In the street
car, the other afternoon, I had to explain that I was a Spaniard to some
girls who were wondering why I was not at the front. . . . One of them,
as soon as she learned my nationality, asked me with great simplicity
why I did not offer myself as a volunteer. . . . Now they have invented
a word for the stay-at-homes, calling them Les Embusques, the hidden
ones. . . . I am sick and tired of the ironical looks shot at me
wherever I go; it makes me wild to be taken for an Embusque."
A flash of heroism was galvanizing the impressionable Bohemian. Now that
everybody was going to the war, he was wishing to do the same thing. He
was not afraid of death; the only thing that was disturbing him was the
military service, the uniform, the mechanical obedience to bugle-call,
the blind subservience to the chiefs. Fighting was not offering any
difficulties for him but his nature capriciously resented everything
in the form of discipline. The foreign groups in Paris were trying to
organize each its own legion of volunteers and he, too, was planning
his--a battalion of Spaniards and South Americans, reserving naturally
the presidency of the organizing committee for himself, and later the
command of the body.
He had inserted notices in the papers, making the studio in the rue
de la Pompe the recruiting office. In ten days, two volunteers had
presented themselves; a clerk, shivering in midsummer, who stipulated
that he should be an officer because he was wearing a suitable jacket,
and a Spanish tavern-keeper who at the very outset had wished to rob
Argensola of his command on the futile pretext that he was a soldier
in his youth while the Bohemian was only an artist.
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