I
The young men of our American Relief Corps are beginning to come back
from the front with stories.
There was no time to pick them up during the first months--the whole
business was too wild and grim. The horror has not decreased, but nerves
and sight are beginning to be disciplined to it. In the earlier days,
moreover, such fragments of experience as one got were torn from their
setting like bits of flesh scattered by shrapnel. Now things that seemed
disjointed are beginning to link themselves together, and the broken
bones of history are rising from the battle-fields.
I can’t say that, in this respect, all the members of the Relief Corps
have made the most of their opportunity. Some are unobservant, or
perhaps simply inarticulate; others, when going beyond the bald
statistics of their job, tend to drop into sentiment and cinema scenes;
and none but H. Macy Greer has the gift of making the thing told seem as
true as if one had seen it. So it is on H. Macy Greer that I depend,
and when his motor dashes him back to Paris for supplies I never fail to
hunt him down and coax him to my rooms for dinner and a long cigar.
Greer is a small hard-muscled youth, with pleasant manners, a
sallow face, straight hemp-coloured hair and grey eyes of unexpected
inwardness. He has a voice like thick soup, and speaks with the slovenly
drawl of the new generation of Americans, dragging his words along like
reluctant dogs on a string, and depriving his narrative of every shade
of expression that intelligent intonation gives. But his eyes see so
much that they make one see even what his foggy voice obscures.
Some of his tales are dark and dreadful, some are unutterably sad, and
some end in a huge laugh of irony. I am not sure how I ought to classify
the one I have written down here.