U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [278]
-230-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 sea-man 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 swobbing 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 smal tidal wave that stove in two of the starboard lifeboats and the convoy got scat-tered 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 Bor-deaux he'd have liked to look up Marceline, but none of the crew got to go ashore. The bosun went and got cockeyed with a couple of
doughboys and came back with a bottle of cognac for Joe, whom he'd taken a shine to, and a lot of latrine talk about how the frogs were licked and the limeys and the wops were licked something terrible and how if it hadn't been for us the Kaiser ud be riding into gay Paree any day and as it was it was nip and tuck. It was cold as hel . Joe and the bosun went and drank the cognac in the gal ey with the cook who was an old timer who'd been in the Klondike gold rush. They had the ship to themselves be-cause the officers were al ashore taking a look at the ma-demosels and everybody else was asleep. The bosun said it was the end of civilization and the cook said he didn't give a f --k and Joe said he didn't give a f --k and the bosun said they were a couple of goddam bolshevikis and passed out cold.
It was a funny trip round Spain and through the
-231-Straits and up the French coast to Genoa. Al the way there was a single file of camouflaged freighters, Greeks and Britishers and Norwegians and Americans, al hugging the coast and creeping along with lifepreservers piled on deck and boats swung out on the davits. Passing 'em was another line coming back light, transports and col iers from Italy and Saloniki, white hospital ships, every kind of old tub out of the seven seas, rusty freighters with their screws so far out of the water you could hear 'em thrash-ing a couple of hours after they were hul down and out of sight. Once they got into the Mediterranean there were French and British battleships to seaward al the time and sil ylooking destroyers with their long smokesmudges that would hail you and come aboard to see the ship's papers. Ashore it didn't look like the war a bit. The weather was sunny after they passed Gibraltar. The Span-ish coast was green with bare pink and yel ow mountains back of the shore and al scattered with little white houses like lumps of sugar that bunched up here and there into towns. Crossing the Gulf of Lyons in a drizzling rain and driving fog and nasty choppy sea they came within an aceof running down a big felucca loaded with barrels of wine. Then they were bowling along the French Riviera in a howling northwest wind, with the redroofed towns al bright and shiny and the dry hil s rising rocky behind them, and snowmountains standing out clear up above. After they passed Monte Carlo it was a circus, the houses were al pink and blue and yel ow and there were tal poplars and tal pointed churchsteeples in al the val eys. That night they were on the lookout for the big light marked on the chart for Genoa when they saw a red glare ahead. Rumor went around that the heinies had captured the town and were burning it. The second mate put up to the skipper right on the bridge that they'd al be captured if they went any further and they'd better go back and put into Marseil es but the skipper told him it was none of
-232-his goddam business and to keep his mouth shut til his