Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

When this became monotonous, the Americans went out to have a look at the streets. They couldn’t see much from a car, for fear of being caught in fighting, and decided that the best place from which to witness a Paris démonstration was from the windows of their hotel suite. Robbie, sensible fellow, was in his rooms, talking business with the head of a French building concern which sometimes bought ascenseurs. The two younger people stood on the balcony of their drawing-room, which looked over the great Place de la Concorde, brilliantly lighted, and with an obelisk in the center having floodlights on it. Directly across the Place was the bridge over the Seine to the Palais-Bourbon, where the deputies met; a building in Roman style with many tall pillars brightly shining.

There must have been a hundred thousand people in the Place, and more pouring in by every street. They were trying to get across the bridge, but the police and troops had blocked it with patrol-wagons. The mob started throwing things, and soon there was a pitched battle, with charges and counter-charges going on most of the night. The Fascists hurled whatever they could lay hands on. They pried up stones from the pavement, and tore off the scaffolding from the American Embassy, which was under repair. The railings of the Tuileries gardens provided them with an iron missile, shaped like a boomerang and impossible to see in the dark. When the mounted gardes républicaines tried to drive them off the bridge, charging and striking with the flat of their sabers, the mob countered with walking-sticks having razor-blades fastened to the ends, to slash the bellies of the horses. In one attack after another they crippled so many of the police and gardes that they came very near getting across the bridge and into the Chamber.

So at last shooting began. The street-lights were smashed, and the floodlights on the obelisk were turned off, so you couldn’t see much. An omnibus had been overturned and set afire near the bridge, but that gave more smoke than light, and it soon burned out. The last sight that Lanny saw was a troop of the Spahis, African cavalrymen in white desert robes looking like the Ku Kluxers, galloping up the Champs Elysees and trampling the mob. There came screams directly under where Irma and Lanny were standing; a chambermaid of the hotel had been shot and killed on the balcony. So the guests scrambled in quickly, deciding that they had seen enough of the class war in France.

"Do you think they will raid the hotel?" asked Irma; but Lanny assured her that this was a respectable kind of mob, and was after the politicians only. So they went to bed.

"Bloody Tuesday," it was called, and the Fascist newspapers set out to make it into the French "Beerhall Putsch." From that time on they would have only one name for Daladier: "Assassin!" They clamored for his resignation, and before the end of the next day they got it; there were whispers that he could no longer depend upon the police and the gardes. More than two hundred of these were in the hospitals, and it looked like a revolution on the way. There was wreckage all over Paris, and the Ministry of Marine partly burned. Charlot had got a slash across the forehead, and for the rest of his life would wear a scar with pride. "La Concorde" he would say, referring to the bridge; it would become a slogan, perhaps some day a password to power.

On Wednesday night matters were worse, for the police were demoralized, and the hoodlums, the apaches, went on the warpath. They smashed the windows of the shops in the Rue de Rivoli and other fashionable streets and looted everything in sight. It wasn’t a pleasant time for visitors in Paris; Robbie was going to Amsterdam on business, so Irma and Lanny stepped into their car and sped home.

But you couldn’t get away from the class war in France. The various reactionary groups had been organized all over the Midi, and they, too, had received their marching orders. They had the sympathy of many in the various foreign colonies; anything to put down the Reds. Rick, after hearing Lanny’s story, said that la patrie was awaiting only one thing, a leader who would have the shrewdness to win the "little man." So far, all the Fascist groups were avowedly reactionary, and it would take a leftish program to win. Lanny expressed the opinion that the French man in the street was much shrewder than the German; it wouldn’t be so easy to hoodwink him.

Life was resumed at Bienvenu. Rick worked on his play and Lanny read the manuscript, encouraged him, and supplied local color. In the privacy of their chamber Irma said: "Really, you are a collaborator, and ought to be named." She wondered why Lanny never wrote a play of his own. She decided that what he lacked was the impulse of self-assertion, the strong ego which takes up the conviction that it has something necessary to the welfare of mankind. Uncle Jesse had it, Kurt had it, Rick had it. Beauty had tried in vain to awaken it in her son, and now Irma tried with no more success. "Rick can do it a lot better"—that was all she could get.

Irma was becoming a little cross with this lame Englishman. She had got Lanny pretty well cured of his Pinkness, but now Rick kept poking up the fires. There came a series of terrible events in Austria—apparently Fascism was going to spread from country to country until it had covered all Europe. Austria had got a Catholic Chancellor named Dollfuss, and a Catholic army, the Heimwehr, composed mainly of peasant lads and led by a dissipated young prince. This government was jailing or deporting Hitlerites, but with the help of Mussolini was getting its own brand of Fascism, and now it set out to destroy the Socialist movement in the city of Vienna. Those beautiful workers' homes, huge apartment blocks which Lanny had inspected with such joy—the Heimwehr brought up its motorized artillery and blasted them to ruins, killing about a thousand men, women, and children. Worse yet, they killed the workers' movement, which had been two generations building.

A terrible time to be alive in. Lanny and Rick could hardly eat or sleep; they could only grieve and brood over the tragedy of the time into which they had been born. Truly it seemed futile to work for anything good; to dream of peace and order, justice or even mercy. This wholesale slaughter of working people was committed in the name of the gentle and lowly Jesus, the carpenter’s son, the social rebel who had been executed because he stirred up the people! A devout Catholic Premier ordering the crime, and devout Catholic officers attending mass before and after committing it! And not for the first time or the last in unhappy Europe. Rick reminded his friend of that cardinal in France who had ordered the St. Bartholomew massacre, saying: "Kill them all; God will be able to pick out His Christians."

Hot weather came to the Riviera, and the people whom Irma considered important went away. Those who were poor, like the Dingles and the Robins, would stick it out and learn to take a siesta. But Nina and Rick went back to England, and Emily Chattersworth moved her servants to Les Forêts and invited Irma and Lanny to visit her and see the spring Salon and the new plays. It was Irma’s idea, to keep her husband’s mind off the troubles of the world. They went, and after they had played around for a couple of weeks, Irma had a letter from her mother, begging them to come to Shore Acres and bring Baby Frances for the summer. Really it was a crime to have that magnificent place and never use it; also it was grossly unfair that one grandmother should have her heart’s desire all the time and the other not at all. "I don’t believe that Beauty cares for the child anything like as much as I do," wrote the Queen Mother; a sentence which Irma skipped when she read the letter aloud.