John Passos - 1919

They plunged out again into the empty marble town, down dark lanes and streets of stone steps with always the glare on some jutting wall overhead brighter and redder as they neared the waterfront. Time and again they got lost; at last they came out on wharves and bristle of masts of crowded feluccas and beyond the little crimsontipped waves of the harbor, the breakwater, and outside the breakwater the mass of flame of the burning tanker. Excited and drunk they walked on and on through the town: “By God, these towns are older than the world,” Dick kept saying.

While they were looking at a marble lion, shaped like a dog, that stood polished to glassy smoothness by centuries of hands at the bottom of a flight of steps, an American voice hailed them, wanting to know if they knew their way around this goddam town. It was a young fellow who was a sailor on an American boat that had come over with a carload of mules. They said sure they knew their way and gave him a drink out of the bottle of cognac they’d bought. They sat there on the stone balustrade beside the lion that looked like a dog and swigged cognac out of the bottle and talked. The sailor showed them some silk stockings he’d salvaged off the burning oilship and told them about how he’d been jazzing an Eyetalian girl only she’d gone to sleep and he’d gotten disgusted and walked out on her. “This war’s hell ain’t it de truth?” he said; they all got to laughing.

“You guys seem to be a couple of pretty good guys,” the sailor said. They handed him the bottle and he took a gulp. “You fellers are princes,” he added spluttering, “and I’m goin’ to tell you what I think, see…. This whole goddam war’s a gold brick, it ain’t on the level, its crooked from A to Z. No matter how it comes out fellers like us gets the’s — y end of the stick, see? Well, what I say is all bets is off… every man go to hell in his own way… and three strikes is out, see?” They finished up the cognac.

Singing out savagely, “To hell wid ’em I say,” the sailor threw the bottle with all his might against the head of the stone lion. The Genoese lion went on staring ahead with glassy doglike eyes.

Sourlooking loafers started gathering around to see what the trouble was so they moved on, the sailor waving his silk stockings as he walked. They found him his steamer tied up to the dock and shook hands again and again at the gangplank.

Then it was up to Dick and Steve to get themselves back across the ten miles to Ponte Decimo. Chilly and sleepy they walked until their feet were sore, then hopped a wop truck the rest of the way. The cobbles of the square and the roofs of the cars were covered with hoarfrost when they got there. Dick made a noise getting into the stretcher beside Sheldrake’s and Sheldrake woke up, “What the hell?” he said. “Shut up,” said Dick, “don’t you see you’re waking people up?”

Next day they got to Milan, huge wintry city with its overgrown pincushion cathedral and its Galleria jammed with people and restaurants and newspapers and whores and Cinzano and Campari Bitters. There followed another period of waiting during which most of the section settled down to an endless crapgame in the back room at Cova’s; then they moved out to a place called Dolo on a frozen canal somewhere in the Venetian plain. To get to the elegant carved and painted villa where they were quartered they had to cross the Brenta. A company of British sappers had the bridge all mined and ready to blow up when the retreat began again. They promised to wait till Section 1 had crossed before blowing the bridge up. In Dolo there was very little to do; it was raw wintry weather; while most of the section sat around the stove and swapped their jack at poker, the grenadine guards made themselves hot rum punches over a gasoline burner, read Boccaccio in Italian and argued with Steve about anarchism.

Dick spent a great deal of his time wondering how he was going to get to Venice. It turned out that the fat lieutenant was worried by the fact that the section had no cocoa and that the Red Cross commissary in Milan hadn’t sent the section any breakfast foods. Dick suggested that Venice was one of the world’s great cocoamarkets, and that somebody who knew Italian ought to be sent over there to buy cocoa; so one frosty morning Dick found himself properly equipped with papers and seals boarding the little steamboat at Mestre.

There was a thin skim of ice on the lagoon that tore with a sound of silk on either side of the narrow bow where Dick stood leaning forward over the rail, tears in his eyes from the raw wind, staring at the long rows of stakes and the light red buildings rising palely out of the green water to bubblelike domes and square pointedtipped towers that etched themselves sharper and sharper against the zinc sky. The hunchback bridges, the greenslimy steps, the palaces. the marble quays were all empty. The only life was in a group of torpedoboats anchored in the Grand Canal. Dick forgot all about the cocoa walking through sculptured squares and the narrow streets and quays along the icefilled canals of the great dead city that lay there on the lagoon frail and empty as a cast snakeskin. To the north he could hear the tomtomming of the guns fifteen miles away on the Piave. One the way back it began to snow.

A few days later they moved up to Bassano behind Monte Grappa into a late renaissance villa all painted up with cupids and angels and elaborate draperies. Back of the villa the Brenta roared day and night under a covered bridge. There they spent their time evacuating cases of frozen feet, drinking hot rum punches at Citadella where the base hospital and the whorehouses were, and singing The Foggy Foggy Dew and The Little Black Bull Came Down From the Mountain over the rubber spaghetti at chow. Ripley and Steve decided they wanted to learn to draw and spent their days off drawing architectural details or the covered bridge. Schuyler practiced his Italian talking about Nietzsche with the Italian Lieut. Fred Summers had gotten a dose off a Milanese lady who he said must have belonged to one of the best families because she was riding in a carriage and picked him up, not he her, and spent most of his spare time brewing himself home remedies like cherry stems in hot water. Dick got to feeling lonely and blue, and in need of privacy, and wrote a great many letters home. The letters he got back made him feel worse than not getting any.

“You must understand how it is,” he wrote the Thurlows, answering an enthusiastic screed of Hilda’s about the “war to end war,” “I don’t believe in Christianity any more and can’t argue from that standpoint, but you do, or at least Edwin does, and he ought to realize that in urging young men to go into his cockeyed lunatic asylum of war he’s doing everything he can to undermine all the principles and ideals he most believes in. As the young fellow we had that talk with in Genoa that night said, it’s not on the level, it’s a dirty goldbrick game put over by governments and politicians for their own selfish interests, it’s crooked from A to Z. If it wasn’t for the censorship I could tell you things that would make you vomit.”

Then he’d suddenly snap out of his argumentative mood and all the phrases about liberty and civilization steaming up out of his head would seem damn silly too, and he’d light the gasoline burner and make a rum punch and cheer up chewing the rag with Steve about books or painting or architecture. Moonlight nights the Austrians made things lively by sending bombing planes over. Some nights Dick found that staying out of the dugout and giving them a chance at him gave him a sort of bitter pleasure, and the dugout wasn’t any protection against a direct hit anyway.

Sometime in February Steve read in the paper that the Empress Taitu of Abyssinia had died. They held a wake. They drank all the rum they had and keened until the rest of the section thought they’d gone crazy. They sat in the dark round the open moonlit window wrapped in blankets and drinking warm zabaglione. Some Austrian planes that had been droning overhead suddenly cut off their motors and dumped a load of bombs right in front of them. The antiaircraft guns had been barking for some time and shrapnel sparkling in the moonhazy sky overhead but they’d been too drunk to notice. One bomb fell geflump into the Brenta and the others filled the space in front of the window with red leaping glare and shook the villa with three roaring snorts. Plaster fell from the ceiling. They could hear the tiles skuttering down off the roof overhead.