U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [256]
sleep during the vague deliberations of the Interna-tional Tribunal. In 1912 he resigned from the Diplomatic Service
and went home to campaign for Roosevelt,
got to Chicago in time to hear them singing On-ward Christian Soldiers at the convention in the Colos-seum; in the closepacked voices and the cheers, he heard the trample of the Russian Marseil aise, the
sul en silence of Mexican peons, Colombian Indians
waiting for a deliverer, in the reverberance of the hymn he heard the measured cadences of the Declaration of Independence.
The talk of social justice petered out; T.R. was
a windbag like the rest of 'em, the Bul Moose was
stuffed with the same sawdust as the G.O.P.
Paxton Hibben ran for Congress as a progressive
in Indiana but the European war had already taken
people's minds off social justice.
-181- War Corr Collier's Weekly 1914-15, staff corr Associated Press in Europe, 1915-17; war corr Leslie's Weekly in Near East and sec Russian commn for Near East Relief, June-Dec 1921
In those years he forgot al about the diplomat's
mauve silk bathrobe and the ivory toilet sets and the little tête-à-têtes with grandduchesses,
he went to Germany as Beveridge's secretary, saw
the German troops goosestepping through Brussels,
saw Poincaré visiting the long doomed gal eries
of Verdun between ranks of bitter halfmutinous sol-diers in blue, saw the gangrened wounds, the cholera, the typhus,
the little children with their bel ies swol en with famine, the maggoty corpses of the Serbian retreat, drunk Al ied officers chasing sick naked girls upstairs in the brothels in Saloniki, soldiers looting stores and churches, French and British sailors fighting with beerbottles in the bars; walked up and down the terrace with King Con-stantine during the bombardment of Athens, fought a duel with a French commission agent who got up and
left when a German sat down to eat in the diningroom at the Grande Bretagne; Hibben thought the duel was a joke until al his friends began putting on silk hats; he stood up and let the Frenchman take two shots at him and then fired into the ground; in Athens as every-where he was always in hot water, a slightly built truculent man, always standing up for his friends, for people out of luck, for some idea, too reckless ever to lay down the careful steppingstones of a respectable career.
Commd 1st lieut F.A. Nov 27-1917; capt May
31-1919; served at war coll camp Grant; in France with 332nd E.A.; Finance Bureau S.O.S.; at G.H.Q. in
-182- office of Insp Gen of A.E.F.; discharged Aug. 21- 1919; capt O.R.C. Feb 7th 1920; recommd Feb 7-
1925
The war in Europe was bloody and dirty and dul ,
but the war in New York revealed such slimy depths
of vileness and hypocrisy that no man who saw it can ever feel the same again; in the army training camps it was different, the boys believed in a world safe for Democracy; Hibben believed in the Fourteen Points,
he believed in The War To End War.
With mil Mission to Armenia, Aug-Dec 1919; staff corr in Europe for the Chicago Tribune; with the Near East Relief 1920-22; sec Russian Red Cross commn in America 1922; v dir for U.S. Nansen Relief Mission 1923; sec AM Commn Relief Russian Children Apr
1922
In the famineyear the cholera year the typhusyear
Paxton Hibben went to Moscow with a relief commis-sion. In Paris they were stil haggling over the price
of blood, squabbling over toy flags, the riverfrontiers on reliefmaps, the historical destiny of peoples, while behind the scenes the good contractplayers, the Deterd-ings, the Zahkaroffs, the Stinnesses sat quiet and pos-sessed themselves of the raw materials. In Moscow there was order,
in Moscow there was work,
in Moscow there was hope;
the Marseillaise of 1905, Onward Christian Sol- diers of 1912, the sul en passiveness of American In-dians, of infantrymen waiting for death at the front was part of the tremendous