John Passos - 1919

One night she met Joe Washburn at a party Ida Olsen was giving for some boys who were leaving for overseas. It was the first time she’d ever seen Joe drink. He wasn’t drunk but she could see that he’d been drinking a great deal. They went and sat side by side on the back steps of the kitchen in the dark. It was a clear hot night full of dryflies with a hard hot wind rustling the dry twigs of all the trees. Suddenly she took Joe’s hand: “Oh, Joe, this is awful.”

Joe began to talk about how unhappy he was with his wife, how he was making big money through his oil leases and didn’t give a damn about it, how sick he was of the army. They’d made him an instructor and wouldn’t let him go overseas and he was almost crazy out there in camp. “Oh, Joe, I want to go overseas too. I’m leading such a silly life here.” “You have been actin’ kinder wild, Daughter, since Bud died,” came Joe’s soft deep drawling voice. “Oh, Joe, I wisht I was dead,” she said and put her head on his knee and began to cry. “Don’t cry, Daughter, don’t cry,” he began to say, then suddenly he was kissing her. His kisses were hard and crazy and made her go all limp against him.

“I don’t love anybody but you, Joe,” she suddenly said quietly. But he already had control of himself; “Daughter, forgive me,” he said in a quiet lawyer’s voice, “I don’t know what I was thinking of, I must be crazy… this war is making us all crazy… Good night… Say… er… erase this all from the record, will you?”

That night she couldn’t sleep a wink. At six in the morning she got into her car, filled up with gas and oil and started for Dallas. It was a bright fall morning with blue mist in the hollows. Dry cornstalks rustled on the long hills red and yellow with fall. It was late when she got home. Dad was sitting up reading the war news in pyjamas and bathrobe. “Well, it won’t be long now, Daughter,” he said. “The Hindenburg line is crumpling up. I knew our boys could do it once they got started.” Dad’s face was more lined with his hair whiter than she’d remembered it. She heated up a can of Campbell’s soup as she hadn’t taken any time to eat. They had a cosy little supper together and read a funny letter of Buster’s from Camp Merritt where his outfit was waiting to go overseas. When she went to bed in her own room it was like being a little girl again, she’d always loved times when she got a chance to have a cosy chat with Dad all alone; she went to sleep the minute her head hit the pillow.

She stayed on in Dallas taking care of Dad; it was only sometimes when she thought of Joe Washburn that she felt she couldn’t stand it another minute. The fake armistice came and then the real armistice, everybody was crazy for a week like a New Orleans mardigras. Daughter decided that she was going to be an old maid and keep house for Dad. Buster came home looking very tanned and full of army slang. She started attending lectures at Southern Methodist, doing church work, getting books out of the circulating library, baking angelcake; when young girlfriends of Buster’s came to the house she acted as a chaperon.

Thanksgiving Joe Washburn and his wife came to dinner with them. Old Emma was sick so Daughter cooked the turkey herself. It was only when they’d all sat down to table, with the yellow candles lighted in the silver candlesticks and the salted nuts set out in the little silver trays and the decoration of pink and purple mapleleaves, that she remembered Bud. She suddenly began to feel faint and ran into her room. She lay face down on the bed listening to their grave voices. Joe came to the door to see what was the matter. She jumped up laughing, and almost scared Joe to death by kissing him square on the mouth. “I’m all right Joe,” she said. “How’s yourself?”

Then she ran to the table and started cheering everybody up, so that they all enjoyed their dinner. When they were drinking their coffee in the other room she told them that she’d signed up to go overseas for six months with the Near East Relief, that had been recruiting at Southern Methodist. Dad was furious and Buster said she ought to stay home now the war was over, but Daughter said, others had given their lives to save the world from the Germans and that she certainly could give up six months to relief work. When she said that they all thought of Bud and were quiet.

It wasn’t actually true that she’d signed up, but she did the next morning and got around Miss Frazier, a returned missionary from China who was arranging it, so that they sent her up to New York that week, with orders to sail immediately with the office in Rome as her first destination. She was so widely excited all the time she was getting her passport and having her uniform fitted, she hardly noticed how glum Dad and Buster looked. She only had a day in New York. When the boat backed out of the dock with its siren screaming and started steaming down the North River, she stood on the front deck with her hair blowing in the wind, sniffing the funny steamboard harbor overseas smell and feeling like a twoyearold.

GOLDEN VOICE OF CARUSO SWELLS IN

VICTORY SONG TO CROWDS ON STREETS

Oh Oh Oh, it’s a lovely war

Oo wouldn’t be a sodger, ay

from Pic Umbral to the north of the Stelvio it will follow the crest of the Rhetian alps up to the sources of the Adige and the Eisah passing thence by mounts Reschen and Brenner and the heights of Oetz and Boaller; thence south crossing Mount Toblach

As soon as reveille has gone

We feel just as ’eavy as lead

But we never git up till the sergeant

Brings us a cup of tea in bed

HYPNOTIZED BY COMMON LAW WIFE

army casualties soar to 64,305 with 318 today; 11,760 have paid the supreme sacrifice in action and 6,193 are severely wounded

Oh Oh Oh, it’s a lovely war

Oo wouldn’t be a sodger ay

Oh, it’s a shayme to tayke the pay

in the villages in peasant houses the Americans are treated as guests living in the best rooms and courteously offered the best shining samovars or teaurns by the housewives

Le chef de gare il est cocu

in the largely populated districts a spectacular touch was given the festivities by groups of aliens appearing in costume and a carnival spirit prevailed

BRITISH SUPPRESS SOVIETS

Le chef de gare il est cocu

Qui est cocu? Le chef de gare

Sa femme elle l’a voulut

there can be no reason to believe these officers of an established news organization serving newspapers all over the country failed to realize their responsibilities at a moment of supreme significance to the people of this country. Even to anticipate the event in a matter of such moment would be a grave imposition for which those responsible must be called to account

Any complaynts this morning?

Do we complayn? Not we

Wats the matter with lumps of onion

Floatin’ around in the tea?

PEACE DOVE IN JEWELS GIVEN

MRS. WILSON

and the watershed of the Cols di Polberdo, Podlaniscam and Idria. From this point the line turns southeast towards the Schneeberg, excludes the whole basin of the Saave and its tributaries. From Schneeberg it goes down to the coast in such a way as to include Castna, Mattuglia and Volusca

sealed signed and delivered all over Tours you can smell lindens in bloom it’s hot my uniform sticks the OD chafes me under the chin

only four days ago AWOL crawling under the freight cars at the station of St. Pierre-des-Corps waiting in the buvette for the MP on guard to look away from the door so’s I could slink out with a cigarette (and my heart) in my mouth then in a tiny box of a hotel room changing the date on that old movement order