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To the memory of those with whom I saw rockets in the sky, on the road
between Erize-la-Petite and Erize-la-Grande, in that early August twilight
in the summer of 1917.
One Man's Initiation: 1917 was first published in London in October,
1920 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd. The original manuscript and corrected
page proofs have not been found. The first American edition was published in
June, 1922, by Goerge H. Doran Company, New York. The Philosophical Library
reprinted the book in 1945, under the title First Encounter, with a new
introduction by the author.
In 1969 a new edition was published by Cornell University Press,
copyright 1969 by John Dos Passos. This edition, based on uncorrected page
proofs of the first edition, and with consultation with the author, restored
several passages expurgated or bowdlerized from the first edition. Along
with several illustrations by the author, and a new (1968) introduction by
Dos Passos including long extracts from his journal, this attractive book,
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 69-15945, and catalog nubmer
PZ3.D740N5, is the authoritative one now. We have not violated the author's
copyright by including any of the new material.
IN the huge shed of the wharf, piled with crates and baggage, broken by
gang-planks leading up to ships on either side, a band plays a tinselly
Hawaiian tune; people are dancing in and out among the piles of trunks and
boxes. There is a scattering of khaki uniforms, and many young men stand in
groups laughing and talking in voices pitched shrill with excitement. In the
brown light of the wharf, full of rows of yellow crates and barrels and
sacks, full of racket of cranes, among which winds in and out the trivial
lilt of the Hawaiian tune, there is a flutter of gay dresses and coloured
hats of women, and white handkerchiefs.
The booming reverberation of the ship's whistle drowns all other sound.
After it the noise of farewells rises shrill. White handkerchiefs are
agitated in the brown light of the shed. Ropes crack in pulleys as the
gang-planks are raised.
Again, at the pierhead, white handkerchiefs and cheering and a flutter
of coloured dresses. On the wharf building a flag spreads exultingly against
the azure afternoon sky.
Rosy yellow and drab purple, the buildings of New York slide together
into a pyramid above brown smudges of smoke standing out in the water,
linked to the land by the dark curves of the bridges.
In the fresh harbour wind comes now and then a salt-wafting breath off
the sea.
Martin Howe stands in the stern that trembles with the vibrating push
of the screw. A boy standing beside him turns and asks in a tremulous voice,
"This your first time across?"
"Yes. . . . Yours?"
"Yes. . . . I never used to think that at nineteen I'd be crossing the
Atlantic to go to a war in France." The boy caught himself up suddenly and
blushed. Then swallowing a lump in his throat he said, "It ought to be time
to eat."
"God help Kaiser Bill!
O-o-o old Uncle Sam.
He's got the cavalry,
He's got the infantry,
He's got the artillery;
And then by God we'll all go to Germany!
God help Kaiser Bill!"
The iron covers are clamped on the smoking-room windows, for no lights
must show. So the air is dense with tobacco smoke and the reek of beer and
champagne. In one corner they are playing poker with their coats off. All
the chairs are full of sprawling young men who stamp their feet to the time,
and bang their fists down so that the bottles dance on the tables.
"God help Kaiser Bill."
Sky and sea are opal grey. Martin is stretched on the deck in the bow
of the boat with an unopened book beside him. He has never been so happy in
his life. The future is nothing to him, the past is nothing to him. All his
life is effaced in the grey languor of the sea, in the soft surge of the
water about the ship's bow as she ploughs through the long swell, eastward.
The tepid moisture of the Gulf Stream makes his clothes feel damp and his
hair stick together into curls that straggle over his forehead. There are
porpoises about, lazily tumbling in the swell, and flying-fish skim from one
grey wave to another, and the bow rises and falls gently in rhythm with the
surging sing-song of the broken water.
Martin has been asleep. As through infinite mists of greyness he looks
back on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leaf seems
to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and
unwritten on. At last things have come to pass.
And very faintly, like music heard across the water in the evening,
blurred into strange harmonies, his old watchwords echo a little in his
mind. Like the red flame of the sunset setting fire to opal sea and sky, the
old exaltation, the old flame that would consume to ashes all the lies in
the world, the trumpet-blast under which the walls of Jericho would fall
down, stirs and broods in the womb of his grey lassitude. The bow rises and
falls gently in rhythm with the surging sing-song of the broken water, as
the steamer ploughs through the long swell of the Gulf Stream, eastward.
"See that guy, the feller with the straw hat; he lost five hundred
dollars at craps last night."
"Some stakes."
It is almost dark. Sea and sky are glowing claret colour, darkened to a
cold bluish-green to westward. In a corner of the deck a number of men are
crowded in a circle, while one shakes the dice in his hand with a strange
nervous quiver that ends in a snap of the fingers as the white dice roll on
the deck.
"Seven up." From the smoking-room comes a sound of singing and glasses
banged on tables.
"Oh, we're bound for the Hamburg show,
To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo,
An' we'll all stick together
In fair or foul weather,
For we're going to see the damn show through!"
On the settee a sallow young man is shaking the ice in a
whisky-and-soda into a nervous tinkle as he talks: "There's nothing they can
do against this new gas. . . . It just corrodes the lungs as if they were
rotten in a dead body. In the hospitals they just stand the poor devils up
against a wall and let them die. They say their skin turns green and that it
takes from five to seven days to die--five to seven days of slow choking."
"Oh, but I think it's so splendid of you"--she bared all her teeth,
white and regular as those in a dentist's show-case, in a smile as she
spoke--"to come over this way to help France."
"Perhaps it's only curiosity," muttered Martin.
"Oh no. . . . You're too modest. . . . What I mean is that it's so
splendid to have understood the issues. . . . That's how I feel. I just told
dad I'd have to come and do my bit, as the English say."
"What are you going to do?"
"Something in Paris. I don't know just what, but I'll certainly make
myself useful somehow." She beamed at him provocatively. "Oh, if only I was
a man, I'd have shouldered my gun the first day; indeed I would."
"But the issues were hardly . . . defined then," ventured Martin.
"They didn't need to be. I hate those brutes. I've always hated the
Germans, their language, their country, everything about them. And now that
they've done such frightful things . . ."
"I wonder if it's all true . . ." "True! Oh, of course it's all true;
and lots more that it hasn't been possible to print, that people have been
ashamed to tell."
"They've gone pretty far," said Martin, laughing.
"If there are any left alive after the war they ought to be
chloroformed. . . . And really I don't think it's patriotic or humane to
take the atrocities so lightly. . . . But really, you must excuse me if you
think me rude; I do get so excited and wrought up when I think of those
frightful things. . . . I get quite beside myself; I'm sure you do too, in
your heart. . . . Any red-blooded person would."
"Only I doubt . . ."
"But you're just playing into their hands if you do that. . . . Oh,
dear, I'm quite beside myself, just thinking of it." She raised a small
gloved hand to her pink cheek in a gesture of horror, and settled herself
comfortably in her deck chair. "Really, I oughtn't to talk about it. I lose
all self-control when I do. I hate them so it makes me quite ill. . . . The
curs! The Huns! Let me tell you just one story. . . . I know it'll make your
blood boil. It's absolutely authentic, too. I heard it before I left New
York from a girl who's really the best friend I have on earth. She got it
from a friend of hers who had got it directly from a little Belgian girl,
poor little thing, who was in the convent at the time. . . . Oh, I don't see
why they ever take any prisoners; I'd kill them all like mad dogs."
"What's the story?"
"Oh, I can't tell it. It upsets me too much. . . . No, that's silly,
I've got to begin facing realities. . . . It was just when the Germans were
taking Bruges, the Uhlans broke into this convent. . . . But I think it was
in Louvain, not Bruges. . . . I have a wretched memory for names. . . .
Well, they broke in, and took all those poor defenceless little girls . . ."
"There's the dinner-bell."
"Oh, so it is. I must run and dress. I'll have to tell you later. . .
."
Through half-closed eyes, Martin watched the fluttering dress and the
backs of the neat little white shoes go jauntily down the deck.
The smoking-room again. Clink of glasses and chatter of confident
voices. Two men talking over their glasses.
"They tell me that Paris is some city."
"The most immoral place in the world, before the war. Why, there are
houses there where . . ." his voice sank into a whisper. The other man burst
into loud guffaws.
"But the war's put an end to all that. They tell me that French people
are regenerated, positively regenerated."
"They say the lack of food's something awful, that you can't get a
square meal. They even eat horse."
"Did you hear what those fellows were saying about that new gas? Sounds
frightful, don't it? I don't care a thing about bullets, but that kind o'
gives me cold feet... . . I don't give a damn about bullets, but that gas. .
. ."
"That's why so many shoot their friends when they're gassed. . . . "
"Say, you two, how about a hand of poker?
A champagne cork pops.
"Jiminy, don't spill it all over me."
"Where we goin', boys?"
"Oh, we're going to the Hamburg show
To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo,
And we'll all stick together
In fair or foul weather,
For we're going to see the damn show through!"
BEFORE going to bed Martin had seen the lighthouses winking at the
mouth of the Gironde, and had filled his lungs with the new, indefinably
scented wind coming off the land. The sound of screaming whistles of
tugboats awoke him. Feet were tramping on the deck above his head. The
shrill whine of a crane sounded in his ears and the throaty cry of men
lifting something in unison.
Through his port-hole in the yet colourless dawn he saw the reddish
water of a river with black-hulled sailing-boats on it and a few lanky
little steamers of a pattern he had never seen before. Again he breathed
deep of the new indefinable smell off the land.
Once on deck in the cold air, he saw through the faint light a row of
houses beyond the low wharf buildings, grey mellow houses of four storeys
with tiled roofs and intricate ironwork balconies, with balconies in which
the ironwork had been carefully twisted by artisans long ago dead into
gracefully modulated curves and spirals.
Some in uniform, some not, the ambulance men marched to the station,
through the grey streets of Bordeaux. Once a woman opened a window and
crying, "Vive l'Amйrique," threw out a bunch of roses and daisies. As they
were rounding a corner, a man with a frockcoat on ran up and put his own hat
on the head of one of the Americans who had none. In front of the station,
waiting for the train, they sat at the little tables of cafйs, lolling
comfortably in the early morning sunlight, and drank beer and cognac.
Small railway carriages into which they were crowded so that their
knees were pressed tight together--and outside, slipping by, blue-green
fields, and poplars stalking out of the morning mist, and long drifts of
poppies. Scarlet poppies, and cornflowers, and white daisies, and the
red-tiled roofs and white walls of cottages, all against a background of
glaucous green fields and hedges. Tours, Poitiers, Orlйans. In the names of
the stations rose old wars, until the floods of scarlet poppies seemed the
blood of fighting men slaughtered through all time. At last, in the
gloaming, Paris, and, in crossing a bridge over the Seine, a glimpse of the
two linked towers of Notre Dame, rosy grey in the grey mist up the river.
"Say, these women here get my goat."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, I was at the Olympia with Johnson and that crowd. They just
pester the life out of you there. I'd heard that Paris was immoral, but
nothing like this."
"It's the war."
"But the Jane I went with . . ."
"Gee, these Frenchwomen are immoral. They say the war does it."
"Can't be that. Nothing is more purifying than sacrifice."
"A feller has to be mighty careful, they say."
"Looks like every woman you saw walking on the street was a whore. They
certainly are good-lookers though."
"King and his gang are all being sent back to the States."
"I'll be darned! They sure have been drunk ever since they got off the
steamer."
"Raised hell in Maxim's last night. They tried to clean up the place
and the police came. They were all soused to the gills and tried to make
everybody there sing the 'Star Spangled Banner.'"
"Damn fool business."
Martin Howe sat at a table on the sidewalk under the brown awning of a
restaurant. Opposite in the last topaz-clear rays of the sun, the foliage of
the Jardin du Luxembourg shone bright green above deep alleys of bluish
shadow. From the pavements in front of the mauve-coloured houses rose little
kiosks with advertisements in bright orange and vermilion and blue. In the
middle of the triangle formed by the streets and the garden was a round pool
of jade water. Martin leaned back in his chair looking dreamily out through
half-closed eyes, breathing deep now and then of the musty scent of Paris,
that mingled with the melting freshness of the wild strawberries on the
plate before him.
As he stared in front of him two figures crossed his field of vision. A
woman swathed in black crepe veils was helping a soldier to a seat at the
next table. He found himself staring in a face, a face that still had some
of the chubbiness of boyhood. Between the pale-brown frightened eyes, where
the nose should have been, was a triangular black patch that ended in some
mechanical contrivance with shiny little black metal rods that took the
place of the jaw. He could not take his eyes from the soldier's eyes, that
were like those of a hurt animal, full of meek dismay. Someone plucked at
Martin's arm, and he turned suddenly, fearfully.
A bent old woman was offering him flowers with a jerky curtsey.
"Just a rose, for good luck?"
"No, thank you."
"It will bring you happiness."
He took a couple of the reddest of the roses.
"Do you understand the language of flowers?"
"No."
"I shall teach you. . . . Thank you so much. . . . Thank you so much."
She added a few large daisies to the red roses in his hand.
"These will bring you love. . . . But another time I shall teach you
the language of flowers, the language of love."
She curtseyed again, and began making her way jerkily down the
sidewalk, jingling his silver in her hand.
He stuck the roses and daisies in the belt of his uniform and sat with
the green flame of Chartreuse in a little glass before him, staring into the
gardens, where the foliage was becoming blue and lavender with evening, and
the shadows darkened to grey-purple and black. Now and then he glanced
furtively, with shame, at the man at the next table. When the restaurant
closed he wandered through the unlighted streets towards the river,
listening to the laughs and conversations that bubbled like the sparkle in
Burgundy through the purple summer night.
But wherever he looked in the comradely faces of young men, in the
beckoning eyes of women, he saw the brown hurt eyes of the soldier, and the
triangular black patch where the nose should have been.
AT Epernay the station was wrecked; the corrugated tin of the roof hung
in strips over the crumbled brick walls.
"They say the Boches came over last night. They killed a lot of
permissionaires."
"That river's the Maine."
"Gosh, is it? Let me get to the winder."
The third-class car, joggling along on a flat wheel, was full of the
smell of sweat and sour wine. Outside, yellow-green and blue-green, crossed
by long processions of poplars, aflame with vermilion and carmine of
poppies, the countryside slipped by. At a station where the train stopped on
a siding, they could hear a faint hollow sound in the distance: guns.
Croix de Guerre had been given out that day at the automobile park at
Ch lons. There was an unusually big dinner at the wooden tables in the
narrow portable barracks, and during the last course the General passed
through and drank a glass of champagne to the health of all present.
Everybody had on his best uniform and sweated hugely in the narrow, airless
building, from the wine and the champagne and the thick stew, thickly
seasoned, that made the dinner's main course.
"We are all one large family," said the General from the end of the
barracks . . . "to France."
That night the wail of a siren woke Martin suddenly and made him sit up
in his bunk trembling, wondering where he was. Like the shriek of a woman in
a nightmare, the wail of the siren rose and rose and then dropped in pitch
and faded throbbingly out.
"Don't flash a light there. It's Boche planes."
Outside the night was cold, with a little light from a waned moon.
"See the shrapnel!" someone cried.
"The Boche has a Mercedes motor," said someone else. "You can tell by
the sound of it."
"They say one of their planes chased an ambulance ten miles along a
straight road the other day, trying to get it with a machinegun. The man who
was driving got away, but he had shell-shock afterwards."
"Did he really?"
"Oh, I'm goin' to turn in. God, these French nights are cold!"
The rain pattered hard with unfaltering determination on the roof of
the little arbour. Martin lolled over the rough board table, resting his
chin on his clasped hands, looking through the tinkling bead curtains of the
rain towards the other end of the weed-grown garden, where, under a canvas
shelter, the cooks were moving about in front of two black steaming
cauldrons. Through the fresh scent of rain-beaten leaves came a greasy smell
of soup. He was thinking of the jolly wedding-parties that must have drunk
and danced in this garden before the war, of the lovers who must have sat in
that very arbour, pressing sunburned cheek against sunburned cheek, twining
hands callous with work in the fields. A man broke suddenly into the arbour
behind Martin and stood flicking the water off his uniform with his cap. His
sand-coloured hair was wet and was plastered in little spikes to his broad
forehead, a forehead that was the entablature of a determined rock-hewn
face.
"Hello," said Martin, twisting his head to look at the newcomer. "You
section twenty-four?"
"Yes. . . . Ever read 'Alice in Wonderland'?" asked the wet man,
sitting down abruptly at the table.
"Yes, indeed."
"Doesn't this remind you of it?"
"What?"
"This war business. Why, I keep thinking I'm going to meet the rabbit
who put butter in his watch round every corner."
"It was the best butter."
"That's the hell of it."
"When's your section leaving here?" asked Martin, picking up the
conversation after a pause during which they'd both stared out into the
rain. They could hear almost constantly the grinding roar of camions on the
road behind the cafй and the slither of their wheels through the mud-puddles
where the road turned into the village.
"How the devil should I know?"
"Somebody had dope this morning that we'd leave here for Soissons
to-morrow." Martin's words tailed off into a convictionless mumble.
"It surely is different than you'd pictured it, isn't it, now?"
They sat looking at each other while the big drops from the leaky roof
smacked on the table or splashed cold in their faces.
"What do you think of all this, anyway?" said the wet man suddenly,
lowering his voice stealthily.
"I don't know. I never did expect it to be what we were taught to
believe. . . . Things aren't."
"But you can't have guessed that it was like this . . . like Alice in
Wonderland, like an ill-intentioned Drury Lane pantomime, like all the dusty
futility of Barnum and Bailey's Circus."
"No, I thought it would be hair-raising," said Martin.
"Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all the ages that
must have been necessary to make this possible! Think of this new particular
vintage of lies that has been so industriously pumped out of the press and
the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you?"
Martin nodded.
"Why, lies are like a sticky juice overspreading the world, a living,
growing flypaper to catch and gum the wings of every human soul. . . . And
the little helpless buzzings of honest, liberal, kindly people, aren't they
like the thin little noise flies make when they're caught?"
"I agree with you that the little thin noise is very silly," said
Martin.
Martin slammed down the hood of the car and stood upright. A cold
stream of rain ran down the sleeves of his slicker and dripped from his
greasy hands.
Infantry tramped by, the rain spattering with a cold glitter on grey
helmets, on gun-barrels, on the straps of equipment. Red sweating faces,
drooping under the hard rims of helmets, turned to the ground with the
struggle with the weight of equipment; rows and patches of faces were the
only warmth in the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowed mud-coloured
bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky. In the cold colourlessness they were
delicate and feeble as the faces of children, rosy and soft under the
splattering of mud and the shagginess of unshaven beards.
Martin rubbed the back of his hand against his face. His skin was like
that, too, soft as the petals of flowers, soft and warm amid all this dead
mud, amid all this hard mud-covered steel.
He leant against the side of the car, his ears full of the heavy
shuffle, of the jingle of equipment, of the splashing in puddles of
water-soaked boots, and watched the endless rosy patches of faces moving by,
the faces that drooped towards the dripping boots that rose and fell,
churning into froth the soupy, putty-coloured mud of the road.
The schoolmaster's garden was full of late roses and marigolds, all
parched and bleached by the thick layer of dust that was over them. Next to
the vine-covered trellis that cut the garden off from the road stood a green
table and a few cane chairs. The schoolmaster, something charmingly
eighteenth-century about the cut of his breeches and the calves of his legs
in their thick woollen golf-stockings, led the way, a brown pitcher of wine
in his hand. Martin Howe and the black-haired, brown-faced boy from New
Orleans who was his car-mate followed him. Then came a little grey woman in
a pink knitted shawl, carrying a tray with glasses.
"In the Verdunois our wine is not very good," said the schoolmaster,
bowing them into chairs. "It is thin and cold like the climate. To your
health, gentlemen."
"To France."
"To America."
"And down with the Boches."
In the pale yellow light that came from among the dark clouds that
passed over the sky, the wine had the chilly gleam of yellow diamonds.
"Ah, you should have seen that road in 1916," said the schoolmaster,
drawing a hand over his watery blue eyes. "That, you know, is the Voie
Sacrйe, the sacred way that saved Verdun. All day, all day, a double line of
camions went up, full of ammunition and ravitaillement and men."
"Oh, the poor boys, we saw so many go up, came the voice, dry as the
rustling of the wind in the vine-leaves, of the grey old woman who stood
leaning against the schoolmaster's chair, looking out through a gap in the
trellis at the rutted road so thick with dust, "and never have we seen one
of them come back."
"It was for France."
"But this was a nice village before the war. From Verdun to Bar-le-Duc,
the Courrier des Postes used to tell us, there was no such village, so clean
and with such fine orchards." The old woman leaned over the schoolmaster's
shoulder, joining eagerly in the conversation.
"Even now the fruit is very fine," said Martin.
"But you soldiers, you steal it all," said the old woman, throwing out
her arms. "You leave us nothing, nothing."
"We don't begrudge it," said the schoolmaster, "all we have is our
country's."
"We shall starve then. . . ."
As she spoke the glasses on the table shook. With a roar of heavy
wheels and a grind of gears a camion went by.
"O good God!" The old woman looked out on to the road with terror in
her face, blinking her eyes in the thick dust.
Roaring with heavy wheels, grinding with gears, throbbing with motors,
camion after camion went by, slowly, stridently. The men packed into the
camions had broken through the canvas covers and leaned out waving their
arms and shouting.
"Oh, the poor children," said the old woman, wringing her hands, her
voice lost in the roar and the shouting.
"They should not destroy property that way," said the schoolmaster. .
.. "Last year it was dreadful. There were mutinies."
Martin sat, his chair tilted back, his hands trembling, staring with
compressed lips at the men who jolted by on the strident, throbbing camions.
A word formed in his mind: tumbrils.
In some trucks the men were drunk and singing, waving their bidons in
the air, shouting at people along the road, crying out all sorts of things:
"Get to the front!" "Into the trenches with them!" "Down with the war!" In
others they sat quiet, faces corpse-like with dust. Through the gap in the
trellis Martin stared at them, noting intelligent faces, beautiful faces,
faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those of sobbing drunkards.
At last the convoy passed and the dust settled again on the rutted
road.
"Oh, the poor children!" said the old woman. "They know they are going
to death."
They tried to hide their agitation. The schoolmaster poured out more
wine.
"Yes," said Martin, "there are fine orchards on the hills round here."
"You should be here when the plums are ripe," said the schoolmaster.
A tall bearded man, covered with dust to the eyelashes, in the uniform
of a commandant, stepped into the garden.
"My dear friends!" He shook hands with the schoolmaster and the old
woman and saluted the two Americans. "I could not pass without stopping a
moment. We are going up to an attack. We have the honour to take the lead."
"You will have a glass of wine, won't you?"
"With great pleasure."
"Julie, fetch a bottle, you know which. . . . How is the morale?"
"Perfect."
"I thought they looked a little discontented."
"No. . . . It's always like that. . . . They were yelling at some
gendarmes. If they strung up a couple it would serve them right, dirty
beasts."
"You soldiers are all one against the gendarmes."
"Yes. We fight the enemy but we hate the gendarmes." The commandant
rubbed his hands, drank his wine and laughed.
"Hah! There's the next convoy. I must go."
"Good luck."
The commandant shrugged his shoulders, clicked his heels together at
the garden gate, saluted, smiling, and was gone.
Again the village street was full of the grinding roar and throb of
camions, full of a frenzy of wheels and drunken shouting.
"Give us a drink, you."
"We're the train de luxe, we are."
"Down with the war!"
And the old grey woman wrung her hands and said:
"Oh, the poor children, they know they are going to death!"
MARTIN, rolled up in his bedroll on the floor of the empty hayloft,
woke with a start.
"Say, Howe!" Tom Randolph, who lay next him, was pressing his hand. "I
think I heard a shell go over."
As he spoke there came a shrill, loudening whine, and an explosion that
shook the barn. A little dirt fell down on Martin's face.
"Say, fellers, that was damn near," came a voice from the floor of the
barn.
"We'd better go over to the quarry."
"Oh, hell, I was sound asleep!"
A vicious shriek overhead and a shaking snort of explosion.
"Gee, that was in the house behind us. . ."
"I smell gas.
"Ye damn fool, it's carbide."
"One of the Frenchmen said it was gas."
"All right, fellers, put on your masks."
Outside there was a sickly rough smell in the air that mingled
strangely with the perfume of the cool night, musical with the gurgling of
the stream through the little valley where their barn was. They crouched in
a quarry by the roadside, a straggling, half-naked group, and watched the
flashes in the sky northward, where artillery along the lines kept up a
continuous hammering drum-beat. Over their head shells shrieked at
two-minute intervals, to explode with a rattling ripping sound in the
village on the other side of the valley.
"Damn foolishness," muttered Tom Randolph in his rich Southern voice.
"Why don't those damn gunners go to sleep and let us go to sleep? . . . They
must be tired like we are."
A shell burst in a house on the crest of the hill opposite, so that
they saw the flash against the starry night sky. In the silence that
followed, the moaning shriek of a man came faintly across the valley.
Martin sat on the steps of the dugout, looking up the shattered shaft
of a tree, from the top of which a few ribbons of bark fluttered against the
mauve evening sky. In the quiet he could hear the voices of men chatting in
the dark below him, and a sound of someone whistling as he worked. Now and
then, like some ungainly bird, a high calibre shell trundled through the air
overhead; after its noise had completely died away would come the thud of
the explosion. It was like battledore and shuttlecock, these huge masses
whirling through the evening far above his head, now from one side, now from
the other. It gave him somehow a cosy feeling of safety, as if he were under
some sort of a bridge over which freight-cars were shunted madly to and fro.
The doctor in charge of the post came up and sat beside Martin. He was
a small brown man with slim black moustaches that curved like the horns of a
long-horn steer. He stood on tip-toe on the top step and peered about in
every direction with an air of ownership, then sat down again and began
talking briskly.
"We are exactly four hundred and five metres from the Boche. . . . Five
hundred metres from here they are drinking beer and saying, 'Hoch der
Kaiser.'"
"About as much as we're saying 'Vive la Rйpublique,' I should say."
"Who knows? But it is quiet here, isn't it? It's quieter here than in
Paris."
"The sky is very beautiful to-night."
"They say they're shelling the Etat-Major to-day. Damned embusquйs;
it'll do them good to get a bit of their own medicine."
Martin did not answer. He was crossing in his mind the four hundred and
five metres to the first Boche listening-post. Next beyond the abris was the
latrine from which a puff of wind brought now and then a nauseous stench.
Then there was the tin roof, crumpled as if by a hand, that had been a cook
shack. That was just behind the second line trenches that zig-zagged in and
out of great abscesses of wet, upturned clay along the crest of a little
hill. The other day he had been there, and had clambered up the oily clay
where the boyau had caved in, and from the level of the ground had looked
for an anxious minute or two at the tangle of trenches and pitted gangrened
soil in the direction of the German outposts. And all along these random
gashes in the mucky clay were men, feet and legs huge from clotting after
clotting of clay, men with greyish-green faces scarred by lines of strain
and fear and boredom as the hillside was scarred out of all semblance by the
trenches and the shell-holes.
"We are well off here," said the doctor again. "I have not had a
serious case all day."
"Up in the front line there's a place where they've planted rhubarb. .
. . You know, where the hillside is beginning to get rocky."
"It was the Boche who did that. . . . We took that slope from them two
months ago. . . . How does it grow?"
"They say the gas makes the leaves shrivel," said Martin, laughing.
He looked long at the little ranks of clouds that had begun to fill the
sky, like ruffles on a woman's dress. Might not it really be, he kept asking
himself, that the sky was a beneficent goddess who would stoop gently out of
the infinite spaces and lift him to her breast, where he could lie amid the
amber-fringed ruffles of cloud and look curiously down at the spinning ball
of the earth? It might have beauty if he were far enough away to clear his
nostrils of the stench of pain.
"It is funny," said the little doctor suddenly, "to think how much
nearer we are, in state of mind, in everything, to the Germans than to
anyone else."
"You mean that the soldiers in the trenches are all further from the
people at home than from each other, no matter what side they are on."
The little doctor nodded.
"God, it's so stupid! Why can't we go over and talk to them? Nobody's
fighting about anything. . . . God, it's so hideously stupid!" cried Martin,
suddenly carried away, helpless in the flood of his passionate revolt.
"Life is stupid," said the little doctor sententiously.
Suddenly from the lines came a splutter of machine-guns.
"Evensong!" cried the little doctor. "Ah, but here's business. You'd
better get your car ready, my friend."
The brancardiers set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that
led to the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into the
lean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, of the
wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles of blood-flecked
uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the middle of the man had
been, where had been the curved belly and the genitals, where the thighs had
joined with a strong swerving of muscles to the trunk, was a depression, a
hollow pool of blood, that glinted a little in the cold diffusion of grey
light from the west.
The rain beat hard on the window-panes of the little room and hissed
down the chimney into the smouldering fire that sent up thick green smoke.
At a plain oak table before the fireplace sat Martin Howe and Tom Randolph,
Tom Randolph with his sunburned hands with their dirty nails spread flat and
his head resting on the table between them, so that Martin could see the
stiff black hair on top of his head and the dark nape of his neck going into
shadow under the collar of the flannel shirt.
"Oh, God, it's too damned absurd! An arrangement for mutual suicide and
no damned other thing," said Randolph, raising his head.
"A certain jolly asinine grotesqueness, though. I mean, if you were God
and could look at it like that . . . Oh, Randy, why do they enjoy hatred
so?"
"A question of taste . . . as the lady said when she kissed the cow."
"But it isn't. It isn't natural for people to hate that way, it can't
be. It even disgusts the perfectly stupid damn-fool people, like Higgins,
who believes that the Bible was written in God's own handwriting and that
the newspapers tell the truth."
"It makes me sick at ma stomach, Howe, to talk to one of those
Hun-hatin' women, if they're male or female."
"It is a stupid affair, la vie, as the doctor at P.I. said yesterday. .
. ."
"Hell, yes. . ."
They sat silent, watching the rain beat on the window, and run down in
sparkling finger-like streams.
"What I can't get over is these Frenchwomen." Randolph threw back his
head and laughed. "They're so bloody frank. Did I tell you about what
happened to me at that last village on the Verdun road?"
"I was lyin' down for a nap under a plumtree, a wonderfully nice place
near a li'l brook an' all, an' suddenly that crazy Jane. . . . You know the
one that used to throw stones at us out of that broken-down house at the
corner of the road. . . . Anyway, she comes up to me with a funny look in
her eyes an' starts makin' love to me. I had a regular wrastlin' match
gettin' away from her."
"Funny position for you to be in, getting away from a woman."
"But doesn't that strike you funny? Why, down where I come from a
drunken mulatto woman wouldn't act like that. They all keep up a fake of not
wantin' your attentions." His black eyes sparkled, and he laughed his deep
ringing laugh, that made the withered woman smile as she set an omelette
before them.
"Voilа, messieurs," she said with a grand air, as if it were a boar's
head that she was serving.
Three French infantrymen came into the cafй, shaking the rain off their
shoulders.
"Nothing to drink but champagne at four francs fifty," shouted Howe.
"Dirty night out, isn't it?"
"We'll drink that, then!"
Howe and Randolph moved up and they all sat at the same table.
"Fortune of war?"
"Oh, the war, what do you think of the war?" cried Martin.
"What do you think of the peste? You think about saving your skin."
"What's amusing about us is that we three have all saved our skins
together," said one of the Frenchmen.
"Yes. We are of the same class," said another, holding up his thumb.
"Mobilised same day." He held up his first finger. "Same company." He held
up a second finger. "Wounded by the same shell. . . . Evacuated to the same
hospital. Convalescence at same time. . Rйformй to the same depфt behind the
lines."
"Didn't all marry the same girl, did you, to make it complete?" asked
Randolph.
They all shouted with laughter until the glasses along the bar rang.
"You must be Athos, Porthos, and d'Artagnan."
"We are," they shouted.
"Some more champagne, madame, for the three musketeers," sang Randolph
in a sort of operatic yodle.
"All I have left is this," said the withered woman, setting a bottle
down on the table.
"Is that poison?"
"It's cognac, it's very good cognac," said the old woman seriously.
"C'est du cognac! Vive le roi cognac!" everybody shouted.
"Au plein de mon cognac
Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,
Au plein de mon cognac
Qu'il fait bon dormir."
"Down with the war! Who can sing the 'Internationale'?"
"Not so much noise, I beg you, gentlemen," came the withered woman's
whining voice. "It's after hours. Last week I was fined. Next time I'll be
closed up."
The night was black when Martin and Randolph, after lengthy and
elaborate farewells, started down the muddy road towards the hospital. They
staggered along the slippery footpath beside the road, splashed every
instant with mud by camions, huge and dark, that roared grindingly by. They
ran and skipped arm-in-arm and shouted at the top of their lungs:
"Auprиs de ma blonde,
Qu'il fait bon, fait bon, fait bon,
Auprиs de ma blonde,
Qu'il fait bon dormir."
A stench of sweat and filth and formaldehyde caught them by the throat
as they went into the hospital tent, gave them a sense of feverish bodies of
men stretched all about them, stirring in pain.
"A car for la Bassйe, Ambulance 4," said the orderly. Howe got himself
up off the hospital stretcher, shoving his flannel shirt back into his
breeches, put on his coat and belt and felt his way to the door, stumbling
over the legs of sleeping brancardiers as he went. Men swore in their sleep
and turned over heavily. At the door he waited a minute, then shouted:
"Coming, Tom?"
"Too damn sleepy," came Randolph's voice from under a blanket.
"I've got cigarettes, Tom. I'll smoke 'em all up if you don't come."
"All right, I'll come."
"Less noise, name of God!" cried a man, sitting up on his stretcher.
After the hospital, smelling of chloride and blankets and reeking
clothes, the night air was unbelievably sweet. Like a gilt fringe on a dark
shawl, a little band of brightness had appeared in the east.
"Some dawn, Howe, ain't it?"
As they were going off, their motor chugging regularly, an orderly
said:
"It's a special case. Go for orders to the commandant."
Colours formed gradually out of chaotic grey as the day brightened. At
the dressing-station an attendant ran up to the car.
"Oh, you're for the special case? Have you anything to tie a man with?"
"No, why?"
"It's nothing. He just tried to stab the sergeant-major."
The attendant raised a fist and tapped on his head as if knocking on a
door. "It's nothing. He's quieter now."
"What caused it?"
"Who knows? There is so much. . . . He says he must kill everyone. . ."
"Are you ready?"
A lieutenant of the medical corps came to the door and looked out. He
smiled reassuringly at Martin Howe. "He's not violent any more. And we'll
send two guardians."
A sergeant came out with a little packet which he handed to Martin.
"That's his. Will you give it to them at the hospital at Fourreaux? And
here's his knife. They can give it back to him when he gets better. He has
an idea he ought to kill everyone he sees. . . . Funny idea."
The sun had risen and shone gold across the broad rolling lands, so
that the hedges and the poplar-rows cast long blue shadows over the fields.
The man, with a guardian on either side of him who cast nervous glances to
the right and to the left, came placidly, eyes straight in front of him, out
of the dark interior of the dressing-station. He was a small man with
moustaches and small, goodnatured lips puffed into an o-shape. At the car he
turned and saluted.
"Good-bye, my lieutenant. Thank you for your kindness," he said.
"Good-bye, old chap," said the lieutenant.
The little man stood up in the car, looking about him anxiously.
"I've lost my knife. Where's my knife?"
The guards got in behind him with a nervous, sheepish air. They
answered reassuringly, "The driver's got it. The American's got it."
"Good."
The orderly jumped on the seat with the two Americans to show the way.
He whispered in Martin's ear:
"He's crazy. He says that to stop the war you must kill everybody, kill
everybody."
In an open valley that sloped between hills covered with beech-woods,
stood the tall abbey, a Gothic nave and apse with beautifully traced
windows, with the ruin of a very ancient chapel on one side, and crossing
the back, a well-proportioned Renaissance building that had been a
dormitory. The first time that Martin saw the abbey, it towered in ghostly
perfection above a low veil of mist that made the valley seem a lake in the
shining moonlight. The lines were perfectly quiet, and when he stopped the
motor of his ambulance, he could hear the wind rustling among the
beech-woods. Except for the dirty smell of huddled soldiers that came now
and then in drifts along with the cool woodscents, there might have been no
war at all. In the soft moonlight the great traceried windows and the
buttresses and the high-pitched roof seemed as gorgeously untroubled by
decay as if the carvings on the cusps and arches had just come from under
the careful chisels of the Gothic workmen.
"And you say we ye progressed," he whispered to Tom Randolph.
"God, it is fine."
They wandered up and down the road a long time, silently, looking at