John Passos - 1919

Dick gave up and went to the Red Cross office to get his transportation; they gave him an order for the Touraine sailing from Bordeaux in two weeks. His last two weeks in Paris he spent working as a volunteer stretcherbearer at the American hospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. It was June. There were airraids every clear night and when the wind was right you could hear the guns on the front. The German offensive was on, the lines were so near Paris the ambulances were evacuating wounded directly on the basehospitals. All night the stretcher cases would spread along the broad pavements under the trees in fresh leaf in front of the hospital; Dick would help carry them up the marble stairs into the reception room. One night they put him on duty outside the operating room and for twelve hours he had the job of carrying out buckets of blood and gauze from which protruded occasionally a shattered bone or a piece of an arm or a leg. When he went off duty he’d walk home achingly tired through the strawberryscented early Parisian morning, thinking of the faces and the eyes and the sweatdrenched hair and the clenched fingers clotted with blood and dirt and the fellows kidding and pleading for cigarettes and the bubbling groans of the lung cases.

One day he saw a pocket compass in a jeweller’s window on the Rue de Rivoli. He went in and bought it; there was suddenly a full-formed plan in his head to buy a civilian suit, leave his uniform in a heap on the wharf at Bordeaux and make for the Spanish border. With luck and all the old transport orders he had in his inside pocket he was sure he could make it; hop across the border and then, once in a country free from nightmare, decide what to do. He even got ready a letter to send his mother.

All the time he was packing his books and other junk in his dufflebag and carrying it on his back up the quais to the Gare d’Orleans, Swinburne’s Song in Time of Order kept going through his head:

While three men hold together

The kingdoms are less by three.

By gum, he must write some verse: what people needed was stirring poems to nerve them for revolt against their cannibal governments. Sitting in the secondclass compartment he was so busy building a daydream of himself living in a sunscorched Spanish town, sending out flaming poems and manifestoes, calling young men to revolt against their butchers, poems that would be published by secret presses all over the world, that he hardly saw the suburbs of Paris or the bluegreen summer farmlands sliding by.

Let our flag run out straight in the wind

The old red shall be floated again

When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned

When the names that were twenty are ten

Even the rumblebump rumblebump of the French railroad train seemed to be chanting as if the words were muttered low in unison by a marching crowd:

While three men hold together

The kingdoms are less by three.

At noon Dick got hungry and went to the diner to eat a last deluxe meal. He sat down at a table opposite a goodlooking young man in a French officer’s uniform. “Good God, Ned, is that you?” Blake Wigglesworth threw back his head in the funny way he had and laughed. “Garçon,” he shouted, “un verre pour le monsieur.”

“But how long were you in the Lafayette Escadrille?” stammered Dick.

“Not long… they wouldn’t have me.”

“And how about the Navy?”

“Threw me out too, the damn fools think I’ve got T.B…. garçon, une bouteille de champagne…. Where are you going?”

“I’ll explain.”

“Well, I’m going home on the Touraine .” Ned threw back his head laughing again and his lips formed the syllables blahblahblahblah. Dick noticed that although his face was very pale and thin his skin under his eyes and up onto the temples was flushed and his eyes looked a little too bright. “Well, so am I,” he heard himself say.

“I got into hot water,” said Ned.

“Me too,” said Dick. “Very.”

They lifted their glasses and looked into each other’s eyes and laughed. They sat in the diner all afternoon talking and drinking and got to Bordeaux boiled as owls. Ned had spent all his money in Paris and Dick had very little left, so they had to sell their bedrolls and equipment to a couple of American lieutenants just arrived they met in the Café de Bordeaux. It was almost like old days in Boston going around from bar to bar and looking for places to get drinks after closing. They spent most of the night in an elegant maison publique all upholstered in pink satin, talking to the madam, a driedup woman with a long upper lip like a llama’s wearing a black spangled evening dress, who took a fancy to them and made them stay and eat onion soup with her. They were so busy talking they forgot about the girls. She’d been in the Transvaal during the Boer War and spoke a curious brand of South African English. “Vous comprennez ve had very fine clientele, every man jack officers, very much elegance, decorum. These johnnies off the veldt… get the hell outen here… bloody select don’t you know. Ve had two salons, one salon English officers, one salon Boer officers, very select, never in all the war make any bloody row, no fight…. Vos compatriotes les Americains ce n’est pas comme ça, mes amis. Beaucoup sonofabeetch, make drunk, make bloody row, make sick, naturellement il y a aussi des gentils garçons comme vous, mes mignons, des veritables gentlemens,” and she patted them both on the cheeks with her horny ringed hands. When they left she wanted to kiss them and went with them to the door saying, “Bonsoi mes jolis petits gentlemens.”

All the crossing they were never sober after eleven in the morning; it was calm misty weather; they were very happy. One night when he was standing alone in the stern beside the small gun, Dick was searching his pocket for a cigarette when his fingers felt something hard in the lining of his coat. It was the little compass he had bought to help him across the Spanish border. Guiltily, he fished it out and dropped it overboard.

HER WOUNDED HERO OF WAR A FRAUD

SAYS WIFE IN SUIT

Mid the wars great coise

Stands the red cross noise

She’s the rose of no man’s land

according to the thousands who had assembled to see the launching and were eyewitnesses of the disaster the scaffold simply seemed to turn over like a gigantic turtle precipitating its occupants into twentyfive feet of water. This was exactly four minutes before the launching was scheduled

Oh that battle of Paree

It’s making a bum out of me

BRITISH BEGIN OPERATION ON AFGHAN FRONTIER

the leading part in world trade which the U.S. is now confidently expected to take, will depend to a very great extent upon the intelligence and success with which its harbors are utilized and developed

I wanta go home I wanta go home

The bullets they whistle the cannons they roar

I dont want to go to the trenches no more

Oh ship me over the sea

Where the Allemand cant get at me

you have begun a crusade against toys, but if all the German toys were commandeered and destroyed the end of German importations would not yet have been reached

HOLDS UP 20 DINERS IN CAFE

LAWHATING GATHERINGS NOT TO BE ALLOWED IN

CRITICAL TIME THREATENING SOCIAL UPHEAVAL

Oh my I’m too young to die

I wanta go home

Nancy Enjoys Nightlife Despite Raids

TATTOOED WOMAN SOUGHT BY POLICE

IN TRUNK MURDER

ARMY WIFE SLASHED BY ADMIRER

Young Man Alleged to Have Taken Money to Aid in Promotion of a Reserve Office. It appears that these men were Chinese merchants from Irkutsk, Chita and elsewhere who were proceeding homeward to Harbin carrying their profits for investment in new stocks