One Mans Initiation: 1917 | Page 4

drunk ever since they got off the
steamer."
"Raised hell in Maxim's last night. They tried to clean up the place and
the police came. They were all soused to the gills and tried to make
everybody there sing the 'Star Spangled Banner.'"
"Damn fool business."

Martin Howe sat at a table on the sidewalk under the brown awning of
a restaurant. Opposite in the last topaz-clear rays of the sun, the foliage
of the Jardin du Luxembourg shone bright green above deep alleys of
bluish shadow. From the pavements in front of the mauve-coloured
houses rose little kiosks with advertisements in bright orange and
vermilion and blue. In the middle of the triangle formed by the streets
and the garden was a round pool of jade water. Martin leaned back in
his chair looking dreamily out through half-closed eyes, breathing deep
now and then of the musty scent of Paris, that mingled with the melting
freshness of the wild strawberries on the plate before him.
As he stared in front of him two figures crossed his field of vision. A
woman swathed in black crepe veils was helping a soldier to a seat at
the next table. He found himself staring in a face, a face that still had
some of the chubbiness of boyhood. Between the pale-brown
frightened eyes, where the nose should have been, was a triangular
black patch that ended in some mechanical contrivance with shiny little
black metal rods that took the place of the jaw. He could not take his
eyes from the soldier's eyes, that were like those of a hurt animal, full
of meek dismay. Someone plucked at Martin's arm, and he turned
suddenly, fearfully.
A bent old woman was offering him flowers with a jerky curtsey.
"Just a rose, for good luck?"
"No, thank you."
"It will bring you happiness."
He took a couple of the reddest of the roses.
"Do you understand the language of flowers?"
"No."
"I shall teach you.... Thank you so much.... Thank you so much."

She added a few large daisies to the red roses in his hand.
"These will bring you love.... But another time I shall teach you the
language of flowers, the language of love."
She curtseyed again, and began making her way jerkily down the
sidewalk, jingling his silver in her hand.
He stuck the roses and daisies in the belt of his uniform and sat with the
green flame of Chartreuse in a little glass before him, staring into the
gardens, where the foliage was becoming blue and lavender with
evening, and the shadows darkened to grey-purple and black. Now and
then he glanced furtively, with shame, at the man at the next table.
When the restaurant closed he wandered through the unlighted streets
towards the river, listening to the laughs and conversations that bubbled
like the sparkle in Burgundy through the purple summer night.
But wherever he looked in the comradely faces of young men, in the
beckoning eyes of women, he saw the brown hurt eyes of the soldier,
and the triangular black patch where the nose should have been.
Chapter III
AT Epernay the station was wrecked; the corrugated tin of the roof
hung in strips over the crumbled brick walls.
"They say the Boches came over last night. They killed a lot of
permissionaires."
"That river's the Maine."
"Gosh, is it? Let me get to the winder."
The third-class car, joggling along on a flat wheel, was full of the smell
of sweat and sour wine. Outside, yellow-green and blue-green, crossed
by long processions of poplars, aflame with vermilion and carmine of
poppies, the countryside slipped by. At a station where the train
stopped on a siding, they could hear a faint hollow sound in the

distance: guns.
Croix de Guerre had been given out that day at the automobile park at
ChÉlons. There was an unusually big dinner at the wooden tables in the
narrow portable barracks, and during the last course the General passed
through and drank a glass of champagne to the health of all present.
Everybody had on his best uniform and sweated hugely in the narrow,
airless building, from the wine and the champagne and the thick stew,
thickly seasoned, that made the dinner's main course.
"We are all one large family," said the General from the end of the
barracks... "to France."
That night the wail of a siren woke Martin suddenly and made him sit
up in his bunk trembling, wondering where he was. Like the shriek of a
woman in a nightmare, the wail of the siren rose and rose and then
dropped in pitch and faded throbbingly out.
"Don't flash a light there. It's Boche planes."
Outside the night was cold, with a little light from a waned moon.
"See the