héroique Cinquième Armée and la victorie by Christmas. Fireworks were furnished by the Boches who sent over an airraid that made everybody scuttle for the bombproof dugout.

Once they got down there Fred Summers said it smelt too bad and anyway he wanted a drink and he and Dick went out to find an estaminet, keeping close under the eaves of the houses to escape the occasional shrapnel fragments from the antiaircraft guns. They found a little bar all full of tobacco smoke and French poilus singing la Madelon. Everybody cheered when they came in and a dozen glasses were handed to them. They smoked their first caporal ordinaire and everybody set them up to drinks so that at closing time, when the bugles blew the French equivalent of taps, they found themselves walking a little unsteadily along the pitchblack streets arm in arm with two poilus who’d promised to find them their cantonment. The poilus said la guerre was une saloperie and la victoire was une sale blague and asked eagerly if les americains knew anything about la revolution en Russie. Dick said he was a pacifist and was for anything that would stop the war and they all shook hands very significantly and talked about la revolution mondiale. When they were turning in on their folding cots, Fred Summers suddenly sat bolt upright with his blanket around him and said in a solemn funny way he had, “Fellers, this ain’t a war, it’s a goddam madhouse.”

There were two other fellows in the section who liked to drink wine and chatter bad French; Steve Warner, who’d been a special student at Harvard, and Ripley who was a freshman at Columbia. The five of them went around together, finding places to get omelettes and pommes frites in the villages within walking distance, making the rounds of the estaminets every night; they got to be known as the grenadine guards. When the section moved up onto the Voie Sacrée back of Verdun and was quartered for three rainy weeks in a little ruined village called Erize la Petite, they set up their cots together in the same corner of the old brokendown barn they were given for a cantonment. It rained all day and all night; all day and all night camions ground past through the deep liquid putty of the roads carrying men and munitions to Verdun. Dick used to sit on his cot looking out through the door at the jiggling mudspattered faces of the young French soldiers going up for the attack, drunk and desperate and yelling à bas la guerre, mort au vaches, à bas la guerre. Once Steve came in suddenly, his face pale above the dripping poncho, his eyes snapping, and said in a low voice, “Now I know what the tumbrils were like in the Terror, that’s what they are, tumbrils.”

Dick was relieved to find out, when they finally moved up within range of the guns, that he wasn’t any more scared than anybody else. The first time they went on post he and Fred lost their way in the shellshredded woods and were trying to turn the car around on a little rise naked as the face of the moon when three shells from an Austrian eightyeight went past them like three cracks of a whip. They never knew how they got out of the car and into the ditch, but when the sparse blue almondsmelling smoke cleared they were both lying flat in the mud. Fred went to pieces and Dick had to put his arm around him and keep whispering in his ear, “Come on, boy, we got to make it. Come on, Fred, we’ll fool ’em.” It all hit him funny and he kept laughing all the way back along the road into the quieter section of the woods where the dressing station had been cleverly located right in front of a battery of 405s so that the concussion almost bounced the wounded out of their stretchers every time a gun was fired. When they got back to the section after taking a load to the triage they were able to show three jagged holes from shellfragments in the side of the car.

Next day the attack began and continual barrages and counter-barrages and heavy gasbombardments; the section was on twentyfour hour duty for three days, at the end of it everybody had dysentery and bad nerves. One fellow got shellshock, although he’d been too scared to go on post, and had to be sent back to Paris. A couple of men had to be evacuated for dysentery. The grenadine guards came through the attack pretty well, except that Steve and Ripley had gotten a little extra sniff of mustard gas up at P2 one night and vomited whenever they ate anything.