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despite the temperamental aberrations of which I have spoken—that Selective Service answers to the description of most American war enterprises which reach all the way out into the communities—the individual units do a better job on the average than the co-ordinating authorities, because they are manned by people, no less able, who have the advantage of being face-to-face with their problem instead of having to guess at it from a far-away desk.

Some enormously hard work is done at the Local Board offices. Few people outside the System have any conception of the amount of unpaid, thankless, and often distasteful labor which has been put in by the Board members, Advisory Board members, Appeal Agents, Appeal Board members, and examining physicians. I can think of one New York Board, for example, in which a retired business man slaves every day from nine till seven or so, and another one spends several hours every afternoon, with no compensation beyond his satisfaction over the job done.

The effectiveness and democratic reputation of the System are vastly enhanced by the fact that in this war—as compared with 1917-18—there have been very few pipelines to officer's status in the Army for young men of wealth and social position. The Army, as it expands, is officering itself from the ranks; during 1942, for instance, it expects to send 95,000 privates and non-commissioned officers to Officers' Candidate Schools, and to graduate 75,000 of them. Incidentally, of all the criticisms of Selective Service that I have heard, one which I should have expected to hear often I have heard only once—the criticism that

the rich get deferred—and in that one case the man who uttered it had suffered no injustice at all: he simply did not understand how the Order Numbering system worked and angrily guessed that the rich boys got the high numbers. (Nor shall I soon forget the almost eager way in which the members of the Board with whom that young man was registered put sons of the well-to-do in Class I.)

The result of these democratic arrangements has been not only to make our Army personnel perhaps the best, man for man, that ever was recruited anywhere, but to change remarkably the public attitude toward the private soldier. In towns which have been historically Army towns, the private may still be unwelcome in the best restaurants and bars; but in other areas he seems to be accepted unquestioningly everywhere. The other evening I noted the presence of five or six privates in an especially fashionable grill in New York and asked an old habitué of the place whether their like would have been found there in 1917. "No," said he. "I don't know if they would even have been admitted. At any rate they'd have felt uncomfortable in the same room with those colonels and lieutenant commanders." A small matter, that, but big in its underlying significance. And it is largely the product of the working of the Selective Service System.

A great task has been performed on the whole admirably to date, quietly and without public applause. Now it is being put to its hardest test. If it comes through with colors flying it will deserve the unreserved congratulations of the nation.

## THE FRENCHMAN SIX FEET THREE

BY GLENWAY WESCOTT

ROGER GAUMOND when I first knew him was wonderfully handsome. He had one of those faces reminiscent of a young Roman of the decline and fall, a good-natured Antonine or a grand-bourgeois Antinous. But even then people laughed at him because, for a Parisian, he was huge. He was six feet two or three, with statuesque shoulders, and ideal hands which got in the way, and feet like a pedestal. He had attractive blue eyes in which there was a sparkle of worry, and he was blond with very white skin. I remember that inspiration would appear on his noble forehead if he got into the least emotion or effort, and a good many things made him blush. When I was last in France—in 1938—he had begun to look somewhat gross and sad. His grandeur inclined to be fat, his pallor had turned sallow, and there was something spoiled about his romantic mouth.

He was the sole son and heir of a well-known family of the more or less grand middle class, with money. His father was an industrialist of consequence, and he himself had a good position in a small manufactory on the left bank of the Seine beyond Sèvres in which his grandmother and one of his great-aunts had a controlling interest. I think he did not care much about his work except for the remuneration of it. He never complained, he rarely made any reference to it at all. He lived by himself in a pleasant apartment in the Rue Constant, in the aristocratic *arrondissement* of Paris, that is, the seventh. He cared about

old furniture, at least to the extent of furnishing his rooms painstakingly and as nobly as he could afford. He also owned a little house outside Paris, at La Miel in the valley of the Chevreuse, where he spent certain months in the spring and summer, driving to work and back in a small but elegant Buick. He enjoyed gardening, priding himself almost boringly upon the special seeds and foreign bulbs which he was able to bring to bloom at La Miel amid his quincunx of apple trees.

He loved music more than all else, particularly Mozart and Wagner, traveling annually to Salzburg and Bayreuth for the *Festspiele*. In the past ten years, year after year, he had come home with an unhappy appreciation of the efficacy of the new German state and the might of the modernized German army. Even in 1938 you risked being called pro-Nazi if you prophesied too well in that way; and some of his friends, especially British and Americans, did call him one. He simply said that it was disgusting of them. I think he felt so absolutely part and parcel of his native land that it would not have occurred to him that his patriotism could be doubted, except as a joke, and a joke in bad taste furthermore.

He was an odd inexpressive fellow. He kept the life of his senses a mystery, a mystery to me at least. His life of the spirit seemed all concentrated in a certain cool, habitual, and often grumbling friendliness toward such Americans as Linda Brewer and myself, and certain cousins of his who lived in Versailles, and

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especially toward a good scholarly fellow named Alain Raffe. Both Roger and Alain Raffe were quite happy young men, I believe; but somehow the expression of displeasure and unhappiness seemed to come more naturally to them than any enthusiasm; and in their general view of life perhaps they never really expected anything very good to last very long.

While I was in Paris that spring of 1938 Roger was summoned to do reserve military service for a fortnight. He had been told that it would be in some portion of the Maginot Line, somewhere between Metz and Sedan. This stirred my curiosity or my imagination, no doubt because I have found the martial architecture of France wonderfully satisfactory to my æsthetic sense, more so in many ways than the ecclesiastical or the residential—especially the works of Vauban, and little Aiguesmortes like a lily with open calyx and pistil and stamens of stone, and that star of masonry lying on the shore at Antibes, and great theatrical Pierrefonds. Multiply all that by hundreds of miles, adorn it with the obscurest modern inventions, I imagined, and you would have the Maginot Line. Sometimes indeed I still catch myself daydreaming of France as having something of that kind upon its borders: edifices brooding distantly in the dull landscape of the departments of the East and Northeast, a battlement as permanent as the Pyramids.

Roger, I must say, when he was called up did not seem inspired by any such mental picture. A little tartly he suggested that, for him, the fortnight ahead meant having to work like a dog in a place probably like a cellar; and in fact, in general, for all concerned, national defense must be a matter of working like dogs, not of a taste for austere architecture.

He asked Alain and me to dine with him the night of his departure for those famed bastions. He had to take an early train, so he suggested our coming to the Rue Constant in the late afternoon

for a drink and a farewell chat. His apartment was in one wing of what had been in the great past a ducal palace, overlooking a garden. There were platforms in which the spring flowers were green but had not yet begun to blossom; and there was a little line-up of trees under Roger's window leading back to a fine small rococo pavilion occupied by his landlady, who was a cabinet minister's widow.

While we drank and chatted we helped Roger into his uniform, which had been sent to his apartment for him to depart in. And when I say we helped, it is not just in a manner of speaking. For it was too small for him by some four or five inches in every dimension. His long and not very muscular forearms as well as his blue-veined wrists and white hands protruded out of the sleeves of the faded blue tunic. Between the tops of the boots and the bottoms of the breeches there were absurd extents of calf over which we had to wind the puttees with the greatest care, securing them with safety-pins. Happily, the boots themselves were roomier than the other items, and by leaving them unlaced, resigning himself to certain blisters, he was able to walk well enough, clumpingly. The exiguity of the topcoat did not matter; he would carry it over his arm. The exiguity of the breeches was the real hardship, which could not be helped. They bifurcated him within an inch of his life; and there was real reason to fear a giving-way in the seat or elsewhere if he made any sudden motion.

At first all this seemed to amuse Roger, but by the time we had completed him as a military man he had begun to take a dark view. "How sad this is," he exclaimed, in those tenor tones which they use in France when things go wrong. "How they have made me ridiculous! How idiotic it is!"

Then, sore-footedly and with grotesque precaution, he practiced walking up and down his fine salon. He had furnished it with a variety of old beauty, very fine: black and brass cabinets of the great cen-

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tury—that is, the seventeenth—and a bronze bust and a good gilt clock and ancestral curtains; and it had an ornately inlaid old floor. It was a strange sight, I thought—the huge improvised soldier in the peaceful setting, in his garb of war so poverty-stricken, stricken and cramped, skidding a little on the beautifully waxed wood. It was very funny, though now naturally it does not seem so.

He strode, if in breeches so uneasy it could be called striding, across to one of the tall windows and he gazed into the garden. "It's sickening! It's idiotic!" he said again.

Then he remarked that he was ashamed to be caught in this disgraceful typical national plight by an efficient American like myself: limping off to one's military service, trussed up in someone else's pants! I reminded him not to be too sure of America's efficiency. I stood there at the window for a moment gazing into the garden with him. There was a flicker of candles in the great political widow's windows; she had guests. In the six o'clock light the gravel of the path past Roger's wing to her door looked like seed pearls. There was a cool breeze coming up as the evening fell, and the short green ribbons of young narcissus waved in the angular flowerbeds along the path. "How pretty it is, don't you think?" said Roger.

After dinner we accompanied him to the Gare de l'Est. French railway terminals are all somewhat alike, I suppose, and surely the Gare de l'Est is not the largest and shabbiest; but that night it seemed so. It had an atmosphere of limbo, it was as cold as limbo.

There were hundreds of friends and relatives saying good-by on the platform, a long rough fringe of average humanity all along the train that poor Roger had to take. Having been away from France for years, I was affected by this crowd as if it had been music, memory-laden and homesick. Indeed it was not my home but it was a place wound into my thought and my senses too closely, too long, ever to be unwound or forgotten. I had not

forgotten the particular body odor of Frenchmen in a mass like this, rather like a vaseful of stale carnations, it seemed to me; carnations and a little garlic. I noted once more how many of their common faces have visionary eyes and, once more, I was made uncomfortable by their jostling which is less innocent and friendly than the American way but no less democratic.

Until the whistle of departure blew, some young men with their darlings and a few couples probably married kept embracing as it is done in France, face to face, with their arms round each other rather low, clasped in the small of each other's back. Now and then they took deliberate kisses and then seemed to be brooding separately on love, each staring up and straight ahead over the beloved shoulder.

There were as many mothers as wives and sweethearts; and when the whistle blew finally, peep peep, all this female assembly, maternal and enamored alike, suddenly appeared to sag and shrink, left behind together, deprived of their chief interest, their fond hearts without focus. It changed the physical aspect of the crowd a little all the way down the platform.

It was a long train composed of those small wooden coaches which are a peculiarity of France, like little old chicken-coops on wheels. I was pleased to see that Roger, the giant, could indeed stand up inside one; but in order to talk to us from the window of his compartment he had to stand with his legs wide apart and his knees bent; his tight shoulders more than ever like those of Atlas, with a world of self-pity and sophisticated sense of humor on them.

Peep peep, and the long lightweight train, low on its wheels, slid out into the dark, eastward. And then a hundred hands were flung up, very white; even the grimy hands looked white in the weak illumination of the train shed. It was one long flutter of farewell so intense that it was rather like a desperate beckoning to come back.

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Of course there is great love everywhere in the world, and the abuse and defrauding of pleasure everywhere. But France was the place, I suppose, where the average man and woman got the most out of their faculties of love. In this way and in their close family ties they probably always have been more vulnerable than other nations. Now indeed it is obvious how bad for them it must be to have a couple of million of their men in the prime of life kidnapped away and kept away; the best breeding stock of the country rounded up behind barbed wire. That was one thing which in my darkest sensibility to Europe in 1938 I did not anticipate. Yet this departure of men, this farewell of women, seemed to me almost sinister. I knew that men departing to military service were the hope of France; one hope of the whole world for that matter. I really had no reason to fret about them except that their raiment and paraphernalia and even the coaches in which they traveled looked a hundred years old.

When Roger returned two weeks later it was near the end of my European holiday; and engagements and errands had so entangled me that I had to put off seeing him. Then he invited me to spend a day at La Miel, which I did, on the second, or perhaps the third, Sunday in April. I had tired myself out in certain difficult intimacies in Paris, and was in a mood to be amused by such a careless companion as Roger; and furthermore Linda Brewer also had a house at La Miel. She is a really old and fond friend of mine, one of my generation, a fellow-writer whom I really admire; not a novelist but a journalist in the great way, personal, unpretentious, and scrupulous, which I admire almost as much as the art of the novel. As she had a better judgment of the French, and a more courageous prophetic feeling for entire Europe, than anyone else I knew, I returned to our country.

She had a stint of writing to do that Sunday, so she could not invite us to

lunch. Roger and Alain Raffe and I spent all the middle of the day outdoors; Roger at work in his garden with a serious breathlessness and an earnest account of the why and whereof of everything, Alain and I pretending to work and to listen. For two weeks I had been thinking of Roger as deep down inside the mysterious Line, in a labyrinth, in a cellar. It surprised me to find him a little tanned or at least weathered. He looked well. Now he was taking an almost gluttonous pleasure in his flower beds, kneeling and crawling, poring over every infant bit of green, plunging his hands out of sight into the mulch and the soft dry sifted soil.

I had no spirit to gossip, I could not listen, I could scarcely think, in a spell of the admiration and melancholy of France, now that I was about to leave it again. Over Roger's low orchard walls one could gaze a long way into the valley of the Chevreuse, a landscape with no flatnesses, with no heights, with scarcely any character except its mere attractiveness. The sunshine was so clear, the blue of the sky so sharp, that the earth seemed lacking in color. For several kilometers around it looked like a drawing in pastel, with the color a little rubbed off or blown away from the design, and some color blowing powdery in the air, in the breeze. The breeze was what they call a wind in France, and it had been so for almost a month, with extraordinary brilliance day after day, and drought and quite cold nights. It was a bad spring for fruit trees. Even Roger's sheltered and rugged apple trees were affected, blooming now with what was rather like a bud broken open than a proper blossom; and the brownish pink of the petals indicated that they would open no farther. But all the milky sweetness peculiar to apple blossom exhaled down from the heavy branches, in which bees were working stubbornly, reeling and blundering in the bad energy of the air.

About four o'clock we strolled over to Linda's for tea and sandwiches and

whiskey. It was chilly then, and our tired Frenchmen were glad to sit by the fire with Mrs. Lavery, the beautiful friend with whom Linda lived. Linda and I sat by ourselves on the far side of the room and talked our politics, international politics—Great Britain and America, America and France, France and Germany—with a certain wisdom, I do believe, relatively speaking, though surely we were unpretentious enough about that. We were quite honest in our narrow hopes and great general dread; no doubt we were very clever, and we felt that we were intelligent; but we did not pretend to be wise, even to each other.

We have in common—at least we have together—moods of an odd combination of unashamed sentiment with some toughness or hardness. And now little by little, in allusions amid what we had to say about politics, we were bidding each other an extraordinarily fond and significant kind of farewell. "When are you sailing?" she asked, and I told her.

"You know, you're quite right not to stay here," she said. "No one is going to be able to write fiction in France from now on. Do you think you will be able to, even at home, when the war gets going? Oh, I wish I could go home with you! How I envy you, in a way."

But she corrected herself. She did not envy me, she said; it was only her sentimentality and imagination. To stay in France as long as it was humanly possible was her fate. Because it was fate of course she herself did not altogether understand why it was. "But I shall be the last to leave. The last Middle-Westerner on this peninsula of Europe, of Eurasia."

I approved of her staying. If she must she must, I said. But then I rather made fun of her or, you might say, fun of the evil fate coming up to en-gulf perhaps everyone on earth. "Don't be too brave, don't stay too long. You will be a great nuisance to us."

"Why?"

"We'll have to come and rescue you.

We'll have to send a destroyer to get you. We'll find you in the fog on the sands at the foot of the Phare d'Ouessant, or up on one of those crazy pinnacles of the Finistère coast, waving your silk handkerchief. We'll take you off the rocks in a breeches-buoy."

I thought it a good joke in my way, a pretty scene, and it still sticks in my imagination: one of those inlets or coves of a matchless crazy beauty in Finistère, a dead extremity of the body of Europe, a broken tip of the index-finger of Eurasia. There is a seashore of dead-white stone which the ocean has half eaten; it is as if a cave had opened and its stalagmites had come out and were standing about. There are enormous skulls of the stone lying there and the ocean keeps cleaving them open, pulling the teeth and washing the sinuses; and the wind meanwhile preys upon the ocean, goring and sawing it and gagging it and hurling it into the stalagmites and the skulls, with its gray blood and disgusting spit spattering in the air for kilometers inland. It is one of those scenes which are impressive because they are reminiscent of human passion at its bitterest, of human physiology at its hardest, of starvation and sex and surgery and the like; but amid which actually a human being looks and feels as minute and shabby and functionless as a trained flea, badly trained at that!

"You have powerful friends, dear," I told Linda. "And you're worth a destroyer."

I have a loud voice, and across the room Roger and Alain and Mrs. Lavery heard this. They sighed and shrugged and smiled, probably regarding us in spite of affection as persons of excessive fantasy and wild talk. Just then Linda's old housekeeper entered with the tea and whiskey and bread and cheese, and we moved over to the fireside.

"I wish we were powerful," Linda said. "We," she insisted, with emphasis on the first person plural, "are not powerful."

It charmed me to find on the tea-table a poor old copy of *The Methodist Hymnal*,

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the earliest book of my life except perhaps *The Wizard of Oz*. Linda had bought it for five francs from a stall on the Quai Voltaire and had just been looking in it for a quotation. It started us talking of the great moral effects of congregational singing, Catholic versus Protestant, and then we spoke of national anthems. Mrs. Lavery was a musician, a lifelong student and practitioner of singing who intended to make a career of it. The month before last she had been engaged to sing our excessively difficult "Star-Spangled Banner" at a Washington's Birthday banquet.

Meanwhile I had been turning the pages of the hymnal, with pleasure and almost pathetic reminiscence of my Wisconsin childhood. Thanks to my mother's teaching and devout influence, this kind of simple Protestant music is second nature for me. I told Linda and the others how, as a boy soprano with high notes like those of a strained flute, I was sometimes paid as much as three dollars to sing at funerals, standing beside the coffins in little country parlors fumigated with tuberoses. It impressed them. Then I suggested our singing a few hymns. Roger and Alain refused but Linda and Mrs. Lavery were charmed to.

The latter had a fine high voice, trained as the French train their singers especially for the German repertory, with a golden tubular tone. The difficulty for her seemed to be that her exquisite physique was not stalwart enough for the volume of sound she had learned to produce. It made her pretty neck, which was like a water bird's, throb, and the note would slip. I played the piano. Linda sang now the alto, now the tenor notes.

I love looking at Linda when she talks, as I think everyone does; and there is much the same charm when she sings. She is not what is called a pretty woman; all her features, her nose, her brow, her lips, are somewhat too strong or too distinctive. And when she is silent you can see how her spirit and excess of expressions have aged her face, a little in an-

ticipation or in advance of the way she will look in due time anyway. As it is, I think her appearance is not likely to change much as she grows older. I regard her as fairly typical of our generation of emancipated, vagabond, international American, with a naturally worried mind but never discouraged in the least, cynical but conscientious—a pleasant enigma to most Europeans. Sometimes, when the matter of her talk or her thought is unhappy she has a look of almost ugly indignation. Then in the other extreme, her good humor will turn to a kind of wildness and glee, and she makes a comic face which is extraordinary, like a Greek mask. She dresses her hair in a lovely rough bob all round her head; it is gray hair, filaments of iron or spun ashes. In those old days in France she wore a monocle.

To sing, she put in her monocle and held her head a little to one side. We sang Watts' "Man Frail and God Eternal," most appropriate: "Like flowery fields the nations"—that is, I thought, the democracies—"stand, pleased with the morning light." We sang poor insane William Cowper's "God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform." We sang "Joy to the world," to Handel's tune, which would have made a better national anthem than the one we have.

I happened to look up over the grand piano and observed that our Frenchmen could scarcely bear it. Their large figures were slumping in their armchairs. Their faces, in the mixed daylight and firelight, showed no more animation than a pair of carvings in white wood. It was as if all feeling had moved out of them somewhere else, as if their hearts had fled, because it had become intolerable to feel anything, in proximity or in conjunction with whatever it was they were thinking. They were both Roman Catholics, although neither of them professed any belief. Perhaps the hue and cry we made was hard for them in the theological sense. We were real American Protestant-pagans, all three of us.

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Upon second thought I suppose it was the matter of nationality rather than the matter of faith. Superior French of the class and schooling of Roger and Alain do often regard us as a not quite civilized people, which does not hinder them from generally liking us. Roger and Alain particularly liked us three and must have assumed that we were a good deal less than one hundred per cent American. But there we were, with loud united voice and absent united mind, unabashed, absorbed in a native Sunday-afternoon ceremony. As it must have struck them, this was the old Adam coming out in us too, the old American Adam. We were powerful, we were happy, and furthermore, we were somewhat outside civilized history; and they loved us; and presently we would withdraw from them in fact as well as in spirit. Heathenish and cold-blooded and heartbreaking, we doubtless would go away and leave them.

Then Linda had to do some more work and it was time for us to dine, so we returned to Roger's. Alain, who was expecting a long-distance call from his father in Brussels, hastened on ahead. It was a cold twilight with a great fragrance, particularly that fermency fragrance of sod which has lately been frozen or frosted. There was an afterglow folded in cloud. We strolled down a narrow old lover's lane, under trees preserved in loving-kindness to a great age, then along a field of little vines all nursed and cut and healed and kept in harness, then along a soft orderly brook, and across a meadow on a well-worn path. Suddenly huge Roger turned toward me and talked to me.

"Listen, Alwyn," he began. He said my peculiar name almost as if it were Hallowe'en without the H. He stood in the middle of the path and talked fast. "Listen, Alwyn, I must tell you this. I did not care to mention it in Linda's presence; she would think it a good thing to put in an article for *Harper's* or *The New Yorker*. And that would be worse than not telling it at all, because the men

who are important never, on principle, believe a thing that they read in articles or in the newspapers. And there has been, my lord, enough of the shame of France. I am ashamed. I will not see any more of it in print. Not even abroad; not even when it is written by those like you and Linda who still feel that you are our allies. And, alas, if the Germans ever come to the conclusion about us that I've come to, God save us!

"I tell you this, Alwyn, because you must know some men who have power in New York and Washington. You can speak in our behalf, to impress upon them the necessity of helping us. Unless you stand by us we shall fail you. You cannot depend on us unless you help us."

"Roger," I interrupted sharply, "what are you talking about? What in the world is this?"

It was, as I might have guessed, the feebleness of the army of France, the inefficacy or ignorance of the government of France, the numerical if not personal inferiority of the French, the inadequacy of the heavy industry of France, the futility of the eastern and northeastern fortifications; in general, the hopeless impurity between the French and their enormous evil incomparable enemy. Roger had suspected all this for some time, and his two weeks' service in the Maginot Line had settled it for him.

"We are lost, we have not a hope, it is finished. France is past. Oh, God, I am so tired of thinking about it! How can we go to war, in the perfect certainty of defeat? What do the English expect of us? They despise us and yet they depend on us. When it is all over you will all say that we were cowards, crooks, degenerates, a nation of eunuchs. But how can we fight well when we have seen with our own eyes, to start with, that we have only old guns, little tanks, a few planes, and that crazy line of fortresses which the Germans understand perfectly, and not one of us has learned anything up to date, no one knows what to do?"

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I could not exactly see Roger's face, in the double-focus light of the dusk, not night yet but nocturne. But I did not need to see it. I knew what expression of the idleness of grief it wore. Irritably, stubbornly, I began to assure him that his pessimism was not to be trusted and that, in him and others like him, it constituted a worse disadvantage to the Republic than the shortcomings which inspired it.

Unfortunately my heart was not altogether in what I said. For if, at any time during the past decade, I had been asked whether in my opinion France had a first-rate army, I should have answered no. This was of course nothing but an impression, based on casual glances into various casernes and camps; on long waits at street corners for certain parades to pass; on conversations with some young men, soldier boys or ex-soldier boys who did not mean to tell me anything in particular, who suffered from none of Roger's emotion.

As I remember, whenever you encountered the French army, there was a kind of gypsy atmosphere; it was agreeable, amiable. You saw as it were great untidy picnics of the military maneuvering along the roads, with the right idea and ideal surely, and businesslike in some ways, but with unbecoming uniforms and quaint-looking guns, with improvisation and patchwork. Inside aged masonry of a hundred traditional fortresses you could always discover something human, picaresque or idyllic or melancholy: little old temperamental mules, little oldard officers, a mess table outdoors with fragrant soup in tin basins, a flutter of body linen drying on a clothesline. All over France you heard a bit of the music of the trumpet at dawn or at dusk, divertimento, as innocent, as rustic as a rooster crowing or a whippoorwill.

What Roger had to report, or rather to express, was a little worse than my impression; but probably that was because it meant more to him than to me. It was nothing very interesting, it was not news. He stood astride of the path wav-

ing his heavy arms, chattering rather than shouting. It was a mere outburst of simple conviction; refreshing in a sense, in France, where even in sadness there was usually too much moderateness and doubt. It was an outcry, an almost poetical generalization. His words themselves were flat and middle-class. A word here and there gave the idea, as in an opera, and the voice did the rest, that extraordinarily light voice, coming a little incongruously from the bulk of his shadowy figure in the empty meadow.

Really it amounted to nothing more than that the Maginot Line had been a bitter disappointment to him. He must have had false hopes of it after all, something like my dream of martial architecture which he had made fun of. In his actual report of his two weeks it was hard to tell exactly what was what; he had no reportorial talent. I wanted to inquire how long it had been before they had issued him a comfortable uniform, but he did not mention it and I was afraid of seeming to mock him. He did not really satisfy my curiosity in any respect. As I say, his mind was all lyricism and criticism. The Maginot Line has remained, to my mind, an enormity of mythical building with especially my Roger in it, my tragical, laughable giant talking so much and saying so little that was memorable or quotable.

He told me that the officers were severe with the men, but ruefully, like doctors keeping some secret. The men were not insubordinate or even sullen. They were rather, as to the possibility of war before long, the limitations of their equipment, and their own shortcomings in the sense of aptitude for war and training for war, tactful with one another. None of them of course knew for a fact that their matériel was inferior to the enemy's, but all of them somehow had been given some suspicion of it. They respected one another, and they had self-respect; but as to the guns and shells and instruments and supplies they were working with, they had only a sense of humor. As it had seemed to Roger

their good behavior itself, given all these implications, was ominous.

As French as can be, Roger then tried to explain the state of mind in the Line by referring to a book. "Have you read *Les Caves du Vatican*?" he asked.

I had indeed; it is André Gide's fantastic satire in which the Pope has been kidnapped and secretly imprisoned in the Vatican basement and an impostor has taken his place. Roger said that in the Line you kept thinking that there must be some supreme superior officer over all the other officers, and perhaps he was an impostor, perhaps he was deranged, perhaps he was a dead wraith. In any case the others did not understand the orders he gave, but as they re-gave them they pretended to.

The particular fortress to which Roger had been sent was an old building, built by the Germans in 1912 or 1913. When the victorious French recovered Alsace they found it in good condition and they economically incorporated it into their new battlements.

"The droll thing is," Roger said, "that we never troubled to remove the German signs painted up on the walls inside it here and there, over the doors, in the corridors. Signs like *Damen* and *Herren*, not really *Damen* and *Herren*; there were no *Damen* except in our dreams. All the other things to do and not to do, *Vorsicht*, *Stufe*, and *Rauchen und spucken streng untersagt*, for example. We left all that just as it was, in the messy, funny Gothic letters, to save money."

His accent in German was good, and evidently it amused him to speak it. "All the *Achtungs*, and the *Tür unter keiner Bedingung zu öffnen*, and all the *Verbotens*. I tell you it had an effect of hallucination. It was a German fortress anyway, and sometimes when I was tired I fancied that we were Germans already and did not know it."

This made Roger laugh, and in laughter—as it often happens, praise God, in all sorts of human emergency—he suddenly began to recover his composure. We went on our way home then along

the path. We found Alain playing the phonograph and we listened for a quarter of an hour. Then we dined, very leisurely and well; and after dinner we gossiped of indifferent acquaintances, certain musicians and the children of certain friends, and went early to bed.

A few days later, when I said good-by to Roger for who knows how long or perhaps forever, I suddenly realized that I had scarcely any affection for him left. The drama of France was too great, and his personal unhappiness and indignation about it too small, small and abstract. He had a broken heart, which is a sick, stupid thing, I said to myself. As a rule those whose hearts are really broken may as well be given up as a bad job. Unless they are quite young, one can do nothing with them or for them. Roger was truly patriotic and perhaps truly sensitive to the future, yet I had an impression of laziness all woven in with his feeling. Certainly, I thought, there must have been something more to the point for him to do than to unburden himself to a mere vacationing American strolling across a crepuscular pasture upon an April evening in the valley of the Chevreuse.

No doubt it was and still is foolish to judge France by men like my Roger, either in condemnation or in excuse. The man who makes an outcry is never quite the same as the inarticulate fellow-humanity behind him. And perhaps even my impatience with Roger individually was unjust. All over the world better men than he have done no more than he; and the majority of good men did not even have his foresight and emotion.

I still wonder at the simplicity and the courage of the chiefs of state allied to France in basing their policy and strategy upon the military might of the French and the obscure fame of those battles in Alsace. I suppose they never happened to meet any Rogers. I find it hard to believe that our brilliant American foreign correspondents, brave honest indefatigable fact-finders, never discov-

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ered that the French army would be good for nothing in a modern war. Probably they did discover everything, but, in their passionate devotion to the democratic cause, lest they discourage or demoralize their readers, kept imposing upon themselves a certain self-censorship. Now in New York I often discuss this with my friend Linda, but it is a mystery we cannot solve.

She was not in fact the last to leave France—far from it; no breeches-buoy! In May, 1940, she came home, for a few weeks, as she thought, because her father was in danger of death; and meanwhile France surrendered and she could never

get a passport to go back. The last we heard of Roger was that in June, 1940, he was in some sector of the Maginot Line between Sedan and Metz, perhaps in that same fortress of the German inscriptions, *Vorsicht* and *Verboten*. That, as Linda reminded me the other day, was where the German army slipped through. So probably he is now behind barbed wire, or laboring as a slave upon a high-way or an underground airport or some other wonderful project of enemy engineering. I like to think that, as his German is excellent and he loves Wagner and he is an amiable creature, he gets on well enough with his captors.

## OMEN

BY EDWARD WEISMILLER

W**ATCH him—there: the observed bird of disaster**
**Roughed by the sour wind, upborne by sky;**
*How he hangs, blacker than doom—drifts away faster*
*Than follows the unhinged eye.*

His poise insures survival. All the sputter
Of the thin brain that pulses in his skull
Serves this, or nothing—is without this the mutter
Of the latched sea in a sunken hull.

Recall him, man. Recall his casual balance,
Out of the reach of your opinioned flight.
Then think of Lucifer, whose orderless talents
Toppled him down through centuries of night.

## HOW LATIN AMERICANS DIE

AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

BY CHARLES MORROW WILSON

T**HERE ARE** roughly a hundred and twenty million people in Latin America, from the Rio Grande to Cape Horn. At this very moment it is a good bet that at least fifty million of them are sick. Sick of everything from sprue to leprosy. Sick of almost all the diseases that we in the United States encounter in our own lives, and of other savage and highly fatal diseases about which we know almost nothing.

A figure of fifty million sick men, women, and children is only an approximation, but reasonably close to the truth. It is too huge to be understandable. Doctors themselves, in the course of their professional work, generally think of sickness in terms of individual patients. Only gradually and partially has it begun to dawn on the experts in the field of public health that sickness in Latin America is as much a condition of life as weather or food. Fifty million sick people signify a society of sick men.

Recently the inhabitants of both continents of America have been subjected to a barrage of well-meaning literature which tried to interpret each to the other. We have discovered a good deal about how Latin America lives and is gay. But we have heard very little about how Latin America dies. A knowledge of how millions of our neighbors meet every year cruel, untimely, and unnecessary deaths is essential to an understanding of the problems facing our southern neighbors. Latin America's public enemy

number one is neither Nazi nor Japanese; it is disease. The operations of this enemy are harder to check and will continue to be far more dangerous to us of the North than anything imported into Latin America out of *Mein Kampf*.

It is a fact that in Cuba and in the Panama Canal Zone yellow fever has been practically conquered and malaria considerably curbed. But consider a few other figures: The average life expectancy of a resident of the United States, as of 1940, was about 62 years and 5 months. In Latin America, according to the best statistics now available, the average life lasts between 15 and 35 years less than that, depending on the locality in which it is lived. In Chile the life expectancy is about 35 years; in Peru, less than 32; in Mexico and Uruguay, well under 40.

These shocking figures are not due to the fact that most Latin Americans live in rural areas and most citizens of the United States in cities. In many countries to the south it is true that health statistics for rural areas are even more alarming than those for cities. But when you compare city with city the picture is much the same. The average yearly death rate per thousand people in the fifty largest cities of Latin America is more than twice as high as the death rate in the fifty largest cities of the United States.

Such figures mean something almost horrifying by the standards which we