Romania During World War I by John Reed;A.K. Brackob;

Author:John Reed;A.K. Brackob;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate Publishers & Book Distributors, LLC
Published: 2021-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

THE RIGHTS OF

SMALL NATIONS[*]

I was having my passport viséd in the Bulgarian consulate at Bucarest, when Frank came in on the same errand. I knew at once that he was an American. The tides of immigration had washed his blood, the Leyendecker brothers had influenced the cut of his nose and jaw, and his look and walk were direct and unsophisticated. He was blond, youthful, “clean-cut.” Beneath the tweed imitation English clothes that Rumanian tailors affect, his body was the body of a college sprinter not yet gone soft, as economically built as a wild animal’s.

As instinctively, too, as an animal, for he was not observant, he flair’d in me a kinsman, and said “Hello” with the superior inflection of one Anglo-Saxon greeting another in the presence of foreign and inferior peoples. He was a communicative boy, too long away from home to be suspicious of Americans. If I were going by the one-thirty train to Sofia, he said, we might travel together. He himself had been working for the Romano-Americano Oil Company – a subsidiary alias for Standard Oil – for two years, in the Rumanian petroleum fields near Ploeshti. And as we walked down the street together he said that he was going to England to enlist in the army and fight.

“What for?” I cried out in astonishment.

“Well,” he said earnestly, looking at me with troubled eyes and shaking his head, “there’s a bunch of Englishmen out at Ploeshti, and they told me all about it. I don’t care – perhaps it’s foolish, like everybody says out in our camp – but I can’t help it. I’ve got to go. I think it was a dirty trick to violate the neutrality of Belgium.”

“The neutrality of Belgium!” said I, with a sense of awe at the preposterous possibilities of human nature.

“Yes,” he rushed on, “it makes me hot to think of a little country like Belgium and a big bully of a country like Germany. It’s a damn shame! England is fighting for the rights of small nations, and I don’t see how anybody can keep out of it that’s got any guts!”

Some hours later I saw him on the station platform, talking to a thin, plain girl in a yellow cotton dress, who wept and powdered her nose simultaneously. His face was flushed and frowning, and he spat out his words the way a strong man does when he’s angry at his dog, his servant, or his wife. The girl wept monotonously; sometimes she touched him with a timid, hungry gesture, but he shook off her hand.

He caught sight of me and brusquely quitted her, coming over with a shamefaced expression. He was evidently worried and exasperated. “Be with you as soon as I get rid of this damn woman!” he said, brutally masculine. “They can’t leave a man alone, can they?”

Lighting a cigarette, he swaggered back to where she stood staring fixedly out along the track, her handkerchief crammed in her mouth, making a desperate effort to control herself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.