JURORS AT GATES OF BEEF BARONS 4 страница

"Say, Joe, I got a job lined up. Guess I oughtn't to
blab around about it, but you're regular. I know you
won't say nothin'. I been on the bum for two weeks,
somethin' wrong with my stomach. Man, I'm sick, I'm
tellin' you. I can't do no heavy work no more. A punk I
know works in a whitefront been slippin' me my grub,
see. Well, I was sittin' on a bench right here on the square,
a feller kinda well dressed sits down an' starts to chum up.
Looked to me like one of these here sissies lookin' for
rough trade, see, thought I'd roll him for some jack,

-173-

what the hell, what can you do if you're sick an' can't
work?"

Joe sat leaning back with his legs stuck out, his hands in
his pockets staring hard at the outline of the battleship
against the buildings. Tex was talking fast, poking his face
into Joe's: "Turns out the sonofabitch was a dick. S -- t I
was scared pissless. A secret service agent. Burns is his
big boss . . . but what he's lookin' for's reds, slackers,
German spies, guys that can't keep their traps shut . . .
an' he turns around and hands me out a job, twentyfive
smackers a week if little Willy makes good. All I got to
do's bum around and listen to guys talk, see? If I hears
anything that ain't 100 per cent I slips the word to the
boss and he investigates. Twentyfive a week and servin'
my country besides, and if I gets in any kind of jam,
Burns gets me out. . . . What do you think of that for
the gravy, Joe?"

Joe got to his feet. "Guess I'll go back to Brooklyn."
"Stick around . . . look here, you've always treated me
white . . . you belong, I know that Joe . . . I'll put
you next to this guy if you want. He's a good scout, edu-
cated feller an' all that and he knows where you can get
plenty liquor an' women if you want 'em." "Hell, I'm
goin' to sea and get out of all this s -- t," said Joe, turning
his back and walking towards the subway station.

THE CAMERA EYE (34) his voice was three thousand miles away all the
time he kept wanting to get up outa bed his cheeks were
bright pink and the choky breathing No kid you better
lay there quiet we dont want you catching more cold

-174-

that's why they sent me down to stay with you to keep
you from getting up outa bed,

the barrelvaulted room all smells fever and white-
wash carbolic sick wops outside the airraid siren's got a
nightmare

( Mestre's a railhead and its moonlight over the
Brenta and the basehospital and the ammunition dump
carbolic blue moonlight)

all the time he kept trying to get up outa bed Kiddo
you better lay there quiet his voice was in Minnesota
but dontjaunerstandafellersgottogetup I got a date anim-
portantengagementtoseeabout those lots ought never-
tohavestayedinbedsolate I'll lose my deposit For
chrissake dont you think I'm broke enough as it is?

Kiddo you gotto lay there quiet we're in the hos-
pital in Mestre you got a little fever makes things seem
funny

Cant you letafellerbe? You're in cahoots withem
thaswhassematteris I know theyreouttorookme they
think Imagoddamsucker tomadethatdeposit I'll showem
Illknockyergoddamblockoff

my shadow on the vault bulkyclumsily staggering and
swaying from the one candle spluttering red in the raw
winterhospital carbolic night above the shadow on the cot
gotto keep his shoulders down to the cot Curley's husky
inspite of

(you can hear their motors now the antiaircraft bat-

-175-

teries are letting loose must be great up there in the moon-
light out of the smell of carbolic and latrines and sick
wops)

sit back and light a macedonia by the candle he
seems to be asleep his breathing's so tough pneumonia
breathing can hear myself breathe and the water tick
in the faucet doctors and orderlies all down in the bomb-
proof cant even hear a sick wop groan

Jesus is the guy dying?

they've cut off their motors the little drums in my
ears sure that's why they call em drums (up there in the
blue moonlight the Austrian observer's reaching for the
string that dumps the applecart) the candleflame stands
up still

not that time but wham in the side of the head woke
Curley and the glass tinkling in the upstairs windows the
candle staggered but didnt go out the vault sways with
my shadow and Curley's shadow dammit he's strong
head's full of the fever reek Kiddo you gotto stay in
bed (they dumped the applecart allright) shellfragments
hailing around outside Kiddo you gotto get back to bed

But I gotadate oh christohsweetiesus cant you tell me
how to get back to the outfit haveaheart dad I didntmean-
noharm itsnonlyaboutthose lots

the voice dwindles into a whine I'm pulling the
covers up to his chin again light the candle again smoke a

-176-

macedonia again look at my watch again must be near day
ten o'clock they dont relieve me till eight

way off a voice goes up and up and swoops like the
airraid siren ayayoooTO

NEWSREEL XXV

General Pershing's forces today occupied Belle Joyeuse
Farm and the southern edges of the Bois des Loges. The
Americans encountered but little machinegun opposition. The
advance was in the nature of a linestraightening operation.
Otherwise the activity along the front today consisted prin-
cipally of artillery firing and bombing. Patrols are operating
around Belluno having preceded the flood of allies pouring
through the Quero pass in the Grappa region

REBEL SAILORS DEFY ALLIES

Bonjour ma cherie
Comment allez vous?
Bonjour ma cherie
how do you do?

after a long conference with a secretary of war and the
secretary of state President Wilson returned to the White
House this afternoon apparently highly pleased that events are
steadily pursuing the course which he had felt they would take

Avez vous fiancé cela ne fait rien
Voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soir?
Wee, wee, combien?

HELP THE FOOD ADMINISTRATION BY
REPORTING WAR PROFITEERS

Lord Robert, who is foreign minister Balfour's right
hand man added, "When victory comes the responsibility for
America and Great Britain will rest not on statesmen but on
the people." The display of the red flag in our thoroughfares

-177-

seems to be emblematic of unbridled licence and an insignia
for lawhating and anarchy, like the black flag it represents
everything that is repulsive

LENINE FLEES TO FINLAND

here I am snug as a bug in a rug on this third day of
October. It was Sunday I went over and got hit in the left
leg with a machinegun bullet above the knee. I am in a base
hospital and very comfortable. I am writing with my left
hand as my right one is under my head

STOCK MARKET STRONG BUT NARROW

Some day I'm going to murder the bugler
Some day they're going to find him dead
I'll dislocate his reveille
And step upon it heavily
And spend
the rest of my life in bed

A HOOSIER QUIXOTE

Hibben, Paxton, journalist, Indiandpolis, Ind.,
Dec. 5, 1880, s. Thomas Entrekin and Jeannie Merrill
(Ketcham) H.; A.B. Princeton 1903, A.M. Harvard
1904

Thinking men were worried in the middle west in
the years Hibben was growing up there, something was
wrong with the American Republic, was it the Gold
Standard, Privilege, The Interests, Wall Street?

The rich were getting richer, the poor were getting
poorer, small farmers were being squeezed out, work-
ingmen were working twelve hours a day for a bare
living; profits were for the rich, the law was for the
rich, the cops were for the rich;

was it for that the pilgrims had bent their heads

-178-

into the storm, filled the fleeing Indians with slugs out
of their blunderbusses

and worked the stony farms of New England;
was it for that the pioneers had crossed the Appa-
lachians,
long squirrelauns slung across lean backs,
a fistful of corn in the pocket of the buckskin vest,
was it for that the Indiana farmboys had turned out
to shoot down Johnny Reb and make the black man
free?

Paxton Hibben was a small cantankerous boy, son
of one of the best families (the Hibbens had a whole-
sale dry goods business in Indianapolis); in school the
rich kids didn't like him because he went around with
the poor kids and the poor kids didn't like him because
his folks were rich,

but he was the star pupil of Short Ridge High
ran the paper,
won all the debates.

At Princeton he was the young collegian, editor
of the Tiger, drank a lot, didn't deny that he ran around
after girls, made a brilliant scholastic record and was
a thorn in the flesh of the godly. The natural course
for a bright young man of his class and position was to
study law, but Hibben wanted

travel and romance á la Byron and de Musset,
wellgroomed adventures in foreign lands,

so

as his family was one of the best in Indiana and
friendly with Senator Beveridge he was gotten a post in
the diplomatic service:

3rd see and 2nd see American Embassy St. Peters-
burg and Mexico City 1905-6, see Legation and Chargé
d'affaires, Bogotá, Colombia, 1908-9; Then Hague and

-179-

Luxemburg 1909-12, Santiago de Chile 1912 (re-
tired).

Pushkin for de Musset; St. Petersburg was a young
dude's romance:

goldencrusted spires under a platinum sky,

the icegrey Neva flowing swift and deep under
bridges that jingled with sleighbells;

riding home from the Islands with the Grand
Duke's mistress, the most beautiful most amorous singer
of Neapolitan streetsongs;

staking a pile of rubles in a tall room glittering
with chandeliers, monocles, diamonds dripped on white
shoulders;

white snow, white tableclothes, white sheets,

Kakhetian wine, vodka fresh as newmown hay,
Astrakhan caviar, sturgeon, Finnish salmon, Lapland
ptarmigan, and the most beautiful women in the world;

but it was 1905, Hibben left the embassy one night
and saw a flare of red against the trampled snow of the
Nevsky

and red flags,

blood frozen in the ruts, blood trickling down the
cartracks;

he saw the machineguns on the balconies of the
Winter Palace, the cossacks charging the unarmed
crowds that wanted peace and food and a little freedom,

heard the throaty roar of the Russian Marseillaise;
some stubborn streak in the old American blood
flared in revolt, he walked the streets all night with
the revolutionists, got in wrong at the embassy

and was transferred to Mexico City where there
was no revolution yet, only peons and priests and the
stillness of the great volcanos.

The Cientificos made him a member of the jockey
Club

-180-

where in the magnificent building of blue Puebla
tile he lost all his money at roulette and helped them
drink up the last few cases of champagne left over from
the plunder of Cortez.

Chargé d'Affaires in Colombia (he never forgot
he owed his career to Beveridge; he believed passion-
ately in Roosevelt, and righteousness and reform, and
the antitrust laws, the Big Stick that was going to scare
away the grafters and malefactors of great wealth and
get the common man his due) he helped wangle the
revolution that stole the canal zone from the bishop of
Bogotá later he stuck up for Roosevelt in the Pulitzer
libel suit; he was a progressive, believed in the Canal
and T.R.

He was shunted to the Hague where he went to
sleep during the vague deliberations of the Interna-
tional Tribunal.

In 1912 he resigned from the Diplomatic Service
and went home to campaign for Roosevelt,

got to Chicago in time to hear them singing On-
ward Christian Soldiers at the convention in the Colos-
seum; in the closepacked voices and the cheers, he
heard the trample of the Russian Marseillaise, the
sullen silence of Mexican peons, Colombian Indians
waiting for a deliverer, in the reverberance of the hymn
he heard the measured cadences of the Declaration of
Independence.

The talk of social justice petered out; T.R. was
a windbag like the rest of 'em, the Bull Moose was
stuffed with the same sawdust as the G.O.P.

Paxton Hibben ran for Congress as a progressive
in Indiana but the European war had already taken
people's minds off social justice.

-181-

War Corr Collier's Weekly 1914-15, staff corr
Associated Press in Europe, 1915-17; war corr Leslie's
Weekly in Near East and sec Russian commn for Near
East Relief, June-Dec 1921

In those years he forgot all about the diplomat's
mauve silk bathrobe and the ivory toilet sets and the
little tête-à-têtes with grandduchesses,

he went to Germany as Beveridge's secretary, saw
the German troops goosestepping through Brussels,

saw Poincaré visiting the long doomed galleries
of Verdun between ranks of bitter halfmutinous sol-
diers in blue,

saw the gangrened wounds, the cholera, the typhus,
the little children with their bellies swollen with famine,
the maggoty corpses of the Serbian retreat, drunk Allied
officers chasing sick naked girls upstairs in the brothels
in Saloniki, soldiers looting stores and churches, French
and British sailors fighting with beerbottles in the bars;

walked up and down the terrace with King Con-
stantine during the bombardment of Athens, fought a
duel with a French commission agent who got up and
left when a German sat down to eat in the diningroom
at the Grande Bretagne; Hibben thought the duel was a
joke until all his friends began putting on silk hats; he
stood up and let the Frenchman take two shots at him
and then fired into the ground; in Athens as every-
where he was always in hot water, a slightly built
truculent man, always standing up for his friends, for
people out of luck, for some idea, too reckless ever to
lay down the careful steppingstones of a respectable
career.

Commd 1st lieut F.A. Nov 27-1917; capt May
31-1919; served at war coll camp Grant; in France with
332nd E.A.; Finance Bureau S.O.S.; at G.H.Q. in

-182-

office of Insp Gen of A.E.F.; discharged Aug. 21-
1919; capt O.R.C. Feb 7th 1920; recommd Feb 7-
1925

The war in Europe was bloody and dirty and dull,
but the war in New York revealed such slimy depths
of vileness and hypocrisy that no man who saw it can
ever feel the same again; in the army training camps
it was different, the boys believed in a world safe for
Democracy; Hibben believed in the Fourteen Points,
he believed in The War To End War.

With mil Mission to Armenia, Aug-Dec 1919; staff
corr in Europe for the Chicago Tribune; with the Near
East Relief 1920-22; sec Russian Red Cross commn in
America 1922; v dir for U.S. Nansen Relief Mission
1923; sec AM Commn Relief Russian Children Apr
1922

In the famineyear the cholera year the typhusyear
Paxton Hibben went to Moscow with a relief commis-
sion.

In Paris they were still haggling over the price
of blood, squabbling over toy flags, the riverfrontiers
on reliefmaps, the historical destiny of peoples, while
behind the scenes the good contractplayers, the Deterd-
ings, the Zahkaroffs, the Stinnesses sat quiet and pos-
sessed themselves of the raw materials.

In Moscow there was order,
in Moscow there was work,
in Moscow there was hope;
the Marseillaise of 1905, Onward Christian Sol-
diers of 1912, the sullen passiveness of American In-
dians, of infantrymen waiting for death at the front
was part of the tremendous roar of the Marxian Inter-
nationale.

Hibben believed in the new world.

-183-

Back in America

somebody got hold of a photograph of Captain
Paxton Hibben laying a wreath on Jack Reed's gravei
they tried to throw him out of the O.R.C.;

at Princeton at the twentieth reunion of his col-
lege class his classmates started to lynch him; they were
drunk and perhaps it was just a collegeboy prank twenty
years too late but they had a noose around his neck,

lynch the goddam red,

no more place in America for change, no more
place for the old gags: social justice, progressivism, re-
volt against oppression, democracy; put the reds on the
skids,

no money for them,
no jobs for them.

Mem Authors League of America, Soc of Colonial
Wars, Vets Foreign Wars, Am Legion, fellow Royal
and Am Geog Socs. Decorated chevalier Order of St.
Stanislas (Russian), Officer Order of the Redeemer
(Greek), Order of the Sacred Treasure ( Japan). Clubs
Princeton, Newspaper, Civic ( New York)

Author: Constantine and the Greek People 1920,
The Famine in Russia 1922, Henry Ward Beecher an
American Portrait 1927.

d. 1929.

NEWSREEL XXVI

EUROPE ON KNIFE EDGE

Tout le long de la Thamise
Nous sommes allés tout les deux
Gouter l'heure exquise.

-184-

in such conditions is it surprising that the Department of
Justice looks with positive affection upon those who refused
service in the draft, with leniency upon convicted anarchists
and with something like indifference upon the overwhelming
majority of them still out of jail or undeported for years after
the organization of the U. S. Steel Corporation Wall Street
was busy on the problem of measuring the cubic yards of water
injected into the property

FINISHED STEEL MOVES RATHER MORE FREELY

Where do we go from here boys
Where do we go from here?

WILD DUCKS FLY OVER PARIS

FERTILIZER INDUSTRY STIMULATED BY WAR

Anywhere from Harlem
To a Jersey City pier

the winning of the war is just as much dependent upon
the industrial workers as it is upon the soldiers. Our wonder-
ful record of launching one hundred ships on independence
day shows what can be done when we put our shoulders to the
wheel under the spur of patriotism

SAMARITAINE BATHS SINK IN SWOLLEN
SEINE

I may not know
What the war's about
But you bet by gosh
I'll soon find out
And so my sweetheart
Don't you fear
I'll bring you a king
For a souvenir
And I'll get you a Turk
And the Kaiser too
And that's about all
One feller can do

-185-