1919
In the morning they were up early and hurried through their coffee and rolls and rushed out hot and cold with excitement to the rue François Premier to report. They were told where to get their uniforms and cautioned to keep away from wine and women and told to come back in the afternoon. In the afternoon they were told to come back next morning for their identity cards. The identity cards took another day’s waiting around. In between they drove around the Bois in horsecabs, went to see Nôtre Dâme and the Conciérgerie and the Sainte Chapelle and out on the street car to Malmaison. Dick was furbishing up his prepschool French and would sit in the mild sunlight among the shabby white statues in the Tuileries Gardens reading Les Dieux Ont Soif and L’Ile des Pinguins. He and Ed Schuyler and Fred stuck together and after dining exceeding well every night for fear it might be their last chance at a Paris meal, took a turn around the boulevards in the crowded horizonblue dusk; they’d gotten to the point of talking to the girls now and kidding them along a little. Fred Summers had bought himself a prophylactic kit and a set of smutty postalcards. He said the last night before they left he was going to tear loose. When they got to the front he might get killed and then what? Dick said he liked talking to the girls but that the whole business was too commercial and turned his stomach. Ed Schuyler, who’d been nicknamed Frenchie and was getting very continental in his ways, said that the street girls were too naïve.
The last night before they left was bright moonlight, so the Gothas came over. They were eating in a little restaurant in Montmartre. The cashlady and the waiter made them all go down into the cellar when the sirens started wailing for the second time. There they met up with three youngish women named Suzette, Minette and Annette. When the little honking fireengine went by to announce that the raid was over it was already closing time and they couldn’t get any more drinks at the bar; so the girls took them to a closely shuttered house where they were ushered into a big room with livercolored wallpaper that had green roses on it. An old man in a green baize apron brought up champagne and the girls began to sit on knees and ruffle up hair. Summers got the prettiest girl and hauled her right into the alcove where the bed was with a big mirror above the whole length of it. Then he pulled the curtain. Dick found himself stuck with the fattest and oldest one and got disgusted. Her flesh felt like rubber. He gave her ten francs and left.
Hurrying down the black sloping street outside he ran into some Australian officers who gave him a drink of whiskey out of a bottle and took him into another house where they tried to get a show put on, but the madam said the girls were all busy and the Australians were too drunk to pay attention anyway and started to wreck the place. Dick just managed to slip out before the gendarmes came. He was walking in the general direction of the hotel when there was another alerte and he found himself being yanked down into a subway by a lot of Belgians. There was a girl down there who was very pretty and Dick was trying to explain to her that she ought to go to a hotel with him when the man she was with, who was a colonel of Spahis in a red cloak covered with gold braid, came up, his waxed mustaches bristling with fury. Dick explained that it was all a mistake and there were apologies all around and they were all braves alliés. They walked around several blocks looking for some place to have a drink together, but everything was closed, so they parted regretfully at the door of Dick’s hotel. He went up to the room in splendid humor; there he found the other two glumly applying argyrol and Metchnikoff paste. Dick made a good tall story out of his adventures. But the other two said he’d been a hell of a poor sport to walk out on a lady and hurt her sensitive feelings. “Fellers,” began Fred Summers, looking in each of their faces with his round eyes, “it ain’t a war, it’s a goddam . . .” He couldn’t think of a word for it so Dick turned out the light.
Newsreel XXII
COMING YEAR PROMISES REBIRTH OF RAILROADS
DEBS IS GIVEN 30 YEARS IN PRISON
There’s a long long trail awinding
Into the land of my dreams
Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams
future generations will rise up and call those men blessed who have the courage of their convictions, a proper appreciation of the value of human life as contrasted with material gain, and who, imbued with the spirit of brotherhood will lay hold of the great opportunity
BONDS BUY BULLETS BUY BONDS
COPPERS INFLUENCED BY UNCERTAIN OUTLOOK
WOMEN VOTE LIKE VETERAN POLITICIANS
restore time honored meat combination dishes such as hash, goulash, meat pies and liver and bacon. Every German soldier carries a little clothesbrush in his pocket; first thing he does when he lands in a prisoncage is to get out this brush and start cleaning his clothes
EMPLOYER MUST PROVE WORKER IS ESSENTIAL
There’s a long long night of waiting
Until my dreams all come true
AGITATORS CAN’T GET AMERICAN PASSPORTS
the two men out of the Transvaal district during the voyage expressed their opinion that the British and American flags expressed nothing and, as far as they were concerned could be sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic, and acknowledged that they were socalled Nationalists, a type much resembling the I.W.W. here. “I have no intention” wrote Hearst, “of meeting Governor Smith either publicly, privately, politically, or socially, as I do not find any satisfaction
KILLS HERSELF AT SEA; CROWDER IN CITY
AFTER SLACKERS
Oh old Uncle Sam
He’s got the infantree
He’s got the cavalree
He’s got artilleree
And then by God we’ll all go to Chermanee
God Help Kaiser Bill!
The Camera Eye (30)
remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead
three of us sit in the dry cement fountain of the little garden with the pink walls in Récicourt
No there must be some way they taught us Land of the Free conscience Give me liberty or give me Well they give us death
sunny afternoon through the faint aftersick of mustardgas I smell the box the white roses and the white phlox with a crimson eye three brownandwhitestriped snails hang with infinite delicacy from a honeysucklebranch overhead up in the blue a sausageballoon grazes drowsily like a tethered cow there are drunken wasps clinging to the tooripe pears that fall and squash whenever the near guns spew their heavy shells that go off rumbling through the sky
with a whir that makes you remember walking in the woods and starting a woodcock
welltodo country people carefully built the walls and the little backhouse with the cleanscrubbed seat and the quartermoon in the door like the backhouse of an old farm at home carefully planted the garden and savored the fruit and the flowers and carefully planned this war
to hell with ’em Patrick Henry in khaki submits to shortarm inspection and puts all his pennies in a Liberty Loan or give me
arrivés shrapnel twanging its harps out of tiny powderpuff clouds invites us delicately to glory we happy watching the careful movements of the snails in the afternoon sunlight talking in low voices about
La Libre Belgique The Junius papers Areopagitica Milton went blind for freedom of speech If you hit the words Democracy will understand even the bankers and the clergymen I you we must
When three men hold together
The kingdoms are less by three
we are happy talking in low voices in the afternoon sunlight about après la guerre that our fingers our blood our lungs our flesh under the dirty khaki feldgrau bleu horizon might go on sweeten grow until we fall from the tree ripe like the tooripe pears the arrivés know and singing éclats sizzling gas shells theirs is the power and the glory
or give me death
Randolph Bourne
Randolph Bourne
came as an inhabitant of this earth
without
the pleasure of choosing his dwelling or his career.
He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey; there he attended grammar-school and highschool.
At the age of seventeen he went to work as secretary to a Morristown businessman.
He worked his way through Columbia working in a pianola record factory in Newark, working as proofreader, pianotuner, accompanist in a vocal studio in Carnegie Hall.
At Columbia he studied with John Dewey,
got a travelling fellowship that took him to England Paris Rome Berlin Copenhagen,
wrote a book on the Gary schools.
In Europe he heard music, a great deal of Wagner and Sciabine
and bought himself a black cape.
This little sparrowlike man,
tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,
always in pain and ailing,
put a pebble in his sling
and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.
War, he wrote, is the health of the state.
Half musician, half educational theorist (weak health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn’t spoiled the world for Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog; Look at the yellow, it’s beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy man.) Bourne seized with feverish intensity on the ideas then going around at Columbia, he picked rosy glasses out of the turgid jumble of John Dewey’s teaching through which he saw clear and sharp
the shining capitol of reformed democracy,
Wilson’s New Freedom;
but he was too good a mathematician; he had to work the equations out;
with the result
that in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get unpopular where his bread was buttered at the New Republic;
for New Freedom read Conscription, for Democracy, Win the War, for Reform, Safeguard the Morgan Loans
for Progress Civilization Education Service,
Buy a Liberty Bond,
Straff the Hun,
Jail the Objectors.
He resigned from The New Republic; only The Seven Arts had the nerve to publish his articles against the war. The backers of The Seven Arts took their money elsewhere; friends didn’t like to be seen with Bourne, his father wrote him begging him not to disgrace the family name. The rainbowtinted future of reformed democracy went pop like a pricked soapbubble.
The liberals scurried to Washington;
some of his friends plead with him to climb up on Schoolmaster Wilson’s sharabang; the war was great fought from the swivel chairs of Mr. Creel’s bureau in Washington.
He was cartooned, shadowed by the espionage service and the counter-espionage service; taking a walk with two girl friends at Wood’s Hole he was arrested, a trunk full of manuscript and letters was stolen from him in Connecticut. (Force to the utmost, thundered Schoolmaster Wilson)
He didn’t live to see the big circus of the Peace of Versailles or the purplish normalcy of the Ohio Gang.
Six weeks after the armistice he died planning an essay on the foundations of future radicalism in America.
If any man has a ghost
Bourne has a ghost,
a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak
hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York,
crying out in a shrill soundless giggle:
War is the health of the state.
Newsreel XXIII
If you dont like your Uncle Sammy
If you dont like the red white and blue
smiles of patriotic Essex County will be concentrated and recorded at Branch Brook Park, Newark, N.J., tomorrow afternoon. Bands will play while a vast throng marches happily to the rhythm of wartime anthems and airs. Mothers of the nation’s sons will be there; wives, many of them carrying babes born after their fathers sailed for the front, will occupy a place in Essex County’s graphic pageant; relatives and friends of the heroes who are carrying on the message of Freedom will file past a battery of cameras and all will smile a message recording installment no. 7 of Smiles Across the Sea. The hour for these folks to start smiling is 2:30.
MOBS PLUNDER CITIES
NEWSPAPERMAN LEADS THROUGH BARRAGE
it was a pitiful sight at dusk every evening when the whole population evacuated the city, going to sleep in the fields until daylight. Old women and tiny children, cripples drawn in carts or wheeled in barrows men carrying chairs bring those too feeble and old to walk
JERSEY TROOPS TAKE WOMAN GUNNERS
the trouble had its origin with the demand of the marine workers for an eight hour day
If you dont like the stars in Old Glory
Then go back to your land across the sea
To the land from which you came
Whatever be its name
G.O.P. LEADER ACCUSED OF DRAFT FRAUDS
If you dont like the red white and blue
Then dont act like the cur in the story
Dont bite the hand that’s feeding you
Eveline Hutchins
Little Eveline and Arget and Lade and Gogo lived on the top floor of a yellowbrick house on the North Shore Drive. Arget and Lade were little Eveline’s sisters. Gogo was her little brother littler than Eveline; he had such nice blue eyes but Miss Mathilda had horrid blue eyes. On the floor below was Dr. Hutchins’ study where Yourfather mustn’t be disturbed, and Dearmother’s room where she stayed all morning painting dressed in a lavender smock. On the groundfloor was the drawingroom and the diningroom, where parishioners came and little children must be seen and not heard, and at dinnertime you could smell good things to eat and hear knives and forks and tinkly companyvoices and Yourfather’s booming scary voice and when Yourfather’s voice was going all the companyvoices were quiet. Yourfather was Dr. Hutchins but Our Father art in heaven. When Yourfather stood beside the bed at night to see that little girls said their prayers Eveline would close her eyes tightscared. It was only when she’d hopped into bed and snuggled way down so that the covers were right across her nose that she felt cosy.
George was a dear although Adelaide and Margaret teased him and said he was their Assistant like Mr. Blessington was Father’s assistant. George always caught things first and then they all had them. It was lovely when they had the measles and the mumps all at once. They stayed in bed and had hyacinths in pots and guinea pigs and Dearmother used to come up and read the Jungle Book and do funny pictures and Yourfather would come up and make funny birdbeaks that opened out of paper and tell stories he made up right out of his head and Dearmother said he had said prayers for you children in church and that made them feel fine and grownup.
When they were all up and playing in the nursery George caught something again and had monia on account of getting cold on his chest and Yourfather was every solemn and said not to grieve if God called little brother away. But God brought little George back to them only he was delicate after that and had to wear glasses, and when Dearmother let Eveline help bathe him because Miss Mathilda was having the measles too Eveline noticed he had something funny there where she didn’t have anything. She asked Dearmother if it was a mump, but Dearmother scolded her and said she was a vulgar little girl to have looked. “Hush, child, don’t ask questions.” Eveline got red all over and cried and Adelaide and Margaret wouldn’t speak to her for days on account of her being a vulgar little girl.
Summers they all went to Maine with Miss Mathilda in a drawingroom. George and Eveline slept in the upper and Adelaide and Margaret slept in the lower; Miss Mathilda was trainsick and didn’t close her eyes all night on the sofa opposite. The train went rumblebump chug chug and the trees and houses ran by, the front ones fast and those way off very slow and at night the engine wailed
and the children couldn’t make out why the strong nice tall conductor was so nice to Miss Mathilda who was so hateful and trainsick. Maine smelt all woodsy and mother and father were there to meet them and they all put on khaki jumpers and went camping with Father and the guides. It was Eveline who learned to swim quicker than anybody.
Going back to Chicago it would be autumn and Mother loved the lovely autumn foliage that made Miss Mathilda feel so traurig on account of winter coming on, and the frost on the grass beyond the shadows of the cars out of the trainwindow in the morning. At home Sam would be scrubbing the enamel paint and Phoebe and Miss Mathilda would be putting up curtains and the nursery would smell traurig of mothballs. One fall Father started to read aloud a little of the Ideals of the King every night after they were all tucked into bed. All that winter Adelaide and Margaret were King Arthur and Queen Whenever. Eveline wanted to be Elaine the Fair, but Adelaide said she couldn’t because her hair was mousy and she had a face like a pie, so she had to be the Maiden Evelina.