The Ambulance Drivers

1

ON THE MORNING OF OCTOBER 14, 1916, JOHN RODERIGO DOS PASSOS'S father accompanied him to the Espagne, moored in lower Manhattan. The latest war news unnerved those boarding the Europe-bound ship. After reading about the recent close calls with German U-boats, ninety-five passengers had canceled their reservation.

Since graduating from Harvard University in May, the twenty-year-old Dos Passos had been like a foal confined in too small a paddock. Stuck for the summer at his father's expansive Virginia estate along the Potomac River, he endured the mugginess, stirring only to turn the page of a book. He worked his way through the ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe by the French writer Romain Rolland, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature the previous year. But what inspired Dos Passos most was Walt Whitman's poem "Song of the Open Road." The poet's invitation to set out on a journey roused Dos Passos. "I wanted to see the war, to paddle up undiscovered rivers, to climb unmapped mountains," he said. "I was frantic to be gone."

He spotted his chance for escape when he learned that men his age were being recruited for ambulance duty in Europe. When the Great War broke out in the summer of 1914 American expatriates living in Paris obtained ambulances and ferried the wounded from the front back to the well-equipped American hospital. Their actions inspired Richard Norton, an American archaeologist living in Paris at the time, who set about launching an organized ambulance service. The son of noted Harvard art history professor Charles Eliot Norton, the socially well-connected younger Norton found ready support for his plan. French millionaire H. Herman Harjes wrote large checks, and the venture was named the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps.

The Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps pursued drivers as if it were looking for candidates for membership in an elite men's club rather than for service in a war zone. "A volunteer must be a man of good disposition possessed of self-control—in short, a gentleman," said one recruitment letter. From a practical point of view, targeting the American elite for recruitment made sense: the prerequisite ability to speak French and the skill to operate a car were talents acquired primarily by members of the upper class. It also took money to join—recruits were expected to pay for their passage and expenses. Ivy League campuses, with their wealthy students, were choice picking grounds. Soon more than 800 Ivy League volunteers headed to France, 348 from Harvard alone.

Dos Passos decided that being an ambulance driver would bring him to the warfront without serving the war-making powers he despised. But his father soon put the kibosh on any ideas his son might have about joining a team of gentleman drivers dashing about European battlefields. Instead, he told him he would send him to study Spanish in Madrid, safely south of the battlefields. Dos Passos consented to his father's plan when he realized his Iberian confinement would last only until January 1917 when he turned twenty-one. "Then in spring I shall go to Paris and make every endeavor to get to the front by hook or crook," he confided to a friend.

At the dock father and son said their good-byes by the breezy water's edge in the fall coolness. "We had no regrets to express to each other, and no sighs were made," the father wrote to a friend soon after. "It was simply a kiss and au revoir." Later in the afternoon, looking out from the window of his law office, the father watched as the ocean liner carried his son out of New York City's harbor.

It had been an unconventional father-son relationship. The son had been born in a Chicago hotel on January 14, 1896, the product of an affair between the well-known but married New York City attorney John Randolph Dos Passos and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison, a widow from a socially prominent Petersburg, Virginia, family. Dos Passos and Madison were in love, but a divorce was out of the question for him. A Catholic, he knew his wife would not consent. So the child was named John Roderigo Madison Jr. His childhood was lived out in hotels in Brussels, Biar-ritz, and Boulogne-sur-Mer, places where his parents could meet openly. But time with his father remained rare. "I came to know him," the son said, "through the turbulence of conflicting currents of love and hate that mark many men's feelings for their fathers."

John R. Dos Passos's wife died in 1910, and he soon after married Lucy Madison. Their son was consigned to Choate, a small and exclusive Connecticut boarding school. It was a miserable life, one that Dos Passos hated. Small, skinny, younger than his classmates, wearing thick glasses, and speaking with a stutter, he was bullied by the testosterone-infused bullies who ruled the student bodies of New England prep schools like Choate. "I have no friends—there is no one who cares a rap about me," he wrote in his diary. Books became Dos Passos's dependable companions. They stirred his ambition. Someday, he told his diary, he would be so successful that his classmates would say, "'I went to school with John R. Dos Passos' (If I ever do assume that name.)" In time his mother and father did change his last name so he could affect the guise of being a stepson. Despite the name change and the marriage of his parents, Dos Passos passed the remainder of his childhood devoid of genuine family life.

When sixteen-year-old Dos Passos walked into Harvard Yard in the fall of 1912, he stepped out from a childhood in which he had been unable to fit in anywhere into a world willing to accept him on his own terms. True, many of Harvard's students were the scions of wealth whose place at the university was assured by birthright. But the faculty, unequaled in any other place in the United States, supported an intellectual meritocracy that rewarded excellence rather than social standing. Despite his unhappy years at Choate, the school had well prepared Dos Passos for his studies.

At last in a setting suitable for a poor-sighted shy teenager, Dos Passos drew enough courage to begin planning a life of his choosing. He elected to study art, poetry, and literature, thereby dashing his father's hopes that he would pursue instruction in law. The prodigious reading he had done at Choate grew even more expansive. The new authors he encountered beguiled him. It seemed as if he sought to devour Harvard's entire collection of books. He read, in the original French, authors such as Flaubert, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Voltaire, and he worked his way through British writers like Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, and Laurence Sterne as well as a full repast of Victorian poets and classic writers such as Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, reading these in Latin, of course.

Eager to become a published writer himself, Dos Passos submitted a short story at the end of his first year to the Harvard Monthly. It was only the first. The magazine took twenty-eight other of his stories along with many poems over the next few years. One could not pick up an issue of the Harvard Monthly without finding the Dos Passos byline.

At the close of his junior year in May 1915 Dos Passos opened a letter from his family's housekeeper. His mother's long-term battle with ill health had taken a turn for the worse. Next came a telegram from his father. "Your mother," he wrote, "is gradually sinking and we must prepare for the worse." She died a few days later.

Dos Passos returned home. Devastated by the loss of his one steadfast parent, he even considered not returning to Harvard for his final year. Grieving, he sought to distract himself by taking a trip to the World's Fair in San Francisco. On the Shasta Limited train Dos Passos met a fifteen-year-old student from St. Paul's School, an elite prep school in New Hampshire, who was traveling with his brother and cousin. It was like meeting a younger version of himself. Walter Rumsey Marvin, who went by his middle name, had spent time in European schools; spoke French, loved history, the classics, and reading and writing poetry; and came from wealth. They linked paths again at the World's Fair and in San Diego, where they passed a lazy day under Southern California's sun swimming and climbing the Sunset Cliffs. When they parted for the last time, promises were made to remain in touch.

"Dear Rummy," Dos Passos wrote from the train taking him back east. "When our roads divided the other morning I had quite reconciled myself to not meet any of you people again—because, you know—you never do meet people again that you want to." In Rummy Dos Passos had found a younger brother to mentor, a confidant with whom to share intimate thoughts in the privacy of letter writing, a kindred soul. The summer that had begun with death now sparkled with renewal.

When it came to the deep sorrow over his mother's death, Cambridge also proved to be a tonic. He was elected to the board of the Harvard Monthly. The publication's office, upstairs in the Harvard Union, was a mecca for students who loved to write and talk about books. There Dos Passos gravitated to poets Robert Hillyer, Dudley Poore, and Edward Estlin Cummings, who went by his initials E. E. and who was already experimenting with form, punctuation, and spelling. When work on the magazine was done, the men moved to Dos Passos's room in Thayer Hall overlooking the Yard for literary debates that stretched well into the night, fueled by an ample supply of alcohol.

He was once again busy, engaged in his studies, and full of life.

By the end of 1916 the literary and poetic pleasures of Harvard, the culinary delights of the streets of Cambridge, and liquor were a crumbling bulwark to the outside world. The Great War and the clamor of the interventionists could no longer be kept at bay. "The sounds of marching feet came dimly through the walls of the sanctum upstairs in the Harvard Union," Dos Passos said. "Franco-British propaganda was beating the drums for American intervention. The professors were losing their minds; hating the Huns became a mania."

It was a war that few in America had seen coming and no one in Europe had sought, but once unleashed, it could not be stopped. Military treaties, like the tacky silk of spiderwebs, pulled heavily armed nations into battle following the 1914 assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. A radical's single gunshot from a pocket-sized pistol set off a continental conflagration of immensity never before seen. Germany and Austria-Hungary, which led off the fighting, and Britain, France, and Russia, the main allies on the other side, were all convinced the war would be over in a matter of months. It was a bad gamble. Stubbornness, misjudgment, and alliances created an inextinguishable explosive mixture. By Christmas 1914 more than six hundred thousand French and German soldiers had died, and five hundred miles of trenches from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea carved out a killing field on soil blackened by bombardment.

The American warmongers gained ground in public opinion as the war dragged on. But they did not sway Dos Passos. Rather, he was inspired by the same kind of pacifism advocated by John Reed, the radical journalist who had graduated from Harvard in 1910. Dos Passos, in the company of E. E. Cummings, made sure to attend Reed's campus speech against US military involvement in Mexico. He carried his admiration for Reed to the Harvard Monthly, where he published two praising reviews of Reed's books. Dos Passos envied and emulated Reed's style of blending facts and impressions in capturing the war in Mexico and Europe. To put the injustices of the world on the page, for Dos Passos this seemed the great power of a writer.

Upon graduation in 1916 Dos Passos confined himself to his father's place in Virginia until he departed for Spain. He consumed books as if he were still in college, and he wrote essays. "Always against something, always the voice crying in the wilderness," he said. But writing was not enough. "I wanted to see the world," he said. "The world was the war."

In Spain Dos Passos waited to turn twenty-one years old and be free of his father's rule. But his January 14, 1917, birthday was soon followed by loss. John R. Dos Passos had been found unconscious on the floor of his bathroom; he died a few hours later of pneumonia. The death of his father brought Dos Passos back to the United States. His mother and father now gone, he had no family aside from a distant half-brother and a maternal aunt. With no one left to stop him, Dos Passos enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. It was a well-timed decision that permitted him to escape the newly instituted military draft triggered by the US entry into the war on April 6, 1917.

Dos Passos prepared for the work ahead by learning some basic first aid and training to operate an ambulance at a New York City automobile driving school. The skill to drive an ambulance was not easy to acquire. The vehicle had levers below the steering wheel. One served as an accelerator, and the other controlled the spark that ignited the combustion gas inside the engine's cylinders. As the ambulance sped or slowed, the driver had to change the timing of the spark. Too much adjustment either way, and the engine would knock or overheat. All the while the driver had to use his feet, like an organist, to operate three pedals that controlled the transmission's various speeds or put the car in reverse.

When not training, Dos Passos attended leftist political rallies and went out with a new covey of radical friends that included Max Eastman, the editor of the magazine The Masses. But leftist politics were risky off campus. Authorities were increasingly clamping down on dissent now that the nation had declared war on Germany. One night Dos Passos barely escaped arrest when the police raided a Greenwich Village apartment of radicals where he was attending an avant-garde dance recital.

He was happy to be among this crowd. "Every day I become more red," Dos Passos wrote to a friend. "I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot—don't you?—with our tea-table convictions and our radicalism that keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum. Dammit, why couldn't one of us have refused to register and gone to jail and made a general ass of himself ?" he wrote. "Until Widener [library] is blown up and A. Lawrence Lowell [president of Harvard] assassinated and the Business School destroyed—and its site sowed with salt—no good will come out of Cambridge."

Leaving the United States was a wise move. Congress would soon put the final touches on an Espionage Act that would make such antiwar utterances a criminal offense.

Under a brazen sun on Wednesday morning, June 20, 1917, Dos Passos lugged his heavy duffle bag along the dock at Pier 57 on the west side of lower Manhattan. Moored before him was the SS Chicago. For nine years the French-owned 508-foot liner had carried passengers in its well-appointed cabins across the Atlantic Ocean. But now it had been enlisted to bring American troops to war.

Above him French sailors scurried about the deck, making final preparations for a crossing to Bordeaux, France. On the pier, among the crates and a pair of long guns destined for the ship's hold, a crowd of well-wishers swayed to a band's peppy, if unauthentic, rendition of Hawaiian music. Women, in summer dresses and colorful hats, waved white handkerchiefs. Then hundreds of men, clad in khaki uniforms, pulled free of clasped hands and embraces, swung their gear over their shoulders, fell into line, and climbed the gangplanks like ants on a tree trunk.

Among them were two of Theodore Roosevelt's children, Theodore Jr. and his younger brother Archibald. President Woodrow Wilson had denied their bellicose father's application to lead a battalion to war. Instead, Roosevelt offered his sons to the nation. A few weeks earlier he had written to General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, requesting that he take Theodore and Archibald to France. "I apply on behalf of my sons that they may serve under you as enlisted men, to go to the front with the first troops sent over," wrote the former president who was convinced the fight would be a short one now that American troops were being called into battle.

The soldiers were also led to believe that what lay ahead would be a brief adventure. A collective hubris, fed by a compliant press and amplified by the government's propaganda, left the uniformed young men blind to the caldron of death across the ocean. The war had already taken more than 4 million European lives. In just four months the first of many telegrams would begin to be sent to 116,516 American families. Their opening words would be: Deeply regret to inform you…

Dos Passos reached the top of the gangplank and pushed his way across the ship's deck. It teemed with soldiers who smelled of sweat and beer and were shouting their good-byes to friends and family on the dock below. He found his assigned stateroom and his two cabin mates, also ambulance corps volunteers. Dos Passos stowed his gear and waited. The hot day wore on. Shortly after five o'clock the mooring lines holding the Chicago fast to the pier were slipped off their bollards and the Hudson's water bubbled as the ship's propellers came to life. "Hurrah—the whistle's blowing and the old tub is starting to move," Dos Passos scribbled furiously on a letter to Rummy. At last he was off on the adventure he had sought since graduating from Harvard a year earlier.

Dos Passos sealed the last of the letters he had dashed off. With his missives in hand, he went up on deck and found the harbor pilot, who agreed to post the letters when he returned to shore. Later, before joining the crowd heading to the bar and smoking rooms, Dos Passos took one last look at New York City outlined by the setting sun in the west. "Rosy yellow and drab purple," he thought, "the buildings of New York slid together into a pyramid above brown smudges of smoke standing out in the water, linked to the land by the dark curves of the bridges."

Ahead lay France, which he loved and knew well from his itinerant childhood in Europe's posh locales, and the great unknown of war.