One Mans Initiation: 1917 | Page 3

much.... No, that's silly, I've got to
begin facing realities.... It was just when the Germans were taking
Bruges, the Uhlans broke into this convent.... But I think it was in

Louvain, not Bruges.... I have a wretched memory for names.... Well,
they broke in, and took all those poor defenceless little girls..."
"There's the dinner-bell."
"Oh, so it is. I 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