“I like to hear you acknowledge your indebtedness,” said Peter frankly, “but I don’t think you should take on your shoulders the penitence of the whole white nation.”
“No, I don’t think I should, either,” Meriwether returned unexpectedly, “but that sort of extremeness seems to be inherent in the question of color. Either you concern yourself with it violently as the Southerner does and so let slip by all the other important issues of life; or you are indifferent and callous like the average Northerner and grow hardened to all sorts of atrocities; or you steep yourself in it like the sentimentalist—that’s my class—and find yourself paralyzed by the vastness of the problem.”
He slipped into a familiar mood of melancholy brooding. It was at such a time that he spoke to Peter of his willingness, of his absolute determination to lose his life in the Great War. For this reason he had gone into the ranks instead of the medical corps where he would have been comparatively safe. “Don’t think I’m a fanatic, Peter. I see this war as the greatest gesture the world has ever made for Freedom. If I can give up my life in this cause I shall feel that I have paid my debt.”
XXX
The interminable voyage was over and Peter debarked to spend still more interminable days at Brest. Dr. Meriwether Bye left immediately for La Courtine, where Peter later caught sight of him once more on his way to the front. The somewhat exalted mood to which his long and intimate talks with Meriwether had raised him vanished completely under the strain of the dirt, the racial and national clashes, and above all the persistent bad weather of Brest.
This town, the end of Brittany and the furthest western outpost of France, always remained in Peter’s memory as a horrible prelude to a most horrible war. Brest up to the time that Europe had gone so completely and so suddenly insane, had been the typical, stupid, monotonous French town with picturesquely irregular pavements, narrow tortuous streets, dark, nestling little shops and the inevitable public square. Around and about the city to all sides stretched well ordered farms.
Then came the march of two million American soldiers across the town and the surrounding country. Under their careless feet the farms became mud, so that the name Brest recalls to the minds of thousands nothing if not a picture of the deepest, slimiest, stickiest mud that the world has known. All about were people, people, too many people, French and Americans. And finally the relations between the two nations, allies though they were, developed from misunderstandings into hot irritations, from irritations into clashes. First white Americans and Frenchmen clashed; separate restaurants and accommodations had to be arranged. Then came the inevitable clash between white and colored Americans; petty jealousies and meannesses arose over the courtesies of Frenchwomen and the lack of discrimination in the French cafés. The Americans found a new and inexplicable irritation in the French colored colonials. Food was bad, prices were exorbitant; officers became tyrants. Everyone was at once in Brest and constantly about to leave it; real understanding and acquaintanceship were impossible.
Peter thought Dante might well have included this place in the description of his Inferno. Here were Disease and Death, Mutilation and Murder. Stevedores and even soldiers became cattle and beasts of burden. Many black men were slaves. The thing from which France was to be defended could hardly be worse than this welter of human misunderstandings, the clashing of unknown tongues, the cynical investigations of the government, the immanence of war and the awful, persistent wretchedness of the weather.
The long wait turned into sudden activity and Peter’s outfit was ordered to Lathus, thence to La Courtine, one of the large training centers. It was at this latter place that he caught sight once more of Meriwether Bye. He seemed unusually alert and cheerful, Peter thought, and when the two got a chance to speak to each other, this impression was confirmed. The young white physician had the look of a man who sees before him a speedy deliverance.
“He thinks he’s going to die and chuck this whole infernal business,” Peter said to himself. “Wish I could be as sure of getting out of it as he is.” Somehow the brief encounter left him more dispirited than ever. “Come out of it, ole hoss,” Harley Alexander used to say to him. “What’d your ‘grand white’ friend do to you?”
“Oh, you shut up!” Peter barked at him.
His real depression, however, dated back to the time immediately after his company had left Brest. The awful condition of things in the seaport town was general rather than specific, and for the first time since Peter had entered the war he was feeling comparatively calm. His long and intimate talks with Meriwether had produced their effect. He had not realized that any such man as the young Quaker physician had existed in the white world. He had too much sense and too many cruel experiences to believe that there were many of Meriwether’s kind to be found in a lifetime’s journey, but somehow his long bitterness of the years had been assuaged. Henceforth, he told himself, he would try to be more generous in his thoughts of white men—perhaps his attitude invited trouble which he was usually only too willing to meet halfway.
At Lathus, Harley Alexander met him in the little place. “Seems to me you’re got up regardless,” Peter had commented. Alexander, one of the trimmest men in the regiment,
