The look of dazed resentment on Radovitch’s grass-and dirt-stained
face changed instantly to one of blank surprise. The poor strained jaw
relaxed, and he turned on me a stare of open-eyed wonder.
“Where in ’ell d’you come from?” he gasped finally; and then, “You
speak English?”
When, ignoring the former query, I grinned acquiescence to the latter,
he came back with, “Ain’t ’Merican, are you? Don’t know New York, do
you?”
On my admission of guilt on both charges, he crawled over and gripped
my hand crushingly in his grimy paw.
“My name’s Radovitch. ’Merican citizen myself,” he said proudly. “Took
out my last papers just ’fore I came over to fight for Serbia. Went to
school five years in New York when I was a kid. Ever been in Chicago?”
“Of course.”
Radovitch’s excitement, increasing when he found I had been in Omaha
(where he had worked in the stockyards), and Jerome, Arizona (where he
had “dumped slag” in the copper smelter), reached its climax when I
assured him that I had once played a game of baseball at Aldridge, a
little coal-mining town in Montana, near the northern portal of
Yellowstone Park.
“I got a store there, and a half int’rest in the baseball grounds and
a dance-hall,” he cried; and he was just in the midst of an excited
account of his rise to fortune in what he called the “hottest little
ol’ camp in the Yellowstone,” when the din of two or three fresh
machine-guns opening in unison drowned his voice, and a few minutes
later a half-dozen rifle muzzles were poked over the edge of our
refuge, while a gruff-voiced Serb corporal, in the khaki tunic of a
British Tommy and the baggy breeches of a French Zouave, informed us
that we were his prisoners.
Radovitch, with a sheepish grin on his face, threw up his hands with
the classic cry of “Kamerad!” and then, shambling over opposite his
captors, coolly bade them toss down a box of cigarettes for him and
his “Merikansky” friend.
“Smashed mine when I fell,” he explained, sauntering back and offering
me a “Macedonia.” “Wouldn’t you reckon we’d had about enough fighting
in Serbia without these d---- d sham fights while we’re supposed to be
resting up here in Corfu? It may be all right for new recruits; but
you’ll have to admit that two years of the brand of scrapping we’ve
been getting over yonder in those mountains is not going to put us on
edge for play-fighting like this. But never mind, we’ll be back to the
real thing again in a month or two. Come on along down to the camp and
meet my Colonel. We were kids together in Prilep. Now he’s in command
of three thousand men and I’m only a corporal; but just the same I
could buy him out twenty times over.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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