1919 (14 page)

Bordeaux, the red Garonne, the pastelcolored streets of old tall
mansardroofed houses, the sunlight and shadow so delicately blue and yellow, the names of the stations all out of Shakespeare, the yellowbacked novels on the bookstands, the bottles of wine in the buvettes, were like nothing he'd imagined. All the way to Paris the faintly bluegreen fields were spattered scarlet with poppies like the first lines of a poem; the little train jogged along in dactyls; everything seemed to fall into rhyme.

They got to Paris too late to report at the Norton-Harjes office. Dick left his bag in the room assigned him with two other fellows at the Hotel Mont Thabor and walked around the streets. It wasn't dark yet. There was almost no traffic but the boulevards were full of strollers in the blue June dusk. As it got darker women leaned out towards them from behind all the trees, girls' hands clutched their arms, here and there a dirty word in English burst like a thrown egg above the nasal singsong of French. The three of them walked arm in arm, a little scared and very aloof, their ears still ringing from the talk on the dangers of infection with syphilis and gonorrhea a medical officer had given the last night on the boat. They went back to the hotel early.

Ed Schuyler, who knew French on account of having been to boarding school in Switzerland, shook his head as he was cleaning his teeth at the washstand and spluttered out through his toothbrush, “C'est la guerre.” “Well, the fist five years'll be the hardest,” said Dick, laughing. Fred Summers was an automobile mechanic from Kansas. He was sitting up in bed in his woolly underwear. “Fellers,” he said, solemnly looking from one to the other, “This ain't a war. . . . It's a goddam whorehouse.”

In the morning they were up early and hurried through their coffee and rolls and rushed out hot and cold with excitement to the rue François Premier to report. They were told where to get their uniforms and cautioned to keep away from wine and women and told to come back in the afternoon. In the afternoon they were told to come back next morning for their identity cards. The identity cards took another day's waiting around. In between they drove around the Bois in horsecabs, went to see Nôtre Dâme and the Conciérgerie and the Sainte Chapelle and out on the street car to Malmaison. Dick was furbishing up his prepschool French and would sit in the mild sunlight among the shabby white statues in the Tuileries Gardens reading
Les Dieux Ont Soif
and
L'Ile des Pinguins.
He and Ed Schuyler and Fred stuck together and after dining exceeding well every night for fear it
might be their last chance at a Paris meal, took a turn around the boulevards in the crowded horizonblue dusk; they'd gotten to the point of talking to the girls now and kidding them along a little. Fred Summers had bought himself a prophylactic kit and a set of smutty postalcards. He said the last night before they left he was going to tear loose. When they got to the front he might get killed and then what? Dick said he liked talking to the girls but that the whole business was too commercial and turned his stomach. Ed Schuyler, who'd been nicknamed Frenchie and was getting very continental in his ways, said that the street girls were too naïve.

The last night before they left was bright moonlight, so the Gothas came over. They were eating in a little restaurant in Montmartre. The cashlady and the waiter made them all go down into the cellar when the sirens started wailing for the second time. There they met up with three youngish women named Suzette, Minette and Annette. When the little honking fireengine went by to announce that the raid was over it was already closing time and they couldn't get any more drinks at the bar; so the girls took them to a closely shuttered house where they were ushered into a big room with livercolored wallpaper that had green roses on it. An old man in a green baize apron brought up champagne and the girls began to sit on knees and ruffle up hair. Summers got the prettiest girl and hauled her right into the alcove where the bed was with a big mirror above the whole length of it. Then he pulled the curtain. Dick found himself stuck with the fattest and oldest one and got disgusted. Her flesh felt like rubber. He gave her ten francs and left.

Hurrying down the black sloping street outside he ran into some Australian officers who gave him a drink of whiskey out of a bottle and took him into another house where they tried to get a show put on, but the madam said the girls were all busy and the Australians were too drunk to pay attention anyway and started to wreck the place. Dick just managed to slip out before the gendarmes came. He was walking in the general direction of the hotel when there was another alerte and he found himself being yanked down into a subway by a lot of Belgians. There was a girl down there who was very pretty and Dick was trying to explain to her that she ought to go to a hotel with him when the man she was with, who was a colonel of Spahis in a red cloak covered with gold braid, came up, his waxed mustaches bristling with fury. Dick explained that it was all a mistake and there
were apologies all around and they were all braves alliés. They walked around several blocks looking for some place to have a drink together, but everything was closed, so they parted regretfully at the door of Dick's hotel. He went up to the room in splendid humor; there he found the other two glumly applying argyrol and Metchnikoff paste. Dick made a good tall story out of his adventures. But the other two said he'd been a hell of a poor sport to walk out on a lady and hurt her sensitive feelings. “Fellers,” began Fred Summers, looking in each of their faces with his round eyes, “it ain't a war, it's a goddam . . .” He couldn't think of a word for it so Dick turned out the light.

COMING YEAR PROMISES REBIRTH OF RAILROADS

 

DEBS IS GIVEN
30
YEARS IN PRISON

 

There's a long long trail awinding

    
Into the land of my dreams

Where the nightingales are singing

    
And the white moon beams

 

future generations will rise up and call those men blessed who have the courage of their convictions, a proper appreciation of the value of human life as contrasted with material gain, and who, imbued with the spirit of brotherhood will lay hold of the great opportunity

 

BONDS BUY BULLETS BUY BONDS

 

COPPERS INFLUENCED BY UNCERTAIN OUTLOOK

 

WOMEN VOTE LIKE VETERAN POLITICIANS

 

restore time honored meat combination dishes such as hash, goulash, meat pies and liver and bacon. Every German soldier carries a little clothesbrush in his pocket; first thing he does when he lands in a prisoncage is to get out this brush and start cleaning his clothes

 

EMPLOYER MUST PROVE WORKER IS ESSENTIAL

 

There's a long long night of waiting

  
Until my dreams all come true

 

AGITATORS CAN'T GET AMERICAN PASSPORTS

 

the two men out of the Transvaal district during the voyage expressed their opinion that the British and American flags expressed nothing and, as far as they were concerned could be sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, and acknowledged that they were socalled Nationalists, a type much resembling the I.W.W. here. “I have no intention” wrote Hearst, “of meeting Governor Smith either publicly, privately, politically, or socially, as I do not find any satisfaction

 

KILLS HERSELF AT SEA; CROWDER IN CITY
AFTER SLACKERS

 

Oh old Uncle Sam

    
He's got the infantree

He's got the cavalree

    
He's got artilleree

And then by God we'll all go to Chermanee

God Help Kaiser Bill!

remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead

three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Récicourt

No      there must be some way      they taught us Land of the Free      conscience      Give me liberty or give me      Well they give us death

sunny afternoon      through the faint aftersick of mustardgas I smell the box the white roses and the white phlox with a crimson eye      three brownandwhitestriped snails hang with infinite delicacy from a honeysucklebranch overhead      up in the blue a sausageballoon grazes drowsily like a tethered cow      there are drunken wasps clinging to the tooripe pears that fall and squash whenever the near guns spew their heavy shells that go off rumbling through the sky

with a whir that makes you remember walking in the woods and starting a woodcock

welltodo country people carefully built the walls and the little backhouse with the cleanscrubbed seat and the quartermoon in the door like the backhouse of an old farm at home      carefully planted the garden and savored the fruit and the flowers and carefully planned this war

to hell with 'em      Patrick Henry in khaki submits to shortarm inspection and puts all his pennies in a Liberty Loan      or give me

arrivés      shrapnel twanging its harps out of tiny powderpuff clouds invites us delicately to glory      we happy watching the careful movements of the snails in the afternoon sunlight talking in low voices about

La Libre Belgique      The Junius papers      Areopagitica Milton went blind for freedom of speech      If you hit the words Democracy will      understand      even      the      bankers      and      the      clergymen      I      you      we      must

 

When three men hold together

The kingdoms are less by three

 

we are happy talking in low voices in the afternoon sunlight about après la guerre that our fingers our blood our lungs our flesh under the dirty khaki feldgrau bleu horizon might go on sweeten grow until we fall from the tree ripe like the tooripe pears      the arrivés know and singing éclats sizzling gas shells      theirs is the power and the glory

or give me death

Randolph Bourne

came as an inhabitant of this earth

without the pleasure of choosing his dwelling or his career.

He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey; there he attended grammar-school and highschool.

At the age of seventeen he went to work as secretary to a Morristown businessman.

He worked his way through Columbia working in a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proofreader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hall.

At Columbia he studied with John Dewey,

got a travelling fellowship that took him to England Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,

wrote a book on the Gary schools.

In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wagner and Sciabine

and bought himself a black cape.

 

This little sparrowlike man,

tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,

always in pain and ailing,

put a pebble in his sling

and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.

 

War,
he wrote,
is the health of the state.

 

Half musician, half educational theorist (weak health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn't spoiled the world for Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog; Look at the yellow, it's beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy man.) Bourne seized with feverish intensity on the ideas then going around at Columbia, he picked rosy glasses out of the turgid jumble of John Dewey's teaching through which he saw clear and sharp

the shining capitol of reformed democracy,

Wilson's New Freedom;

but he was too good a mathematician; he had to work the equations out;

with the result

that in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get unpopular where his bread was buttered at the New Republic;

for
New Freedom
read
Conscription,
for
Democracy, Win the War,
for
Reform, Safeguard the Morgan Loans

for Progress Civilization Education Service,

Buy a Liberty Bond,

Straff the Hun,

Jail the Objectors.

He resigned from
The New Republic;
only
The Seven Arts
had the nerve to publish his articles against the war. The backers of
The Seven Arts
took their money elsewhere; friends didn't like to be seen with Bourne, his father wrote him begging him not to disgrace the family name. The rainbowtinted future of reformed democracy went pop like a pricked soapbubble.

The liberals scurried to Washington;

some of his friends plead with him to climb up on Schoolmaster Wilson's sharabang; the war was great fought from the swivel chairs of Mr. Creel's bureau in Washington.

He was cartooned, shadowed by the espionage service and the counter-espionage service; taking a walk with two girl friends at Wood's Hole he was arrested, a trunk full of manuscript and letters was stolen from him in Connecticut. (Force to the utmost, thundered Schoolmaster Wilson)