John Passos - 1919

“Jesus, that was almost good night,” said Summers. Steve started singing, Come away from that window, my light and my life , but the rest of them drowned it out with an out of tune Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles. They suddenly all felt crazy drunk.

Ed Schuyler was standing on a chair giving a recitation of the Erlkönig when Feldmann, the Swiss hotelkeeper’s son who was now head of the section, stuck his head in the door and asked what in the devil they thought they were doing. “You’d better go down in the abris, one of the Italian mechanics was killed and a soldier walking up the road had his legs blown off… no time for monkeyshines.” They offered him a drink and he went off in a rage. After that they drank marsala. Sometime in the early dawn greyness Dick got up and staggered to the window to vomit; it was raining pitchforks, the foaming rapids of the Brenta looked very white through the shimmering rain.

Next day it was Dick’s and Steve’s turn to go on post to Rova. They drove out of the yard at six with their heads like fireballoons, damn glad to be away from the big scandal there’d be at the section. At Rova the lines were quiet, only a few pneumonia or venereal cases to evacuate, and a couple of poor devils who’d shot themselves in the foot and were to be sent to the hospital under guard; but at the officers’ mess where they ate things were very agitated indeed. Tenente Sardinaglia was under arrest in his quarters for saucing the Coronele and had been up there for two days making up a little march on his mandolin that he called the march of the medical colonels. Serrati told them about it giggling behind his hand while they were waiting for the other officers to come to mess. It was all on account of the macchina for coffee. There were only three macchine for the whole mess, one for the colonel, one for the major, and the other went around to the junior officers in rotation; well, one day last week they’d been kidding that bella ragazza, the niece of the farmer on whom they were quartered; she hadn’t let any of the officers kiss her and had carried on like a crazy woman when they pinched her behind, and the colonel had been angry about it, and angrier yet when Sardinaglia had bet him five lira that he could kiss her and he’d whispered something in her ear and she’d let him and that had made the colonel get purple in the face and he’d told the ordinanza not to give the macchina to the tenente when his turn came round; and Sardinaglia had slapped the ordinanza’s face and there’d been a row and as a result Sardinaglia was confined to his quarters and the Americans would see what a circus it was. They all had to straighten their faces in a hurry because the colonel and the major and the two captains came jingling in at that moment.

The ordinanza came and saluted, and said pronto spaghetti in a cheerful tone, and everybody sat down. For a while the officers were quiet sucking in the long oily tomatocoated strings of spaghetti, the wine was passed around and the colonel had just cleared his throat to begin one of his funny stories that everybody had to laugh at, when from up above there came the tinkle of a mandolin. The colonel’s face got red and he put a forkful of spaghetti in his mouth instead of saying anything. As it was Sunday the meal was unusually long: at dessert the coffee macchina was awarded to Dick as a courtesy to gli americani and somebody produced a bottle of strega. The colonel told the ordinanza to tell the bella ragazza to come and have a glass of strega with him; he looked pretty sour at the idea, Dick thought; but he went and got her. She turned out to be a handsome stout oliveskinned countrygirl. Her cheeks burning she went timidly up to the colonel and said, thank you very much but please she never drank strong drinks. The colonel grabbed her and made her sit on his knee and tried to make her drink his glass of strega, but she kept her handsome set of ivory teeth clenched and wouldn’t drink it. It ended by several of the officers holding her and tickling her and the colonel pouring the strega over her chin. Everybody roared with laughter except the ordinanza, who turned white as chalk, and Steve and Dick who didn’t know where to look. While the senior officers were teasing and tickling her and running their hands into her blouse, the junior officers were holding her feet and running their hands up her legs. Finally the colonel got control of his laughter enough to say, “Basta, now she must give me a kiss.” But the girl broke loose and ran out of the room.

“Go and bring her back,” the colonel said to the ordinanza. After a moment the ordinanza came back and stood at attention and said he couldn’t find her. “Good for him,” whispered Steve to Dick. Dick noticed that the ordinanza’s legs were trembling. “You can’t can’t you?” roared the colonel, and gave the ordinanza a push; one of the lieutenants stuck his foot out and the ordinanza tripped over it and fell. Everybody laughed and the colonel gave him a kick; he had gotten to his hands and knees when the colonel gave him a kick in the seat of his pants that sent him flat to the floor again. The officers all roared, the ordinanza crawled to the door with the colonel running after him giving him little kicks first on one side and then on the other, like a soccerplayer with a football. That put everybody in a good humor and they had another drink of strega all around. When they got outside Serrati, who’d been laughing with the rest, grabbed Dick’s arm and hissed in his ear, “Bestie…. sono tutti bestie.”

When the other officers had gone, Serrati took them up to see Sardinaglia who was a tall longfaced young man who liked to call himself a futurista. Serrati told him what had happened and said he was afraid the Americans had been disgusted. “A futurist must be disgusted at nothing except weakness and stupidity,” said Sardinaglia sententiously. Then he told them he’d found out who the bella ragazza was really sleeping with… with the ordinanza. That he said disgusted him; it showed that women were all pigs. Then he said to sit down on his cot while he played them the march of the medical colonels. They declared it was fine. “A futurist must be strong and disgusted with nothing,” he said, still trilling on the mandolin, “that’s why I admire the Germans and American millionaires.” They all laughed.

Dick and Steve went out to pick up some feriti to evacuate to the hospital. Behind the barn where they parked the cars, they found the ordinanza sitting on a stone with his head in his hands, tears had made long streaks on the dirt of his face. Steve went up to him and patted him on the back and gave him a package of Mecca cigarettes, that had been distributed to them by the Y.M.C.A. The ordinanza squeezed Steven’s hand, looked as if he was going to kiss it. He said after the war he was going to America where people were civilized, not bestie like here. Dick asked him where the girl had gone. “Gone away,” he said. “Andata via.”

When they got back to the section they found there was hell to pay. Orders had come for Savage, Warner, Ripley and Schuyler to report to the head office in Rome in order to be sent back to the States. Feldmann wouldn’t tell them what the trouble was. They noticed at once that the other men in the section were looking at them suspiciously and were nervous about speaking to them, except for Fred Summers who said he didn’t understand it, the whole frigging business was a madhouse anyway. Sheldrake, who’d moved his dufflebag and cot into another room in the villa, came around with an I told you so air and said he’d heard the words seditious utterances and that an Italian intelligence officer had been around asking about them. He wished them good luck and said it was too bad. They left the section without saying goodby to anybody. Feldmann drove them and their dufflebags and bedrolls down to Vicenza in the camionette. At the railroad station he handed them their orders of movement to Rome, said it was too bad, wished them good luck, and went off in a hurry without shaking hands.