U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [269]
-209-you? . . . if you're not a dirty yel ow dawg. . . ." Dick tried to point out that he was anxious to keep on doing the work he had been doing, he was trying to get back to the front with the Red Cross, he wanted an opportunity to ex-plain his position. The captain strode up and down, bawling him out, yel ing that any man who was stil a pacifist after the President's declaration of war was a moron or what was worse a degenerate and that they didn't want people like that in the A.E.F. and that he was going to see to it that Dick would be sent back to the States and that he would not be al owed to come back in any capacity what-soever. "The A.E.F. is no place for a slacker." Dick gave up and went to the Red Cross office to get his transportation; they gave him an order for the Touraine sailing from Bordeaux in two weeks. His last two weeks in Paris he spent working as a volunteer stretcherbearer at the American hospital on the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne. It was June. There were airraids every clear night and when the wind was right you could hear the guns on the front. The German offensive was on, the lines were so near Paris the ambulances were evacuating wounded
directly on the basehospitals. Al night the stretcher cases would spread along the broad pavements under the trees in fresh leaf in front of the hospital; Dick would help carry them up the marble stairs into the reception room. One night they put him on duty outside the operating room and for twelve hours he had the job of carrying out buckets of blood and gauze from which protruded occasional y a shattered bone or a piece of an arm or a leg. When he went off duty he'd walk home achingly tired through the straw-berryscented early Parisian morning, thinking of the faces and the eyes and the sweatdrenched hair and the clenched fingers clotted with blood and dirt and the fel ows kidding and pleading for cigarettes and the bubbling groans of the lung cases.
One day he saw a pocket compass in a jewel er's win--210-dow on the Rue de Rivoli. He went in and bought it; there was suddenly a ful formed plan in his head to buy a civilian suit, leave his uniform in a heap on the wharf at Bordeaux and make for the Spanish border. With luck and al the old transport orders he had in his inside pocket he was sure he could make it; hop across the border and then, once in a country free from nightmare, decide what to do. He even got ready a letter to send his mother.
Al the time he was packing his books and other junk in his dufflebag and carrying it on his back up the quais to the Gare d'Orleans, Swinburne Song in Time of Order kept going through his head:
While three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three.
By gum, he must write some verse: what people needed was stirring poems to nerve them for revolt against their cannibal governments. Sitting in the secondclass compartment he was so busy building a daydream of himself living in a sunscorched Spanish town, sending out flaming poems and manifestoes, cal ing young men to revolt against their butchers, poems that would be published by secret presses al over the world, that he hardly saw the suburbs of Paris or the bluegreen summer farmlands sliding by. Let our flag run out straight in the wind
The old red shall be floated again
When the ranks that are thin shall be thinned
When the names that were twenty are ten
Even the rumblebump rumblebump of the French rail-road train seemed to be chanting as if the words were mut-tered low in unison by a marching crowd: While three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three.
-211-At noon Dick got hungry and went to the diner to eat a last deluxe meal. He sat down at a table opposite a goodlooking young man in a French officer's uniform.