The same evening he asked Eveline to dine with him at the Café de la Paix and to do it she broke a date she had with Jerry Burnham who had gotten back from the Near East and the Balkans and was full of stories of cholera and calamity. J.W. ordered a magnificent dinner, he said Eleanor had told him to see if Eveline didn’t need a little cheering up. He talked about the gigantic era of expansion that would dawn for America after the war. America the good samaritan healing the wounds of wartorn Europe. It was as if he was rehearsing a speech, when he got to the end of it he looked at Eveline with a funny deprecatory smile and said, “And the joke of it is, it’s true,” and Eveline laughed and suddenly found that she liked J.W. very much indeed.
She had on a new dress she’d bought at Paquin’s with some money her father had sent her for her birthday, and it was a relief after the uniform. They were through eating before they had really gotten started talking. Eveline wanted to try to get him to talk about himself. After dinner they went to Maxim’s, but that was full up with brawling drunken aviators, and the rumpus seemed to scare J.W. so that Eveline suggested to him that they go down to her place and have a glass of wine. When they got to the quai de la Tournelle, just as they were stepping out of J.W.’s staffcar she caught sight of Don Stevens walking down the street. For a second she hoped he wouldn’t see them, but he turned around and ran back. He had a young fellow with him in a private’s uniform whose name was Johnson. They all went up and sat around glumly in her parlor. She and J.W. couldn’t seem to talk about anything but Eleanor, and the other two sat glumly in their chairs looking embarrassed until J.W. got to his feet, went down to his staffcar, and left.
“God damn it, if there’s anything I hate it’s a Cross Red Major,” broke out Don as soon as the door closed behind J.W.
Eveline was angry. “Well, it’s no worse than being a fake Quaker,” she said icily.
“You must forgive our intruding, Miss Hutchins,” mumbled the doughboy who had a blonde Swedish look.
“We wanted to get you to come out to a café or something, but it’s too late now,” started Don crossly. The doughboy interrupted him, “I hope, Miss Hutchins, you don’t mind our intruding, I mean my intruding… I begged Don to bring me along. He’s talked so much about you and it’s a year since I’ve seen a real nice American girl.”
He had a deferential way of talking and a whiny Minnesota accent that Eveline hated at first, but by the time he excused himself and left she liked him and stood up for him when Don said, “He’s an awful sweet guy but there’s something sappy about him. I was afraid you wouldn’t like him.” She wouldn’t let Don spend the night with her as he’d expected and he went away looking very sullen.
In October Eleanor came back with a lot of antique Italian painted panels she’d picked up for a song. In the Red Cross office there were more people than were needed for the work and she and Eleanor and J.W. took a tour of the Red Cross canteens in the east of France in a staffcar. It was a wonderful trip, the weather was good for a wonder, almost like American October, they had lunch and dinner at regimental headquarters and army corps headquarters and divisional headquarters everywhere, and all the young officers were so nice to them, and J.W. was in such a good humor and kept them laughing all the time, and they saw field batteries firing and an airplane duel and sausage balloons and heard the shriek of an arrivé. It was during that trip that Eveline began to notice for the first time something cool in Eleanor’s manner that hurt her; they’d been such good friends the first week Eleanor had gotten back from Rome.
Back in Paris it suddenly got very exciting, so many people they knew turned up, Eveline’s brother George who was an interpreter at the headquarters of the S.O.S. and a Mr. Robbins, a friend of J.W.’s who was always drunk and had a very funny way of talking and Jerry Burnham and a lot of newspaper men and Major Appleton who was now a Colonel. They had little dinners and parties and the main difficulty was sorting out ranks and getting hold of people who mixed properly. Fortunately their friends were all officers or correspondents who ranked as officers. Only once Don Stevens turned up just before they were having Colonel Appleton and Brigadier General Byng to dinner, and Eveline’s asking him to stay made things very awkward because the General thought Quakers were slackers of the worst kind, and Don flared up and said a pacifist could be a better patriot than a staff officer in a soft job and that patriotism was a crime against humanity anyway. It would have been very disagreeable if Colonel Appleton who had drunk a great many cocktails hadn’t broken through the little gilt chair he was sitting on and the General had laughed and kidded the Colonel with a bad pun about avoir du poise that took everybody’s mind off the argument. Eleanor was very sore about Don, and after the guests had left she and Eveline had a standup quarrel. Next morning Eleanor wouldn’t speak to her; Eveline went out to look for another apartment.
Newsreel XXVIII
Oh the eagles they fly high
In Mobile, in Mobile
Americans swim broad river and scale steep banks of canal in brilliant capture of Dun. It is a remarkable fact that the Compagnie Generale Transatlantique, more familiarly known as the French Line, has not lost a single vessel in its regular passenger service during the entire period of the war
RED FLAG FLIES ON BALTIC
“I went through Egypt to join Allenby;” he said, “I flew in an aeroplane making the journey in two hours that it took the children of Israel forty years to make. That is something to set people thinking of the progress of modern science.”
Lucky cows don’t fly
In Mobile, in Mobile
PERSHING FORCES FOE FURTHER BACK
SINGS FOR WOUNDED SOLDIERS; NOT SHOT AS SPY
Je donnerais Versailles
Paris et Saint Denis
Le tours de Nôtre Dâme
Les clochers de mon pays
HELP THE FOOD ADMINISTRATION BY
REPORTING WAR PROFITEERS
the completeness of the accord reached on most points by the conferees caused satisfaction and even some surprise among participants
REDS FORCE MERCHANT VESSELS TO FLEE
HUNS ON RUN
Auprès de ma blonde
Qu’il fait bon fait bon fait bon
Auprès de ma blonde
Qu’il fait bon dormir
CHEZ LES SOCIALISTES LES AVEUGLES SONT ROI
The German government requests the President of the united States of America to take steps for the restoration of peace, to notify all the belligerents of this request and to invite them to delegate plenipotentiaries for the purpose of taking up negotiations. The German Government accepts, as a basis for the peace negotiations, the programme laid down by the President of the United States in his message to Congress of January 8th, 1918, and in his subsequent pronouncements, particularly in his address of September 27th, 1918. In order to avoid further bloodshed the German government requests the President of the United States to bring about the immediate conclusion of a general armistice on land, on the water, and in the air.
Joe Williams
Joe had been hanging around New York and Brooklyn for a while, borrowing money from Mrs. Olsen and getting tanked up all the time. One day she went to work and threw him out. It was damned cold and he had to go to a mission a couple of nights. He was afraid of getting arrested for the draft and he was fed up with every goddam thing; it ended by his going out as ordinary seaman on the Appalachian, a big new freighter bound for Bordeaux and Genoa. It kinder went with the way he felt being treated like a jailbird again and swabbing decks and chipping paint. In the focastle there was mostly country kids who’d never seen the sea and a few old bums who weren’t good for anything. They got into a dirty blow four days out and shipped a small tidal wave that stove in two of the starboard lifeboats and the convoy got scattered and they found that the deck hadn’t been properly caulked and the water kept coming down into the focastle. It turned out that Joe was the only man they had on board the mate could trust at the wheel, so they took him off scrubbing paint and in his four hour tricks he had plenty of time to think about how lousy everything was. In Bordeaux he’d have liked to look up Marceline, but none of the crew got to go ashore.