1919 (27 page)

“Go and bring her back,” the colonel said to the ordinanza. 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 lieutenants 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 nothing,” 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 evacuate 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 Steven'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 frigging 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 intelligence 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 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 transportation, 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 Pistoja, Lucca, Pisa and back to the main line at Florence. When the conductors 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 the got to Rome, to the 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 highclass 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 got 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 agreeable 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 explain 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 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, etcetera, and that the whole thing had been satisfactorily explained as an indiscretion; as a matter of fact the incident was closed. Dick kept saying, he ought to be allowed to explain his position, and the major kept saying the incident was closed, etcetera, etcetera, until it all seemed a little silly and he left the office. The major promised him transportation 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 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 civilization 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 perfectly 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 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 explain 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 whatsoever. “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 strawberryscented 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 window on the Rue de Rivoli. He went in and bought it; there was suddenly a full-formed 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's
Song in Time of Order
kept going through his head:

 

While three men hold together