U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [83]
-197-"This war's hel ain't it de truth?" he said; they al got to laughing.
"You guys seem to be a couple of pretty good guys," the sailor said. They handed him the bottle and he took a gulp.
"You fel ers are princes," he added spluttering, "and I'm goin' to tel you what I think, see. .
. . This whole god-dam war's a gold brick, it ain't on the level, its crooked from A to Z. No matter how it comes out fel ers like us gets the's-y end of the stick, see? Wel , what I say is al bets is off . . . every man go to hel in his own way . . . and three strikes is out, see?" They finished up the cognac. Singing out savagely, "To hel wid 'em I say," the sailor threw the bottle with al his might against the head of the stone lion. The Genoese lion went on staring ahead with glassy doglike eyes.
Sourlooking loafers started gathering around to see what the trouble was so they moved on, the sailor waving his silk stockings as he walked. They found him his steamer tied up to the dock and shook hands again and again at the gangplank.
Then it was up to Dick and Steve to get themselves back across the ten miles to Ponte Decimo. Chil y and sleepy they walked until their feet were sore, then hopped a wop truck the rest of the way. The cobbles of the square and the roofs of the cars were covered with hoarfrost when they got there. Dick made a noise getting into the stretcher beside Sheldrake's and Sheldrake woke up, "What the hel ?" he said. "Shut up," said Dick, "don't you see you're waking people up?"
Next day they got to Milan, huge wintry city with its overgrown pincushion cathedral and its Gal eria jammed with people and restaurants and newspapers and whores and Cinzano and Campari Bitters. There fol owed another period of waiting during which most of the section settled down to an endless crapgame in the back room at Cova's; then they moved out to a place cal ed Dolo on a frozen
-198-canal somewhere in the Venetian plain. To get to the ele-gant carved and painted vil a where they were quartered they had to cross the Brenta. A company of British sappers had the bridge al mined and ready to blow up when the retreat began again.They promised to wait til Section 1
had crossed before blowing the bridge up. In Dolo there was very little to do; it was raw wintry weather; while most of the section sat around the stove and swapped their jack at poker, the grenadine guards made themselves hot rum punches over a gasoline burner, read Boccaccio in Italian and argued with Steve about anarchism.
Dick spent a great deal of his time wondering how he was going to get to Venice. It turned out that the fat lieutenant was worried by the fact that the section had no cocoa and that the Red Cross commissary in Milan hadn't sent the section any breakfast foods. Dick suggested that Venice was one of the world's great cocoamarkets, and that somebody who knew Italian ought to be sent over there to buy cocoa; so one frosty morning Dick found himself properly equipped with papers and seals boarding the little steamboat at Mestre.
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