U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [98]
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 opinion was asked. The glare got brighter as they got nearer. It turned out to be a tanker on fire outside the breakwater. She was a big new Standard Oil tanker, set-tled a little in the bows with fire pouring out of her and spreading out over the water. You could see the break-water and the lighthouses and the town piling up the hil s behind with red glitter in al the windows and the crowded ships in the harbor al lit up with the red flare.
After they'd anchored, the bosun took Joe and a couple of the youngsters in the dingy and they went over to see what they could do aboard the tanker. The stern was way up out of water. So far as they could see there was no one on the ship. Some wops in a motorboat came up and jab-bered at them but they pretended not to understand what they meant. There was a fireboat standing by too, but there wasn't anything they could do. "Why the hel don't they scuttle her?" the bosun kept saying. Joe caught sight of a ropeladder hanging