One Mans Initiation: 1917 | Page 3

must run and dress. I'll have to tell you later...."
Through half-closed eyes, Martin watched the fluttering dress and the backs of the neat little white shoes go jauntily down the deck.
The smoking-room again. Clink of glasses and chatter of confident voices. Two men talking over their glasses.
"They tell me that Paris is some city."
"The most immoral place in the world, before the war. Why, there are houses there where..." his voice sank into a whisper. The other man burst into loud guffaws.
"But the war's put an end to all that. They tell me that French people are regenerated, positively regenerated."
"They say the lack of food's something awful, that you can't get a square meal. They even eat horse."
"Did you hear what those fellows were saying about that new gas? Sounds frightful, don't it? I don't care a thing about bullets, but that kind o' gives me cold feet... . . I don't give a damn about bullets, but that gas...."
"That's why so many shoot their friends when they're gassed.... "
"Say, you two, how about a hand of poker?
A champagne cork pops.
"Jiminy, don't spill it all over me."
"Where we goin', boys?"
"Oh, we're going to the Hamburg show To see the elephant and the wild kangaroo, And we'll all stick together In fair or foul weather, For we're going to see the damn show through!"
Chapter II
BEFORE going to bed Martin had seen the lighthouses winking at the mouth of the Gironde, and had filled his lungs with the new, indefinably scented wind coming off the land. The sound of screaming whistles of tugboats awoke him. Feet were tramping on the deck above his head. The shrill whine of a crane sounded in his ears and the throaty cry of men lifting something in unison.
Through his port-hole in the yet colourless dawn he saw the reddish water of a river with black-hulled sailing-boats on it and a few lanky little steamers of a pattern he had never seen before. Again he breathed deep of the new indefinable smell off the land.
Once on deck in the cold air, he saw through the faint light a row of houses beyond the low wharf buildings, grey mellow houses of four storeys with tiled roofs and intricate ironwork balconies, with balconies in which the ironwork had been carefully twisted by artisans long ago dead into gracefully modulated curves and spirals.
Some in uniform, some not, the ambulance men marched to the station, through the grey streets of Bordeaux. Once a woman opened a window and crying, "Vive l'Amérique," threw out a bunch of roses and daisies. As they were rounding a corner, a man with a frockcoat on ran up and put his own hat on the head of one of the Americans who had none. In front of the station, waiting for the train, they sat at the little tables of cafés, lolling comfortably in the early morning sunlight, and drank beer and cognac.
Small railway carriages into which they were crowded so that their knees were pressed tight together--and outside, slipping by, blue-green fields, and poplars stalking out of the morning mist, and long drifts of poppies. Scarlet poppies, and cornflowers, and white daisies, and the red-tiled roofs and white walls of cottages, all against a background of glaucous green fields and hedges. Tours, Poitiers, Orléans. In the names of the stations rose old wars, until the floods of scarlet poppies seemed the blood of fighting men slaughtered through all time. At last, in the gloaming, Paris, and, in crossing a bridge over the Seine, a glimpse of the two linked towers of Notre Dame, rosy grey in the grey mist up the river.
"Say, these women here get my goat."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, I was at the Olympia with Johnson and that crowd. They just pester the life out of you there. I'd heard that Paris was immoral, but nothing like this."
"It's the war."
"But the Jane I went with..."
"Gee, these Frenchwomen are immoral. They say the war does it."
"Can't be that. Nothing is more purifying than sacrifice."
"A feller has to be mighty careful, they say."
"Looks like every woman you saw walking on the street was a whore. They certainly are good-lookers though."
"King and his gang are all being sent back to the States."
"I'll be darned! They sure have been drunk ever since they got off the steamer."
"Raised hell in Maxim's last night. They tried to clean up the place and the police came. They were all soused to the gills and tried to make everybody there sing the 'Star Spangled Banner.'"
"Damn fool business."
Martin Howe sat at a table on the sidewalk under the brown awning of a restaurant. Opposite in the last topaz-clear rays of the sun, the foliage of the Jardin du Luxembourg shone bright green above deep alleys of bluish shadow. From the pavements in