[50] Assassinated at Salonica, 1913.
[51] Peña Pobre has been occupied and evacuated countless times by Zapatistas, and is now completely laid waste—the great paper-mills, the gardens, the hacienda buildings. Since writing these words a vast and blood-stained scroll has been unfolded, and I think many a one has modified his political creed.—E. O'S., 1917.
[52] Of the Casasus house nothing but the walls remain. Everything has been pillaged and scattered. People have happened on an occasional old volume of the great library, and an occasional piece of the gilt-and-brocade furniture has been seen in the second-hand shops. — told me that a matter of importance took him to the house when used as a barracks by Carrancistas. In the great patio were only a filthy cot and an old brasero near which a poor soldadera was sitting. The fountain was dry and full of refuse, and some soldiers were standing about waiting for their officer, who came in violently disputing with a woman of the town. From under the cot, after a few moments, the woman drew out a small, beautiful old chest clamped with silver and inset with coral, with which she departed, "the living symbol of the aspirations of the downtrodden masses," as one of his followers calls Don Venustiano.—E. O'S., 1917.
[53] These treasures were scattered and destroyed during the first Carrancista occupation.
[54] Orozco was arrested with General Huerta by the United States authorities on June 27, 1915. A few days later he escaped his guard at El Paso, and shortly afterward was killed during a raid on the border.
[55] A young mining engineer lately come out of Mexico on one of the intermittent trains, over the once favorite northern route, tells me that everywhere the stations are destroyed. Overturned rolling-stock lies rotting in the ditches; at one point where the fuel gave out the trainmen got down and chopped up the seats remaining on what once had been a station platform, and at another a Pullman car was smashed and fed to the engine. What intending travelers and the stockholders in the company think of Carranza's passion for reconstruction is said to be too fierce for expression!—E. O'S., January, 1917.
[56] Marquis de la G., then military attaché at the French Embassy in Berlin.
[57] Et comment fera celui qui a reçu du sort le don superbe et fatal de voir la vérité, et de ne pouvoir pas ne pas la voir?—Romain Rolland, Vie de Tolstoi. (January, 1917.)
[58] Killed in battle at Belloy-en-Santerre, July, 1916.
A friend and companion of Alan Seeger's Harvard days, Pierre Abreu, himself extraordinarily fitted for the understanding of the "humanities" in every sense, told me of him one windy twilight crossing to France on the Espagne that autumn after his death. I had just seen, in my North American Review, that most charming of all his poems, "I Have a Rendezvous with Death."