in our time
chapter 1
Everybody was drunk. The whole
battery was drunk going along the road in the dark. We were going to the
Champagne. The lieutenant kept riding his horse out into the fields and saying
to him, “I’m drunk, I tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along
the road all night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my
kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be
observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant worried
about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that road. That was when
I was a kitchen corporal.
chapter 2
The first matador got the horn
through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out. The second matador slipped
and the bull caught him through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one
hand and held the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham
against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and then got up
like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him away and yelled for his
sword but he fainted. The kid came out and had to kill five bulls because you
can’t have more than three matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he
couldn’t get the sword in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times
and the crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or
the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and puked and
they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and threw things down into
the bull ring.
chapter 3
Minarets stuck up in the rain out
of Adrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles
along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through
the mud. No end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned.
The old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle moving.
The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts were jammed solid
on the bridge with camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded
along the procession. Women and kids were in the carts crouched with
mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid
with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at
it. It rained all through the evacuation.
chapter 4
We were in a garden at Mons.
Young Buckley came in with his patrol from across the river. The first German I
saw climbed up over the garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and
then potted him. He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell
down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the wall. We shot
them. They all came just like that.
chapter 5
It was a frightfully hot day.
We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across the bridge. It was simply
priceless. A big old wrought iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy
to lift and you could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It
was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from
forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It
was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were very fine. We were
frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we had to fall back.
chapter 6
They shot the six cabinet
ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital. There
were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving
of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed
shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him
downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against the wall
but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood very quietly against
the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make
him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water
with his head on his knees.
chapter 7
Nick sat against the wall of the
church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine gun fire in the
street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face
was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi,
big backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick
looked straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house opposite had
fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street.
Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street
were other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well.
Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully
and looked down at Rinaldi. “Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made a
separate peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. “Not
patriots.” Nick turned his head carefully away smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a
disappointing audience.
chapter 8
While the bombardment was
knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta, he lay very flat and sweated and
prayed oh jesus christ get me out of here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ
please please please christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do
anything you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that you
are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus. The shelling moved
further up the line. We went to work on the trench and in the morning the sun
came up and the day was hot and muggy and cheerful and quiet. The next night
back at Mestre he did not tell the girl he went upstairs with at the Villa
Rossa about Jesus. And he never told anybody.
chapter 9
At two o’clock in the morning two
Hungarians got into a cigar store at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue.
Drevitts and Boyle drove up from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford.
The Hungarians were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the
seat of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevetts got frightened when he
found they were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t to have done it.
There’s liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.
—They’re crooks ain’t they? said
Boyle. They’re wops ain’t they? Who the hell is going to make any trouble?
—That’s all right maybe this
time, said Drevitts, but how did you know they were wops when you bumped them?
Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops
a mile off.
chapter 10
One hot evening in Milan they
carried him up onto the roof and he could look out over the top of the town.
There were chimney swifts in the sky. After a while it got dark and the
searchlights came out. The others went down and took the bottles with them. He
and Ag could hear them below on the balcony. Ag sat on the bed. She was cool
and fresh in the hot night.
Ag stayed on night duty for three
months. They were glad to let her. When they operated on him she prepared him
for the operating table, and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went
under the anæsthetic holding tight on to himself so that he would not blab
about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches he used
to take the temperature so Ag would not have to get up from the bed. There were
only a few patients, and they all knew about it. They all liked Ag. As he
walked back along the halls he thought of Ag in his bed.
Before he went back to the front
they went into the Duomo and prayed. It was dim and quiet, and there were other
people praying. They wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for
the banns, and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they
were married, but they wanted everyone to knew about it, and to make it so they
could not lose it.
Ag wrote him many letters that he
never got until after the armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch and he sorted them
by the dates and read them all straight through. They were about the hospital,
and how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without him
and how terrible it was missing him at night.
After the armistice they agreed
he should go home to get a job so they might be married. Ag would not come home
until he had a good job and could come to New York to meet her. It was
understood he would not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone
in the States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padova to
Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at once. When they
had to say good-bye in the station at Padova they kissed good-bye, but were not
finished with the quarrel. He felt sick about saying good-bye like that.
He went to America on a boat from
Genoa. Ag went back to Torre di Mosta to open a hospital. It was lonely and
rainy there, and there was a battalion of arditi quartered in the town. Living
in the muddy, rainy town in the winter the major of the battalion made love to
Ag, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote a letter to the
States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair. She was sorry, and she
knew he would probably not be able to understand, but might some day forgive
her, and be grateful to her, and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be
married in the spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was
only a boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and believed
in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.
The Major did not marry her in
the spring, or any other time. Ag never got an answer to her letter to Chicago
about it. A short time after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl from The
Fair riding in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.
chapter 11
In 1919 he was travelling on the
railroads in Italy carrying a square of oilcloth from the headquarters of the
party written in indelible pencil and saying here was a comrade who had
suffered very much under the whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid
him in any way. He used this instead of a ticket. He was very shy and quite
young and the train men passed him on from one crew to another. He had no
money, and they fed him behind the counter in railway eating houses.
He was delighted with Italy. It
was a beautiful country he said. The people were all kind. He had been in many
towns, walked much and seen many pictures. Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della
Francesca he bought reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of
Avanti. Mantegna he did not like.
He reported at Bologna, and I
took him with me up into the Romagna where it was necessary I go to see a man.
We had a good trip together. It was early September and the country was
pleasant. He was a Magyar, a very nice boy and very shy. Horthy’s men had done
some bad things to him. He talked about it a little. In spite of Italy, he
believed altogether in the world revolution.
—But how is the movement going in
Italy? he asked.
—Very badly, I said.
—But it will go better, he said.
You have everything here. It is the one country that everyone is sure of. It
will be the starting point of everything.
At Bologna he said good-bye to us
to go on the train to Milano and then to Aosta to walk over the pass into
Switzerland. I spoke to him about the Mantegnas in Milano. No, he said, very
shyly, he did not like Mantegna. I wrote out for him where to eat in Milano and
the addresses of comrades. He thanked me very much, but his mind was already
looking forward to walking over the pass. He was very eager to walk over the
pass while the weather held good. The last I heard of him the Swiss had him in
jail near Sion.
chapter 12
They whack whacked the white
horse on the legs and he knee-ed himself up. The picador twisted the stirrups
straight and pulled and hauled up into the saddle. The horse’s entrails hung
down in a blue bunch and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the
monos whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods. He cantered jerkily
along the barrera. He stopped stiff and one of the monos held his bridle and
walked him forward. The picador kicked in his spurs, leaned forward and shook
his lance at the bull. Blood pumped regularly from between the horse’s front
legs. He was nervously wobbly. The bull could not make up his mind to charge.
chapter 13
The crowd shouted all the time
and threw pieces of bread down into the ring, then cushions and leather wine
bottles, keeping up whistling and yelling. Finally the bull was too tired from
so much bad sticking and folded his knees and lay down and one of the cuadrilla
leaned out over his neck and killed him with the puntillo. The crowd came over
the barrera and around the torero and two men grabbed him and held him and some
one cut off his pigtail and was waving it and a kid grabbed it and ran away
with it. Afterwards I saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face
and quite drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am
not really a good bull fighter.
chapter 14
If it happened right down close
in front of you, you could see Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him, and
when the bull charged he swung back firmly like an oak when the wind hits it,
his legs tight together, the muleta trailing and the sword following the curve
behind. Then he cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung back from
the charge his feet firm, the muleta curving and each swing the crowd roaring.
When he started to kill it was
all in the same rush. The bull looking at him straight in front, hating. He
drew out the sword from the folds of the muleta and sighted with the same
movement and called to the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta
charged and just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the
bull and then it was over. Villalta standing straight and the red kilt of the
sword sticking out dully between the bull’s shoulders. Villalta, his hand up at
the crowd and the bull roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs
caving.
chapter 15
I heard the drums coming down the
street and then the fifes and the pipes and then they came around the corner,
all dancing. The street full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When
they stopped the music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them
all and when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the
street with them. He was drunk all right.
You go down after him, said
Maera, he hates me.
So I went down and caught up with
them and grabbed him while he was crouched down waiting for the music to break
loose and said, Come on Luis. For Christ sake you’ve got bulls this afternoon.
He didn’t listen to me, he was listening so hard for the music to start.
I said, Don’t be a damn fool
Luis. Come on back to the hotel.
Then the music started up again
and he jumped up and twisted away from me and started dancing. I grabbed his
arm and he pulled loose and said, Oh leave me alone. You’re not my father.
I went back to the hotel and
Maera was on the balcony looking out to see if I’d be bringing him back. He
went inside when he saw me and came downstairs disgusted.
Well, I said, after all he’s just
an ignorant Mexican savage.
Yes, Maera said, and who will
kill his bulls after he gets a cogida?
We, I suppose, I said.
Yes, we, said Maera. We kills the
savages’ bulls, and the drunkards’ bulls, and the riau-riau dancers’ bulls.
Yes. We kill them. We kill them all right. Yes. Yes. Yes.
chapter 16
Maera lay still, his head on his
arms, his face in the sand. He felt warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each
time he felt the horn coming. Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head.
Once the horn went all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Someone
had the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape in
his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and started to run
with him toward the barriers through the gate out the passage way around under
the grand stand to the infirmary. They laid Maera down on a cot and one of the
men went out for the doctor. The others stood around. The doctor came running
from the corral where he had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and
wash his hands. There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead.
Maera wanted to say something and found he could not talk. Maera felt
everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then it got
larger and larger and larger and then smaller and smaller. Then everything
commenced to run faster and faster as when they speed up a cinematograph film.
Then he was dead.
chapter 17
They hanged Sam Cardinella at six
o’clock in the morning in the corridor of the county jail. The corridor was
high and narrow with tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were
occupied. The men had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be
hanged were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were negroes.
They were very frightened. One of the white men sat on his cot with his head in
his hands. The other lay flat on his cot with a blanket wrapped around his
head.
They came out onto the gallows
through a door in the wall. There were six or seven of them including two
priests. They were carrying Sam Cardinella. He had been like that since about
four o’clock in the morning.
While they were strapping his
legs together two guards held him up and the two priests were whispering to
him. “Be a man, my son,” said one priest. When they came toward him with the
cap to go over his head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle.
The guards who had been holding him up dropped him. They were both disgusted.
“How about a chair, Will?” asked one of the guards, “Better get one,” said a
man in a derby hat.
When they all stepped back on the
scaffolding back of the drop, which was very heavy, built of oak and steel and
swung on ball bearings, Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight,
the younger of the two priests kneeling beside the chair. The priest skipped
back onto the scaffolding just before the drop fell.
chapter 18
The king was working in the
garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We walked through the garden. This is
the queen, he said. She was clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said.
We sat down at a table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda.
We have good whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he told me,
would not allow him to go outside the palace grounds. Plastiras is a very good
man I believe, he said, but frightfully difficult. I think he did right though
shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot a few men things might have been
altogether different. Of course the great thing in this sort of an affair is
not to be shot oneself!
It was very jolly. We talked for
a long time. Like all Greeks he wanted to go to America.