John Passos - 1919

In their twentyfour hour periods off duty they’d meet in a little garden at Récicourt that was the section’s base. No one else seemed to know about it. The garden had been attached to a pink villa but the villa had been mashed to dust as if a great foot had stepped on it. The garden was untouched, only a little weedy from neglect, roses were in bloom there and butterflies and bees droned around the flowers on sunny afternoons. At first they took the bees for distant arrivés and went flat on their bellies when they heard them. There had been a cement fountain in the middle of the garden and there they used to sit when the Germans got it into their heads to shell the road and the nearby bridge. There was regular shelling three times a day and a little scattering between times. Somebody would be detailed to stand in line at the Copé and buy south of France melons and four franc fifty champagne. Then they’d take off their shirts to toast their backs and shoulders if it was sunny and sit in the dry fountain eating the melons and drinking the warm cidery champagne and talk about how they’d go back to the States and start an underground newspaper like La Libre Belgique to tell people what the war was really like.

What Dick liked best in the garden was the little backhouse, like the backhouse in a New England farm, with a clean scrubbed seat and a half moon in the door, through which on sunny days the wasps who had a nest in the ceiling hummed busily in and out. He’d sit there with his belly aching listening to the low voices of his friends talking in the driedup fountain. Their voices made him feel happy and at home while he stood wiping himself on a few old yellowed squares of a 1914 Petit Journal that still hung on the nail. Once he came back buckling his belt and saying, “Do you know? I was thinking how fine it would be if you could reorganize the cells of your body into some other kind of life… it’s too damn lousy being a human… I’d like to be a cat, a nice comfortable housecat sitting by the fire.”

“It’s a hell of a note,” said Steve, reaching for his shirt and putting it on. A cloud had gone over the sun and it was suddenly chilly. The guns sounded quiet and distant. Dick felt suddenly chilly and lonely. “It’s a hell of a note when you have to be ashamed of belonging to your own race. But I swear I am, I swear I’m ashamed of being a man… it will take some huge wave of hope like a revolution to make me feel any selfrespect ever again…. God, we’re a lousy cruel vicious dumb type of tailless ape.” “Well, if you want to earn your selfrespect, Steve, and the respect of us other apes, why don’t you go down, now that they’re not shelling, and buy us a bottle of champagny water?” said Ripley.

After the attack on hill 304 the division went en repos back of Bar-le-Duc for a couple of weeks and then up into a quiet section of the Argonne called le Four de Paris where the French played chess with the Boches in the front line and where one side always warned the other before setting off a mine under a piece of trench. When they were off duty they could go into the inhabited and undestroyed town of Sainte Ménéhoulde and eat fresh pastry and pumpkin soup and roast chicken. When the section was disbanded and everybody sent back to Paris Dick hated to leave the mellow autumn woods of the Argonne. The U.S. army was to take over the ambulance service attached to the French. Everybody got a copy of the section’s citation; Dick Norton made them a speech under shellfire, never dropping the monocle out of his eye, dismissing them as gentlemen volunteers and that was the end of the section.

Except for an occasional shell from the Bertha, Paris was quiet and pleasant that November. It was too foggy for airraids. Dick and Steve Warner got a very cheap room back of the Pantheon; in the daytime they read French and in the evenings roamed round cafés and drinking places. Fred Summers got himself a job with the Red Cross at twentyfive dollars a week and a steady girl the second day they hit Paris. Ripley and Ed Schuyler took lodgings in considerable style over Henry’s bar. They all ate dinner together every night and argued themselves sick about what they ought to do. Steve said he was going home and C.O. and to hell with it; Ripley and Schuyler said they didn’t care what they did as long as they kept out of the American army, and talked about joining the Foreign Legion or the Lafayette Escadrille.

Fred Summers said, “Fellers, this war’s the most gigantic cockeyed graft of the century and me for it and the cross red nurses.” At the end of first week he was holding down two Red Cross jobs, each at twentyfive a week, and being kept by a middleaged French marraine who owned a big house in Neuilly. When Dick’s money gave out Fred borrowed some for him from his marraine, but he never would let any of the others see her. “Don’t want you fellers to know what I’m in for,” he’d say.

At lunchtime one day Fred Summers came round to say that everything was fixed up and that he had jobs for them all. The wops, he explained, were pretty well shot after Caporetto and couldn’t get out of the habit of retreating. It was thought that sending the American Red Cross ambulance section down would help their morale. He was in charge of recruiting for the time being and had put all their names down. Dick immediately said he spoke Italian and felt he’d be a great help to the morale of the Italians, so the next morning they were all at the Red Cross office when it opened and were duly enrolled in Section 1 of the American Red Cross for Italy. There followed a couple more weeks waiting around during which Fred Summers took on a mysterious Serbian lad he picked up in a café back of the Place St. Michel who wanted to teach them to take hashish, and Dick became friends with a drunken Montenegran who’d been a barkeep in New York and who promised to get them all decorated by King Nicholas of Montenegro. But the day they were going to be received at Neuilly to have the decorations pinned on, the section left.

The convoy of twelve Fiats and eight Fords ran along the smooth macadam roads south through the Forest of Fontainebleau and wound east through the winecolored hills of central France. Dick was driving a Ford alone and was so busy trying to remember what to do with his feet he could hardly notice the scenery. Next day they went over the mountains and down into the valley of the Rhone, into a rich wine country with planetrees and cypresses, smelling of the vintage and late fall roses and the south. By Montélimar, the war, the worry about jail and protest and sedition all seemed a nightmare out of another century.

They had a magnificent supper in the quiet pink and white town with cêpes and garlic and strong red wine. “Fellers,” Fred Summers kept saying, “this ain’t a war, it’s a goddam Cook’s tour.” They slept in style in the big brocadehung beds at the hotel, and when they left in the morning a little schoolboy ran after Dick’s car shouting Vive l’Amerique and handed him a box of nougat, the local specialty; it was the land of Cockaigne.

That day the convoy fell to pieces running to Marseilles; discipline melted away; drivers stopped at all the wineshops along the sunny roads to drink and play craps. The Red Cross publicity man and the Saturday Evening Post correspondent who was the famous writer, Montgomery Ellis, got hideously boiled and could be heard whooping and yelling in the back of the staffcar, while the little fat lieutenant ran up and down the line of cars at every stop red and hysterically puffing. Eventually they were all rounded up and entered Marseilles in formation. They’d just finished parking in a row in the main square and the boys were settling back into the bars and cafés round about, when a man named Ford got the bright idea of looking into his gasoline tank with a match and blew his car up. The local firedepartment came out in style and when car No. 8 was properly incinerated turned their highpressure hose on the others, and Schuyler, who spoke the best French in the section, had to be dragged away from a conversation with the cigarette girl at the corner café to beg the firechief for chrissake to lay off.