A year after graduating from Harvard in 1916, John Dos Passos joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, a volunteer organization run by the American Red Cross. He served at the Verdun front in August 1917, when the French were trying to recapture ground they had lost to the Germans the previous year. To a friend in the United States, he wrote about his first trip to the front.
Aug 23
Dear Rummy
I’ve been meaning to write you again & again—but I’ve been so vastly bitter that I can produce nothing but gall and wormwood
The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.
Of all the things in this world a government is the thing least worth fighting for.
None of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about any of the aims of this ridiculous affair—They fight because they are too cowardly & too unimaginative not to see which way they ought to turn their guns—
For God’s sake, Rummy boy, put this in your pipe and smoke it—everything said & written & thought in America about the war is lies—God! They choke one like poison gas—
I am sitting, my gas mask over my shoulder, my tin helmet on my head—in a poste de secours—(down underground) near a battery of 220s which hit one over the head with their infernal barking as I write.
Apart from the utter bitterness I feel about the whole thing, I’ve been enjoying my work immensely—We’ve been for a week in what they say is the hottest sector an ambulance ever worked—All the time—ever since our section of twenty Fiat cars climbed down the long hill into the shot-to-hell valley back of this wood that most of our work is in, we’ve been under intermittent bombardment.
My first night of work I spent five hours in a poste de secours under poison gas—Of course we had our masks—but I can’t imagine a more hellish experience. Every night we get gassed in this sector—which is right behind the two points where the great advance of the 21st of August was made—look it up & you’ll see that we were kept busy—we evacuated from between the two big hills.
It’s remarkable how many shells can explode round you without hitting you.
Our ambulance however is simply peppered with holes—how the old bus holds together is more than I can make out—
Do send news of yourself—and think about the war—and don’t believe anything people tell you—’ceptin tis me—or anyone else whose really been here.
Incidentally Jane Addams account that the soldiers were fed rum & ether before attacks is true. No human being can stand the performance without constant stimulants—
It’s queer how much happier I am here in the midst of it than in America, where the air was stinking with lies & hypocritical patriotic gibber—
The only German atrocity I’ve heard of was that they sent warning to a certain town three days before they dropped aero bombs on it so that the wounded might be evacuated from the hospitals—
Even French atrocities that you hear more of—slitting the throats of prisoners etc.—sort of fade away in reality—We’ve carried tons of wounded Germans and have found them very pleasant & grateful & given just as much care as the French. The prisoners & their captors laugh & chat & kid each other along at a great rate.
In fact there is less bitterness about the war—at the front—than there is over an ordinary Harvard-Yale baseball game.
It’s damned remarkable how universally decent people are if you’ll only leave them to themselves——
I could write on for hours, but I’m rather sleepy—so I think I’ll take a nap among the friendly fleas——
Love
Jack
SS.Ane 6o
7 Rue François I
Paris France
Here’s another page—
You should have seen the dive I took out of the front seat of the car the other day when a shell exploded about twenty feet to one side of us—We were trying to turn on a narrow & much bombarded road——C’était rigolo, mon vieux! The brancardiers in the dugout are practicing their German on a prisoner——So long—Write at once.
1917