1. Camp Eustis--Bouton, Pennsylvania
A small torrent of khaki swept on to the ferryboat that was taking troops to the special train for Camp Merritt. They stood all over her deck, in uncomfortably small areas; there seemed to be no room for the pack, which perhaps you were expected to swallow. Faces were a little pale from seasickness, but carried a uniformly radiant expression, which proceeded from a lively anticipation of civilian happiness. The conversation was ejaculatory, and included slapping and digging and squeezing your neighbor. Men were saying over and over again: "This is about the last li'l war they'll ketch me for."
I succeeded in getting beside the civilian pilot.
"What's happening in America?" I asked.
"Oh," he said, "it's a mess over here. There ain't any jobs, and labor is raisin' hell. Everybody that hez a job strikes." He looked out over the water at a tug hurrying past. "I don't know what we're comin' out at. Russia, mebbe."
In the spring of the year Camp Eustis was an island of concrete roads and wooden barracks salvaged from an encroaching sea of mud. Its site had been selected at an immense distance from any village, or even any collection of human dwellings, for particular reasons. It was to contain the longest artillery range in the United States.
After wallowing in bog road through Virginian forest, one came with a shock of relief to a wide, raised, concrete roadbed, which passed newly built warehouses and, after an eighth of a mile, curved into the centre of the camp.
It was like any one of the score of mushroom military centres that grew up on American soil in the years from 1917 to 1919, except that there was an unusual abundance of heavy guns. They covered field upon field, opposite the ordnance warehouses, and their yellow and green camouflage looked absurdly showy in the spring sunshine. Mornings, there was apt to be a captive balloon or two afloat from the balloon school, against blue sky and white clouds; and the landscape held several gaunt observation towers, constructed of steel girders and rising from the forest to a height of seventy-five or eighty feet.
The camp was crowded with returning overseas units, awaiting demobilization and praying earnestly for it day by day, as men pray for pardon.
In a few weeks I should be out of this, going to work somewhere, wearing cits. What a variety of moods the world had split into, from the enormous tension that relaxed on the eleventh of November. Geographically the training-camp was two thousand miles from the devastations of Europe; and from the new forces that were destroying or renewing civilization, how many more? It seemed like the aftermath of an exciting play that had just been acted; waiting here was like staying to put away properties, and dismiss the actors. It occurred to me that the camp was at least ten thousand miles from America.
There was one consolation in this interminable lingering amid the spring muds and rains of Virginia. Duties were light, and there were a hundred and fifty cavalry horses in the stables, needing exercise. Sometimes we went out on the drill-ground and were taught tricks by an old cavalry officer; or hurdles were set up and we practised jumping our horses. The roads were deeply gutted by spring rains and the pressure of heavy trucks, but there were wood-trails good to explore, and interesting objectives like Williamstown or Yorktown. I fell into doing my thinking in the saddle.
Naturally I wondered about my new job--my civilian job. It was not just an ordinary change from one breadwinning place to another. It was a new job in a world never convertible quite to the one that had kindled the war. It was impossible not to feel that the civilized structure had shaken and disintegrated a bit, or to escape the sense of great powers released. I was unable to decide whether the powers were cast for a rôle of great destruction or of great renewal.
Even in Eustis we received newspapers. The urge and groan of those powers naturally worked into phrases now and then, and even into special tightly worded formulæ. I remember newspaper ejaculations, professorial dissertations, orators' exaggerations: "Capital and labor--Labor in its place--The proletariat--A new order"--and so forth. I felt confused and distrustful in the face of phrases and of the implied doctrines, old and new.
Besides the business of demobilizing the national army, the remaining regular officers and non-coms went into the school of fire, and practised observation of shots over a beautiful relief map of the "Chemin-des-Dames." This was the most warlike thing we did and continued for several months.
One day I took a walk beside the ordnance warehouses, and looked over at the rows of guns stretching for a quarter of a mile beside railroad tracks. In a short time I would be turning my back on these complicated engines. I was even sorry about it, a little; I had spent so much sweat and brain learning about their crankinesses.
In that civil life to follow, I began to see that I wanted two things: 1, a job to give me a living; 2, a chance to discover and build under the new social and economic conditions.
I was twenty-five, a college graduate, a first-lieutenant in the army. In the civilian world into which I was about to jump, most of my connections were with the university I had recently left, few or none in the business world. Why not enlist, then, in one of the basic industries, coal, oil, or steel? I liked steel--it was the basic American industry, and technically and economically it interested me. Why not enlist in steel? Get a laborer's job? Learn the business? And, besides, the chemical forces of change, I meditated, were at work at the
bottom of society--
The next day I sent in the resignation of my commission in the regular army of the United States.
Outside the car window, ore piles were visible, black stacks and sooty sheet-iron mills, coal dumps and jagged cuts in the hills against greenness and the meadows and mountains beyond. There were farms, here and there, but they seemed to have been let in by sufferance amid the primary apparatus of the steel-makers.
What an amazingly primary thing steel had become in the civilization we called modern! Steel was the basic industry of America; but, more than that, it was, in a sense, the buttress, the essential frame, rather, of present-day life. It made rails, surgical instruments, the girders of skyscrapers, the tools which cut, bored, and filed all the other tools that made, in their turn, the material basis of our living. It was interesting to think that it contained America's biggest "trust," the greatest example of integration, of financial, of managerial combination, anywhere to be found. Steel was critical in America's future, wasn't it--critical for business, critical for labor?
I met a salesman on the train, who was about to go into business for himself. "I intend to start out on a new tack," he said.
He told me briefly his life-story, and how things were forcing him to start a new enterprise, alone. He was very much excited by the idea. He was going to quit his employer, having been with him twenty-nine years.
"I'm getting a new job myself," I said; "I've just got out of the army."
We both fell into silence, and thought of our own separate futures.
What were a young man's chances in American business to-day? I thought of a book I had just been reading called, "The Age of Big Business." In it was the story of the first captains who saw a vision of immense material development, and with the utmost vigor and hardihood pushed on and marked the leading trails. But apparently the affair had been too roughly done, the structure too crudely wrought: machinery jarred, broke, threatened to bring life down in a rusty heap. "No, you are wrong," I fancied the business leader saying; "it is the agitator who, by dwelling on imaginary ills, has stirred up the masses of mankind."
I gazed out of the window at the black mills as we passed them. I was about to learn the steel business. I knew perfectly well that the men who built this basic structure were as hardy and intelligent--no less and no more so, I hazarded--as this new generation of mine. But the job--difficult technical job though it was--appeared too simple in their eyes. "Build up business, and society will take care of itself," they had said. A partial breakdown, a partial revolution had resulted. Perhaps a thoroughgoing revolution threatened. I didn't know.
I knew there was no "solution." There was nothing so neat as that for this multiform condition. But an
adjustment, a
working arrangement would be found out, somehow, by my generation. I expected to discover no specific--no formula with ribbons--after working at the bottom of the mill. I did expect to learn something of the practical technique of making steel, and alongside it,--despite, or perhaps because of, an outsider's fresh vision,--some sense of the forces getting ready at the bottom of things to make or break society. Both kinds of education were certainly up to my generation.
The train jarred under its brakes, and began to slow down.
"Good luck," I said to the salesman; "I hope you make it all right."
"Good luck," he said.
The train stopped and I found the Bouton station, small and neatly built, of a gray stone, with deeply overhanging roof and Gothicized windows. It seemed unrelated to the rest of the steel community. On the right, across tracks, loomed a dark gathering of stacks arising from irregular acres of sheet-iron roofs. Smoke-columns of various texture, some colored gold from an interior light, streaked the sky immediately above the mill stacks. The town spread itself along a valley and on the sides of encircling hills on my left. In the foreground was Main Street, with stores and restaurants and a fruit-seller. I went across the street to explore for breakfast.
"Can I look at the job?" I asked.
"Sure," he said, "you can look at the job."
I walked out of the square, brick office of the open-hearth foreman, and lost my way in a maze of railroad tracks, trestles, and small brick shanties, at last pushing inside a blackened sheet-iron shell, the mill. I entered by the side, following fierce white lights shining from the half-twilight interior. They seemed immensely brighter than the warm sun in the heavens.
I was first conscious of the blaring mouths of furnaces. There were five of them, and men with shovels in line, marching within a yard, hurling a white gravel down red throats. Two of the men were stripped, and their backs were shiny in the red flare. I tried to feel perfectly at home, but discovered a deep consciousness of being overdressed. My straw hat I could have hurled into a ladle of steel.
Some one yelled, "Watch yourself!" and I looked up, with some horror, to note half the mill moving slowly but resolutely onward, bent on my annihilation. I was mistaken. It was the charging-machine, rattling and grinding past furnace No. 7.
The machine is a monster, some forty feet from head to rear, stretching nearly the width of the central open space in the mill. The tracks on which it proceeds go the whole length, in front of all the furnaces. I dodged it, or rather ran from it, toward what appeared open water, but found there more tracks for stumbling. An annoyed whistle lifted itself against the general background of noise. I looked over my shoulder. It relieved me to find a mere locomotive. I knew how to cope with locomotives. It was coming at me leisurely, so I gave it an interested inspection before leaving the track. It dragged a cauldron of exaggerated proportions on a car fitted to hold it easily. A dull glow showed from inside, and a swirl of sparks and smoke shot up and lost themselves among girders.
The annoyed whistle recurred. By now the charging affair had lumbered past, was still threatening noisily, but was two furnaces below. I stepped back into the central spaces of the mill.
The foreman had told me to see the melter, Peter Grayson. I asked a short Italian, with a blazing face and weeping eyes, where the melter was.
He stared hostilely at me.
"Pete Grayson," I said.
"Oh, Pete," he returned; "there!"
I followed his eyes past a pile of coal, along a pipe, up to Pete. He was a Russian, of Atlas build, bent, vast-shouldered, a square head like a box. He was lounging slowly toward me with short steps. Coming into the furnace light, I could see he was an old man with white hair under his cap, and a wooden face which, I was certain, kept a uniform expression in all weathers.
"What does a third-helper do?" I asked when he came alongside.
Pete spat and turned away, as if the question disgusted him profoundly. But I noticed in a moment that he was giving the matter thought.
We waited two minutes. Finally he said, looking at me, "Why a third-helper has got a hell of a lot to do."
He seemed to regard this quantitative answer as entirely satisfying.
"I know," I said, "but
what in hell does he do?"
He again looked at the floor, considered, and spat. "He works around the furnace," he said.
I saw that I should have to accept this as a prospectus. So I began negotiations. "I want a job," I said. "I come from Mr. Towers. Have you got anything now?"
He looked away again and said, "They want a man on the night-shift. Can you come at five?"
My heart leaped a bit at "the night-shift." I thought over the hours-schedule the employment manager had rehearsed: "Five to seven, fourteen hours, on the night-week."
"Yes," I said.
We had just about concluded this verbal contract, when a chorus of "Heows" hit our eardrums. Men make such a sound in a queer, startling, warning way, difficult to describe. I looked around for the charging machine, or locomotive, but neither was in range.
"What are they 'Heowing' about?" I thought violently to myself.
But Pete had already grabbed my arm with a hand like a crane-hook. "Want to watch y'self," he said; "get hurt."
I saw what it was, now: the overhead crane, about to carry over our heads a couple of tons of coal in a huge swaying box.
I looked around a little more before I left, trying to organize some meaning into the operations I observed; trying to wonder how it would be to take a shovel and hurl that white gravel into those red throats. I said to myself: "Hell! I guess I can handle it," and thought strongly on the worst things I had known in the army.
As I stood, a locomotive entered the mill from the other end, and went down the track before the furnaces. It was dragging flat-cars, with iron boxes laid crosswise on them, as big as coffins. I went over and looked carefully at the train load, and at one or two of the boxes. They were filled with irregular shapes of iron, wire coils, bars, weights, sheets, fragments of machines, in short--scrap.
"This is what they eat," I thought, glancing at the glowing doors; "I wonder how many tons a day." I waited till the locomotive came to a shaken stop in front of the middle furnace, then left the mill by the tracks along which it had entered.
I followed them out and along a short bridge. A little way to my right was solid ground--the yards, where I had been. Back of Mr. Towers's little office were more mills. I picked out the power house--half a city block. Behind them all were five cone-shaped towers, against the sky, and a little smoke curling over the top--the blast-furnaces. Behind me the Bessemer furnace threw off a cloud of fire that had changed while I was in the mill from brown to brownish gold. In front, and to my left, the tracks ran on the edge of a sloping embankment that fell away quickly to a lower level. Fifty yards from the base was the blooming-mill, where the metal was being rolled into great oblong shapes called "blooms." A vague red glow came out of its interior twilights.
Down through the railroad ties on which I walked was open space, twenty feet below. Two workmen were coming out with dinner-buckets. It must be nearly twelve. I had a curiosity to know the arrangement and workings of the dark mill-cellar from which they came.
Turning back on the open-hearth mill, when I had crossed the bridge, I could see that it extended itself, in a sort of gigantic lean-to shelter, over what the melter had called the "pit." There was a crane moving about there, and more centres of light, which I took to be molten steel. I wondered about that area, too, and what sort of work the men did.
When I reached the end of the track, I thought to myself: "I go to work at five o'clock. How about clothes?"
No one in the mill wore overalls, except carpenters and millwrights, and so on. The helpers on the furnaces were clad in shapeless, baggy, gray affairs for trousers, and shirts were blue or gray, with a rare khaki. Hats were either degraded felts, or those black-visor effects--like locomotive engineers.
The twelve-o'clock whistle blew. A few men had been moving toward the gate slowly for minutes. The whistle sent them at top walking-speed. I stared at them to assure myself as to the correct dress for steel makers.
Main Street began at the tracks, and ran straight through the town, mounting the hills as it went. At the railroad end was the Hotel Bouton, where I had breakfasted. Beside it was an Italian fruit store sprawling leisurely over the sidewalk, and a Greek restaurant, one of four. The Greeks monopolized the feeding of Bouton. A block farther, on the right, I ran into a clothing-store, a barber-shop, and two rudimentary department stores. Then, on the same side, a finished city block, looking queer and haughty amid its village companions.
"What's that?" I asked a strolling, raw-boned Slav.
"Comp'ny store," he said.
I passed a one-story movie "palace," almost concealed behind chromatic advertising, and then the street twisted and I entered the "American quarter." Half a mile of neat, slightly varying brick houses, with lawns fifteen by twenty, and children in such quantity as seriously to menace automobiles.
I looked at the numbers with growing interest, to discover in which I should go to bed to-morrow morning at 7.30. The employment manager had given me the number 343 to try. Here it was, on the right, quite like the others, and, I guessed, about twenty minutes from the mill. Calculation of the rising-times for future night-shifts came into my mind.
I was shown the back room on the second floor--a very good room, with a big bed, and two windows.
"You can see our garden," said Mrs. Farrell standing at one of the windows.
I looked out and found the most intensively cultivated twenty-foot plot I had ever seen or imagined. Behind was the back road and a mud cliff. The room seemed a little extravagant for a third-helper, but I took it, in order to have a place for the night, and contracted to pay four dollars a week.
I walked through a street where the prices of clothing were moderate, but where there seemed a dearth of second-hand shops. In one store were green suits, belted, and hung on forms. They had the close-fitting waist, and were marked, "Style Plus Garments: Our Special Price, $15.00." The proprietor, who stood in the doorway, to be handy for collaring the prospective customer, rushed out at me, hands threatening. He was of the prevailing racial type.
"Fix you up wid a dandy suit," he said.
"What I am looking for," I said, "is something second-hand. Do you have any?" I shot this out partly as a check.
"Old man upstairs, fix you up. That door."
I went through that door and up two flights, to a room containing an old man, a sewing machine, and a large table covered with old clothing.
"I'm looking for something for working-clothes," I said; "second-hand coat and pants."
He lifted a number from the tangled mass of garments, and displayed them. They appeared to me too clean, too new, too dressy.
"No," I said, "not that."
He searched again and came up with a highly respectable blue coat, with a mere raveling on one sleeve.
"No," I said, "I'll find one."
I fished very deeply, and caught some green pants, evidently "old" and spattered with white paint on the knees. He hastened to point out the white paint.
I tried to explain that I liked a little white paint on my clothes, but saw I was unconvincing. I finally bought the suit with a sort of violence for two dollars, and left with a sense of fortunate escape.
Now for a hat. Two blocks down the street I found one, somewhat soiled and misshapen.
"I'll take that," I said.
The clerk lifted it, and, when I was fumbling for money, brushed off a vast portion of the dirt, and reshaped it into smooth, luxuriant curves. But still I bought the hat.
"At any rate," I thought, "I can restore the thing."