U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [268]
-207-pacifist views but now that the country was at war were wil ing to do any kind of work they could to help, but that didn't mean he believed in the war, he felt he ought to be al owed to explain his position. The major said Ah wel he quite understood, etcetera, etcetera, but that the young should realize the importance of discretion, etcetera, etcetera, and that the whole thing had been satisfactorily explained as an indiscretion; as a matter of fact the inci-dent was closed. Dick kept saying, he ought to be al owed to explain his position, and the major kept saying the inci-dent was closed, etcetera, etcetera, until it al seemed a little sil y and he left the office. The major promised him trans-portation to Paris if he wanted to take it up with the office there. Dick went back to the hotel feeling baffled and sore. The other two had gone out, so he and Steve walked around the town, looking at the sunny streets, that smelt of frying oliveoil and wine and old stones, and the domed baroque churches and the columns and the Pantheon and the Tiber. They didn't have a cent in their pockets to buy lunch or a drink with. They spent the afternoon hungry, napping glumly on the warm sod of the Pincian, and got back to the room famished and depressed to find Schuyler and Ripley drinking vermouth and soda and in high spirits. Schuyler had run into an old friend of his father's, Colonel Anderson, who was on a mission investigating the Red Cross, and had poured out his woes and given him dope about smal graft at the office in Milan. Major Anderson had set him up to lunch and highbal s at the Hotel de Russie, lent him a hundred dol ars and fixed him up with a job in the publicity department. "So men and brethren, evviva Italia and the goddamned Al eati, we're al set."
"What about the dossier?" Steve asked savagely. "Aw forget it, siamo tutti Italiani . . . who's a defeatist now?" Schuyler set them al up to meals, took them out to Tivoli and the Lake of Nemi in a staff car, and final y put
-208-them on the train to Paris with the rating of captain on their transport orders. The first day in Paris Steve went off to the Red Cross office to get shipped home. "To hel with it, I'm going to C.O.," was al he'd say. Ripley enlisted in the French artil ery 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 Cril on,
"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 mil ion patriots is building towards the stainless purpose of saving civiliza-tion from the Huns wil be mashed like a fly. I'm surprised that a col egebred man like you hasn't more sense. Don't monkey with the buzzsaw."
Final y he was sent to the army intel igence service where he found a young fel ow named Spaulding he'd
known in col ege 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 per-fectly criminal to al ow yourself the luxury of private opinions, perfectly criminal. It's war time and we've al got to do our duty, it's people like you that are encouraging the