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.