There Won't Be War

The whole village was a red light district, and if you had the francs you could find love around the clock, though you’d do well to study the choices and see who had that itchy look a lady acquires when she’s got the clap. And so it was that on the 1st of July, as the hot French twilight poured into a cootie-ridden bordello on the Place Vendome, Wilbur Hines’s willy finally put to port after nineteen years at sea. Like Cantigny, it was quick and confusing and over before I knew it. I had six more days coming to me, though, and I figured it would get better.

My keeper heads north, twenty-one paces. The sun beats down. The sweatband of his cap is rank and soggy. Click, click: right face. His eyes lock on the river.

I loved Bar-le-Duc. The citizens treated me like a war hero, saluting me wherever I went. There’s no telling how far you’ll go in this world if you’re willing to belly rip a few German teenagers.

Beyond the Poilu and the hookers, the cafes were also swarming with Bolsheviks, and I must admit their ideas made sense to me—at least, they did by my fourth glass of Chateau d’Yquem. After Cantigny, with its flying metal and Alvin Piatt walking around with a bloody stump screaming “Mommy!” I’d begun asking the same questions as the Bolshies, such as, “Why are we having this war, anyway?” When I told them my family was poor, the Bolshies got all excited, and I hadn’t felt so important since the army took me. I actually gave those fellows a few francs, and they promptly signed me up as a noncom in their organization. So now I held two ranks, PFC in the American Expeditionary Forces and lance corporal in the International Brotherhood of Proletarian Veterans or whatever the hell they were calling themselves.

My third night on the cathouse circuit, I got into an argument with one of the tarts. Fifi—I always called them Fifi—decided she’d given me special treatment on our second round, something to do with her mouth, her bouche, and now she wanted twenty francs instead of the usual ten. Those ladies thought every Doughboy was made of money. All you heard in Bar-le-Duc was “les Americains, beaucoup d’argent.”

“Dix francs,” I said.

“Vingt,” Fifi insisted. Her eyes looked like two dead snails. Her hair was the color of Holstein dung.

“Dix.”

“Vingt—or I tell ze MP you rip me,” Fifi threatened. She meant rape.

“Dix,” I said, throwing the coins on the bed, whereupon Fifi announced with a tilted smile that she had “a bad case of ze VD” and hoped she’d given it to me.

Just remember, you weren’t there. Your body wasn’t full of raw metal, and you didn’t have Fifi’s clap, and nobody was expecting you to maintain a lot of distinctions between the surrendering boys you were supposed to stab and the Frog tarts you weren’t. It was hot. My chest hurt. Half my friends had died capturing a pissant hamlet whose streets were made of horse manure. And all I could see were those nasty little clap germs gnawing at my favorite organs.

My Remington stood by the door. The bayonet was tinted now, the color of a turnip; so different from the war itself, that bayonet—no question about its purpose. As I pushed it into Fifi and listened to the rasp of the steel against her pelvis, I thought how prophetic her mispronunciation had been: I tell ze MP you rip me.

I used the fire escape. My hands were wet and warm. All the way back to my room, I felt a gnawing in my gut like I’d been gassed. I wished I’d never stood on my toes in the Boalsburg Recruiting Station. A ditty helped. After six reprises and a bottle of cognac, I finally fell asleep.

The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous? The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous? The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, She’ll screw you in the chicken coop, Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?

On the sixteenth of July I boarded one of those 40 and 8 trains and rejoined my regiment, now dug in along the Marne. A big fight had already happened there, sometime in ‘14, and they were hoping for another. I was actually glad to be leaving Bar-le-Duc, for all its wonders and delights. I knew the local gendarmes were looking into the Fifi matter.

Click, click, thock, thock, thock. My keeper pauses, twenty-one seconds. He marches south down the black path.

At the Marne they put me in charge of a Hotchkiss machine gun, and I set it up on a muddy hill, the better to cover the forward trench where they’d stationed my platoon. I had two good friends in that hole, and so when Captain Mallery showed up with orders from le general—we were now part of the XX French Corps—saying I should haul the Hotchkiss a mile downstream, I went berserk.

“Those boys are completely exposed,” I protested. The junk in my chest was on fire. “If there’s an infantry attack, we’ll lose ’em all.”

“Move the Hotchkiss, Private Johnson,” the captain said.