3 books to know World War I. John Dos Passos
behind the curtain.
“But that Chamfort was worse yet. Everybody was sort o' nervous because the Germans had dropped a message sayin' they'd give 'em three days to clear the hospital out, and that then they'd shell hell out of the place.”
“The Germans done that! Quit yer kiddin',” said Fuselli.
“They did it at Souilly, too,” said Dook. “Hell, yes.... A funny thing happened there. The hospital was in a big rambling house, looked like an Atlantic City hotel.... We used to run our car in back and sleep in it. It was where we took the shell-shock cases, fellows who were roarin' mad, and tremblin' all over, and some of 'em paralysed like.... There was a man in the wing opposite where we slept who kept laugh-in'. Bill Rees was on the car with me, and we laid in our blankets in the bottom of the car and every now and then one of us'ld turn over and whisper: 'Ain't this hell, kid?' 'cause that feller kept laughin' like a man who had just heard a joke that was so funny he couldn't stop laughin'. It wasn't like a crazy man's laugh usually is. When I first heard it I thought it was a man really laughin', and I guess I laughed too. But it didn't stop.... Bill Rees an' me laid in our car shiverin', listenin' to the barrage in the distance with now and then the big noise of an aeroplane bomb, an' that feller laughin', laughin', like he'd just heard a joke, like something had struck him funny.” Cohan took a gulp of champagne and jerked his head to one side. “An that damn laughin' kept up until about noon the next day when the orderlies strangled the feller.... Got their goat, I guess.”
Fuselli was looking towards the other side of the room, where a faint murmur of righteous indignation was rising from the dark man with the unshaven jaw and his companions. Fuselli was thinking that it wasn't good to be seen round too much with a fellow like Cohan, who talked about the Germans notifying hospitals before they bombarded them and who was waiting for a court-martial. Might get him in wrong. He slipped out of the cafe into the dark. A dank wind blew down the irregular street, ruffling the reflected light in the puddles, making a shutter bang interminably somewhere. Fuselli went to the main square again, casting an envious glance in the window of the Cheval Blanc, where he saw officers playing billiards in a well-lighted room painted white and gold, and a blond girl in a raspberry-colored shirtwaist enthroned haughtily behind the bar. He remembered the M. P. and automatically hastened his steps. In a narrow street the other side of the square he stopped before the window of a small grocery shop and peered inside, keeping carefully out of the oblong of light that showed faintly the grass-grown cobbles and the green and grey walls opposite. A girl sat knitting beside the small counter with her two little black feet placed demurely side by side on the edge of a box full of red beets. She was very small and slender. The lamplight gleamed on her black hair, done close to her head. Her face was in the shadow. Several soldiers lounged awkwardly against the counter and the jambs of the door, following her movements with their eyes as dogs watch a plate of meat being moved about in a kitchen.
After a little the girl rolled up her knitting and jumped to her feet, showing her face,—an oval white face with large dark lashes and an impertinent mouth. She stood looking at the soldiers who stood about her in a circle, then twisted up her mouth in a grimace and disappeared into the inner room.
Fuselli walked to the end of the street where there was a bridge over a small stream. He leaned on the cold stone rail and looked into the water that was barely visible gurgling beneath between rims of ice.
“O this is a hell of a life,” he muttered.
He shivered in the cold wind but remained leaning over the water. In the distance trains rumbled interminably, giving him a sense of vast desolate distances. The village clock struck eight. The bell had a soft note like the bass string of a guitar. In the darkness Fuselli could almost see the girl's face grimacing with its broad impertinent lips. He thought of the sombre barracks and men sitting about on the end of their cots. Hell, he couldn't go back yet. His whole body was taut with desire for warmth and softness and quiet. He slouched back along the narrow street cursing in a dismal monotone. Before the grocery store he stopped. The men had gone. He went in jauntily pushing his cap a little to one side so that some of his thick curly hair came out over his forehead. The little bell in the door clanged.
The girl came out of the inner room. She gave him her hand indifferently.
“Comment ca va! Yvonne? Bon?”
His pidgin-French made her show her little pearly teeth in a smile.
“Good,” she said in English.
They laughed childishly.
“Say, will you be my girl, Yvonne?”
She looked in his eyes and laughed.
“Non compris,” she said.
“We, we; voulez vous et' ma fille?”
She shrieked with laughter and slapped him hard on the cheek. “Venez,” she said, still laughing. He followed her. In the inner room was a large oak table with chairs round it. At the end Eisenstein and a French soldier were talking excitedly, so absorbed in what they were saying that they did not notice the other two. Yvonne took the Frenchman by the hair and pulled his head back and told him, still laughing, what Fuselli had said. He laughed.
“No, you must not say that,” he said in English, turning to Fuselli.
Fuselli was angry and sat down sullenly at the end of the table, keeping his eyes on Yvonne. She drew the knitting out of the pocket of her apron and holding it up comically between two fingers, glanced towards the dark corner of the room where an old woman with a lace cap on her head sat asleep, and then let herself fall into a chair.
“Boom!” she said.
Fuselli laughed until the tears filled his eyes. She laughed too. They sat a long while looking at each other and giggling, while Eisenstein and the Frenchman talked. Suddenly Fuselli caught a phrase that startled him.
“What would you Americans do if revolution broke out in France?”
“We'd do what we were ordered to,” said Eisenstein bitterly. “We're a bunch of slaves.” Fuselli noticed that Eisenstein's puffy sallow face was flushed and that there was a flash in his eyes he had never seen before.
“How do you mean, revolution?” asked Fuselli in a puzzled voice.
The Frenchman turned black eyes searchingly upon him.
“I mean, stop the butchery,—overthrow the capitalist government.—The social revolution.”
“But you're a republic already, ain't yer?”
“As much as you are.”
“You talk like a socialist,” said Fuselli. “They tell me they shoot guys in America for talkin' like that.”
“You see!” said Eisenstein to the Frenchman.
“Are they all like that?”
“Except a very few. It's hopeless,” said Eisenstein, burying his face in his hands. “I often think of shooting myself.”
“Better shoot someone else,” said the Frenchman. “It will be more useful.”
Fuselli stirred uneasily in his chair.
“Where'd you fellers get that stuff anyway?” he asked. In his mind he was saying: “A kike and a frog, that's a good combination.”
His eye caught Yvonne's and they both laughed, Yvonne threw her knitting ball at him. It rolled down under the table and they both scrambled about under the chairs looking for it.
“Twice I have thought it was going to happen,” said the Frenchman.
“When was that?”
“A little while ago a division started marching on Paris.... And when I was in Verdun.... O there will be a revolution.... France is the country of revolutions.”
“We'll always be here to shoot you down,” said Eisenstein.
“Wait till you've