AFTER-WAR PLANS OF AETNA EXPLOSIVES

ANCIENT CITY IN GLOOM EVEN THE CHURCH
BELLS ON SUNDAY BEING STILLED

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

RICHARD ELLSWORTH SAVAGE

It was at Fontainebleau lined up in the square in front
of Francis I's palace they first saw the big grey Fiat ambu-
lances they were to drive. Schuyler came back from talking
with the French drivers who were turning them over with
the news that they were sore as hell because it meant they
had to go back into the front line. They asked why the
devil the Americans couldn't stay home and mind their
own business instead of coming over here and filling up
all the good embusqué jobs. That night the section went
into cantonment in tarpaper barracks that stank of carbolic,
in a little town in Champagne. It turned out to be the
Fourth of July, so the maréchale-de-logis served out
champagne with supper and a general with white walrus
whiskers came and made a speech about how with the help
of Amérique héroique la victoire was certain, and proposed
a toast to le président Veelson. The chef of the section,
Bill Knickerbocker, got up a little nervously and toasted
la France héroique, l'héroique Cinquième Armée and la
victoire by Christmas. Fireworks were furnished by the
Boches who sent over an airraid that made everybody
scuttle for the bombproof dugout.

Once they got down there Fred Summers said it smelt
too bad and anyway he wanted a drink and he and Dick
went out to find an estaminet, keeping close under the eaves

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of the houses to escape the occasional shrapnel fragments
from the antiaircraft guns. They found a little bar all full
of tobacco smoke and French poilus singing la Madelon.
Everybody cheered when they came in and a dozen glasses
were handed to them. They smoked their first caporal
ordinaire and everybody set them up to drinks so that at
closing time, when the bugles blew the French equivalent
of taps, they found themselves walking a little unsteadily
along the pitchblack streets arm in arm with two poilus
who'd promised to find them their cantonment. The poilus
said la guerre was une saloperie and la victorie was une
sale blague and asked eagerly if les americains knew any-
thing about la revolution en Russie. Dick said he was a
pacifist and was for anything that would stop the war and
they all shook hands very significantly and talked about
la revolution mondiale. When they were turning in on
their folding cots, Fred Summers suddenly sat bolt up-
right with his blanket around him and said in a solemn
funny way he had, "Fellers, this ain't a war, it's a goddam
madhouse."

There were two other fellows in the section who liked
to drink wine and chatter bad French; Steve Warner,
who'd been a special student at Harvard, and Ripley who
was a freshman at Columbia. The five of them went
around together, finding places to get omelettes and pom-
mes frites in the villages within walking distance, making
the rounds of the estaminets every night; they got to be
known as the grenadine guards. When the section moved
up onto the Voie Sacrée back of Verdun and was quartered
for three rainy weeks in a little ruined village called Erize
la Petite, they set up their cots together in the same corner
of the old brokendown barn they were given for a canton-
ment. It rained all day and all night; all day and all night
camions ground past through the deep liquid putty of the
roads carrying men and munitions to Verdun. Dick used
to sit on his cot looking out through the door at the jiggling

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mudspattered faces of the young French soldiers going up
for the attack, drunk and desperate and yelling à bas la
guerre, mort au vachea, à bas la guerre. Once Steve came in
suddenly, his face pale above the dripping poncho, his eyes
snapping, and said in a low voice, "Now I know what the
tumbrils were like in the Terror, that's what they are,
tumbrils."

Dick was relieved to find out, when they finally moved
up within range of the guns, that he wasn't any more
scared than anybody else. The first time they went on post
he and Fred lost their way in the shellshredded woods and
were trying to turn the car around on a little rise naked as
the face of the moon when three shells from an Austrian
eightyeight went past them like three cracks of a whip.
They never knew how they got out of the car and into
the ditch, but when the sparse blue almondsmelling smoke
cleared they were both lying flat in the mud. Fred went
to pieces and Dick had to put his arm around him and
keep whispering in his ear, "Come on, boy, we got to make
it. Come on, Fred, we'll fool 'em." It all hit him funny
and he kept laughing all the way back along the road
into the quieter section of the woods where the dressing
station had been cleverly located right in front of a bat-
tery of 405s so that the concussion almost bounced the
wounded out of their stretchers every time a gun was fired.
When they got back to the section after taking a load to
the triage they were able to show three jagged holes from
shellfragments in the side of the car.

Next day the attack began and continual barrages and
counterbarrages and heavy gasbombardmentsi the section
was on twentyfour hour duty for three days, at the end of
it everybody had dysentery and bad nerves. One fellow
got shellshock, although he'd been too scared to go on
post, and had to be sent back to Paris. A couple of men
had to be evacuated for dysentery. The grenadine guards
came through the attack pretty well, except that Steve

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and Ripley had gotten a little extra sniff of mustard gas
up at P2 one night and vomited whenever they ate any-
thing.

In their twentyfour hour periods off duty they'd meet
in a little garden at Récicourt that was the section's base.
No one else seemed to know about it. The garden had
been attached to a pink villa but the villa had been mashed
to dust as if a great foot had stepped on it. The garden
was untouched, only a little weedy from neglect, roses
were in bloom there and butterflies and bees droned around
the flowers on sunny afternoons. At first they took the bees
for distant arrivés and went flat on their bellies when they
heard them. There had been a cement fountain in the mid-
dle of the garden and there they used to sit when the
Germans got it into their heads to shell the road and the
nearby bridge. There was regular shelling three times a
day and a little scattering between times. Somebody would
be detailed to stand in line at the Copé and buy south of
France melons and four franc fifty champagne. Then
they'd take off their shirts to toast their backs and shoulders
if it was sunny and sit in the dry fountain eating the melons
and drinking the warm cidery champagne and talk about
how they'd go back to the States and start an underground
newspaper like La Libre Belgique to tell people what the
war was really like.

What Dick liked best in the garden was the little back-
house, like the backhouse in a New England farm, with a
clean scrubbed seat and a half moon in the door, through
which on sunny days the wasps who had a nest in the ceiling
hummed busily in and out. He'd sit there with his belly
aching listening to the low voices of his friends talking
in the driedup fountain. Their voices made him feel happy
and at home while he stood wiping himself on a few old
yellowed squares of a 1914 Petit Journal that still hung
on the nail. Once he came back buckling his belt and say-
ing, "Do you know? I was thinking how fine it would be

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if you could reorganize the cells of your body into some
other kind of life . . . it's too damn lousy being a human
. . . I'd like to be a cat, a nice comfortable housecat sit-
ting by the fire."

"It's a hell of a note," said Steve, reaching for his shirt
and putting it on. A cloud had gone over the sun and it
was suddenly chilly. The guns sounded quiet and distant.
Dick felt suddenly chilly and lonely. "It's a hell of a note
when you have to be ashamed of belonging to your own
race. But I swear I am, I swear I'm ashamed of being a
man . . . it will take some huge wave of hope like a
revolution to make me feel any selfrespect ever again. . . .
God, we're a lousy cruel vicious dumb type of tailless ape."
"Well, if you want to earn your selfrespect, Steve, and
the respect of us other apes, why don't you go down, now
that they're not shelling, and buy us a bottle of champagny
water?" said Ripley.

After the attack on hill 304 the division went en repos
back of Bar-le-Duc for a couple of weeks and then up
into a quiet section of the Argonne called le Four de Paris
where the French played chess with the Boches in the front
line and where one side always warned the other before
setting off a mine under a piece of trench. When they were
off duty they could go into the inhabited and undestroyed
town of Sainte Ménéhoulde and eat fresh pastry and
pumpkin soup and roast chicken. When the section was
disbanded and everybody sent back to Paris Dick hated to
leave the mellow autumn woods of the Argonne. The
U. S. army was to take over the ambulance service at-
tached to the French. Everybody got a copy of the section's
citation; Dick Norton made them a speech under shell-
fire, never dropping the monocle out of his eye, dismissing
them as gentlemen volunteers and that was the end of the
section.

Except for an occasional shell from the Bertha, Paris

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was quiet and pleasant that November. It was too foggy
for airraids. Dick and Steve Warner got a very cheap
room back of the Pantheon; in the daytime they read
French and in the evenings roamed round cafés and drink-
ing places. Fred Summers got himself a job with the Red
Cross at twentyfive dollars a week and a steady girl the
second day they hit Paris. Ripley and Ed Schuyler took
lodgings in considerable style over Henry's bar. They all
ate dinner together every night and argued themselves sick
about what they ought to do. Steve said he was going
home and C.O. and to hell with it; Ripley and Schuyler
said they didn't care what they did as long as they kept out
of the American army, and talked about joining the For-
eign Legion or the Lafayette Escadrille.

Fred Summers said, "Fellers, this war's the most gigan-
tic cockeyed graft of the century and me for it and the
cross red nurses." At the end of first week he was holding
down two Red Cross jobs, each at twentyfive a week, and
being kept by a middleaged French marraine who owned
a big house in Neuilly. When Dick's money gave out Fred
borrowed some for him from his marraine, but he never
would let any of the others see her. "Don't want you
fellers to know what I'm in for," he'd say.

At lunchtime one day Fred Summers came round to
say that everything was fixed up and that he had jobs for
them all. The wops, he explained, were pretty well shot
after Caporetto and couldn't get out of the habit of re-
treating. It was thought that sending an American Red
Cross ambulance section down would help their morale.
He was in charge of recruiting for the time being and had
put all their names down. Dick immediately said he spoke
Italian and felt he'd be a great help to the morale of the
Italians, so the next morning they were all at the Red Cross
office when it opened and were duly enrolled in Section 1
of the American Red Cross for Italy. There followed a
couple more weeks waiting around during which Fred

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Summers took on a mysterious Serbian lady he picked up
in a café back of the Place St. Michel who wanted to teach
them to take hashish, and. Dick became friends with a
drunken Montenegran who'd been a barkeep in New York
and who promised to get them all decorated by King
Nicholas of Montenegro. But the day they were going
to be received at Neuilly to have the decorations pinned
on, the section left.

The convoy of twelve Fiats and eight Fords ran along
the smooth macadam roads south through the Forest of
Fontainebleau and wound east through the winecolored
hills of central France. Dick was driving a Ford alone and
was so busy trying to remember what to do with his feet
he could hardly notice the scenery. Next day they went
over the mountains and down into the valley of the Rhone,
into a rich wine country with planetrees and cypresses,
smelling of the vintage and late fall roses and the south.
By Montélimar, the war, the worry about jail and protest
and sedition all seemed a nightmare out of another century.

They had a magnificent supper in the quiet pink and
white town with cêpes and garlic and strong red wine.
"Fellers," Fred Summers kept saying, "this ain't a war,
it's a goddam Cook's tour." They slept in style in the big
brocadehung beds at the hotel, and when they left in the
morning a little schoolboy ran after Dick's car shouting
Vive l'Amerique and handed him a box of nougat, the local
specialty; it was the land of Cockaigne.

That day the convoy fell to pieces running into Mar-
seilles; discipline melted away; drivers stopped at all the
wineshops along the sunny roads to drink and play craps.
The Red Cross publicity man and the Saturday Evening
Post correspondent who was the famous writer, Mont-
gomery Ellis, got hideously boiled and could be heard
whooping and yelling in the back of the staffcar, while the
little fat lieutenant ran up and down the line of cars at
every stop red and hysterically puffing. Eventually they

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were all rounded up and entered Marseilles in formation.
They'd just finished parking in a row in the main square
and the boys were settling back into the bars and cafés
round about, when a man named Ford got the bright idea
of looking into his gasoline tank with a match and blew his
car up. The local firedepartment came out in style and
when car No. 8 was properly incinerated turned their high-
pressure hose on the others, and Schuyler, who spoke the
best French in the section, had to be dragged away from a
conversation with the cigarette girl at the corner café to
beg the firechief for chrissake to lay off.

With the addition of a fellow named Sheldrake who was
an expert on folkdancing and had been in the famous sec-
tion 7, the grenadine guards dined in state at the Bristol.
They continued the evening at the promenoire at the
Apollo, that was so full of all the petite femmes in the
world, they never saw the show. Everything was cock-
eyed and full of women, the shrill bright main streets with
their cafés and cabarets, and the black sweaty tunnels of
streets back of the harbor full of rumpled beds and sailors
and black skin and brown skin, wriggling bellies, flopping
purplewhite breasts, grinding thighs.

Very late Steve and Dick found themselves alone in a
little restaurant eating ham and eggs and coffee. They were
drunk and sleepy and quarrelling drowsily. When they
paid, the middleaged waitress told them to put the tip on
the corner of the table and blew them out of their chairs
by calmly hoisting her skirts and picking up the coins
between her legs.

"It's a hoax, a goddam hoax. . . . Sex is a slotmachine,"
Steve kept saying and it seemed gigantically funny, so
funny that they went into an early morning bar and tried
to tell the man behind the counter about it, but he didn't
understand them and wrote out on a piece of paper the
name of an establishment where they could faire rigajig,
une maison, propre, convenable, et de haute moralité.

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Hooting with laughter they found themselves reeling and
stumbling as they climbed endless stairways. The wind was
cold as hell. They were in front of a crazylooking cathe-
dral looking down on the harbor, steamboats, great ex-
panses of platinum sea hemmed in by ashen mountains.
"By God, that's the Mediterranean."

They sobered up in the cold jostling wind and the wide
metallic flare of dawn and got back to their hotel in time
to shake the others out of their drunken slumbers and be
the first to report for duty at the parked cars. Dick was
so sleepy he forgot what he ought to do with his feet and
ran his Ford into the car ahead and smashed his headlights.
The fat lieutenant bawled him out shrilly and took the car
away from him and put him on a Fiat with Sheldrake, so
he had nothing to do all day but look out of his drowse at
the Corniche and the Mediterranean and the redroofed
towns and the long lines of steamboats bound east hugging
the shore for fear of Uboats, convoyed by an occasional
French destroyer with its smokestacks in all the wrong
places.

Crossing the Italian border they were greeted by crowds
of schoolchildren with palmleaves and baskets of oranges,
and a movie operator. Sheldrake kept stroking his beard
and bowing and saluting at the cheers of evviva gli
americani, until zowie, he got an orange between the eyes
that pretty near gave him a nosebleed. Another man down
the line came within an inch of having his eye put out by
a palmbranch thrown by a delirious inhabitant of Vinti-
miglia. It was a great reception. That night in San Remo
enthusiastic wops kept running up to the boys on the street,
shaking their hands and congratulating them on il Presi-
dente Veelson; somebody stole all the spare tires out of
the camionette and the Red Cross Publicity Man's suitcase
that had been left in the staffcar. They were greeted
effusively and shortchanged in the bars. Evviva gli aleati.

Everybody in the section began to curse out Italy and

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the rubber spaghetti and the vinegary wine, except. Dick
and Steve, who suddenly became woplovers and bought
themselves grammars to learn the language. Dick already
gave a pretty good imitation of talking Italian, especially
before the Red Cross officers, by putting an o on the end of
all the French words he knew. He didn't give a damn
about anything any more. It was sunny, vermouth was a
great drink, the towns and the toy churches on the tops of
hills and the vineyards and the cypresses and the blue sea
were like a succession of backdrops for an oldfashioned
opera. The buildings were stagy and ridiculously mag-
nificent; on every blank wall the damn wops had painted
windows and colonnades and balconies with fat Titian-
haired beauties leaning over them and clouds and covies of
dimpletummied cupids.

That night they parked the convoy in the main square of
a godforsaken little burg on the outskirts of Genoa. They
went with Sheldrake to have a drink in a bar and found
themselves drinking with the Saturday Evening Post
correspondent who soon began to get tight and to say how
he envied them their good looks and their sanguine youth
and idealism. Steve picked him up about everything and
argued bitterly that youth was the lousiest time in your
life, and that he ought to be goddam glad he was forty
years old and able to write about the war instead of fight-
ing in it. Ellis goodnaturedly pointed out that they weren't
fighting either. Steve made Sheldrake sore by snapping
out, "No, of course not, we're goddamned embusqués."
He and Steve left the bar and ran like deer to get out of
sight before Sheldrake could follow them. Around the
corner they saw a streetcar marked Genoa and Steve hopped
it without saying a word. Dick didn't have anything to
do but follow.

The car rounded a block of houses and came out on the
waterfront. "Judas Priest, Dick," said Steve, "the goddam
town's on fire." Beyond the black hulks of boats drawn up

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on the shore a rosy flame like a gigantic lampflame sent a
broad shimmer towards them across the water. "Gracious,
Steve, do you suppose the Austrians are in there?"

The car went whanging along; the conductor who came
and got their fare looked calm enough. "Inglese?" he
asked. "Americani," said Steve. He smiled and clapped
them on the back and said something about the Presidente
Veelson that they couldn't understand.

They got off the car in a big square surrounded by huge
arcades that a raw bittersweet wind blew hugely through.
Dressedup people in overcoats were walking up and down
on the clean mosaic pavement. The town was all marble.
Every façade that faced the sea was pink with the glow
of the fire. "Here the tenors and the baritones and the
sopranos all ready for the show to begin," said Dick. Steve
grunted, "Chorus'll probably be the goddam Austrians."

They were cold and went into one of the shiny nickel
and plateglass cafés to have a grog. The waiter told them
in broken English that the fire was on an American tanker
that had hit a mine and that she'd been burning for three
days. A longfaced English officer came over from the bar
and started to tell them how he was on a secret mission;
it was all bloody awful about the retreat; it hadn't stopped
yet; in Milan they were talking about falling back on the
Po; the only reason the bloody Austrians hadn't overrun
all bloody Lombardy was they'd been so disorganized by
their rapid advance they were in almost as bad shape as the
bloody Italians were. Damned Italian officers kept talking
about the quadrilateral, and if it wasn't for the French and
British troops behind the Italian lines they'd have sold out
long ago. French morale was pretty shaky, at that. Dick
told him about how the tools got swiped every time they
took their eyes off their cars. The Englishman said the
thievery in these parts was extraordinary; that was what
his secret mission was about; he was trying to trace an
entire carload of boots that had vanished between Vinti

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miglia and San Raphael, "Whole bloody luggage van turns
into thin air overnight . . . extraordinary. . . . See those
blighters over there at that table, they're bloody Austrian
spies every mother's son of them . . . but try as I can I
can't get them arrested . . . extraordinary. It's a bloody
melodrama that's what it is, just like Drury Lane. A jolly
good thing you Americans have come in. If you hadn't
you'd see the bloody German flag flying over Genoa at
this minute." He suddenly looked at his wristwatch, ad-
vised them to buy a bottle of whiskey at the bar if they
wanted another bit of drink, because it was closing time,
said cheeryoh, and hustled out.

They plunged out again into the empty marble town,
down dark lanes and streets of stone steps with always the
glare on some jutting wall overhead brighter and redder
as they neared the waterfront. Time and again they got
lost; at last they came out on wharves and bristle of masts
of crowded feluccas and beyond the little crimsontipped
waves of the harbor, the breakwater, and outside the break-
water the mass of flame of the burning tanker. Excited and
drunk they walked on and on through the town: "By God,
these towns are older than the world," Dick kept saying.

While they were looking at a marble lion, shaped like a
dog, that stood polished to glassy smoothness by centuries
of hands at the bottom of a flight of steps, an American
voice hailed them, wanting to know if they knew their way
around this goddam town. It was a young fellow who was
a sailor on an American boat that had come over with a
carload of mules. They said sure they knew their way and
gave him a drink out of the bottle of cognac they'd bought.
They sat there on the stone balustrade beside the lion that
looked like a dog and swigged cognac out of the bottle and
talked. The sailor showed them some silk stockings he'd
salvaged off the burning oilship and told them about how
he'd been jazzing an Eyetalian girl only she'd gone to
sleep and he'd gotten disgusted and walked out on her.

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"This war's hell ain't it de truth?" he said; they all got to
laughing.

"You guys seem to be a couple of pretty good guys," the
sailor said. They handed him the bottle and he took a gulp.
"You fellers are princes," he added spluttering, "and I'm
goin' to tell you what I think, see. . . . This whole god-
dam war's a gold brick, it ain't on the level, its crooked
from A to Z. No matter how it comes out fellers like us
gets the's-y end of the stick, see? Well, what I say is all
bets is off . . . every man go to hell in his own way . . .
and three strikes is out, see?" They finished up the cognac.

Singing out savagely, "To hell wid 'em I say," the
sailor threw the bottle with all his might against the head
of the stone lion. The Genoese lion went on staring ahead
with glassy doglike eyes.

Sourlooking loafers started gathering around to see
what the trouble was so they moved on, the sailor waving
his silk stockings as he walked. They found him his steamer
tied up to the dock and shook hands again and again at the
gangplank.

Then it was up to Dick and Steve to get themselves back
across the ten miles to Ponte Decimo. Chilly and sleepy
they walked until their feet were sore, then hopped a wop
truck the rest of the way. The cobbles of the square and
the roofs of the cars were covered with hoarfrost when
they got there. Dick made a noise getting into the stretcher
beside Sheldrake's and Sheldrake woke up, "What the
hell?" he said. "Shut up," said Dick, "don't you see you're
waking people up?"

Next day they got to Milan, huge wintry city with its
overgrown pincushion cathedral and its Galleria jammed
with people and restaurants and newspapers and whores
and Cinzano and Campari Bitters. There followed another
period of waiting during which most of the section settled
down to an endless crapgame in the back room at Cova's;
then they moved out to a place called Dolo on a frozen

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canal somewhere in the Venetian plain. To get to the ele-
gant carved and painted villa where they were quartered
they had to cross the Brenta. A company of British sappers
had the bridge all mined and ready to blow up when the
retreat began again.They promised to wait till Section 1
had crossed before blowing the bridge up. In Dolo there
was very little to do; it was raw wintry weather; while
most of the section sat around the stove and swapped their
jack at poker, the grenadine guards made themselves hot
rum punches over a gasoline burner, read Boccaccio in
Italian and argued with Steve about anarchism.

Dick spent a great deal of his time wondering how he
was going to get to Venice. It turned out that the fat
lieutenant was worried by the fact that the section had
no cocoa and that the Red Cross commissary in Milan
hadn't sent the section any breakfast foods. Dick suggested
that Venice was one of the world's great cocoamarkets, and
that somebody who knew Italian ought to be sent over
there to buy cocoa; so one frosty morning Dick found
himself properly equipped with papers and seals boarding
the little steamboat at Mestre.

There was a thin skim of ice on the lagoon that tore with
a sound of silk on either side of the narrow bow where Dick
stood leaning forward over the rail, tears in his eyes from
the raw wind, staring at the long rows of stakes and the
light red buildings rising palely out of the green water to
bubblelike domes and square pointedtipped towers that
etched themselves sharper and sharper against the zinc
sky. The hunchback bridges, the greenslimy steps, the
palaces, the marble quays were all empty. The only life
was in a group of torpecloboats anchored in the Grand
Canal. Dick forgot all about the cocoa walking through
sculptured squares and the narrow streets and quays along
the icefilled canals of the great dead city that lay there on
the lagoon frail and empty as a cast snakeskin. To the
north he could hear the tomtomming of the guns fifteen

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miles away on the Piave. On the way back it began to
snow.

A few days later they moved up to Bassano behind
Monte Grappa into a late renaissance villa all painted up
with cupids and angels and elaborate draperies. Back of
the villa the Brenta roared day and night under a covered
bridge. There they spent their time evacuating cases of
frozen feet, drinking hot rum punches at Citadella where
the base hospital and the whorehouses were, and singing
The Foggy Foggy Dew and The Little Black Bull Came
Down From the Mountain over the rubber spaghetti at
chow. Ripley and Steve decided they wanted to learn to
draw and spent their days off drawing architectural details
or the covered bridge. Schuyler practiced his Italian talking
about Nietzsche with the Italian Lieut. Fred Summers
had gotten a dose off a Milanese lady who he said must
have belonged to one of the best families because she was
riding in a carriage and picked him up, not he her, and
spent most of his spare time brewing himself home reme-
dies like cherry stems in hot water. Dick got to feeling
lonely and blue, and in need of privacy, and wrote a great
many letters home. The letters he got back made him feel
worse than not getting any.

"You must understand how it is," he wrote the Thur-
lows, answering an enthusiastic screed of Hilda's about the
"war to end war," "I don't believe in Christianity any
more and can't argue from that standpoint, but you do, or
at least Edwin does, and he ought to realize that in urging
young men to go into this cockeyed lunatic asylum of war
he's doing everything he can to undermine all the principles
and ideals he most believes in. As the young fellow we had
that talk with in Genoa that night said, it's not on the level,
it's a dirty goldbrick game put over by governments and
politicians for their own selfish interests, it's crooked from
A to Z. If it wasn't for the censorship I could tell you
things that would make you vomit."

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Then he'd suddenly snap out of his argumentative
mood and all the phrases about liberty and civilization
steaming up out of his head would seem damn silly too,
and he'd light the gasoline burner and make a rum punch
and cheer up chewing the rag with Steve about books or
painting or architecture. Moonlight nights the Austrians
made things lively by sending bombing planes over. Some
nights Dick found that staying out of the dugout and
giving them a chance at him gave him a sort of bitter
pleasure, and the dugout wasn't any protection against a
direct hit anyway.

Sometime in February Steve read in the paper that the
Empress Taitu of Abyssinia had died. They held a wake.
They drank all the rum they had and keened until the
rest of the section thought they'd gone crazy. They sat
in the dark round the open moonlit window wrapped in
blankets and drinking warm zabaglione. Some Austrian
planes that had been droning overhead suddenly cut off
their motors and dumped a load of bombs right in front
of them. The antiaircraft guns had been barking for some
time and shrapnel sparkling in the moonhazy sky over-
head but they'd been too drunk to notice. One bomb fell
geflump into the Brenta and the others filled the space in
front of the window with red leaping glare and shook the
villa with three roaring snorts. Plaster fell from the ceiling.
They could hear the tiles skuttering down off the roof
overhead.

"Jesus, that was almost good night," said Summers.
Steve started singing, Come away from that window, my
light and my life, but the rest of them drowned it out with
an out of tune Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles. They
suddenly all felt crazy drunk.

Ed Schuyler was standing on a chair giving a recitation
of the Erlkönig when Feldmann, the Swiss hotel-
keeper's son who was now head of the section, stuck his
head in the door and asked what in the devil they thought

-201-

they were doing. "You'd better go down in the abris, one
of the Italian mechanics was killed and a soldier walking
up the road had his legs blown off . . . no time for
monkeyshines." They offered him a drink and he went off
in a rage. After that they drank marsala. Sometime in the
early dawn greyness Dick got up and staggered to the
window to vomit; it was raining pitchforks, the foaming
r'ds of the Brenta looked very white through the shim-
mering rain.

Next day it was Dick's and Steve's turn to go on post
to Rova. They drove out of the yard at six with their
heads like fireballoons, damn glad to be away from the big
scandal there'd be at the section. At Rova the lines were
quiet, only a few pneumonia or venereal cases to evacuate,
and a couple of poor devils who'd shot themselves in the
foot and were to be sent to the hospital under guard; but
at the officers' mess where they ate things were very agi-
tated indeed. Tenente Sardinaglia was under arrest in his
quarters for saucing the Coronele and had been up there
for two days making up a little march on his mandolin
that he called the march of the medical colonels. Serrati
told them about it giggling behind his hand while they
were waiting for the other officers to come to mess. It was
all on account of the macchina for coffee. There were only
three macchine for the whole mess, one for the colonel,
one for the major, and the other went around to the
junior officers in rotation; well, one day last week they'd
been kidding that bella ragazza, the niece of the farmer
on whom they were quartered; she hadn't let any of the
officers kiss her and had carried on like a crazy woman
when they pinched her behind, and the colonel had been
angry about it, and angrier yet when Sardinaglia had bet
him five lira that he could kiss her and he'd whispered
something in her ear and she'd let him and that had made
the colonel get purple in the face and he'd told the ordi-
nanza not to give the macchina to the tenente when his

-202-

turn came round; and Sardinaglia had slapped the ordi-
nanza's face and there'd been a row and as a result Sardi-
naglia was confined to his quarters and the Americans
would see what a circus it was. They all had to straighten
their faces in a hurry because the colonel and the major
and the two captains came jingling in at that moment.

The ordinanza came and saluted, and said pronto
spaghetti in a cheerful tone, and everybody sat down. For
a while the officers were quiet sucking in the long oily
tomatocoated strings of spaghetti, the wine was passed
around and the colonel had just cleared his throat to begin
one of his funny stories that everybody had to laugh at,
when from up above there came the tinkle of a mandolin.
The colonel's face got red and he put a forkful of spaghetti
in his mouth instead of saying anything. As it was Sunday
the meal was unusually long: at dessert the coffee macchina
was awarded to Dick as a courtesy to gli americani and
somebody produced a bottle of strega. The colonel told the
ordinanza to tell the bella ragazza to come and have a
glass of strega with him; he looked pretty sour at the idea,
Dick thought; but he went and got her. She turned out
to be a handsome stout oliveskinned countrygirl. Her
cheeks burning she went timidly up to the colonel and
said, thank you very much but please she never drank
strong drinks. The colonel grabbed her and made her sit
on his knee and tried to make her drink his glass of strega,
but she kept her handsome set of ivory teeth clenched and
wouldn't drink it. It ended by several of the officers hold-
ing her and tickling her and the colonel pouring the strega
over her chin. Everybody roared with laughter except the
ordinanza, who turned white as chalk, and Steve and Dick
who didn't know where to look. While the senior officers
were teasing and tickling her and running their hands into
her blouse, the junior officers were holding her feet and
running their hands up her legs. Finally the colonel got
control of his laughter enough to say, "Basta, now she

-203-

must give me a kiss." But the girl broke loose and ran out
of the room.

"Go and bring her back," the colonel said to the ordi-
nanza. After a moment the ordinanza came back and stood
at attention and said he couldn't find her. "Good for him,"
whispered Steve to Dick. Dick noticed that the ordinanza's
legs were trembling. "You can't can't you?" roared the
colonel, and gave the ordinanza a push; one of the lieu-
tenants stuck his foot out and the ordinanza tripped over
it and fell. Everybody laughed and the colonel gave him a
kick; he had gotten to his hands and knees when the
colonel gave him a kick in the seat of his pants that sent
him flat to the floor again. The officers all roared, the
Ordinanza crawled to the door with the colonel running
after him giving him little kicks first on one side and then
on the other, like a soccerplayer with a football. That put
everybody in a good humor and they had another drink of
strega all around. When they got outside Serrati, who'd
been laughing with the rest, grabbed Dick's arm and hissed
in his ear, "Bestie, . . . sono tutti bestie."

When the other officers had gone, Serrati took them up
to see Sardinaglia who was a tall longfaced young man who
liked to call himself a futurista. Serrati told him what had
happened and said he was afraid the Americans had been
disgusted. "A futurist must be disgusted at nothing except
weakness and stupidity," said Sardinaglia sententiously.
Then he told them he'd found out who the bella ragazza
was really sleeping with . . . with the ordinanza. That he
said disgusted him; it showed that women were all pigs.
Then he said to sit down on his cot while he played them
the march of the medical colonels. They declared it was
fine. "A futurist must be strong and disgusted with noth-
ing," he said, still trilling on the mandolin, "that's why I
admire the Germans and American millionaires." They
all laughed.

Dick and Steve went out to pick up some feriti to evacu-

-204-

ate to the hospital. Behind the barn where they parked the
cars, they found the ordinanza sitting on a stone with his
head in his hands, tears had made long streaks on the dirt
of his face. Steve went up to him and patted him on the
back and gave him a package of Mecca cigarettes, that had
been distributed to them by the Y.M.C.A. The ordinanza
squeezed Steve's hand, looked as if he was going to kiss it.
He said after the war he was going to America where
people were civilized, not bestie like here. Dick asked him
where the girl had gone. "Gone away," he said. "Andata
via."

When they got back to the section they found there was
hell to pay. Orders had come for Savage, Warner, Ripley
and Schuyler to report to the head office in Rome in order
to be sent back to the States. Feldmann wouldn't tell them
what the trouble was. They noticed at once that the other
men in the section were looking at them suspiciously and
were nervous about speaking to them, except for Fred
Summers who said he didn't understand it, the whole frig-
ging business was a madhouse anyway. Sheldrake, who'd
moved his dufflebag and cot into another room in the villa,
came around with an I told you so air and said he'd heard
the words seditious utterances and that an Italian intelli-
gence officer had been around asking about them. He
wished them good luck and said it was too bad. They left
the section without saying goodby to anybody. Feldmann
drove them and their dufflebags and bedrolls down to
Vicenza in the camionette. At the railroad station he handed
them their orders of movement to Rome, said it was too
bad, wished them good luck, and went off in a hurry
without shaking hands.

"The sons of bitches," growled Steve, "you might think
we had leprosy." Ed Schuyler was reading the military
passes, his face beaming. "Men and brethren," he said, "I
am moved to make a speech . . . this is the greatest graft
yet . . . do you gentlemen realize that what's happening

-205-

is that the Red Cross, otherwise known as the goose that
lays the golden egg, is presenting us with a free tour of
Italy? We don't have to get to Rome for a year.""Keep
out of Rome till the revolution," suggested Dick. "Enter
Rome with the Austrians," said Ripley.

A train came into the station. They piled into a first
class compartment; when the conductor came and tried
to explain that their orders read for second class trans-
portation, they couldn't understand Italian, so finally he
left them there. At Verona they piled off to check their
dufflebags and cots to Rome. It was suppertime so they
decided to walk around the town and spend the night. In
the morning they went to see the ancient theatre and the
great peachcolored marble church of San Zeno. Then they
sat around the café at the station until a train came by for
Rome. The train was jampacked with officers in pale blue
and pale green cloaks; by Bologna they'd gotten tired of
sitting on the floor of the vestibule and decided they must
see the leaning towers. Then they went to Pistoa, Lucca,
Pisa and back to the main line at Florence. When the con-
ductors shook their heads over the orders of movement
they explained that they'd been misinformed and due to
ignorance of the language had taken the wrong train. At
Florence, where it was rainy and cold and the buildings all
looked like the replicas of them they'd seen at home, the
station master put them forcibly on the express for Rome,
but they sneaked out the other side after it had started
and got into the local for Assisi. From there they got to
Siena by way of San Gimignano, as full of towers as New
York, in a hack they hired for the day, and ended up one
fine spring morning full up to the neck with painting and
architecture and oil and garlic and scenery, looking at
the Signorelli frescoes in the cathedral at Orvieto. They
stayed there all day looking at the great fresco of the Last
Judgment, drinking the magnificent wine and basking in
the sunny square outside. When they got to Rome, to the

-206-

station next to the baths of Diocletian, they felt pretty bad
at the prospect of giving up their passes; they were amazed
when the employee merely stamped them and gave them
back, saying, "Per il ritorno."

They went to a hotel and cleaned up, and then pooling
the last of their money went on a big bust with a high-
class meal, Frascati wine and asti for dessert, a vaudeville
show and a cabaret on the Via Roma where they met an
American girl they called the baroness who promised to
show them the town. By the end of the evening nobody
had enough money left to go home with the baroness or
any of her charming ladyfriends, so they hired a cab with
their last ten lire to take them out to see the Colosseum by
moonlight. The great masses of ruins, the engraved stones,
the names, the stately Roman names, the old cabdriver
with his oilcloth stovepipe hat and his green soupstrainers
recommending whorehouses under the last quarter of the
ruined moon, the great masses of masonry full of arches
and columns piled up everywhere into the night, the boom
of the word Rome dying away in pompous chords into the
past, sent them to bed with their heads whirling, Rome
throbbing in their ears so that they could not sleep.

Next morning Dick got up while the others were still
dead to the world and went round to the Red Cross; he
was suddenly nervous and worried so that he couldn't eat
his breakfast. At the office he saw a stoutish Bostonian
Major who seemed to be running things, and asked him
straight out what the devil the trouble was. The Major
hemmed and hawed and kept the conversation in an agree-
able tone, as one Harvard man to another. He talked
about indiscretions and the oversensitiveness of the Italians.
As a matter of fact the censor didn't like the tone of certain
letters, etcetera, etcetera. Dick said he felt he ought to ex-
plain his position, and that if the Red Cross felt he hadn't
done his duty they ought to give him a courtmartial, he
said he felt there were many men in his position who had

-207-

pacifist views but now that the country was at war were
willing to do any kind of work they could to help, but that
didn't mean he believed in the war, he felt he ought to be
allowed to explain his position. The major said Ah well he
quite understood, etcetera, etcetera, but that the young
should realize the importance of discretion, etcetera, et-
cetera, and that the whole thing had been satisfactorily
explained as an indiscretion; as a matter of fact the inci-
dent was closed. Dick kept saying, he ought to be allowed
to explain his position, and the major kept saying the inci-
dent was closed, etcetera, etcetera, until it all seemed a little
silly and he left the office. The major promised him trans-
portation to Paris if he wanted to take it up with the office
there. Dick went back to the hotel feeling baffled and sore.

The other two had gone out, so he and Steve walked
around the town, looking at the sunny streets, that smelt of
frying oliveoil and wine and old stones, and the domed
baroque churches and the columns and the Pantheon and
the Tiber. They didn't have a cent in their pockets to buy
lunch or a drink with. They spent the afternoon hungry,
napping glumly on the warm sod of the Pincian, and got
back to the room famished and depressed to find Schuyler
and Ripley drinking vermouth and soda and in high spirits.
Schuyler had run into an old friend of his father's, Colonel
Anderson, who was on a mission investigating the Red
Cross, and had poured out his woes and given him dope
about small graft at the office in Milan. Major Anderson
had set him up to lunch and highballs at the Hotel de
Russie, lent him a hundred dollars and fixed him up with
a job in the publicity department. "So men and brethren,
evviva Italia and the goddamned Alleati, we're all set."
"What about the dossier?" Steve asked savagely. "Aw
forget it, siamo tutti Italiani . . . who's a defeatist now?"

Schuyler set them all up to meals, took them out to
Tivoli and the Lake of Nemi in a staff car, and finally put

-208-

them on the train to Paris with the rating of captain on
their transport orders.

The first day in Paris Steve went off to the Red Cross
office to get shipped home. "To hell with it, I'm going to
C.O.," was all he'd say. Ripley enlisted in the French
artillery school at Fontainebleau. Dick got himself a cheap
room in a little hotel on the Ile St. Louis and spent his
days interviewing first one higher up and then another in
the Red Cross; Hiram Halsey Cooper had suggested the
names in a very guarded reply to a cable Dick sent him
from Rome. The higherups sent him from one to the
other. "Young man," said one baldheaded official in a
luxurious office at the Hotel Crillon, "your opinions, while
showing a senseless and cowardly turn of mind, don't
matter. The American people is out to get the kaiser. We
are bending every nerve and every energy towards that
end; anybody who gets in the way of the great machine
the energy and devotion of a hundred million patriots is
building towards the stainless purpose of saving civiliza-
tion from the Huns will be mashed like a fly. I'm surprised
that a collegebred man like you hasn't more sense. Don't
monkey with the buzzsaw."

Finally he was sent to the army intelligence service
where he found a young fellow named Spaulding he'd
known in college who greeted him with a' queazy smile.
"Old man," he said, "in a time like this we can't give in
to our personal feelings can we . . .? I think it's per-
fectly criminal to allow yourself the luxury of private
opinions, perfectly criminal. It's war time and we've all got
to do our duty, it's people like you that are encouraging
the Germans to keep up the fight, people like you and the
Russians." Spaulding's boss was a captain and wore spurs
and magnificently polished puttees; he was a sternlooking
young man with a delicate profile. He strode up to Dick,
put his face close to his and yelled, "What would you do
if two Huns attacked your sister? You'd fight, wouldn't

-209-

you? . . . if you're not a dirty yellow dawg. . . ." Dick
tried to point out that he was anxious to keep on doing the
work he had been doing, he was trying to get back to the
front with the Red Cross, he wanted an opportunity to ex-
plain his position. The captain strode up and down, bawling
him out, yelling that any man who was still a pacifist after
the President's declaration of war was a moron or what
was worse a degenerate and that they didn't want people
like that in the A.E.F. and that he was going to see to
it that Dick would be sent back to the States and that he
would not be allowed to come back in any capacity what-
soever. "The A.E.F. is no place for a slacker."

Dick gave up and went to the Red Cross office to get his
transportation; they gave him an order for the Touraine
sailing from Bordeaux in two weeks. His last two weeks in
Paris he spent working as a volunteer stretcherbearer at
the American hospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne.
It was June. There were airraids every clear night and
when the wind was right you could hear the guns on the
front. The German offensive was on, the lines were so
near Paris the ambulances were evacuating wounded
directly on the basehospitals. All night the stretcher cases
would spread along the broad pavements under the trees
in fresh leaf in front of the hospital; Dick would help carry
them up the marble stairs into the reception room. One
night they put him on duty outside the operating room and
for twelve hours he had the job of carrying out buckets of
blood and gauze from which protruded occasionally a
shattered bone or a piece of an arm or a leg. When he went
off duty he'd walk home achingly tired through the straw-
berryscented early Parisian morning, thinking of the faces
and the eyes and the sweatdrenched hair and the clenched
fingers clotted with blood and dirt and the fellows kidding
and pleading for cigarettes and the bubbling groans of the
lung cases.

One day he saw a pocket compass in a jeweller's win-

-210-

dow on the Rue de Rivoli. He went in and bought it;
there was suddenly a fullformed plan in his head to buy a
civilian suit, leave his uniform in a heap on the wharf at
Bordeaux and make for the Spanish border. With luck and
all the old transport orders he had in his inside pocket he
was sure he could make it; hop across the border and then,
once in a country free from nightmare, decide what to do.
He even got ready a letter to send his mother.

All the time he was packing his books and other junk
in his dufflebag and carrying it on his back up the quais to
the Gare d'Orleans, Swinburne Song in Time of Order
kept going through his head:

While three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three.

By gum, he must write some verse: what people needed
was stirring poems to nerve them for revolt against their
cannibal governments. Sitting in the secondclass compart-
ment he was so busy building a daydream of himself living
in a sunscorched Spanish town, sending out flaming poems
and manifestoes, calling young men to revolt against their
butchers, poems that would be published by secret presses
all over the world, that he hardly saw the suburbs of Paris
or the bluegreen summer farmlands sliding by.

Let our flag run out straight in the wind
The old red shall be floated again
When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned
When the names that were twenty are ten

Even the rumblebump rumblebump of the French rail-
road train seemed to be chanting as if the words were mut-
tered low in unison by a marching crowd:

While three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three.

-211-

At noon Dick got hungry and went to the diner to
eat a last deluxe meal. He sat down at a table opposite a
goodlooking young man in a French officer's uniform.
"Good God, Ned, is that you?" Blake Wigglesworth
threw back his head in the funny way he had and laughed.
"Garçon," he shouted, "un verre pour le monsieur."

"But how long were you in the Lafayette Escadrille?"
stammered Dick.

"Not long . . . they wouldn't have me."

"And how about the Navy?"

"Threw me out too, the damn fools think I've got T.B.
. . . garçon, une bouteille de champagne. . . . Where
are you going?"

"I'll explain."

"Well, I'm going home on the Touraine." Ned threw
back his head laughing again and his lips formed the syl-
lables blahblahblahblah. Dick noticed that although his
face was very pale and thin his skin under his eyes and up
onto the temples was flushed and his eyes looked a little
too bright. "Well, so am I," he heard himself say.

"I got into hot water," said Ned.

"Me too," said Dick. "Very."

They lifted their glasses and looked into each other's
eyes and laughed. They sat in the diner all afternoon talk-
ing and drinking and got to Bordeaux boiled as owls. Ned
had spent all his money in Paris and Dick had very little
left, so they had to sell their bedrolls and equipment to a
couple of American lieutenants just arrived they met in
the Café de Bordeaux. It was almost like old days in
Boston going around from bar to bar and looking for
places to get drinks after closing. They spent most of the
night in an elegant maison publique all upholstered in
pink satin, talking to the madam, a driedup woman with
a long upper lip like a llama's wearing a black spangled
evening dress, who took a fancy to them and made them
stay and eat onion soup with her. They were so busy

-212-

talking they forgot about the girls. She'd been in the
Transvaal during the Boer War and spoke a curious
brand of South African English. "Vous comprennez ve
had very fine clientele, every man jack officers, very much
elegance, decorum. These johnnies off the veldt . . . get
the hell outen here . . . bloody select don't you know. Ve
had two salons, one salon English officers, one salon Boer
officers, very select, never in all the war make any bloody
row, no fight. . . . Vos compatriotes les Americains ce
n'est pas comme ça, mes amis. Beaucoup sonofabeetch,
make drunk, make bloody row, make sick, naturellement
il y a aussi des gentils garçons comme vous, mes mignons,
des veritables gentlemens," and she patted them both on
the cheeks with her horny ringed hands. When they left
she wanted to kiss them and went with them to the door
saying, "Bonsoir mes jolis petits gentlemens."

All the crossing they were never sober after eleven in
the morning; it was calm misty weather; they were very
happy. One night when he was standing alone in the stern
beside the small gun, Dick was searching his pocket for a
cigarette when his fingers felt something hard in the lining
of his coat. It was the little compass he had bought to
help him across the Spanish border. Guiltily, he fished it
out and dropped it overboard.

NEWSREEL XXVII

HER WOUNDED HERO OF WAR A FRAUD
SAYS WIFE IN SUIT

Mid the wars great coise
Stands the red cross noise
She's the rose of no man's land

-213-

according to the thousands who had assembled to see the
launching and were eyewitnesses of the disaster the scaffold
simply seemed to turn over like a gigantic turtle precipitating
its occupants into twentyfive feet of water. This was exactly
four minutes before the launching was scheduled

Oh that battle of Paree
It's making a bum out of me

BRITISH BEGIN OPERATION ON AFGHAN
FRONTIER

the leading part in world trade which the U.S. is now
confidently expected to take, will depend to a very great extent
upon the intelligence and success with which its harbors are
utilized and developed

I wanta go home I wanta go home
The bullets they whistle the cannons they roar
I dont want to go to the trenches no more
Oh ship me over the sea
Where the Allemand cant get at me

you have begun a crusade against toys, but if all the
German toys were commandeered and destroyed the end of
German importations would not yet have been reached

HOLDS UP 20 DINERS IN CAFE

LAWHATING GATHERINGS NOT TO BE ALLOWED IN
CRITICAL TIME THREATENING SOCIAL UPHEAVAL

Oh my I'm too young to die
I wanta go home

Nancy Enjoys Nightlife Despite Raids

TATTOOED WOMAN SOUGHT BY POLICE IN
TRUNK MURDER

ARMY WIFE SLASHED BY ADMIRER

-214-

Young Man Alleged to Have Taken Money to Aid in
Promotion of a Reserve Officer. It appears that these men
were Chinese merchants from Irkutsk, Chita and elsewhere
who were proceeding homeward to Harbin carrying their
profits for investment in new stocks

Oh that battle of Paree
Its making a bum out of me
Toujours la femme et combien

300,000 RUSSIAN NOBLES SLAIN BY
BOLSHEVIKI

Bankers of This Country, Britain and France to
Safeguard Foreign Investors

these three girls came to France thirteen months ago and
were the first concertparty to entertain at the front. They
staged a show for the American troops from a flatca