The Deserter

by Richard Harding Davis

INTRODUCTION

When Mr. Davis wrote the story of "The Deserter," he could not possibly have foreseen that it was to be his last story—the last of those short stories which gave him such eminence as a short-story writer.

He apparently was as rugged and as vigorous as ever.

And yet, had he sat down to write a story which he knew was to be his last, I do not think he could have written one more fittingly designed to be the capstone of his literary monument. The theme is one in which he has unconsciously mirrored his own ideals of honorable obligation, as well as one which presents a wholesome lesson to young soldiers who have taken an oath to do faithful service to a nation.

It is a story with a moral so subtly expressed that every soldier or sailor who reads it will think seriously of it if the temptation to such disloyalty should enter his mind. This story of the young man who tried to desert at Salonika may well have a heartening influence upon all men in uniforms who waver in the path of duty—especially in these days of vast military operations when a whole world is in arms. It belongs in patriotic literature by the side of Edward Everett Hale's "The Man Without a Country." The motif is the same—that of obligation and service and loyalty to a pledge.

In "The Deserter" Mr. Davis does not reveal the young soldier's name, for obvious reasons, and the name of the hotel and ship in Salonika are likewise disguised. It is part of the art of the skilful story-writer to dress his narrative in such a way as to eliminate those matter-of-fact details which would be emphasized by one writing the story as a matter of news. For instance, the Hotel Hermes in Mr. Davis's story is the Olympos Palace Hotel, and the Adriaticus is the Greek steamer Helleni. The name of the young soldier is given as "Hamlin," and under this literary "camouflage," to borrow a word born of the war, the story may be read without the thought that a certain definite young man will be humiliated by seeing his own name revealed as that of a potential deserter.

But the essentials of the story are all true, and its value as a lasting influence for good is in no way impaired by the necessary fictions as to places and identities.

It was my privilege to see the dramatic incidents of the story of "The Deserter" as they unfolded during the time included in Mr. Davis's story. The setting was in the huge room—chamber, living-room, workroom, clubroom, and sometimes dining-room that we occupied in the Olympos Palace Hotel in Salonika. William G. Shepherd, of the United Press, James H. Hare, the veteran war photographer, and I were the original occupants of this room, which owed its vast dimensions to the fact that it formerly had been the dining-room of the hotel, later the headquarters of the Austrian Club, and finally, under the stressful conditions of an overcrowded city, a bedroom. Mr. Davis joined us here in November of 1915, and for some days shared the room until he could secure another in the same hotel.

The city was seething with huge activities. We lived from day to day, not knowing what moment some disaster might result as a consequence of an incongruous military and political situation, in which German and Austrian consular officials walked the streets side by side with French and British officers. Men who had lived through many strange situations declared that this motley of tongues and nationalities and conflicting interests to be found in Salonika during those last weeks of 1915 was without a parallel in their experiences.

Into this atmosphere occasionally came the little human dramas that were a welcome novelty beside the big drama that dominated the picture, and it was thus that the drama of the young soldier who wished to desert came into our lives as a gripping, human document.

To Mr. Davis the drama was more than a "news" story; it was something big and fundamental, involving a young man's whole future, and as such it revealed to his quick instinct for dramatic situations the theme for a big story.

No sooner had "Hamlin" left our room, reclad in his dirty uniform and headed for certain punishment back at his camp, than Mr. Davis proclaimed his intention to write the story.

"The best war story I ever knew!" he exclaimed.

Of course the young soldier did not see it as a drama in real life, and he certainly did not comprehend that he might be playing a part in what would be a tragedy in his own life. To him the incident had no dramatic possibilities. He was merely a young man who had been racked by exposure and suffering to a point where he longed to escape a continuance of such hardship, and the easiest way out of it seemed by way of deserting.

He was "fed up" on discomfort and dirt and cold, and harassed by the effects of an ill-healed wound received in Flanders some months before, and he wanted to go home.

The story, as Mr. Davis tells it in the following pages, is complete as it stands. So far as he knew up to the time of his death, there was no sequel. He died thinking of "Hamlin" as a potential deserter who had been shamed out of his purpose to desert and who had left, ungrateful and bitter with resentment at his fellow Americans, who had persuaded him to go back to camp, "take his medicine," and "see it through."

The Hotel "Hermes" is probably no more. Only a few days ago the news came that all of the water-front of Salonika, a district stretching in splendid array from the "White Tower" to the Customs House, had been wiped out by a tremendous fire. It was in this district that most of the finest buildings, including the Olympos Palace Hotel—the Hotel Hermes of Mr. Davis's story—were located, and there is little likelihood that any of this part of the city escaped. The magnitude of the fire is indicated by the estimated loss, which is $100,000,000, with about $26,000,000 insurance.

The government has authorized the construction of barracks outside the burned zone, but has decided not to permit repairs or temporary construction within that area until plans for rebuilding the city are complete.

Thus the setting of the story of "The Deserter" is gone, the author is gone, and who can tell at this moment whether "Hamlin," fighting in the trenches on the British front in Prance, is not also gone.

I hope it may not affect the interest or the moral of the story if I give the sequel. I know that Mr. Davis would have been glad to hear what became of the young man who left our room with an angry word of resentment against us. I hope, too, that the reader will feel a natural interest in knowing how he fared, and what punishment he received for having overstayed his leave, and for shaving his mustache as part of his plan to escape detection, both of which infractions made him subject to punishment.

One day about three weeks after Davis had left Salonika homeward bound, a soldier brought us a note from "Hamlin." He was on a Red Cross lighter down at the pier, and we at once went down to see him. He was lying on a stretcher among scores of men. His face was thin and pale, and in answer to our eager questions he told how he had fared when he returned to camp.

"Oh, they gave it to me good," he said. "But they still think I got drunk. They took away my stripes and made me a private. But I was sick the night I got back to camp and I've been laid up ever since. They say there is something the matter with my intestines and they're going to cut me open again. Gee, but the captain was surprised! He said he had always counted on me as a teetotaller and that he was grieved and disappointed in me. And just think, I've never taken a drink in my life!"

We said good-by, and this time it was a friendly good-by. That night he left on a hospital ship for Alexandria.

Once more the course of young Mr. "Hamlin's" life was swallowed up in the vast oblivion of army life, and we heard no more of him until, one day in London, three months later, Shepherd felt an arm thrown about his shoulder and turned to find the healthy and cheerful face of "Hamlin."

A few minutes later, at a luncheon-table, Shepherd heard his story.

After leaving Alexandria he was sent to a hospital in Manchester. On the day of his discharge he was asked to report to a certain major, who informed him that the government had conferred upon him the D.C.M.—the medal for Distinguished Conduct in the field—in recognition of his service in recovering a wounded man from No Man's land in Flanders ten months before. The following day, before a file of soldiers drawn up on the parade-ground, the honor was officially conferred and a little ribbon was pinned upon his coat to testify to the appreciative, though somewhat tardy, gratitude of the government.

"Hamlin" pointed to the little ribbon on his lapel and proudly drew from his pocket an official paper in which his heroic achievement was duly recited.

He had not heard of Davis's death, and was deeply touched when Mr. Shepherd told him of it. At once he expressed his endless gratitude to Davis and the rest of us for what we had done for him in Salonika.

In a few days he was to return to France with his regiment. What has happened to him since then I have no means of knowing. His movements are again wrapped in that dense fog which veils the soldier's life to all the outside world except those to whom he writes.

In view of what we now know of Hamlin's physical condition at the time his mind was obsessed with the idea of deserting, both Mr. Shepherd and I are glad to believe that his decision to desert was the consequence of physical rather than mental or moral weakness, for his stamina was at its lowest ebb because of a weakened body.

JOHN T. McCUTCHEON.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS,
September 15, 1917.