Пользователь - WORLD'S END

When the meeting was over, Lanny saw the young workingman elbowing his way to the front. He went onto the stage and grabbed Jesse Blackless by the hands and shook them. The painter patted him on the back, and Lanny wondered, was this unkempt youth a friend of his uncle's, a member of his group, or just a convert, or a prospect? Lanny continued to reflect upon it, only half hearing the shocked comments of Penelope Selden, his lady friend.

They got into a taxi to drive to the Majestic, and on the way she forgot politics and put. her hand in his. They danced together in the onyx-lined ballroom; a gay and festive scene, with half the men and many of the women wearing uniforms. They too had suffered, and been under strain; they too needed relaxation from heavy duties, and it wasn't fair to blame them for dancing. But Lanny was haunted by the faces of the angry workers; he was haunted by the millions of children who were growing up stunted and deformed, because of things which these dancing ladies and gentlemen had done and were still doing.

The young English girl, with soft brown hair and merry eyes and disposition, was pleasant to hold in your arms. Lanny held her for an hour, dancing with no one else; she made plain that she liked him, and he had got the impression that she would be his for the asking. So many of the women were in a reckless mood, in these days of deliverance from anxieties too greatly prolonged. Lanny couldn't very well say to her: "I've had an unhappy love affair, and I've sworn off the sex business for a while." What he said was: "Don't you think maybe your chief could do something with Lloyd George, if he told him about this meeting, and what a fury the people are in? Really, you know, it's a very bad state of affairs!"

V

Lieutenant Jerry Pendleton showed up in Paris, having got a week's leave. He had won promotion in the Argonne Forest by the method of being luckier than other sergeants of his outfit. In his new uniform he looked handsome and dignified, and Lanny at first thought he was the same gay and buoyant red-head from whom he had parted back at Camp Devens. But soon he noticed that Jerry had a tendency to fall silent, and there would come a brooding, somber look. Apparently going to war did something to a man. Lanny had been expecting to be entertained with accounts of hairbreadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach; but his former tutor said: "Let's not talk about it, kid. All I want is to go home and try to forget."

"Aren't you going down to see Cerise?"

"I haven't enough time."

Lanny knew that wasn't true, for Jerry could have taken the night express and been in Cannes in the morning. The youth let the subject drop; but later, after he had told about his misadventure with Gracyn in Connecticut, the lieutenant warmed up and revealed what was troubling his mind. "The plain truth is, I just don't like the French. I'm sore at the whole damn country."

"What have they done to you?"

"It's just that we're so different, I guess. I'm always stumbling on things I dislike. I realize I don't know Cerise very well, and I'm never going to be allowed to know her until I've married her; and then what will I find out?"

"My mother married a Frenchman, and they were very happy."

"Your mother lived here a long time and probably knew how to choose. I've seen so many things in France that I want to get away from. Manure-piles!"

Lanny laughed. Having spent nearly all his life in France, he assumed that this national institution was necessary to the agricultural procиss. But Jerry said they ordered things differently in Kansas; everything there was clean and agreeable, even the hogs. Lanny was amused, because when Jerry Pendleton had first made his appearance on the Riviera he had described his home state as a dull, provincial place, and had earnestly desired not to go back and help run two drug stores.

But now what a change! "I fought to save these people," said the lieutenant of a machine-gun company, "and now I have to bite every franc to see if it's made of lead."

"That can happen anywhere in Europe," replied his friend.

"It doesn't happen in Koblenz," declared the other, emphatically. He was part of the army which had gone into the Rhineland to guard the bridgeheads pending the signing of a treaty. Jerry's brigade was covering a semicircle of German territory, some forty miles in diameter on the far side of the river, and his company had been quartered for three months in a tiny village where they had every opportunity to know the population. The lieutenant himself was billeted in a farmhouse where everything was so neat, and the old couple so kind, so patient and humble, grateful for the tiniest favor - it was exactly as Kurt had told Lanny it would be, the doughboys had learned that the Germans were not the Huns they had been pictured. More and more the Americans were wondering why they had had to fight such people, and how much longer they were going to have to stay and blockade them from the rest of the world.

The Rhineland is a rich country and produces food and wine in abundance; but it had been just behind the fighting front for four years and the retreating German armies had carried off all they could. Now the people were living on the scantiest rations and the children were pale and hollow-eyed. The well-fed Yanks were expected to live in houses with undernourished children and pregnant women and never give them food. There were strict orders against "fraternizing with the enemy"; but did that include stuffing half a load of bread into your overcoat pocket and passing it out to the kids?

And what about the Frдuleins, those sweet-faced, gentle creatures with golden or straw-colored braids down their backs, and white dresses with homemade embroidery on the edges? Their fellows had been marched back into the interior of Germany, and here were handsome upstanding conquerors from the far-off prairie states, with chocolates and canned peaches and other unthinkable delicacies at their disposal. Lieutenant Pendleton chuckled as he told about what must surely have been the oddest military regulation ever issued in the history of warfare; the doughboys had been officially informed that entering into intimate relations with German Frдulein s was not to be considered as "fraternizing" within the meaning of the army regulations!

"Is that why you've lost interest in Cannes?" asked Lanny, with a grin.

"No," said Jerry, "but I'll tell you this. If somebody doesn't hurry up and make up his mind about peace terms, a lot of our fellows are just going to take things into their own hands and go home - and their Frдuleins with them. What's the matter with these old men in Paris, Lanny?"

"I'll introduce you to some of them," answered the youth, "and you can find out for yourself."

VI

Jerry Pendleton having lunch at the Crillon; a piece of luck that rarely fell to the lot of a "shavetail," even one who had fought through a war! It would be something to tell at the officers' mess in the Rhineland; it would be something to tell to his grandchildren in Kansas, in days when all this was in the history books - the "First World War."

Lanny sat at table with his chief, because meals were times for confidential chats and informal reports, and perhaps for helping to translate the excited French of somebody who wanted more territory for his tiny state. A young officer on leave from the front might hear things that would give him a jolt - for these college professors had opinions of their own, and did not hesitate to bandy about the most exalted names.

The young lieutenant was asked to what unit he belonged and what service he had seen. When he said that he had been through the Meuse-Argonne - well, it was no great distinction, for more than a million others could say the same, not counting fifty thousand or so who would never speak of that, or anything else. The conversation turned to that six weeks' blood-bath, hailed as a glory in the press at home. What was the real truth about it? Had Foch wished to set the Americans a task at which no army could succeed?

Had he been punishing General Pershing for obstinacy and presumption?

The young lieutenant learned that from the hour when the first American division had been landed in France there had been a war going on between the American commander-in-chief and the British and French commands, backed by their governments. It had been their idea that American troops should be brigaded in with British and French troops and used to replace the wastage of their battles; but Pershing had been determined that there should be an American army, fighting under the American flag. He had declared this purpose and hung onto it like any British bulldog. But the others had never given up; they had used each new defeat as an excuse for putting pressure; they had pulled every sort of political wire and worried every American who had any authority or influence.

So, by the summer of 1918, they had managed to acquire a pretty-complete dislike of the jimber-jawed Missouri general. When Baker, Secretary of War, had visited England, Lloyd George had tactfully suggested that President Wilson should be requested to remove Pershing; to which the secretary had replied coldly that the American government was not in need of having anyone decide who should command American troops. Clemenceau had written a long letter to Foch, insisting that he should appeal to President Wilson to remove Pershing, on the ground that he had proved himself incompetent to handle armies in battle. Alston said he had seen a copy of that letter, though he wasn't at liberty to tell who had shown it to him. What more likely than that the generalissimo of all the Allied forces had said to himself: "Well, if this stubborn fellow is determined to have his own way, we'll give him something to do that will keep him busy."

After listening to such conversation, Lanny and his friend strolled down the Champs-Йlysйes, between the mile-long rows of captured cannon, and for the first time and the last the lieutenant was moved to "open up" to his friend. "My God, Lanny!" he exclaimed. "Imagine fifty thousand lives being wiped out because two generals were jealous of each other!"

"History is full of things like that," remarked the youth. "Ten thousand men march out and die because the king's mistress has been snubbed by an ambassador."

The ex-tutor went on to pour out the dreadful story of the Meuse-Argonne, a mass of hills and rocks covered with forest and brush. "Of course that's all gone now," said Jerry, "because we blasted every green thing from a couple of hundred square miles; we even blew off the tops of some of the hills. The Germans had been working for four years making it a tangle of wire, with machine guns hidden every few yards, and dugouts and concrete shelters. We were told to go and take such and such places, no matter what the cost, and we took them - wave after wave of men, falling in rows. I saw a man's head blown off within three feet of me, and I wiped his brains out of my eyes. We had whole regiments that just ceased to exist."

"I heard about it," said Lanny.

"You might, because you met insiders; but the folks at home haven't the remotest idea, and won't ever be told. Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting. There was nothing else you could do, because you were in there and the only way out was forward. The hell of it was that the roads ran crossways to our line of advance, so there was never any way to get in supplies except on men's backs. You took a position, and flopped down into a shell hole, and there you lay day and night, with shells crashing around you and bullets whining just over your head. The rain drenched you and near froze at night, and you had no food, and no water but the rain you caught in your tin hat; all around were men groaning and screaming, and nothing to do but lie there and die. That's modern war, by God, and if they give me any more of it, I'm going to turn Bolo."