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
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 compartment 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 railroad train seemed to be chanting as if the words were muttered low in unison by a marching crowd:
While three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three.
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 syllables 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 talking 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 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, “Bonsoi mes jolis petits gentlemens.”