CAFARD

It is mid-January, snowing, blowing, the thermometer below zero. We have done no flying for five days. We have read our most recent magazines from cover to cover, including the advertisements, many of which we find more interesting, better written, than the stories. We have played our latest phonograph record for the five hundred and ninety-eighth time. Now we are hugging our one stove, which is no larger than a length of good American stove-pipe, in the absurd hope of getting a fleeting promise of heat.

Boredom, insufferable boredom. There is no American expression there will be soon, no doubt for this disease which claims so many victims from the Channel coast to the borders of Switzerland. The British have it without giving it a name. They say “Fed up and far from home.” The more inventive French call it “Cafard.”

Our outlook upon life is warped, or, to use a more seasonable expression, frozen. We are not ourselves. We make sarcastic remarks about one another. We hold up for ridicule individual peculiarities of individuality. Some one, tiring of this form of indoor sports, starts the phonograph again.

Wind, wind, wind (the crank)
Kr-r-r-r-r-r-r (the needle on the disk)
La-dee-dum, dee-doodle, di-dee-day (the orchestral introduction)

Sometimes when I feel sad
And things look blue,
I wish the boy I had
Was one like you

“For the love of Pete! Shut off that damn silly thing!”

“I admire your taste, Irving!”

“Can it!”

“Well, what will you have, then?”

“Play that Russian thing, the ‘Danse des Buffons.’”

“Don’t play anything.”

“Lord! I wish some one would send us some new records.”

“Yes, instead of knitted wristers what?”

“And mufflers.”

“Talking about wristers, how many pair do you think I’ve received? Eight!”

“You try to head ’em off. Doesn’t do any good. They keep coming just the same.”

“It’s because they are easy to make. Working wristers and mufflers is a method of dodging the knitting draft.”

“Well, now, I call that gratitude! You don’t deserve to have any friends.”

“Isn’t it the truth? Have you ever known of a soldier or an aviator who wore wristers?”

“I give mine to my mechanician. He sends them home, and his wife unravels the yarn and makes sweaters for the youngsters.”

“Think of the waste energy. Harness up the wrist-power and you could keep three aircraft factories going day and night.”

“Oh, well, if it amuses the women, what’s the difference?”

“That’s not the way to look at it. They ought to be doing something useful.”

“Plenty of them are; don’t forget that, old son.”

“Anybody got anything to read?”

“Now, if they would send us more books ”

“And magazines ”

“Two weeks ago, Blake, you were wishing they wouldn’t send so many.”

“What of it? We were having fine weather then.”

“There ought to be some system about sending parcels to the front.”

“The Germans have it, they say. Soldier wants a book, on engineering, for example, or a history, or an anthology of recent poetry. Gets it at once through Government channels.”

“Say what you like about the Boches, they don’t know the meaning of waste energy.”

“But you can’t have method and efficiency in a democracy.”

“There you go! Same old fallacy!”

“No fallacy about it! Efficiency and personal freedom don’t go together. They never have and they never will.”

“And what does our personal freedom amount to? When you get down to brass tacks, personal freedom is a mighty poor name for it, speaking for four fifths of the population.”

“Germany doesn’t want it, our brand, and we can’t force it on her.”

“And without it, she has a mighty good chance of winning this war ”

When the talk begins with the uselessness of wristers, shifts from that to democratic inefficiency, and from that to the probability of Deutschland ueber Alles, you may be certain of the diagnosis. The disease is cafard.

The sound of a motor-car approaching. Dunham rushes to the window and then swears, remembering our greased-cloth window panes.

“Go and see who it is, Tiffin, will you? Hope it’s the mail orderly.”

Tiffin goes on outpost and reports three civilians approaching.

“Now, who can they be, I wonder?”

“Newspaper men probably.”

“Good Lord! I hope not.”

“Another American mission.”

“That’s my guess, too.”

Rodman is right. It is another American mission coming to “study conditions” at the front.

“But unofficially, gentlemen, quite unofficially,” says Mr. A., its head, a tall, melancholy-looking man, with a deep, bell-like voice. Mr. B., the second member of the mission, is in direct contrast, a birdlike little man, who twitters about the room, from group to group.

“Oh! If you boys only knew how splendid you are! How much we in America You are our first representatives at the front, you know. You are the vanguard of the millions who ” etc.

Miller looks at me solemnly. His eyes are saying, “How long, O Lord, how long!”

Mr. C., the third member, is a silent man. He has keen, deep-set eyes. “There,” we say, “is the brain of the mission.”

Tea is served very informally. Mr. A. is restless. He has something on his mind. Presently he turns to Lieutenant Talbott.

“May I say a few words to your squadron?”

“Certainly,” says Talbott, glancing at us uneasily.

Mr. A. rises, steps behind his chair, clears his throat, and looks down the table where ten pilots, the others are taking a constitutional in the country, caught in negligee attire by the unexpected visitors, are sitting in attitudes of polite attention.

“My friends ” the deep, bell-like voice. In fancy, I hear a great shifting of chairs, and following the melancholy eyes with my own, over the heads of my ten fellow pilots, beyond the limits of our poor little messroom, I see a long vista of polished shirt fronts, a diminishing track of snowy linen, shimmering wineglasses, shining silver.

“My friends, believe me when I say that this occasion is one of the proudest and happiest of my life. I am standing within sound of the guns which for three long years have been battering at the bulwarks of civilization. I hear them, as I utter these words, and I look into the faces of a little group of Americans who, day after day, and week after week” (increasing emphasis) “have been facing those guns for the honor and glory of democratic institutions” (rising inflection).

“We in America have heard them, faintly, perhaps, yet unmistakably, and now I come to tell you, in the words of that glorious old war song, ‘We are coming, Father Woodrow, ONE HUN-DRED MIL-LION strong!’”

We listen through to the end, and Lieutenant Talbott, in his official capacity, begins to applaud. The rest of us join in timidly, self-consciously. I am surprised to find how awkwardly we do it. We have almost forgotten how to clap our hands! My sense of the spirit of place changes suddenly. I am in America. I am my old self there, with different thoughts, different emotions. I see everything from my old point of view. I am like a man who has forgotten his identity. I do not recover my old, or, better, my new one, until our guests have gone.