1919 (25 page)

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 battery 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 counter-barrages and heavy gasbombardments; 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 and Ripley had gotten a little extra sniff of mustard gas up at P2 one night and vomited whenever they ate anything.

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 middle 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 backhouse, 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 saying, “Do you know? I was thinking how fine it would be 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 sitting 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 attached to the French. Everybody got a copy of the section's citation; Dick Norton made them a speech under shellfire, 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 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 drinking 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 Foreign Legion or the Lafayette Escadrille.

Fred Summers said, “Fellers, this war's the most gigantic 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 retreating. It was thought that sending the 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 Summers took on a mysterious Serbian lad 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 to Marseilles; 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, Montgomery 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 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 highpressure 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 section 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 cockeyed 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. 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 cathedral looking down on the harbor, steamboats, great expanses 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 Vintimiglia. 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 Presidente 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 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 magnificent; on every blank wall the damn wops had painted windows and colonnades and balconies with fat Titianhaired 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 fighting 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.