Title: In Our Time
Author: Hemingway, Ernest
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "In Our Time" ***


  in our time



  the author _wood-cut from portrait by_ henry strater



  in our time

  _by_

  ernest hemingway

        A Girl in Chicago: Tell us about
        the French women, Hank. What are
        they like?

        Bill Smith: How old are the French
        women, Hank?

  paris:

  _printed at the_ three mountains press _and for sale
  at_ shakespeare & company, _in the rue de l’odéon;_
  _london:_ william jackson, _took's court, cursitor street, chancery lane._

  1924



  to
  robert mᶜalmon and william bird
  _publishers of the city of paris_
  and to
  captain eric edward dorman-smith, m.c.,
  _of his majesty’s fifth fusiliers_
  this book
  is respectfully dedicated



  _of_ 170 _copies_
  _printed on_
  rives _hand-made paper_
  _this is number_



  in our time



  chapter 1


Everybody was drunk. The whole battery was drunk going along the road
in the dark. We were going to the Champagne. The lieutenant kept
riding his horse out into the fields and saying to him, “I’m drunk, I
tell you, mon vieux. Oh, I am so soused.” We went along the road all
night in the dark and the adjutant kept riding up alongside my
kitchen and saying, “You must put it out. It is dangerous. It will be
observed.” We were fifty kilometers from the front but the adjutant
worried about the fire in my kitchen. It was funny going along that
road. That was when I was a kitchen corporal.



  chapter 2


The first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd
hooted him out. The second matador slipped and the bull caught him
through the belly and he hung on to the horn with one hand and held
the other tight against the place, and the bull rammed him wham
against the wall and the horn came out, and he lay in the sand, and
then got up like crazy drunk and tried to slug the men carrying him
away and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came out and
had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three
matadors, and the last bull he was so tired he couldn’t get the sword
in. He couldn’t hardly lift his arm. He tried five times and the
crowd was quiet because it was a good bull and it looked like him or
the bull and then he finally made it. He sat down in the sand and
puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd hollered and
threw things down into the bull ring.



  chapter 3


Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats.
The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road.
Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No end
and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned. The
old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle
moving. The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts
were jammed solid on the bridge with camels bobbing along through
them. Greek cavalry herded along the procession. Women and kids were
in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines,
bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a
blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all
through the evacuation.



  chapter 4


We were in a garden at Mons. Young Buckley came in with his patrol
from across the river. The first German I saw climbed up over the
garden wall. We waited till he got one leg over and then potted him.
He had so much equipment on and looked awfully surprised and fell
down into the garden. Then three more came over further down the
wall. We shot them. They all came just like that.



  chapter 5


It was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect
barricade across the bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old
wrought iron grating from the front of a house. Too heavy to lift and
you could shoot through it and they would have to climb over it. It
was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them
from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and
worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers
were very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank
had gone, and we had to fall back.



  chapter 6


They shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning
against the wall of a hospital. There were pools of water in the
courtyard. There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard.
It rained hard. All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut.
One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two soldiers carried him
downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him up against
the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood
very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers
it was no good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first
volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.



  chapter 7


Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to
be clear of machine gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out
awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and
dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Rinaldi, big
backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall.
Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house
opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung
twisted toward the street. Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the
shade of the house. Up the street were other dead. Things were
getting forward in the town. It was going well. Stretcher bearers
would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully and
looked down at Rinaldi. “Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we’ve made
a separate peace.” Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with
difficulty. “Not patriots.” Nick turned his head carefully away
smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience.



  chapter 8


While the bombardment was knocking the trench to pieces at Fossalta,
he lay very flat and sweated and prayed oh jesus christ get me out of
here. Dear jesus please get me out. Christ please please please
christ. If you’ll only keep me from getting killed I’ll do anything
you say. I believe in you and I’ll tell everyone in the world that
you are the only thing that matters. Please please dear jesus. The
shelling moved further up the line. We went to work on the trench and
in the morning the sun came up and the day was hot and muggy and
cheerful and quiet. The next night back at Mestre he did not tell the
girl he went upstairs with at the Villa Rossa about Jesus. And he
never told anybody.



  chapter 9


At two o’clock in the morning two Hungarians got into a cigar store
at Fifteenth Street and Grand Avenue. Drevitts and Boyle drove up
from the Fifteenth Street police station in a Ford. The Hungarians
were backing their wagon out of an alley. Boyle shot one off the seat
of the wagon and one out of the wagon box. Drevetts got frightened
when he found they were both dead. Hell Jimmy, he said, you oughtn’t
to have done it. There’s liable to be a hell of a lot of trouble.

—They’re crooks ain’t they? said Boyle. They’re wops ain’t they? Who
the hell is going to make any trouble?

—That’s all right maybe this time, said Drevitts, but how did you
know they were wops when you bumped them?

Wops, said Boyle, I can tell wops a mile off.



  chapter 10


One hot evening in Milan they carried him up onto the roof and he
could look out over the top of the town. There were chimney swifts in
the sky. After a while it got dark and the searchlights came out. The
others went down and took the bottles with them. He and Ag could hear
them below on the balcony. Ag sat on the bed. She was cool and fresh
in the hot night.

Ag stayed on night duty for three months. They were glad to let her.
When they operated on him she prepared him for the operating table,
and they had a joke about friend or enema. He went under the
anæsthetic holding tight on to himself so that he would not blab
about anything during the silly, talky time. After he got on crutches
he used to take the temperature so Ag would not have to get up from
the bed. There were only a few patients, and they all knew about it.
They all liked Ag. As he walked back along the halls he thought of Ag
in his bed.

Before he went back to the front they went into the Duomo and prayed.
It was dim and quiet, and there were other people praying. They
wanted to get married, but there was not enough time for the banns,
and neither of them had birth certificates. They felt as though they
were married, but they wanted everyone to knew about it, and to make
it so they could not lose it.

Ag wrote him many letters that he never got until after the
armistice. Fifteen came in a bunch and he sorted them by the dates
and read them all straight through. They were about the hospital, and
how much she loved him and how it was impossible to get along without
him and how terrible it was missing him at night.

After the armistice they agreed he should go home to get a job so
they might be married. Ag would not come home until he had a good job
and could come to New York to meet her. It was understood he would
not drink, and he did not want to see his friends or anyone in the
States. Only to get a job and be married. On the train from Padova to
Milan they quarrelled about her not being willing to come home at
once. When they had to say good-bye in the station at Padova they
kissed good-bye, but were not finished with the quarrel. He felt sick
about saying good-bye like that.

He went to America on a boat from Genoa. Ag went back to Torre di
Mosta to open a hospital. It was lonely and rainy there, and there
was a battalion of _arditi_ quartered in the town. Living in the
muddy, rainy town in the winter the major of the battalion made love
to Ag, and she had never known Italians before, and finally wrote a
letter to the States that theirs had been only a boy and girl affair.
She was sorry, and she knew he would probably not be able to
understand, but might some day forgive her, and be grateful to her,
and she expected, absolutely unexpectedly, to be married in the
spring. She loved him as always, but she realized now it was only a
boy and girl love. She hoped he would have a great career, and
believed in him absolutely. She knew it was for the best.

The Major did not marry her in the spring, or any other time. Ag
never got an answer to her letter to Chicago about it. A short time
after he contracted gonorrhea from a sales girl from The Fair riding
in a taxicab through Lincoln Park.



  chapter 11


In 1919 he was travelling on the railroads in Italy carrying a square
of oilcloth from the headquarters of the party written in indelible
pencil and saying here was a comrade who had suffered very much under
the whites in Budapest and requesting comrades to aid him in any way.
He used this instead of a ticket. He was very shy and quite young and
the train men passed him on from one crew to another. He had no
money, and they fed him behind the counter in railway eating houses.

He was delighted with Italy. It was a beautiful country he said. The
people were all kind. He had been in many towns, walked much and seen
many pictures. Giotto, Masaccio, and Piero della Francesca he bought
reproductions of and carried them wrapped in a copy of _Avanti_.
Mantegna he did not like.

He reported at Bologna, and I took him with me up into the Romagna
where it was necessary I go to see a man. We had a good trip
together. It was early September and the country was pleasant. He was
a Magyar, a very nice boy and very shy. Horthy’s men had done some
bad things to him. He talked about it a little. In spite of Italy, he
believed altogether in the world revolution.

—But how is the movement going in Italy? he asked.

—Very badly, I said.

—But it will go better, he said. You have everything here. It is the
one country that everyone is sure of. It will be the starting point
of everything.

At Bologna he said good-bye to us to go on the train to Milano and
then to Aosta to walk over the pass into Switzerland. I spoke to him
about the Mantegnas in Milano. No, he said, very shyly, he did not
like Mantegna. I wrote out for him where to eat in Milano and the
addresses of comrades. He thanked me very much, but his mind was
already looking forward to walking over the pass. He was very eager
to walk over the pass while the weather held good. The last I heard
of him the Swiss had him in jail near Sion.



  chapter 12


They whack whacked the white horse on the legs and he knee-ed himself
up. The picador twisted the stirrups straight and pulled and hauled
up into the saddle. The horse’s entrails hung down in a blue bunch
and swung backward and forward as he began to canter, the _monos_
whacking him on the back of his legs with the rods. He cantered
jerkily along the barrera. He stopped stiff and one of the _monos_
held his bridle and walked him forward. The picador kicked in his
spurs, leaned forward and shook his lance at the bull. Blood pumped
regularly from between the horse’s front legs. He was nervously
wobbly. The bull could not make up his mind to charge.



  chapter 13


The crowd shouted all the time and threw pieces of bread down into
the ring, then cushions and leather wine bottles, keeping up
whistling and yelling. Finally the bull was too tired from so much
bad sticking and folded his knees and lay down and one of the
_cuadrilla_ leaned out over his neck and killed him with the
_puntillo_. The crowd came over the barrera and around the torero and
two men grabbed him and held him and some one cut off his pigtail and
was waving it and a kid grabbed it and ran away with it. Afterwards I
saw him at the café. He was very short with a brown face and quite
drunk and he said after all it has happened before like that. I am
not really a good bull fighter.



  chapter 14


If it happened right down close in front of you, you could see
Villalta snarl at the bull and curse him, and when the bull charged
he swung back firmly like an oak when the wind hits it, his legs
tight together, the muleta trailing and the sword following the curve
behind. Then he cursed the bull, flopped the muleta at him, and swung
back from the charge his feet firm, the muleta curving and each swing
the crowd roaring.

When he started to kill it was all in the same rush. The bull looking
at him straight in front, hating. He drew out the sword from the
folds of the muleta and sighted with the same movement and called to
the bull, Toro! Toro! and the bull charged and Villalta charged and
just for a moment they became one. Villalta became one with the bull
and then it was over. Villalta standing straight and the red kilt of
the sword sticking out dully between the bull’s shoulders. Villalta,
his hand up at the crowd and the bull roaring blood, looking straight
at Villalta and his legs caving.



  chapter 15


I heard the drums coming down the street and then the fifes and the
pipes and then they came around the corner, all dancing. The street
full of them. Maera saw him and then I saw him. When they stopped the
music for the crouch he hunched down in the street with them all and
when they started it again he jumped up and went dancing down the
street with them. He was drunk all right.

You go down after him, said Maera, he hates me.

So I went down and caught up with them and grabbed him while he was
crouched down waiting for the music to break loose and said, Come on
Luis. For Christ sake you’ve got bulls this afternoon. He didn’t
listen to me, he was listening so hard for the music to start.

I said, Don’t be a damn fool Luis. Come on back to the hotel.

Then the music started up again and he jumped up and twisted away
from me and started dancing. I grabbed his arm and he pulled loose
and said, Oh leave me alone. You’re not my father.

I went back to the hotel and Maera was on the balcony looking out to
see if I’d be bringing him back. He went inside when he saw me and
came downstairs disgusted.

Well, I said, after all he’s just an ignorant Mexican savage.

Yes, Maera said, and who will kill his bulls after he gets a
_cogida?_

We, I suppose, I said.

Yes, we, said Maera. We kills the savages’ bulls, and the drunkards’
bulls, and the _riau-riau_ dancers’ bulls. Yes. We kill them. We kill
them all right. Yes. Yes. Yes.



  chapter 16


Maera lay still, his head on his arms, his face in the sand. He felt
warm and sticky from the bleeding. Each time he felt the horn coming.
Sometimes the bull only bumped him with his head. Once the horn went
all the way through him and he felt it go into the sand. Someone had
the bull by the tail. They were swearing at him and flopping the cape
in his face. Then the bull was gone. Some men picked Maera up and
started to run with him toward the barriers through the gate out the
passage way around under the grand stand to the infirmary. They laid
Maera down on a cot and one of the men went out for the doctor. The
others stood around. The doctor came running from the corral where he
had been sewing up picador horses. He had to stop and wash his hands.
There was a great shouting going on in the grandstand overhead. Maera
wanted to say something and found he could not talk. Maera felt
everything getting larger and larger and then smaller and smaller.
Then it got larger and larger and larger and then smaller and
smaller. Then everything commenced to run faster and faster as when
they speed up a cinematograph film. Then he was dead.



  chapter 17


They hanged Sam Cardinella at six o’clock in the morning in the
corridor of the county jail. The corridor was high and narrow with
tiers of cells on either side. All the cells were occupied. The men
had been brought in for the hanging. Five men sentenced to be hanged
were in the five top cells. Three of the men to be hanged were
negroes. They were very frightened. One of the white men sat on his
cot with his head in his hands. The other lay flat on his cot with a
blanket wrapped around his head.

They came out onto the gallows through a door in the wall. There were
six or seven of them including two priests. They were carrying Sam
Cardinella. He had been like that since about four o’clock in the
morning.

While they were strapping his legs together two guards held him up
and the two priests were whispering to him. “Be a man, my son,” said
one priest. When they came toward him with the cap to go over his
head Sam Cardinella lost control of his sphincter muscle. The guards
who had been holding him up dropped him. They were both disgusted.
“How about a chair, Will?” asked one of the guards, “Better get one,”
said a man in a derby hat.

When they all stepped back on the scaffolding back of the drop, which
was very heavy, built of oak and steel and swung on ball bearings,
Sam Cardinella was left sitting there strapped tight, the younger of
the two priests kneeling beside the chair. The priest skipped back
onto the scaffolding just before the drop fell.



  chapter 18


The king was working in the garden. He seemed very glad to see me. We
walked through the garden. This is the queen, he said. She was
clipping a rose bush. Oh how do you do, she said. We sat down at a
table under a big tree and the king ordered whiskey and soda. We have
good whiskey anyway, he said. The revolutionary committee, he told
me, would not allow him to go outside the palace grounds. Plastiras
is a very good man I believe, he said, but frightfully difficult. I
think he did right though shooting those chaps. If Kerensky had shot
a few men things might have been altogether different. Of course the
great thing in this sort of an affair is not to be shot oneself!

It was very jolly. We talked for a long time. Like all Greeks he
wanted to go to America.



  Here ends _The Inquest_ into the state
  of contemporary English prose, as
  edited by Ezra Pound and printed at
  the Three Mountains Press. The six
  works constituting the series are:

  Indiscretions _of_ Ezra Pound

  Women and Men _by_ Ford Madox Ford

  Elimus _by_ B. C. Windeler
     with Designs _by_ D. Shakespear

  The Great American Novel
     _by_ William Carlos Williams

  England _by_ B.M.G.-Adams

  In Our Time _by_ Ernest Hemingway
     with Portrait _by_ Henry Strater





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