World's End

by Upton Sinclair

  “Of course I have little Marceline,” the letter went on. “That is why she was brought into the world, because in my secret heart I knew what was coming. I am still nursing her, but I have been going over to Sept Chênes every afternoon. There are such pitiful cases. I don’t know what to think about the war, or what to expect. It seems impossible that the Germans can ever be driven out of France. Shall I have to watch the spectacle of American boys corning over and being sacrificed for nothing? Have I got to live to see my only son drawn into it? Am I going to hear the same phrases from you that I listened to from Marcel’s lips?”

  While Lanny was reading that letter, he knew that Marcel must be in the thick of the fighting. He was a trained man, and the fact that part of his face was gone wouldn’t count in a time like this. They would give him a uniform and a gun, assign him to a regiment, and put him into one of the camions that were being rushed to the front.

  And so it turned out. Marcel wrote letters to his wife, full of quiet certainty and peace; he was doing the thing that he had to do, that he was made to do. He wrote about the sights he had seen in Paris; about the men in his outfit, some too old and some too young, some veterans just out of hospital. He wasn’t allowed to tell where he was going, but presently he was there, and the boche was in front of him, and still advancing, and had to be stopped.

  And that was the end. There came no more letters. The enemy advanced, and was not stopped—at least not yet. Of course there remained the possibility that Marcel might have been taken prisoner; his friends had to wait until the war was over, and then wait some more; but they never heard from him. Later on Lanny made inquiries, and learned that Marcel’s company had been defending one of those trenches which had been turned into shell holes; presumably he had stayed there, firing his rifle as long as he could hold it and see the enemy. He had been buried in an unmarked grave, along with many of his comrades; his dust would enrich the soil of la patrie, and his soul would inspire new generations of Frenchmen with a love of beauty, and with pity for the blunders and sorrows of mankind.

  VII

  Lanny came home for a week-end, and found a surprise letter. He had failed to let Jerry Pendleton know he was in the United States, so the letter had crossed the ocean and come back. His old tutor had been picked in one of the early drafts and trained in Camp Funston. Now he was a sergeant, a machine-gun expert giving special training to a group in Camp Devens and expecting soon to move on, to a destination not supposed to be mentioned in soldiers’ letters. But Jerry said: “I’m going to see Cerise if I have to bust a gut”—which wasn’t exactly keeping military secrets!

  Lanny was greatly excited, for he had heard a lot about Camp Devens; it was where some of his classmates had gone, and others were planning to go at the end of the term. It was in Massachusetts, some three hours’ drive from Newcastle. “Oh, Robbie, can’t I go and see him? Right away, before he sails!”

  “Send a wire and find out if he’s still there,” said the father. Lanny did so, and the reply came in a jiffy: “Delighted advise coming quickly visitors one to five any day.” Jerry, economical fellow, had got in his exact ten words.

  Lanny was all in a fuss. He must go the next day, which was Sunday. Wouldn’t Robbie go with him? Jerry Pendleton was a grand chap, and perhaps was using the Budd gun, and might be able to tell Robbie things. The father said, all right, they’d make an excursion of it. Esther said to take the boys. Of course Bess started her clamor, and Robbie said: “Send Jerry a telegram to prepare tea for five!”

  New England was beautiful at that time of year; the spring flowers up in the woods, and the trees a shimmering pale green. The rivers ran brown with floods from the distant hills, but the bridges were strong, and most of the roads were paved. The young people chattered with excitement, having heard a lot about this marvelous “cantonment,” as it was officially called. There were sixteen of them scattered over the United States, and they had grown like the beanstalk in the fairy tale—last June there had been nothing, and two months later there had been accommodations, complete with all modern improvements, for six or seven hundred thousand men.

  They arrived at the gates of the new city at one, and found their host waiting for them. The army was proud of its great feat, and visitors were made welcome. Jerry was bronzed by the sun and seemed taller, certainly he was broader, and a fine advertisement for military training; handsome in his khaki uniform with leggings and his service hat with a flat brim and strap. He was serious, and proud of the place, showing it off as if he owned it. It was a regular city, with avenues named A, B, C, and cross streets 1, 2, 3. Its buildings were mostly one-story, all alike, of unpainted pine siding; there were fourteen hundred buildings in Camp Devens, and the stuff had all been cut to a pattern. Jerry said that when the carpenters got going they aimed to make a record of one building every hour, and boasted of a world’s record when they averaged one every fifteen minutes.

  Now forty thousand doughboys swarmed all over the place: keen, clean-cut fellows, all smooth-shaven—and all having had chicken and mashed potatoes for their Sunday dinner. Another world’s record was being made, an army without liquor; since it had put in the plumbing before anything else, there wasn’t any disease and wasn’t going to be. All this the machine-gun expert told them while standing on the running board of the car, guiding Robbie through the traffic of trucks, motorcycles, and mule wagons which were like old prairie schooners with khaki tops.

  Jerry took them to his own building, which he said he had in strict privacy with some thirty other men. The long room had a low ceiling, and a pleasant smell of fresh pinewood. Everything was as clean as in a hospital; the cots were of black steel and the floors were swept and scrubbed daily. Jerry showed them the messroom, where they had better food than most of the men had ever seen in their lives. He took them to the drill grounds, where you could watch thousands of men exercising—“and believe me, we get plenty of it,” said the red-headed sergeant.

  “Yes,” he added, “the machine guns are Budd’s.” He took them to the place where he gave instruction with real trenches, and rocks and trees and brush for cover. Jerry showed some of the drill, and sang a doughboy song: “Keep your head down, Fritzie boy!”

  He and Robbie had technical details to talk about, while the young people stood and listened in awe. Yes, it was a grand gun; Jerry doubted if anybody in Europe had one as good. “I’ve studied some of them,” he explained. “I have to teach something about them, because a soldier never knows what he may run into on the battlefield.”

  This man’s army was learning fast, and it was going to do the job. Its training was all for attack, the sergeant affirmed. “We aren’t going over there to sit in trenches. We teach the men how to capture positions, and to go on from there to the next one.”

  “The Germans have pretty good machine guns,” cautioned Robbie.

  “We expect to flatten them out with artillery, and then get them with hand grenades. There’s one thing they lack, and that’s a lifetime’s practice at throwing a baseball. Most of our fellows can land a grenade onto a target the first throw. Every time you hit the nigger you get a good seegar!” Jerry grinned, and added: “I don’t know if you ever went to a county fair in Kansas.”

  VIII

  All the time Lanny kept thinking: “Marcel ought to be here and see this!”—a thought which had a tendency to diminish the pleasure of his visit. It was gratifying to meet an old friend, and find him bronzed and handsome, astonishingly matured and full of vigor; but when you thought how he might be three months from now—like Marcel, or Rick, or Lanny’s gigolo—the crowded cantonment took on a different aspect. They watched those proud, upstanding fellows marching on the drill ground, and Lanny saw a troubled look on his half-sister’s face, and guessed that she was thinking the same thoughts. She was only ten years old, but children always know when there is dissension in a home, and Bess understood how her father felt about this war, and how Lanny felt.

  On their way home the
two boys prattled gaily about the wonders they had seen. They were Budds, and made machine guns, and in their fancy used them freely. They had learned to make sounds in imitation of the weapon’s chatter, and as the car rolled along they discovered solid ranks of Germans charging out of some farmer’s woodlot, and mowed them down without the slightest qualm. They wanted to know all about the men they had seen being entrained from the cantonment; what embarkation camp they were taken to, and what kind of transports they boarded, the time it took to get to France, the chances of a submarine sinking them.

  Their father didn’t worry about them, because they were too young to get into this mess. But he wanted to be sure that Lanny hadn’t been seduced by all the glamour. Making war is an ancient practice of mankind, and it is always impressive to see a job done with vigor and speed. So Robbie waited for something to come out of his eldest’s thoughtful mood; and when it did, he got a pleasant surprise.

  Said Lanny: “Do you suppose that when school’s over you could find me some job in the plant for the summer?”

  “What sort of a job, son?”

  “Anything where I could be useful, and learn something about the business.”

  “You really think that would interest you?”

  “Well, everybody’s doing something, and a fellow doesn’t feel comfortable just to be playing round.”

  “If you make a good record at school, Lanny, nobody’s going to question your right to a summer vacation.”

  “If they knew how little real work I have to do, they might. And if you’re going to tell a draft board that I’m needed to make munitions, hadn’t I better know something about it?”

  “It’ll be two years and a half before you have to consider that problem.”

  “I read that they’re thinking of lowering the draft age. So if you don’t want me in, you’d better get busy and fix up an alibi.”

  “We’ll think about it,” replied the father; and added, with a smile: “It would make something of a hit with the president of Budd’s!”

  23

  Midsummer-Night’s Dream

  I

  Examinations came at St. Thomas’s, and Lanny passed with good grades, and checked off his list several subjects about which he would never have to think again.

  He had now spent fourteen months in Connecticut; and during that period more than a million Americans had been ferried across to France. Jerry Pendleton and fifty thousand other sergeants were ready to try out the idea that German machine-gun nests could be wiped out by baseball players throwing Budd hand grenades. During the fourteen months’ period the plants had been working day and night without let-up. Smoke billowed from their chimneys, the workers toiled like swarms of ants, and the products were piled by the million in warehouses in France and behind the fighting front. The doughboys had had a sort of tryout at the battle of Cantigny, and now were being moved into position to stop the German advance on Paris.

  Such was the news in the papers when Lanny sat down to discuss with his father the problem of how to spend the summer. He still wanted to go into the plant; and when Robbie asked his ideas, he said: “Why shouldn’t I take a job like anybody else, and see how it feels to put in an eight-hour day?”

  “Beginning at the bottom of the ladder?” smiled the father.

  “Isn’t that the accepted way?”

  “Accepted by the fiction editors. You’d be set down in one corner of one room, and learn six motions of your hands, and do them say eight hundred times a day for three months. You would learn that it is very fatiguing.”

  “I thought I might learn something about the people I was working with.”

  “You’d learn that nine out of ten of them don’t know anything but their six motions, and don’t care about those. You’d learn that they are making a lot of money, and don’t know what to do with it except to buy fancy shirts and socks and a second-hand car. You can learn all that by going down on Center Street any evening.”

  This was discouraging. “I didn’t like to suggest going into the office, Robbie, because I don’t know anything, and I saw that everybody was so busy.”

  “Both those things are true. But, first, tell me what’s in your mind. Do you want to become a Budd executive, and live out by the country club? Or would you rather learn my business in Europe? In other words, do you want to make munitions or sell them?”

  “I thought I ought to know both jobs, Robbie.”

  “You have to know something about both if you’re going to know either; but they are highly specialized, and you have to concentrate. It’s like choosing your major and minor subjects when you go to college.”

  “Well, you’re asking if I want to be with you, or with Uncle Lawford. You know what I’ll say to that.”

  “Then why not start in my office, and see everything in the plant from there, as I do?”

  “Can you make sure I won’t get in the way?”

  “I’ll make mighty darn sure of it,” said the father. “If you get in my way, I’ll tell you, and if you get in other people’s way, they’ll tell you.”

  “That’s fair enough.”

  “All right then; here’s my idea for the summer: have a desk in my room, and sit there and study munitions instead of sines and cosines or the names of English kings. When I interview callers you listen, and when I dictate letters, you get the correspondence and follow it back until you understand the deal. Study contracts and specifications, prices and discounts; get the blueprints, and what you don’t understand ask me about. Learn the formulas for steel, and when you know enough to understand what you’re seeing, go down to the shop and watch the process. When you know the parts of a gun, take it apart and see if you can put it together again. Go to the testing grounds and watch it work—all sorts of things like that.”

  Lanny listened in a glow. “Gee, Robbie, that’s too much!”

  “How far you get will depend on you. This much ought to be certain—in three months you’ll know whether you’re really interested and want to go on. Is that a deal?”

  “You bet it is!”

  “I’ll tell my secretaries to give you whatever papers you ask for, and you’ll make it your business to turn them back to the person you got them from. You mustn’t touch the files yourself, because there can’t be any blundering in them. If there’s anything else you want, ask me, because everybody in the place is working under heavy pressure, and they wouldn’t like you if you tripped them up. One thing you know already—you won’t ever breathe a word to anybody about what you learn on this job.”

  II

  For a while Lanny was like a sailorman who has dug up an old chest full of Spanish doubloons and jewels; he couldn’t get enough of looking at them and running them through his hands. All those mysterious things that he had heard his father discussing with army officers and ministers of war were now unveiled to him. One of the first that came along was a lot of reports from the firms abroad that had leased Budd patents for the duration of the war; also the secret reports that Bub Smith was sending on the same subject. It was like being turned loose amid the private papers of Sherlock Holmes! Lanny dreamed of the day when he might be able to call Robbie’s attention to some discrepancy in the reports of Zaharoff’s companies, something that Robbie himself had overlooked in the rush of affairs. But he never had that luck.

  His new job brought him the honor of an invitation to dine at his grandfather’s. He and Robbie went together, and the old gentleman said: “Well, young man, I hear you have kept your promise.” Just that, and no more.

  They talked about the war developments, and ate a New England boiled dinner served by an old-maid servant under the direction of an old-maid relative. Later in the evening the grandfather said: “Well, young man, you have attended my Bible class. Have you learned anything?” Lanny said that he had; and at once the other launched on a discourse having to do with the one certainty of Salvation through Faith. He talked for five minutes or more; and then he turned to Robbie and remarked: “Well,
number 17-B gun seems to be holding up pretty well in France.”

  Lanny was so absorbed in his new researches that he wanted to get to the office early, and wanted to stay at night when something kept his father. But Esther intervened again, and Robbie agreed—a growing youth ought not to work more than an eight-hour day, and Lanny ought to get some tennis and a swim in the pool at the country club before dinner. So it was ordered; and so the way was prepared for another stage in a young man’s expanding career.

  The Newcastle Country Club had purchased two large farms and built a one-story red brick clubhouse, close enough to town so that businessmen could motor out now and then for a round of golf before dinner on summer evenings. Besides the Budd people, there were officials of other manufacturing concerns, of utilities and banks and the bigger stores; several doctors and lawyers, the local newspaper publisher, and a few gentlemen of no special calling. The ladies came in the afternoon to play bridge, and in the evenings there were dances, and now and then some entertainment to relieve the boredom of people who knew one another too well. When you have lived all your life in a town, it may seem dull and commonplace; but when you are young, and a stranger, the commonest varieties of gossip take on the aspect of lessons in human nature.

  There were several “sets” in this club: groups of persons who considered themselves superior to others, whether because they were richer, or because their families were older, or because they drank less, or because they drank more. There were a few who regarded themselves as clever; they were younger, and had the ideas called “modern.” Since the western part of Connecticut is a suburb of New York, there were “smart” people, who did what they pleased and made cynical remarks about the “mores” of their grandfathers. You couldn’t very well keep them out of a club, because some of them belonged to the “best” families.