Three Soldiers (2 page)

“You’re goddam right.”

“Will you fellers quit talkin’? It’s after taps,” thundered the sergeant, who sat reading the paper at a little board desk at the door of the barracks under the feeble light of one small bulb, carefully screened. “You’ll have the O. D. down on us.”

Fuselli wrapped the blanket round his head and prepared to sleep. Snuggled down into the blankets on the narrow cot, he felt sheltered from the sergeant’s thundering voice and from the cold glare of officers’ eyes. He felt cosy and happy like he had felt in bed at home, when he had been a little kid. For a moment he pictured to himself the other man, the man who had punched an officer’s jaw, dressed like he was, maybe only nineteen, the same age like he was, with a girl like Mabe waiting for him somewhere. How cold and frightful it must feel to be out of the camp with the guard looking for you! He pictured himself running breathless down a long street pursued by a company with guns, by officers whose eyes glinted cruelly like the pointed tips of bullets. He pulled the blanket closer round his head, enjoying the warmth and softness of the wool against his cheek. He must remember to smile at the sergeant when he passed him off duty. Somebody had said there’d be promotions soon. Oh, he wanted so hard to be promoted. It’d be so swell if he could write back to Mabe and tell her to address her letters Corporal Dan Fuselli. He must be more careful not to do anything that would get him in wrong with anybody. He must never miss an opportunity to show them what a clever kid he was. “Oh, when we’re ordered overseas, I’ll show them,” he thought ardently, and picturing to himself long movie reels of heroism he went off to sleep.

A sharp voice beside his cot woke him with a jerk.

“Get up, you.”

The white beam of a pocket searchlight was glaring in the face of the man next to him.

“The O. D.” said Fuselli to himself.

“Get up, you,” came the sharp voice again.

The man in the next cot stirred and opened his eyes.

“Get up.”

“Here, sir,” muttered the man in the next cot, his eyes blinking sleepily in the glare of the flashlight. He got out of bed and stood unsteadily at attention.

“Don’t you know better than to sleep in your O. D. shirt? Take it off.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your name?”

The man looked up, blinking, too dazed to speak.

“Don’t know your own name, eh?” said the officer, glaring at the man savagely, using his curt voice like a whip.—“Quick, take off yer shirt and pants and get back to bed.”

The Officer of the Day moved on, flashing his light to one side and the other in his midnight inspection of the barracks. Intense blackness again, and the sound of men breathing deeply in sleep, of men snoring. As he went to sleep Fuselli could hear the man beside him swearing, monotonously, in an even whisper, pausing now and then to think of new filth, of new combinations of words, swearing away his helpless anger, soothing himself to sleep by the monotonous reiteration of his swearing.

A little later Fuselli woke with a choked nightmare cry. He had dreamed that he had smashed the O. D. in the jaw and had broken out of the jug and was running, breathless, stumbling, falling, while the company on guard chased him down an avenue lined with little dried-up saplings, gaining on him, while with voices metallic as the clicking of rifle triggers officers shouted orders, so that he was certain to be caught, certain to be shot. He shook himself all over, shaking off the nightmare as a dog shakes off water, and went back to sleep again, snuggling into his blankets.

John Andrews stood naked in the center of a large bare room, of which the walls and ceiling and floor were made of raw pine boards. The air was heavy from the steam heat. At a desk in one corner a typewriter clicked spasmodically.

“Say, young feller, d’you know how to spell imbecility?”

John Andrews walked over to the desk, told him, and added, “Are you going to examine me?”

The man went on typewriting without answering. John Andrews stood in the center of the floor with his arms folded, half amused, half angry, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, listening to the sound of the typewriter and of the man’s voice as he read out each word of the report he was copying.

“Recommendation for discharge” … click, click … “Damn this typewriter. … Private Coe Elbert” … click, click. “Damn these rotten army typewriters. … Reason … mental deficiency. History of Case. …”

At that moment the recruiting sergeant came back.

“Look here, if you don’t have that recommendation ready in ten minutes Captain Arthurs’ll be mad as hell about it, Bill. For God’s sake get it done. He said already that if you couldn’t do the work, to get somebody who could. You don’t want to lose your job do you?”

“Hullo,” the sergeant’s eyes lit on John Andrews, “I’d forgotten you. Run around the room a little. … No, not that way. Just a little so I can test yer heart. … God, these rookies are thick.”

While he stood tamely being prodded and measured, feeling like a prize horse at a fair, John Andrews listened to the man at the typewriter, whose voice went on monotonously.

“No … record of sexual dep. … O hell, this eraser’s no good! … pravity or alcoholism; spent … normal … youth on farm. App-earance normal though im … say, how many ‘m’s’ in immature?”

“All right, put yer clothes on,” said the recruiting sergeant. “Quick, I can’t spend all day. Why the hell did they send you down here alone?”

“The papers were balled up,” said Andrews.

“Scores ten years … in test B,” went on the voice of the man at the typewriter. … “Sen … exal ment … m-e-n-t-a-l-i-t-y that of child of eight. Seems unable … to either. … Goddam this man’s writin’. How kin I copy it when he don’t write out his words?”

“All right. I guess you’ll do. Now there are some forms to fill out. Come over here.”

Andrews followed the recruiting sergeant to a desk in the far corner of the room, from which he could hear more faintly the click, click of the typewriter and the man’s voice mumbling angrily.

“Forgets to obey orders. … Responds to no form of per … suasion. M-e-m-o-r-y, nil.”

“All right. Take this to barracks B. … Fourth building, to the right; shake a leg,” said the recruiting sergeant.

Andrews drew a deep breath of the sparkling air outside. He stood ir-resolutely a moment on the wooden steps of the building looking down the row of hastily constructed barracks. Some were painted green, some were of plain boards, and some were still mere skeletons. Above his head great piled, rose-tinted clouds were moving slowly across the immeasurable free sky. His glance slid down the sky to some tall trees that flamed bright yellow with autumn outside the camp limits, and then to the end of the long street of barracks, where was a picket fence and a sentry walking to and fro, to and fro. His brows contracted for a moment. Then he walked with a sort of swagger towards the fourth building to the right.

John Andrews was washing windows. He stood in dirty blue denims at the top of a ladder, smearing with a soapy cloth the small panes of the barrack windows. His nostrils were full of a smell of dust and of the sandy quality of the soap. A little man with one lined greyish-red cheek puffed out by tobacco followed him up, also on a ladder, polishing the panes with a dry cloth till they shone and reflected the mottled cloudy sky. Andrews’s legs were tired from climbing up and down the ladder, his hands were sore from the grittiness of the soap; as he worked he looked down, without thinking, on rows of cots where the blankets were all folded the same way, on some of which men were sprawled in attitudes of utter relaxation. He kept remarking to himself how strange it was that he was not thinking of anything. In the last few days his mind seemed to have become a hard meaningless core.

“How long do we have to do this?” he asked the man who was working with him. The man went on chewing, so that Andrews thought he was not going to answer at all. He was just beginning to speak again when the man, balancing thoughtfully on top of his ladder, drawled out:

“Four o’clock.”

“We won’t finish today then?”

The man shook his head and wrinkled his face into a strange spasm as he spat.

“Been here long?”

“Not so long.”

“How long?”

“Three months. … Ain’t so long.” The man spat again, and climbing down from his ladder waited, leaning against the wall, until Andrews should finish soaping his window.

“I’ll go crazy if I stay here three months. … I’ve been here a week,” muttered Andrews between his teeth as he climbed down and moved his ladder to the next window.

They both climbed their ladders again in silence.

“How’s it you’re in Casuals?” asked Andrews again.

“Ain’t got no lungs.”

“Why don’t they discharge you?”

“Reckon they’re going to, soon.”

They worked on in silence for a long time. Andrews started at the upper right-hand corner and smeared with soap each pane of the window in turn. Then he climbed down, moved his ladder, and started on the next window. At times he would start in the middle of the window for variety. As he worked a rhythm began pushing its way through the hard core of his mind, leavening it, making it fluid. It expressed the vast dusty dullness, the men waiting in rows on drill fields, standing at attention, the monotony of feet tramping in unison, of the dust rising from the battalions going back and forth over the dusty drill fields. He felt the rhythm filling his whole body, from his sore hands to his legs, tired from marching back and forth, from making themselves the same length as millions of other legs. His mind began unconsciously, from habit, working on it, orchestrating it. He could imagine a vast orchestra swaying with it. His heart was beating faster. He must make it into music; he must fix it in himself, so that he could make it into music, and write it down, so that orchestras could play it and make the ears of multitudes feel it, make their flesh tingle with it.

He went on working through the endless afternoon, climbing up and down his ladder, smearing the barrack windows with a soapy rag. A silly phrase took the place of the welling of music in his mind: “Arbeit und Rhythmus.” He kept saying it over and over to himself: “Arbeit und Rhythmus.” He tried to drive the phrase out of his mind, to bury his mind in the music of the rhythm that had come to him, that expressed the dusty boredom, the harsh constriction of warm bodies full of gestures and attitudes and aspirations into moulds, like the moulds toy soldiers are cast in. The phrase became someone shouting raucously in his ears: “Arbeit und Rhythmus,”—drowning everything else, beating his mind hard again, parching it.

But suddenly he laughed aloud. Why, it was in German. He was being got ready to kill men who said that. If anyone said that, he was going to kill him. They were going to kill everybody who spoke that language, he and all the men whose feet he could hear tramping on the drill field, whose legs were all being made the same length on the drill field.

It was Saturday morning. Directed by the corporal, a bandy-legged Italian who even on the army diet managed to keep a faint odour of gar-

Three Soldiers lic about him, three soldiers in blue denims were sweeping up the leaves in the street between the rows of barracks.

“You fellers are slow as molasses. … Inspection in twenty-five minutes,” he kept saying.

The soldiers raked on doggedly, paying no attention.

“You don’t give a damn. If we don’t pass inspection, I get hell—not you. Please queeck. Here, you, pick up all those goddam cigarette butts.”

Andrews made a grimace and began collecting the little grey sordid ends of burnt-out cigarettes. As he leant over he found himself looking into the dark-brown eyes of the soldier who was working beside him. The eyes were contracted with anger and there was a flush under the tan of the boyish face.

“Ah didn’t git in this here army to be ordered around by a goddam wop,” he muttered.

“Doesn’t matter much who you’re ordered around by, you’re ordered around just the same,” said Andrews.

“Where d’ye come from, buddy?”

“Oh, I come from New York. My folks are from Virginia,” said Andrews.

“Indiana’s ma state. The tornado country. … Git to work; here’s that bastard wop comin’ around the buildin’.”

“Don’t pick ’em up that-a-way; sweep ’em up,” shouted the corporal.

Andrews and the Indiana boy went round with a broom and a shovel collecting chewed-out quids of tobacco and cigar butts and stained bits of paper.

“What’s your name? Mahn’s Chrisfield. Folks all call me Chris.”

“Mine’s Andrews, John Andrews.”

“Ma dad uster have a hired man named Andy. Took sick an’ died last summer. How long d’ye reckon it’ll be before us-guys git overseas?”

“God, I don’t know.”

“Ah want to see that country over there.”

“You do?”

“Don’t you?”

“You bet I do.”

“All right, what you fellers stand here for? Go an’ dump them garbage cans. Lively!” shouted the corporal waddling about importantly on his bandy legs. He kept looking down the row of barracks, muttering to himself, “Goddam. … Time fur inspectin’ now, goddam. Won’t never pass this time.”

His face froze suddenly into obsequious immobility. He brought his hand up to the brim of his hat. A group of officers strode past him into the nearest building.

John Andrews, coming back from emptying the garbage pails, went in the back door of his barracks.

“Attention!” came the cry from the other end. He made his neck and arms as rigid as possible.

Through the silent barracks came the hard clank of the heels of the officers inspecting.

A sallow face with hollow eyes and heavy square jaw came close to Andrews’s eyes. He stared straight before him noting the few reddish hairs on the officer’s Adam’s apple and the new insignia on either side of his collar.

“Sergeant, who is this man?” came a voice from the sallow face.

“Don’t know, sir; a new recruit, sir. Corporal Valori, who is this man?”

“The name’s Andrews, sergeant,” said the Italian corporal with an obsequious whine in his voice.

The officer addressed Andrews directly, speaking fast and loud.

“How long have you been in the army?”

“One week, sir.”

“Don’t you know you have to be clean and shaved and ready for inspection every Saturday morning at nine?”

“I was cleaning the barracks, sir.”

“To teach you not to answer back when an officer addresses you. …”

The officer spaced his words carefully, lingering on them. As he spoke he glanced out of the corner of his eye at his superior and noticed the major was frowning. His tone changed ever so slightly. “If this ever occurs again you may be sure that disciplinary action will be taken. … Attention there!” At the other end of the barracks a man had moved. Again, amid absolute silence, could be heard the clanking of the officers’ heels as the inspection continued.

“Now, fellows, all together,” cried the “Y” man who stood with his arms stretched wide in front of the movie screen. The piano started jingling and the roomful of crowded soldiers roared out:

The rafters rang with their deep voices.

The “Y” man twisted his lean face into a facetious expression.

“Somebody tried to put one over on the ‘Y’ man and sing ‘What the hell do we care?’ But you do care, don’t you, Buddy?” he shouted.

There was a little rattle of laughter.

“Now, once more,” said the “Y” man again, “and lots of guts in the get and lots of kill in the Kaiser. Now all together. …”

The moving pictures had begun. John Andrews looked furtively about him, at the face of the Indiana boy beside him intent on the screen, at the tanned faces and the close-cropped heads that rose above the mass of khaki-covered bodies about him. Here and there a pair of eyes glinted in the white flickering light from the screen. Waves of laughter or of little exclamations passed over them. They were all so alike, they seemed at moments to be but one organism. This was what he had sought when he had enlisted, he said to himself. It was in this that he would take refuge from the horror of the world that had fallen upon him. He was sick of revolt, of thought, of carrying his individuality like a banner above the turmoil. This was much better, to let everything go, to stamp out his maddening desire for music, to humble himself into the mud of common slavery. He was still tingling with sudden anger from the officer’s voice that morning: “Sergeant, who is this man?” The officer had stared in his face, as a man might stare at a piece of furniture.

“Ain’t this some film?” Chrisfield turned to him with a smile that drove his anger away in a pleasant feeling of comradeship.

“The part that’s comin’s fine. I seen it before out in Frisco,” said the man on the other side of Andrews. “Gee, it makes ye hate the Huns.”

The man at the piano jingled elaborately in the intermission between the two parts of the movie.

The Indiana boy leaned in front of John Andrews, putting an arm round his shoulders, and talked to the other man.

“You from Frisco?”

“Yare.”

“That’s goddam funny. You’re from the Coast, this feller’s from New York, an’ Ah’m from ole Indiana, right in the middle.”

“What company you in?”

“Ah ain’t yet. This feller an me’s in Casuals.”

“That’s a hell of a place. … Say, my name’s Fuselli.”

“Mahn’s Chrisfield.”

“Mine’s Andrews.”

“How soon’s it take a feller to git out o’ this camp?”

“Dunno. Some guys says three weeks and some says six months. … Say, mebbe you’ll get into our company. They transferred a lot of men out the other day, an’ the corporal says they’re going to give us rookies instead.”

“Goddam it, though, but Ah want to git overseas.”

“It’s swell over there,” said Fuselli, “everything’s awful pretty-like. Picturesque, they call it. And the people wears peasant costumes. … I had an uncle who used to tell me about it. He came from near Torino.”

“Where’s that?”

“I dunno. He’s an Eyetalian.”

“Say, how long does it take to git overseas?”

“Oh, a week or two,” said Andrews.

“As long as that?” But the movie had begun again, unfolding scenes of soldiers in spiked helmets marching into Belgian cities full of little milk carts drawn by dogs and old women in peasant costume. There were hisses and catcalls when a German flag was seen, and as the troops were pictured advancing, bayonetting the civilians in wide Dutch pants, the old women with starched caps, the soldiers packed into the stuffy Y.M.C.A. hut shouted oaths at them. Andrews felt blind hatred stirring like something that had a life of its own in the young men about him. He was lost in it, carried away in it, as in a stampede of wild cattle. The terror of it was like ferocious hands clutching his throat. He glanced at the faces round him. They were all intent and flushed, glinting with sweat in the heat of the room.

As he was leaving the hut, pressed in a tight stream of soldiers moving towards the door, Andrews heard a man say:

“I never raped a woman in my life, but by God, I’m going to. I’d give a lot to rape some of those goddam German women.”

“I hate ’em too,” came another voice, “men, women, children and unborn children. They’re either jackasses or full of the lust for power like their rulers are, to let themselves be governed by a bunch of warlords like that.”

“Ah’d lahk te cepture a German officer an’ make him shine ma boots an’ then shoot him dead,” said Chris to Andrews as they walked down the long row towards their barracks.

“You would?”

“But Ah’d a damn side rather shoot somebody else Ah know,” went on Chris intensely. “Don’t stay far from here either. An’ Ah’ll do it too, if he don’t let off pickin’ on me.”

“Who’s that?”

“That big squirt Anderson they made a file closer at drill yesterday. He seems te think that just because Ah’m littler than him he can do anything he likes with me.”

Andrews turned sharply and looked in his companion’s face; something in the gruffness of the boy’s tone startled him. He was not accustomed to this. He had thought of himself as a passionate person, but never in his life had he wanted to kill a man.

“D’you really want to kill him?”

“Not now, but he gits the hell started in me, the way he teases me. Ah pulled ma knife on him yisterday. You wasn’t there. Didn’t ye notice Ah looked sort o’ upsot at drill?”

“Yes … but how old are you, Chris!”

“Ah’m twenty. You’re older than me, ain’t yer?”

“I’m twenty-two.”

They were leaning against the wall of their barracks, looking up at the brilliant starry night.

“Say, is the stars the same over there, overseas, as they is here?”

“I guess so,” said Andrews, laughing. “Though I’ve never been to see.”

“Ah never had much schoolin’,” went on Chris. “I lef ’ school when I was twelve, ’cause it warn’t much good, an’ dad drank so the folks needed me to work on the farm.”

“What do you grow in your part of the country?”

“Mostly coan. A little wheat an’ tobacca. Then we raised a lot o’ stock. … But Ah was juss going to tell ye Ah nearly did kill a guy once.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Ah was drunk at the time. Us boys round Tallyville was a pretty tough bunch then. We used ter work juss long enough to git some money to tear things up with. An’ then we used to play craps an’ drink whiskey. This happened just at coan-shuckin’ time. Hell, Ah don’t even know what it was about, but Ah got to quarrellin’ with a feller Ah’d been right smart friends with. Then he laid off an’ hit me in the jaw. Ah don’t know what Ah done next, but before Ah knowed it Ah had a hold of a shuckin’ knife and was slashin’ at him with it. A knife like that’s a turruble thing to stab a man with. It took four of ’em to hold me down an’ git it away from me. They didn’t keep me from givin’ him a good cut across the chest, though. Ah was juss crazy drunk at the time. An’ man, if Ah wasn’t a mess to go home, with half ma clothes pulled off and ma shirt torn. Ah juss fell in the ditch an’ slep’ there till daylight an’ got mud all through ma hair. … Ah don’t scarcely tech a drop now, though.”

“So you’re in a hurry to get overseas, Chris, like me,” said Andrews after a long pause.

“Ah’ll push that guy Anderson into the sea, if we both go over on the same boat,” said Chrisfield laughing; but he added after a pause: “It would have been hell if Ah’d killed that feller, though. Honest Ah wouldn’t a-wanted to do that.”

“That’s the job that pays, a violinist,” said somebody.

“No, it don’t,” came a melancholy drawling voice from a lanky man who sat doubled up with his long face in his hands and his elbows resting on his knees. “Just brings a living wage … a living wage.”

Several men were grouped at the end of the barracks. From them the long row of cots, with here and there a man asleep or a man hastily undressing, stretched, lighted by occasional feeble electric-light bulbs, to the sergeant’s little table beside the door.

“You’re gettin’ a dis-charge, aren’t you?” asked a man with a brogue, and the red face of a jovial gorilla, that signified the bartender.

“Yes, Flannagan, I am,” said the lanky man dolefully.

“Ain’t he got hard luck?” came a voice from the crowd.

“Yes, I have got hard luck, Buddy,” said the lanky man, looking at the faces about him out of sunken eyes. “I ought to be getting forty dollars a week and here I am getting seven and in the army besides.”

“I meant that you were gettin’ out of this goddam army.”

“The army, the army, the democratic army,” chanted someone under his breath.

“But, begorry, I want to go overseas and ’ave a look at the ’uns,” said Flannagan, who managed with strange skill to combine a cockney whine with his Irish brogue.