U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [76]
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 roar of the Marxian Inter- nationale.
Hibben believed in the new world.
-183-Back in America
somebody got hold of a photograph of Captain
Paxton Hibben laying a wreath on Jack Reed's gravei they tried to throw him out of the O.R.C.;
at Princeton at the twentieth reunion of his col-lege class his classmates started to lynch him; they were drunk and perhaps it was just a col egeboy prank twenty years too late but they had a noose around his neck, lynch the goddam red,
no more place in America for change, no more
place for the old gags: social justice, progressivism, re-volt against oppression, democracy; put the reds on the skids,
no money for them,
no jobs for them.
Mem Authors League of America, Soc of Colonial
Wars, Vets Foreign Wars, Am Legion, fellow Royal and Am Geog Socs. Decorated chevalier Order of St. Stanislas (Russian), Officer Order of the Redeemer (Greek), Order of the Sacred Treasure (