1919
Eleanor had bought them a pair of little blue parakeets in a cage. They drank Montracher and ate roast duck cooked with oranges. In the middle of the meal Dick had to go up to the Crillon. It was a relief to be out in the air, sitting in an open taxi, running past the Louvre made enormous by the late twilight under which the Paris streets seemed empty and very long ago like the Roman forum. All the way up past the Tuileries he played with an impulse to tell the taxidriver to take him to the opera, to the circus, to the fortifications, anywhere to hell and gone. He set his pokerface as he walked past the doorman at the Crillon.
Miss Williams gave him a relieved smile when he appeared in the door. “Oh, I was afraid you’d be late, Captain Savage.” Dick shook his head and grinned. “Anybody come?” “Oh, they’re coming in swarms. It’ll make the front pages,” she whispered. Then she had to answer the phone.
The big room was already filling up with newspaper men. Jerry Burnham whispered as he shook hands, “Say, Dick, if it’s a typewritten statement you won’t leave the room alive.” “Don’t worry,” said Dick with a grin. “Say, where’s Robbins?” “He’s out of the picture,” said Dick dryly, “I think he’s in Nice drinking up the last of his liver.”
J.W. had come in by the other door and was moving around the room shaking hands with men he knew, being introduced to others. A young fellow with untidy hair and his necktie crooked put a paper in Dick’s hand. “Say, ask him if he’d answer some of these questions.” “Is he going home to campaign for the League of Nations?” somebody asked in his other ear.
Everybody was settled in chairs; J.W. leaned over the back of his and said that this was going to be an informal chat, after all, he was an old newspaper man himself. There was a pause. Dick glanced around at J.W.’s pale slightly jowly face just in time to catch a flash of his blue eyes around the faces of the correspondents. An elderly man asked in a grave voice if Mr. Moorehouse cared to say anything about the differences of opinion between the President and Colonel House. Dick settled himself back to be bored. J.W. answered with a cool smile that they’d better ask Colonel House himself about that. When somebody spoke the word oil everybody sat up in their chairs. Yes, he could say definitely an accord, a working agreement had been reached between certain American oil producers and perhaps the Royal Dutch-Shell, oh, no, of course not to set prices but as proof of a new era of international cooperation that was dawning in which great aggregations of capital would work together for peace and democracy, against reactionaries and militarists on the one hand and against the bloody forces of bolshevism on the other. And what about the League of Nations? “A new era,” went on J.W. in a confidential tone, “is dawning.”
Chairs scraped and squeaked, pencils scratched on pads, everybody was very attentive. Everybody got it down that J.W. was sailing for New York on the Rochambeau in two weeks. After the newspapermen had gone off to make their cable deadline, J.W. yawned and asked Dick to make his excuses to Eleanor, that he was really too tired to get down to her place tonight. When Dick got out on the streets again there was still a little of the violet of dusk in the sky. He hailed a taxi; goddam it, he could take a taxi whenever he wanted to now.
It was pretty stiff at Eleanor’s, people were sitting around in the parlor and in one bedroom that had been fitted up as a sort of boudoir with a tall mirror draped with lace, talking uncomfortably and intermittently. The bridegroom looked as if he had ants under his collar. Eveline and Eleanor were standing in the window talking with a gauntfaced man who turned out to be Don Stevens who’d been arrested in Germany by the Army of Occupation and for whom Eveline had made everybody scamper around so. “And any time I get in a jam,” he was saying, “I always find a little Jew who helps get me out . . . this time he was a tailor.”
“Well, Eveline isn’t a little Jew or a tailor,” said Eleanor icily, “but I can tell you she did a great deal.”
Stevens walked across the room to Dick and asked him what sort of a man Moorehouse was. Dick found himself blushing. He wished Stevens wouldn’t talk so loud. “Why, he’s a man of extraordinary ability,” he stammered.
“I thought he was a stuffed shirt . . . I didn’t see what those damn fools of the bourgeois press thought they were getting for a story . . . I was there for the D.H.”
“Yes, I saw you,” said Dick.
“I thought maybe, from what Steve Warner said, you were the sort of guy who’d be boring from within.”
“Boring in another sense, I guess, boring and bored.”
Stevens stood over him glaring at him as if he was going to hit him. “Well, we’ll know soon enough which side a man’s on. We’ll all have to show our faces, as they say in Russia, before long.”
Eleanor interrupted with a fresh smoking bottle of champagne. Stevens went back to talk to Eveline in the window. “Why, I’d as soon have a Baptist preacher in the house,” Eleanor tittered.
“Damn it, I hate people who get their pleasure by making other people feel uncomfortable,” grumbled Dick under his breath. Eleanor smiled a quick V-shaped smile and gave his arm a pat with her thin white hand, that was tipped by long nails pointed and pink and marked with halfmoons. “So do I, Dick, so do I.”
When Dick whispered that he had a headache and thought he’d go home and turn in, she gripped his arm and pulled him into the hall. “Don’t you dare go home and leave me alone with this frost.” Dick made a face and followed her back into the salon. She poured him a glass of champagne from the bottle she still held in her hand: “Cheer up Eveline,” she whispered squeakily. “She’s about ready to go down for the third time.”
Dick stood around for hours talking to Mrs. Johnson about books, plays, the opera. Neither of them seemed to be able to keep track of what the other was saying. Eveline couldn’t keep her eyes off her husband. He had a young cubbish look Dick couldn’t help liking; he was standing by the sideboard getting tight with Stevens, who kept making ugly audible remarks about parasites and the lahdedah boys of the bourgeoisie. It went on for a long time. Paul Johnson got sick and Dick had to help him find the bathroom. When he came back into the salon he almost had a fight with Stevens, who, after an argument about the Peace Conference, suddenly hauled off with his fists clenched and called him a goddam fairy. The Johnsons hustled Stevens out. Eleanor came up to Dick and put her arm around his neck and said he’d been magnificent.
Paul Johnson came back upstairs after they’d gone to get the parakeets. He looked pale as a sheet. One of the birds had died and was lying on its back stiff with his claws in the air at the bottom of the cage.
At about three o’clock Dick rode home to his hotel in a taxi.
Newsreel XLIII
the placards borne by the radicals were taken away from them, their clothing torn and eyes blackened before the service and ex-service men had finished with them
34 Die After Drinking Wood Alcohol Trains in France May Soon Stop
Gerard Throws His Hat into the Ring
SUPREME COURT DASHES LAST HOPE OF
MOIST MOUTH
LIFE BOAT CALLED BY ROCKET SIGNALS SEARCHES IN
VAIN FOR SIXTEEN HOURS
America I love you
You’re like a sweetheart of mine
LES GENS SAGES FUIENT LES REUNIONS POLITIQUES
WALLSTREET CLOSES WEAK: FEARS
TIGHT MONEY
From ocean to ocean
For you my devotion
Is touching each boundary line
LITTLE CARUSO EXPECTED
his mother, Mrs. W.D. McGillicudy said: “My first husband was killed while crossing tracks in front of a train, my second husband was killed in the same way and now it is my son
Just like a little baby
Climbing its mother’s knee
MACHINEGUNS MOW DOWN MOBS
IN KNOXVILLE
America I love you
Aviators Lived for Six Days on Shellfish
the police compelled the demonstrators to lower these flags and ordered the convention not to ex
hibit any red emblems save the red in the starry banner of the United States; it may not be indiscreet to state, however, in any case it cannot dim his glory, that General Pershing was confined to his stateroom through seasickness when the message arrived. Old Fellow of 89 Treasures Chewinggum as Precious Souvenir Couldn’t Maintain His Serenity In Closing League Debates
And there’s a hundred million others like me
The Body of an American
Whereasthe Congressoftheunitedstates byaconcurrentresolutionadoptedon the4thdayofmarch lastauthorizedthe Secretaryofwar to cause to be brought to theunitedstatesthe body of an American whowasamemberoftheamericanexpeditionaryforcesineuropewholosthis lifeduringtheworldwarandwhoseidentityhasnot beenestablished for burial inthememorialamphitheatreofthe nationalcemeteryatarlingtonvirginia
In the tarpaper morgue at Chalons-sur-Marne in the reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the pine box that held all that was left of
enie menie minie moe plenty other pine boxes stacked up there containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe
and other person or persons unknown. Only one can go. How did they pick John Doe?
Make sure he aint a dinge, boys,
make sure he aint a guinea or a kike,
how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll puttees?
. . . and the gagging chloride and the puky dirtstench of the yearold dead . . .
The day withal was too meaningful and tragic for applause. Silence, tears, songs and prayer, muffled drums and soft music were the instrumentalities today of national approbation.
John Doe was born (thudding din of blood in love into the shuddering soar of a man and a woman alone indeed together lurching into
and ninemonths sick drowse waking into scared agony and the pain and blood and mess of birth). John Doe was born
and raised in Brooklyn, in Memphis, near the lakefront in Cleveland, Ohio, in the stench of the stockyards in Chi, on Beacon Hill, in an old brick house in Alexandria Virginia, on Telegraph Hill, in a halftimbered Tudor cottage in Portland the city of roses,
in the Lying-In Hospital old Morgan endowed on Stuyvesant Square,
across the railroad tracks, out near the country club, in a shack cabin tenement apartmenthouse exclusive residential suburb;
scion of one of the best families in the social register, won first prize in the baby parade at Coronado Beach, was marbles champion of the Little Rock grammarschools, crack basketballplayer at the Booneville High, quarterback at the State Reformatory, having saved the sheriff’s kid from drowning in the Little Missouri River was invited to Washington to be photographed shaking hands with the President on the White House steps;—
though this was a time of mourning, such an assemblage necessarily has about it a touch of color. In the boxes are seen the court uniforms of foreign diplomats, the gold braid of our own and foreign fleets and armies, the black of the conventional morning dress of American statesmen, the varicolored furs and outdoor wrapping garments of mothers and sisters come to mourn, the drab and blue of soldiers and sailors, the glitter of musical instruments and the white and black of a vested choir
—busboy harveststiff hogcaller boyscout champeen corn-shucker of Western Kansas bellhop at the United States Hotel at Saratoga Springs office boy callboy fruiter telephone lineman longshoreman lumberjack plumber’s helper,
worked for an exterminating company in Union City, filled pipes in an opium joint in Trenton, N. J.
Y.M.C.A. secretary, express agent, truckdriver, fordmechanic, sold books in Denver Colorado: Madam would you be willing to help a young man work his way through college?
President Harding, with a reverence seemingly more significant because of his high temporal station, concluded his speech:
We are met today to pay the impersonal tribute;
the name of him whose body lies before us took flight with his imperishable soul . . .
as a typical soldier of this representative democracy he fought and died believing in the indisputable justice of his country’s cause . . .
by raising his right hand and asking the thousands within the sound of his voice to join in the prayer:
Our Father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name . . .
Naked he went into the army;
they weighed you, measured you, looked for flat feet, squeezed your penis to see if you had clap, looked up your anus to see if you had piles, counted your teeth, made you cough, listened to your heart and lungs, made you read the letters on the card, charted your urine and your intelligence,
gave you a service record for a future (imperishable soul)
and an identification tag stamped with your serial number to hang around your neck, issued O D regulation equipment, a condiment can and a copy of the articles of war.
Atten’SHUN suck in your gut you c——r wipe that smile off your face eyes right wattja tink dis is a choirch-social? ForwarD’ARCH.
John Doe
and Richard Roe and other person or persons unknown
drilled hiked, manual of arms, ate slum, learned to salute, to soldier, to loaf in the latrines, forbidden to smoke on deck, overseas guard duty, forty men and eight horses, shortarm inspection and the ping of shrapnel and the shrill bullets combing the air and the sorehead woodpeckers the machineguns mud cooties gasmasks and the itch.
Say feller tell me how I can get back to my outfit.
John Doe had a head
for twentyodd years intensely the nerves of the eyes the ears the palate the tongue the fingers the toes the armpits, the nerves warmfeeling under the skin charged the coiled brain with hurt sweet warm cold mine must dont sayings print headlines:
Thou shalt not the multiplication table long division, Now is the time for all good men knocks but once at a young man’s door, It’s a great life if Ish gebibbel, The first five years’ll be the Safety First, Suppose a hun tried to rape your my country right or wrong, Catch ’em young, What he dont know wont treat ’em rough, Tell ’em nothin, He got what was coming to him he got his, This is a white man’s country, Kick the bucket, Gone west, If you dont like it you can croaked him
Say buddy cant you tell me how I can get back to my outfit?
Cant help jumpin when them things go off, give me the trots them things do. I lost my identification tag swimmin in the Marne, roughhousin with a guy while we was waitin to be deloused, in bed with a girl named Jeanne (Love moving picture wet French postcard dream began with saltpeter in the coffee and ended at the propho station);—
Say soldier for chrissake cant you tell me how I can get back to my outfit?
John Doe’s
heart pumped blood:
alive thudding silence of blood in your ears
down in the clearing in the Oregon forest where the punkins were punkincolor pouring into the blood through the eyes and the fallcolored trees and the bronze hoopers were hopping through the dry grass, where tiny striped snails hung on the underside of the blades and the flies hummed, wasps droned, bumblebees buzzed, and the woods smelt of wine and mushrooms and apples, homey smell of fall pouring into the blood,
and I dropped the tin hat and the sweaty pack and lay flat with the dogday sun licking my throat and adamsapple and the tight skin over the breastbone.
The shell had his number on it.
The blood ran into the ground.
The service record dropped out of the filing cabinet when the quartermaster sergeant got blotto that time they had to pack up and leave the billets in a hurry.
The identification tag was in the bottom of the Marne.
The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of bluebottle flies,
and the incorruptible skeleton,
and the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki
they took to Chalons-sur-M
arne
and laid it out neat in a pine coffin
and took it home to God’s Country on a battleship
and buried it in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheater in the Arlington National Cemetery
and draped the Old Glory over it
and the bugler played tabs
and Mr. Harding prayed to God and the diplomats and the generals and the admirals and the brasshats and the politicians and the handsomely dressed ladies out of the society column of the Washington Post stood up solemn
and thought how beautiful sad Old Glory God’s Country it was to have the bugler play taps and the three volleys made their ears ring.
Where his chest ought to have been they pinned
the Congressional Medal, the D.S.C., the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, the Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania, the Czechoslovak war cross, the Virtuti Militari of the Poles, a wreath sent by Hamilton Fish, Jr., of New York, and a little wampum presented by a deputation of Arizona redskins in warpaint and feathers. All the Washingtonians brought flowers.