U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [79]
"You must understand how it is," he wrote the Thur-lows, answering an enthusiastic screed of Hilda's about the
"war to end war," "I don't believe in Christianity any more and can't argue from that standpoint, but you do, or at least Edwin does, and he ought to realize that in urging young men to go into this cockeyed lunatic asylum of war he's doing everything he can to undermine al the principles and ideals he most believes in. As the young fel ow we had that talk with in Genoa that night said, it's not on the level, it's a dirty goldbrick game put over by governments and politicians for their own selfish interests, it's crooked from A to Z. If it wasn't for the censorship I could tel you things that would make you vomit."
-200-Then he'd suddenly snap out of his argumentative mood and al the phrases about liberty and civilization steaming up out of his head would seem damn sil y too, and he'd light the gasoline burner and make a rum punch and cheer up chewing the rag with Steve about books or painting or architecture. Moonlight nights the Austrians made things lively by sending bombing planes over. Some nights Dick found that staying out of the dugout and giving them a chance at him gave him a sort of bitter pleasure, and the dugout wasn't any protection against a direct hit anyway.
Sometime in February Steve read in the paper that the Empress Taitu of Abyssinia had died. They held a wake. They drank al the rum they had and keened until the rest of the section thought they'd gone crazy. They sat in the dark round the open moonlit window wrapped in blankets and drinking warm zabaglione. Some Austrian planes that had been droning overhead suddenly cut off their motors and dumped a load of bombs right in front of them. The antiaircraft guns had been barking for some time and shrapnel sparkling in the moonhazy sky over-head but they'd been too drunk to notice. One bomb fel geflump into the Brenta and the others fil ed the space in front of the window with red leaping glare and shook the vil a with three roaring snorts. Plaster fel from the ceiling. They could hear the tiles skuttering down off the roof overhead.
"Jesus, that was almost good night," said Summers. Steve started singing, Come away from that window, my light and my life, but the rest of them drowned it out with an out of tune Deutschland Deutschland Uber Alles. They suddenly al felt crazy drunk. Ed Schuyler was standing on a chair giving a recitation of the Erlkönig when Feldmann, the Swiss hotel-keeper's son who was now head of the section, stuck his head in the door and asked what in the devil they thought
-201-they were doing. "You'd better go down in the abris, one of the Italian mechanics was kil ed and a soldier walking up the road had his legs blown off . . . no time for monkeyshines." They offered him a drink and he went off in a rage. After that they drank marsala. Sometime in the early dawn greyness Dick got up and staggered to the window to vomit; it was raining pitchforks, the foaming r'ds of the Brenta looked very white through the shim-mering rain. Next day it was Dick's and Steve's turn to go on post to Rova. They drove out of the yard at six with their heads like firebal oons, damn glad to be away from the big scandal there'd be at the section. At Rova the lines were quiet, only a few pneumonia or venereal cases to evacuate, and a couple of poor devils who'd shot themselves in the foot and were to be sent to the hospital under guard; but at the officers'
mess where they ate things were very agi-tated indeed. Tenente Sardinaglia was under arrest in his quarters for saucing the Coronele and had been up there for two days making up a little march on his mandolin that he cal ed the march of the medical colonels. Serrati told them about it giggling behind his hand while they were waiting for the other officers to come to mess. It was al on account of the macchina for coffee. There were only three macchine for the whole mess, one for the colonel, one for the major, and the other went around to the junior officers in rotation; wel , one day last week they'd been kidding that bel a ragazza, the niece of the farmer on whom they were quartered; she hadn't let any of the officers kiss her and had carried on like a crazy woman when they pinched her behind, and the colonel had been angry about it, and angrier yet when Sardinaglia had bet him five lira that he could kiss her and he'd whispered something in her ear and she'd let him and that had made the colonel get purple in the face and he'd told the ordi-nanza not to give the macchina to the tenente when his