John Passos - 1919

By the time he got on the train his eyes were stinging with sleepiness. He and the sergeant who went with him had a compartment reserved at the end of a first class coach marked Paris-Brindisi. Outside of their compartment the train was packed; people were standing in the aisles. Dick had taken off his coat and Sam Browne belt and was loosening his puttees, planning to stretch out on one of the seats and go to sleep even before the train left, when he saw a skinny American face in the door of the compartment. “I beg your pardon, is this Ca-ca-captain Savage?” Dick sat up and nodded yawning. “Captain Savage, my name is Barrow, G. H. Barrow, attached to the American delegation…. I have to go to Rome tonight and there’s not a seat on the train. The transport officer in the station very kindly said that… er… er although it wasn’t according to Hoyle you might stretch a point and allow us to ride with you… I have with me a very charming young lady member of the Near East Relief…” “Captain Savage, it certainly is mighty nice of you to let us ride with you,” came a drawling Texas voice, and a pinkcheeked girl in a dark grey uniform brushed past the man who said his name was Barrow and climbed up into the car. Mr. Barrow, who was shaped like a string bean and had a prominent twitching Adam’s apple and popeyes, began tossing up satchels and suitcases. Dick was sore and began to say stiffly, “I suppose you know that it’s entirely against my orders…” but he heard his own voice saying it and suddenly grinned and said, “All right, Sergeant Wilson and I will probably be shot at sunrise, but go ahead.” At that moment the train started.

Dick reluctantly scraped his things together into one corner and settled down there and immediately closed his eyes. He was much too sleepy to make the effort of talking to any damn relievers. The sergeant sat in the other corner and Mr. Barrow and the girl occupied the other seat. Through his doze Dick could hear Mr. Barrow’s voice chugging along, now and then drowned out by the rattle of the express train. He had a stuttery way of talking like a badly running motorboat engine. The girl didn’t say much except, “Oh my,” and “I declare,” now and then. It was the European situation: President Wilson says… new diplomacy… new Europe… permanent peace without annexations or indemnities. President Wilson says… new understanding between capital and labor… President Wilson appeals to… industrial democracy… plain people all over the world behind the president. Covenant. League of Nations… Dick was asleep dreaming of a girl rubbing her breasts against him purring like a kitten, of a popeyed man making a speech, of William Jennings Wilson speaking before the Baltimore conflagration, of industrial democracy in a bathhouse on the Marne in striped trunks, with a young Texas boy with pink cheeks who wanted to… like a string bean… with a twitching adamsapple…

He woke up with a nightmarish feeling that somebody was choking him. The train had stopped. It was stifling in the compartment. The blue shade was drawn down on the lamp overhead. He stepped over everybody’s legs and went out in the passage and opened a window. Cold mountain air cut into his nostrils. The hills were snowy in the moonlight. Beside the track a French sentry was sleepily leaning on his rifle. Dick yawned desperately.

The Near East Relief girl was standing beside him, looking at him smiling. “Where are we gettin’ to, Captain Savage?… Is this Italy yet?” “I guess it’s the Swiss Border… we’ll have a long wait, I guess… they take forever at these borders.”

“Oh Jimminy,” said the girl, jumping up and down, “it’s the first time I ever crossed a border.”

Dick laughed and settled back into his seat again. The train pulled into a barny lonelylooking station, very dimly lit, and the civilian passengers started piling out with their baggage. Dick sent his papers by the sergeant to the military inspection and settled back to sleep again.

He slept soundly and didn’t wake up until the Mont Cenis. Then it was the Italian frontier. Again cold air, snowy mountains, everybody getting out into an empty barn of a station.

Sleepysentimentally remembering the last time he’d gone into Italy on the Fiat car with Sheldrake, he walked shivering to the station bar and drank a bottle of mineral water and a glass of wine. He took a couple of bottles of mineral water and a fiasco of chianti back to the compartment, and offered Mr. Barrow and the girl drinks when they came back from the customs and the police looking very cross and sleepy. The girl said she couldn’t drink wine because she’d signed a pledge not to drink or smoke when she joined the N.E.R., but she drank some mineral water and complained that it tickled her nose. Then they all huddled back into their corners to try to sleep some more. By the time they pulled into the Termi station in Rome they were all calling each other by their first names. The Texas girl’s name was Anne Elizabeth. She and Dick had spent the day standing in the corridor looking out at the saffronroofed towns and the peasants’ houses each with a blue smear on the stucco behind the grapevine over the door, and the olives and the twisted shapes of the vines in their redterraced fields; the pale hilly Italian landscape where the pointed cypresses stood up so dark they were like gashes in a canvas. She’d told him all about trying to get overseas all through the war and how her brother had been killed learning to fly at San Antonio, and how nice Mr. Barrow had been on the boat and in Paris but that he would try to make love to her and acted so silly, which was very inconvenient; Dick said well maybe it wasn’t so silly. He could see that Anne Elizabeth felt fine about travelling to Rome with a real army officer who’d been to the front and could talk Italian and everything.

From the station he had to rush to the embassy with his despatch cases, but he had time to arrange to call up Miss Trent at the Near East Relief. Barrow too shook hands with him warmly and said he hoped they’d see something of each other; he was anxious to establish contacts with people who really knew what it was all about.

The only thing Dick thought of that night was to get through and get to bed. Next morning he called up Ed Schuyler at the Red Cross. They ate a big winey lunch together at an expensive restaurant near the Pincio gardens. Ed had been leading the life of Riley; he had an apartment on the Spanish Stairs and took a lot of trips. He’d gotten fat. But now he was in trouble. The husband of an Italian woman he’d been running round with was threatening to challenge him to a duel and he was afraid there’d be a row and he’d lose his job with the Red Cross. “The war was all right but it’s the peace that really gets you,” he said. Anyway he was sick of Italy and the Red Cross and wanted to go home. The only thing was that they were going to have a revolution in Italy and he’d like to stay and see it. “Well, Dick, for a member of the grenadine guards you seem to have done pretty well for yourself.”

“All a series of accidents,” said Dick, wrinkling up his nose. “Things are funny, do you know it?” “Don’t I know it… I wonder what happened to poor old Steve? Fred Summers was joining the Polish Legion, last I heard of him.” “Steve’s probably in jail,” said Dick, “where we ought to be.” “But it’s not every day you get a chance to see a show like this.”

It was four o’clock when they left the restaurant. They went to Ed’s room and sat drinking cognac in his window looking out over the yellow and verdigris roofs of the city and the baroque domes sparkling in the last sunlight, remembering how tremendously they’d felt Rome the last time they’d been there together, talking about what they’d be doing now that the war was over. Ed Schuyler said he wanted to get a foreign correspondent job that would take him out east; he couldn’t imagine going back home to upstate New York; he had to see Persia and Afghanistan. Talking about what he was going to do made Dick feel hellishly miserable. He started walking back and forth across the tiled floor.