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
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
Young Man Alleged to Have Taken Money to Aid in Promotion of a Reserve Office. 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 lafemme 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 flatcar base of a large naval gun three kilometers behind the line on the day of the evening of the drive at Chateau Thierry. After that they were assigned to the Aix-les-Bains leave area where they acted during the day as canteen girls and entertained and danced at night
You never knew a place that was so short of men
Beaucoup rum beaucoup fun
Mother’d never know her loving son
Oh, if you want to see that statue of Libertee
Keep away from that battle of Paree
The Camera Eye (35)
there were always two cats the color of hot milk with a little coffee in it with aquamarine eyes and sootblack faces in the window of the laundry opposite the little creamery where we ate breakfast on the Montagne St. Geneviève huddled between the old squeezedup slategrey houses of the Latin Quarter leaning over steep small streets cosy under the fog minute streets lit with different-colored chalks cluttered with infinitesimal bars restaurants paintships and old prints beds bidets faded perfumery microscopic sizzle of frying butter
the Bertha made a snapping noise no louder than a cannon-cracker near the hotel where Oscar Wilde died we all ran up stairs to see if the house was on fire but the old woman whose lard was burning was sore as a crutch
all the big new quarters near the Arc de Triomphe were deserted but in the dogeared yellowbacked Paris of the Carmagnole the Faubourg St Antoine the Commune we were singing
’suis dans l’axe
’suis dans l’axe
’suis dans l’axe du gros canon
when the Bertha dropped in the Seine there was a concours de pêche in the little brightgreen skiffs among all the old whiskery fishermen scooping up in nets the minnows the concussion had stunned
Eveline Hutchins
Eveline went to live with Eleanor in a fine apartment Eleanor had gotten hold of somehow on the quai de la Tournelle. It was the mansard floor of a grey peelingfaced house built at the time of Richelieu and done over under Louis Quinze. Eveline never tired of looking out the window, through the delicate tracing of the wroughtiron balcony, at the Seine where toy steamboats bucked the current, towing shinyvarnished barges that had lace curtains and geraniums in the windows of their deckhouses painted green and red, and at the island opposite where the rocketing curves of the flying buttresses shoved the apse of Nôtre Dâme dizzily upwards out of the trees of a little park. They had tea at a small Buhl table in the window almost every evening when they got home from the office on the Rue de Rivoli, after spending the day pasting pictures of ruined French farms and orphaned children and starving warbabies into scrapbooks to be sent home for use in Red Cross drives.
After tea she’d go out in the kitchen and watch Yvonne cook. With the groceries and sugar they drew at the Red Cross commissary, Yvonne operated a system of barter so that their food hardly cost them anything. At first Eveline tried to stop her but she’d answer with a torrent of argument: did Mademoiselle think that President Poincaré or the generals or the cabinet ministers, ces salots de profiteurs, ces salots d’embusqués, went without their brioches? It was the systme D, ils’s’en fichent des particuliers, des pauvres gens… very well her ladies would eat as well as any old camels of generals, if she had her way she’d have all the generals line up before a firingsquad and the embusqué ministers and the ronds de cuir too. Eleanor said her sufferings had made the old woman a little cracked but Jerry Burnham said it was the rest of the world that was cracked.
Jerry Burnham was the little redfaced man who’d been such a help with the colonel the first night Eveline got to Paris. They often laughed about it afterwards. He was working for the U.P. and appeared every few days in her office on his rounds covering Red Cross activities. He knew all the Paris restaurants and would take Eveline out to dinner at the Tour d’Argent or to lunch at the Taverne Nicholas Flamel and they’d walk around the old streets of the Marais afternoons and get late to their work together. When they’d settle in the evening at a good quiet table in a café where they couldn’t be overheard (all the waiters were spies he said), he’d drink a lot of cognac and soda and pour out his feelings, how his work disgusted him, how a correspondent couldn’t get to see anything anymore, how he had three or four censorships on his neck all the time and had to send out prepared stuff that was all a pack of dirty lies every word of it, how a man lost his selfrespect doing things like that year after year, how a newspaperman had been little better than a skunk before the war, but that now there wasn’t anything low enough you could call him. Eveline would try to cheer him up telling him that when the war was over he ought to write a book like Le Feu and really tell the truth about it. “But the war won’t ever be over… too damn profitable, do you get me? Back home they’re coining money, the British are coining money; even the French, look at Bordeaux and Toulouse and Marseilles coining money and the goddam politicians, all of ’em got bank accounts in Amsterdam or Barcelona, the sons of bitches.” Then he’d take her hand and get a crying jag and promise that if it did end he’d get back his selfrespect and write the great novel he felt he had in him.