U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [236]
crowds that wanted peace and food and a little freedom, heard the throaty roar of the Russian Marseil aise; some stubborn streak in the old American blood
flared in revolt, he walked the streets al night with the revolutionists, got in wrong at the embassy
and was transferred to Mexico City where there
was no revolution yet, only peons and priests and the stil ness of the great volcanos. The Cientificos made him a member of the jockey
Club
-180-where in the magnificent building of blue Puebla tile he lost al his money at roulette and helped them drink up the last few cases of champagne left over from the plunder of Cortez.
Chargé d'Affaires in Colombia (he never forgot
he owed his career to Beveridge; he believed passion-ately in Roosevelt, and righteousness and reform, and the antitrust laws, the Big Stick that was going to scare away the grafters and malefactors of great wealth and get the common man his due) he helped wangle the
revolution that stole the canal zone from the bishop of Bogotá later he stuck up for Roosevelt in the Pulitzer libel suit; he was a progressive, believed in the Canal and T.R. He was shunted to the Hague where he went to
sleep during the vague deliberations of the Interna-tional Tribunal. In 1912 he resigned from the Diplomatic Service
and went home to campaign for Roosevelt,
got to Chicago in time to hear them singing On-ward Christian Soldiers at the convention in the Colos-seum; in the closepacked voices and the cheers, he heard the trample of the Russian Marseil aise, the
sul en silence of Mexican peons, Colombian Indians
waiting for a deliverer, in the reverberance of the hymn he heard the measured cadences of the Declaration of Independence.
The talk of social justice petered out; T.R. was
a windbag like the rest of 'em, the Bul Moose was
stuffed with the same sawdust as the G.O.P.
Paxton Hibben ran for Congress as a progressive
in Indiana but the European war had already taken
people's minds off social justice.
-181- War Corr Collier's Weekly 1914-15, staff corr Associated Press in Europe, 1915-17; war corr Leslie's Weekly in Near East and sec Russian commn for Near East Relief, June-Dec 1921
In those years he forgot al about the diplomat's
mauve silk bathrobe and the ivory toilet sets and the little tête-à-têtes with grandduchesses,
he went to Germany as Beveridge's secretary, saw
the German troops goosestepping through Brussels,
saw Poincaré visiting the long doomed gal eries
of Verdun between ranks of bitter halfmutinous sol-diers in blue, saw the gangrened wounds, the cholera, the typhus,
the little children with their bel ies swol en with famine, the maggoty corpses of the Serbian retreat, drunk Al ied officers chasing sick naked girls upstairs in the brothels in Saloniki, soldiers looting stores and churches, French and British sailors fighting with beerbottles in the bars; walked up and down the terrace with King Con-stantine during the bombardment of Athens, fought a duel with a French commission agent who got up and
left when a German sat down to eat in the diningroom at the Grande Bretagne; Hibben thought the duel was a joke until al his friends began putting on silk hats; he stood up and let the Frenchman take two shots at him and then fired into the ground; in Athens as every-where he was always in hot water, a slightly built truculent man, always standing up for his friends, for people out of luck, for some idea, too reckless ever to lay down the careful steppingstones of a respectable career.
Commd 1st lieut F.A. Nov 27-1917; capt May
31-1919; served at war coll camp Grant; in France with 332nd E.A.; Finance Bureau S.O.S.; at G.H.Q. in
-182- office of Insp Gen of A.E.F.; discharged Aug. 21- 1919; capt O.R.C. Feb 7th 1920; recommd Feb 7-
1925
The war in Europe was bloody and dirty and dul ,
but the war in New York revealed such slimy depths
of vileness and hypocrisy that no man who saw it can ever feel the same again; in the army training camps it was different, the boys believed in a world safe for Democracy; Hibben believed in the Fourteen Points,