U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [264]
There was a thin skim of ice on the lagoon that tore with a sound of silk on either side of the narrow bow where Dick stood leaning forward over the rail, tears in his eyes from the raw wind, staring at the long rows of stakes and the light red buildings rising palely out of the green water to bubblelike domes and square pointedtipped towers that etched themselves sharper and sharper against the zinc sky. The hunchback bridges, the greenslimy steps, the palaces, the marble quays were al empty. The only life was in a group of torpecloboats anchored in the Grand Canal. Dick forgot al about the cocoa walking through sculptured squares and the narrow streets and quays along the icefil ed canals of the great dead city that lay there on the lagoon frail and empty as a cast snakeskin. To the north he could hear the tomtomming of the guns fifteen
-199-miles away on the Piave. On the way back it began to snow.
A few days later they moved up to Bassano behind
Monte Grappa into a late renaissance vil a al painted up with cupids and angels and elaborate draperies. Back of the vil a the Brenta roared day and night under a covered bridge. There they spent their time evacuating cases of frozen feet, drinking hot rum punches at Citadel a where the base hospital and the whorehouses were, and singing The Foggy Foggy Dew and The Little Black Bull Came Down From the Mountain over the rubber spaghetti at chow. Ripley and Steve decided they wanted to learn to draw and spent their days off drawing architectural details or the covered bridge. Schuyler practiced his Italian talking about Nietzsche with the Italian Lieut. Fred Summers had gotten a dose off a Milanese lady who he said must have belonged to one of the best families because she was riding in a carriage and picked him up, not he her, and spent most of his spare time brewing himself home reme-dies like cherry stems in hot water. Dick got to feeling lonely and blue, and in need of privacy, and wrote a great many letters home. The letters he got back made him feel worse than not getting any.
"You must understand how it is," he wrote the Thur-lows, answering an enthusiastic screed of Hilda's about the
"war to end war," "I don't believe in Christianity any more and can't argue from that standpoint, but you do, or at least Edwin does, and he ought to realize that in urging young men to go into this cockeyed lunatic asylum of war he's doing everything he can to undermine al the principles and ideals he most believes in. As the young fel ow we had that talk with in Genoa that night said, it's not on the level, it's a dirty goldbrick game put over by governments and politicians for their own selfish interests, it's crooked from A to Z. If it wasn't for the censorship I could tel you things that would make you vomit."
-200-Then he'd suddenly snap out of his argumentative mood and al the phrases about
-200-Then he'd suddenly snap out of his argumentative mood and al the phrases about liberty and civilization steaming up out of his head would seem damn sil y too, and he'd light the gasoline burner and make a rum punch and cheer up chewing the rag with Steve about books or painting or architecture. Moonlight nights the Austrians made things lively by sending bombing planes over. Some nights Dick found that staying out of the dugout and giving them a chance at him gave him a sort of bitter pleasure, and the dugout wasn't any protection against a direct hit anyway.
Sometime in February Steve read in the paper that the Empress Taitu of Abyssinia had died. They held a wake. They drank al the rum they had and keened until the rest of the section thought they'd gone crazy. They sat in the dark round the open moonlit window wrapped in blankets and drinking warm zabaglione. Some Austrian planes that had been droning overhead suddenly cut off their motors and dumped a load of bombs right in front of them. The antiaircraft guns had been barking for some time and shrapnel sparkling in the moonhazy sky over-head but they'd been too drunk to notice. One