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Three Soldiers

by John Dos Passos · English · Gutenberg #6362 · 763,648 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Three Soldiers

Author: John Dos Passos


        
Release date: August 1, 2004 [eBook #6362]
                Most recently updated: March 16, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6362

Credits: Produced by Eve Sobol and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THREE SOLDIERS ***




Produced by Eve Sobol






THREE SOLDIERS

By John Dos Passos


1921



LIST OF CONTENTS

PART ONE: MAKING THE MOULD

PART TWO: THE METAL COOLS

PART THREE: MACHINES

PART FOUR: RUST

PART FIVE: THE WORLD OUTSIDE

PART SIX: UNDER THE WHEELS


  “Les contemporains qui souffrent de certaines choses ne peuvent
  s'en souvenir qu'avec une horreur qui paralyse tout autre plaisir,
  meme celui de lire un conte.”

                                            STENDHAL




PART ONE: MAKING THE MOULD


I

The company stood at attention, each man looking straight before him
at the empty parade ground, where the cinder piles showed purple with
evening. On the wind that smelt of barracks and disinfectant there was
a faint greasiness of food cooking. At the other side of the wide field
long lines of men shuffled slowly into the narrow wooden shanty that was
the mess hall. Chins down, chests out, legs twitching and tired from the
afternoon's drilling, the company stood at attention. Each man stared
straight in front of him, some vacantly with resignation, some trying
to amuse themselves by noting minutely every object in their field of
vision,--the cinder piles, the long shadows of the barracks and mess
halls where they could see men standing about, spitting, smoking,
leaning against clapboard walls. Some of the men in line could hear
their watches ticking in their pockets.

Someone moved, his feet making a crunching noise in the cinders.

The sergeant's voice snarled out: “You men are at attention. Quit yer
wrigglin' there, you!”

The men nearest the offender looked at him out of the corners of their
eyes.

Two officers, far out on the parade ground, were coming towards them. By
their gestures and the way they walked, the men at attention could see
that they were chatting about something that amused them. One of the
officers laughed boyishly, turned away and walked slowly back across
the parade ground. The other, who was the lieutenant, came towards them
smiling. As he approached his company, the smile left his lips and he
advanced his chin, walking with heavy precise steps.

“Sergeant, you may dismiss the company.” The lieutenant's voice was
pitched in a hard staccato.

The sergeant's hand snapped up to salute like a block signal. “Companee
dis...missed,” he rang out.

The row of men in khaki became a crowd of various individuals with dusty
boots and dusty faces. Ten minutes later they lined up and marched in a
column of fours to mess. A few red filaments of electric lights gave a
dusty glow in the brownish obscurity where the long tables and benches
and the board floors had a faint smell of garbage mingled with the smell
of the disinfectant the tables had been washed off with after the last
meal. The men, holding their oval mess kits in front of them, filed by
the great tin buckets at the door, out of which meat and potatoes were
splashed into each plate by a sweating K.P. in blue denims.

“Don't look so bad tonight,” said Fuselli to the man opposite him as he
hitched his sleeves up at the wrists and leaned over his steaming food.
He was sturdy, with curly hair and full vigorous lips that he smacked
hungrily as he ate.

“It ain't,” said the pink flaxen-haired youth opposite him, who wore his
broad-brimmed hat on the side of his head with a certain jauntiness:

“I got a pass tonight,” said Fuselli, tilting his head vainly.

“Goin' to tear things up?”

“Man...I got a girl at home back in Frisco. She's a good kid.”

“Yer right not to go with any of the girls in this goddam town.... They
ain't clean, none of 'em.... That is if ye want to go overseas.”

The flaxen-haired youth leaned across the table earnestly.

“I'm goin' to git some more chow: Wait for me, will yer?” said Fuselli.

“What yer going to do down town?” asked the flaxen-haired youth when
Fuselli came back.

“Dunno,--run round a bit an' go to the movies,” he answered, filling his
mouth with potato.

“Gawd, it's time fer retreat.” They overheard a voice behind them.

Fuselli stuffed his mouth as full as he could and emptied the rest of
his meal reluctantly into the garbage pail.

A few moments later he stood stiffly at attention in a khaki row that
was one of hundreds of other khaki rows, identical, that filled all
sides of the parade ground, while the bugle blew somewhere at the other
end where the flag-pole was. Somehow it made him think of the man behind
the desk in the office of the draft board who had said, handing him the
papers sending him to camp, “I wish I was going with you,” and had held
out a white bony hand that Fuselli, after a moment's hesitation, had
taken in his own stubby brown hand. The man had added fervently, “It
must be grand, just grand, to feel the danger, the chance of being
potted any minute. Good luck, young feller.... Good luck.” Fuselli
remembered unpleasantly his paper-white face and the greenish look
of his bald head; but the words had made him stride out of the office
sticking out his chest, brushing truculently past a group of men in the
door. Even now the memory of it, mixing with the strains of the national
anthem made him feel important, truculent.

“Squads right!” came an order. Crunch, crunch, crunch in the gravel. The
companies were going back to their barracks. He wanted to smile but he
didn't dare. He wanted to smile because he had a pass till midnight,
because in ten minutes he'd be outside the gates, outside the green
fence and the sentries and the strands of barbed wire. Crunch, crunch,
crunch; oh, they were so slow in getting back to the barracks and he was
losing time, precious free minutes. “Hep, hep, hep,” cried the sergeant,
glaring down the ranks, with his aggressive bulldog expression, to where
someone had fallen out of step.

The company stood at attention in the dusk. Fuselli was biting the
inside of his lips with impatience. Minutes at last, as if reluctantly,
the sergeant sang out:

“Dis...missed.”

Fuselli hurried towards the gate, brandishing his pass with an important
swagger.

Once out on the asphalt of the street, he looked down the long row of
lawns and porches where violet arc lamps already contested the faint
afterglow, drooping from their iron stalks far above the recently
planted saplings of the avenue. He stood at the corner slouched against
a telegraph pole, with the camp fence, surmounted by three strands of
barbed wire, behind him, wondering which way he would go. This was a
hell of a town anyway. And he used to think he wanted to travel
round and see places.--“Home'll be good enough for me after this,” he
muttered. Walking down the long street towards the centre of town,
where was the moving-picture show, he thought of his home, of the dark
apartment on the ground floor of a seven-storey house where his aunt
lived. “Gee, she used to cook swell,” he murmured regretfully.

On a warm evening like this he would have stood round at the corner
where the drugstore was, talking to fellows he knew, giggling when the
girls who lived in the street, walking arm and arm, twined in couples or
trios, passed by affecting ignorance of the glances that followed them.
Or perhaps he would have gone walking with Al, who worked in the same
optical-goods store, down through the glaring streets of the theatre
and restaurant quarter, or along the wharves and ferry slips, where they
would have sat smoking and looking out over the dark purple harbor, with
its winking lights and its moving ferries spilling swaying reflections
in the water out of their square reddish-glowing windows. If they had
been lucky, they would have seen a liner come in through the Golden
Gate, growing from a blur of light to a huge moving brilliance, like the
front of a high-class theatre, that towered above the ferry boats. You
could often hear the thump of the screw and the swish of the bow
cutting the calm baywater, and the sound of a band playing, that came
alternately faint and loud. “When I git rich,” Fuselli had liked to say
to Al, “I'm going to take a trip on one of them liners.”

“Yer dad come over from the old country in one, didn't he?” Al would
ask.

“Oh, he came steerage. I'd stay at home if I had to do that. Man, first
class for me, a cabin de lux, when I git rich.”

But here he was in this town in the East, where he didn't know anybody
and where there was no place to go but the movies.

“'Lo, buddy,” came a voice beside him. The tall youth who had sat
opposite at mess was just catching up to him. “Goin' to the movies?”

“Yare, nauthin' else to do.”

“Here's a rookie. Just got to camp this mornin',” said the tall youth,
jerking his head in the direction of the man beside him.

“You'll like it. Ain't so bad as it seems at first,” said Fuselli
encouragingly.

“I was just telling him,” said the other, “to be careful as hell not to
get in wrong. If ye once get in wrong in this damn army... it's hell.”

“You bet yer life... so they sent ye over to our company, did they,
rookie? Ain't so bad. The sergeant's sort o' decent if yo're in right
with him, but the lieutenant's a stinker.... Where you from?”

“New York,” said the rookie, a little man of thirty with an ash-colored
face and a shiny Jewish nose. “I'm in the clothing business there. I
oughtn't to be drafted at all. It's an outrage. I'm consumptive.” He
spluttered in a feeble squeaky voice.

“They'll fix ye up, don't you fear,” said the tall youth. “They'll make
you so goddam well ye won't know yerself. Yer mother won't know ye, when
you get home, rookie.... But you're in luck.”

“Why?”

“Bein' from New York. The corporal, Tim Sidis, is from New York, an' all
the New York fellers in the company got a graft with him.”

“What kind of cigarettes d'ye smoke?” asked the tall youth.

“I don't smoke.”

“Ye'd better learn. The corporal likes fancy ciggies and so does the
sergeant; you jus' slip 'em each a butt now and then. May help ye to get
in right with 'em.”

“Don't do no good,” said Fuselli.... “It's juss luck. But keep neat-like
and smilin' and you'll get on all right. And if they start to ride ye,
show fight. Ye've got to be hard boiled to git on in this army.”

“Ye're goddam right,” said the tall youth. “Don't let 'em ride yer....
What's yer name, rookie?”

“Eisenstein.”

“This feller's name's Powers.... Bill Powers. Mine's Fuselli.... Goin'
to the movies, Mr. Eisenstein?”

“No, I'm trying to find a skirt.” The little man leered wanly. “Glad to
have got ackwainted.”

“Goddam kike!” said Powers as Eisenstein walked off up a side street,
planted, like the avenue, with saplings on which the sickly leaves
rustled in the faint breeze that smelt of factories and coal dust.

“Kikes ain't so bad,” said Fuselli, “I got a good friend who's a kike.”



They were coming out of the movies in a stream of people in which the
blackish clothes of factory-hands predominated.

“I came near bawlin' at the picture of the feller leavin' his girl to go
off to the war,” said Fuselli.

“Did yer?”

“It was just like it was with me. Ever been in Frisco, Powers?”

The tall youth shook his head. Then he took off his broad-brimmed hat
and ran his fingers over his stubby tow-head.

“Gee, it was some hot in there,” he muttered.

“Well, it's like this,” said Fuselli. “You have to cross the ferry to
Oakland. My aunt... ye know I ain't got any mother, so I always live
at my aunt's.... My aunt an' her sister-in-law an' Mabe... Mabe's my
girl... they all came over on the ferry-boat, 'spite of my tellin' 'em I
didn't want 'em. An' Mabe said she was mad at me, 'cause she'd seen the
letter I wrote Georgine Slater. She was a toughie, lived in our street,
I used to write mash notes to. An' I kep' tellin' Mabe I'd done it juss
for the hell of it, an' that I didn't mean nawthin' by it. An' Mabe said
she wouldn't never forgive me, an' then I said maybe I'd be killed an'
she'd never see me again, an' then we all began to bawl. Gawd! it was a
mess.... ”

“It's hell sayin' good-by to girls,” said Powers, understandingly. “Cuts
a feller all up. I guess it's better to go with coosies. Ye don't have
to say good-by to them.”

“Ever gone with a coosie?”

“Not exactly,” admitted the tall youth, blushing all over his pink face,
so that it was noticeable even under the ashen glare of the arc lights
on the avenue that led towards camp.

“I have,” said Fuselli, with a certain pride. “I used to go with a
Portugee girl. My but she was a toughie. I've given all that up now I'm
engaged, though.... But I was tellin' ye.... Well, we finally made up
an' I kissed her an' Mabe said she'd never marry any one but me. So when
we was walkin” up the street I spied a silk service flag in a winder,
that was all fancy with a star all trimmed up to beat the band, an' I
said to myself, I'm goin' to give that to Mabe, an' I ran in an' bought
it. I didn't give a hoot in hell what it cost. So when we was all
kissin' and bawlin' when I was goin' to leave them to report to the
overseas detachment, I shoved it into her hand, an' said, 'Keep that,
girl, an' don't you forgit me.' An' what did she do but pull out a
five-pound box o' candy from behind her back an' say, 'Don't make
yerself sick, Dan.' An' she'd had it all the time without my knowin' it.
Ain't girls clever?”

“Yare,” said the tall youth vaguely.



Along the rows of cots, when Fuselli got back to the barracks, men were
talking excitedly.

“There's hell to pay, somebody's broke out of the jug.”

“How?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Sergeant Timmons said he made a rope of his blankets.”

“No, the feller on guard helped him to get away.”

“Like hell he did. It was like this. I was walking by the guardhouse
when they found out about it.”

“What company did he belong ter?”

“Dunno.”

“What's his name?”


“Some guy on trial for insubordination. Punched an officer in the jaw.”

“I'd a liked to have seen that.”

“Anyhow he's fixed himself this time.”

“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.



                             II

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, Hill. 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-ear-ance 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
irresolutely 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 stared 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.



                             III

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
garlic 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 and 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:

     “Hail, Hail, the gang's all here;
      We're going to get the Kaiser,
      We're going to get the Kaiser,
      We're going to get the Kaiser,
      Now!”

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 to 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 shuck-in' 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.

“Overseas?” took up the lanky man. “If I could have gone an' studied
overseas, I'd be making as much as Kubelik. I had the makings of a good
player in me.”

“Why don't you go?” asked Andrews, who stood on the outskirts with
Fuselli and Chris.

“Look at me... t. b.,” said the lanky man.

“Well, they can't get me over there soon enough,” said Flannagan.

“Must be funny not bein' able to understand what folks say. They say
'we' over there when they mean 'yes,' a guy told me.”

“Ye can make signs to them, can't ye?” said Flannagan “an' they can
understand an Irishman anywhere. But ye won't 'ave to talk to the 'uns.
Begorry I'll set up in business when I get there, what d'ye think of
that?”

Everybody laughed.

“How'd that do? I'll start an Irish House in Berlin, I will, and
there'll be O'Casey and O'Ryan and O'Reilly and O'Flarrety, and begod
the King of England himself'll come an' set the goddam Kaiser up to a
drink.”

“The Kaiser'll be strung up on a telephone pole by that time; ye needn't
worry, Flannagan.”

“They ought to torture him to death, like they do niggers when they
lynch 'em down south.”

A bugle sounded far away outside on the parade ground. Everyone slunk
away silently to his cot.

John Andrews arranged himself carefully in his blankets, promising
himself a quiet time of thought before going to sleep. He needed to be
awake and think at night this way, so that he might not lose entirely
the thread of his own life, of the life he would take up again some day
if he lived through it. He brushed away the thought of death. It was
uninteresting. He didn't care anyway. But some day he would want to play
the piano again, to write music. He must not let himself sink too deeply
into the helpless mentality of the soldier. He must keep his will power.

No, but that was not what he had wanted to think about. He was so bored
with himself. At any cost he must forget himself. Ever since his first
year at college he seemed to have done nothing but think about himself,
talk about himself. At least at the bottom, in the utterest degradation
of slavery, he could find forgetfulness and start rebuilding the fabric
of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship
and scorn. Scorn--that was the quality he needed. It was such a raw,
fantastic world he had suddenly fallen into. His life before this
week seemed a dream read in a novel, a picture he had seen in a shop
window--it was so different. Could it have been in the same world at
all? He must have died without knowing it and been born again into a
new, futile hell.

When he had been a child he had lived in a dilapidated mansion that
stood among old oaks and chestnuts, beside a road where buggies and
oxcarts passed rarely to disturb the sandy ruts that lay in the mottled
shade. He had had so many dreams; lying under the crepe-myrtle bush
at the end of the overgrown garden he had passed the long Virginia
afternoons, thinking, while the dryflies whizzed sleepily in the
sunlight, of the world he would live in when he grew up. He had planned
so many lives for himself: a general, like Caesar, he was to conquer the
world and die murdered in a great marble hall; a wandering minstrel,
he would go through all countries singing and have intricate endless
adventures; a great musician, he would sit at the piano playing, like
Chopin in the engraving, while beautiful women wept and men with long,
curly hair hid their faces in their hands. It was only slavery that
he had not foreseen. His race had dominated for too many centuries for
that. And yet the world was made of various slaveries.

John Andrews lay on his back on his cot while everyone about him slept
and snored in the dark barracks. A certain terror held him. In a week
the great structure of his romantic world, so full of many colors and
harmonies, that had survived school and college and the buffeting
of making a living in New York, had fallen in dust about him. He was
utterly in the void. “How silly,” he thought; “this is the world as it
has appeared to the majority of men, this is just the lower half of the
pyramid.”

He thought of his friends, of Fuselli and Chrisfield and that funny
little man Eisenstein. They seemed at home in this army life. They did
not seem appalled by the loss of their liberty. But they had never lived
in the glittering other world. Yet he could not feel the scorn of them
he wanted to feel. He thought of them singing under the direction of the
“Y” man:

     “Hail, Hail, the gang's all here;
      We're going to get the Kaiser,
      We're going to get the Kaiser,
      We're going to get the Kaiser,
      Now!”

He thought of himself and Chrisfield picking up cigarette butts and
the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet on the drill field. Where was the
connection? Was this all futile madness? They'd come from such various
worlds, all these men sleeping about him, to be united in this. And what
did they think of it, all these sleepers? Had they too not had dreams
when they were boys? Or had the generations prepared them only for this?

He thought of himself lying under the crepe-myrtle bush through the hot,
droning afternoon, watching the pale magenta flowers flutter down into
the dry grass, and felt, again, wrapped in his warm blankets among
all these sleepers, the straining of limbs burning with desire to rush
untrammelled through some new keen air. Suddenly darkness overspread his
mind.


He woke with a start. The bugle was blowing outside.

“All right, look lively!” the sergeant was shouting. Another day.



                             IV

The stars were very bright when Fuselli, eyes stinging with sleep,
stumbled out of the barracks. They trembled like bits of brilliant jelly
in the black velvet of the sky, just as something inside him trembled
with excitement.

“Anybody know where the electricity turns on?” asked the sergeant in
a good-humored voice. “Here it is.” The light over the door of the
barracks snapped on, revealing a rotund cheerful man with a little
yellow mustache and an unlit cigarette dangling out of the corner of his
mouth. Grouped about him, in overcoats and caps, the men of the company
rested their packs against their knees.

“All right; line up, men.”

Eyes looked curiously at Fuselli as he lined up with the rest. He had
been transferred into the company the night before.

“Attenshun,” shouted the sergeant. Then he wrinkled up his eyes and
grinned hard at the slip of paper he had in his hand, while the men of
his company watched him affectionately.

“Answer 'Here' when your name is called. Allan, B.C.”

“Yo!” came a shrill voice from the end of the line.

“Anspach.”

“Here.”

Meanwhile outside the other barracks other companies could be heard
calling the roll. Somewhere from the end of the street came a cheer.

“Well, I guess I can tell you now, fellers,” said the sergeant with his
air of quiet omniscience, when he had called the last name. “We're going
overseas.”

Everybody cheered.

“Shut up, you don't want the Huns to hear us, do you?”

The company laughed, and there was a broad grin on the sergeant's round
face.

“Seem to have a pretty decent top-kicker,” whispered Fuselli to the man
next to him.

“You bet yer, kid, he's a peach,” said the other man in a voice full of
devotion. “This is some company, I can tell you that.”

“You bet it is,” said the next man along. “The corporal's in the Red Sox
outfield.”

The lieutenant appeared suddenly in the area of light in front of the
barracks. He was a pink-faced boy. His trench coat, a little too large,
was very new and stuck out stiffly from his legs.

“Everything all right, sergeant? Everything all right?” he asked several
times, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

“All ready for entrainment, sir,” said the sergeant heartily.

“Very good, I'll let you know the order of march in a minute.”

Fuselli's ears pounded with strange excitement. These phrases,
“entrainment,” “order of march,” had a businesslike sound. He suddenly
started to wonder how it would feel to be under fire. Memories of movies
flickered in his mind.

“Gawd, ain't I glad to git out o' this hell-hole,” he said to the man
next him.

“The next one may be more of a hell-hole yet, buddy,” said the sergeant
striding up and down with his important confident walk.

Everybody laughed.

“He's some sergeant, our sergeant is,” said the man next to Fuselli.
“He's got brains in his head, that boy has.”

“All right, break ranks,” said the sergeant, “but if anybody moves away
from this barracks, I'll put him in K. P. Till--till he'll be able to
peel spuds in his sleep.”

The company laughed again. Fuselli noticed with displeasure that the
tall man with the shrill voice whose name had been called first on the
roll did not laugh but spat disgustedly out of the corner of his mouth.

“Well, there are bad eggs in every good bunch,” thought Fuselli.

It gradually grew grey with dawn. Fuselli's legs were tired from
standing so long. Outside all the barracks, as far as he could see up
the street, men stood in ragged lines waiting.

The sun rose hot on a cloudless day. A few sparrows twittered about the
tin roof of the barracks.

“Hell, we're not goin' this day.”

“Why?” asked somebody savagely.

“Troops always leaves at night.”

“The hell they do!”

“Here comes Sarge.”

Everybody craned their necks in the direction pointed out.

The sergeant strolled up with a mysterious smile on his face.

“Put away your overcoats and get out your mess kits.”

Mess kits clattered and gleamed in the slanting rays of the sun. They
marched to the mess hall and back again, lined up again with packs and
waited some more.

Everybody began to get tired and peevish. Fuselli wondered where his old
friends of the other company were. They were good kids too, Chris and
that educated fellow, Andrews. Tough luck they couldn't have come along.

The sun rose higher. Men sneaked into the barracks one by one and lay
down on the bare cots.

“What you want to bet we won't leave this camp for a week yet?” asked
someone.

At noon they lined up for mess again, ate dismally and hurriedly. As
Fuselli was leaving the mess hall tapping a tattoo on his kit with two
dirty finger nails, the corporal spoke to him in a low voice.

“Be sure to wash yer kit, buddy. We may have pack inspection.”

The corporal was a slim yellow-faced man with a wrinkled skin, though he
was still young, and an arrow-shaped mouth that opened and shut like the
paper mouths children make.

“All right, corporal,” Fuselli answered cheerfully. He wanted to make
a good impression. “Fellers'll be sayin' 'All right, corporal,' to me
soon,” he thought. An idea that he repelled came into his mind. The
corporal didn't look strong. He wouldn't last long overseas. And he
pictured Mabe writing Corporal Dan Fuselli, O.A.R.D.5.

At the end of the afternoon, the lieutenant appeared suddenly, his face
flushed, his trench coat stiffer than ever.

“All right, sergeant; line up your men,” he said in a breathless voice.

All down the camp street companies were forming. One by one they marched
out in columns of fours and halted with their packs on. The day was
getting amber with sunset. Retreat sounded.

Fuselli's mind had suddenly become very active. The notes of the bugle
and of the band playing “The Star Spangled Banner” sifted into his
consciousness through a dream of what it would be like over there. He
was in a place like the Exposition ground, full of old men and women
in peasant costume, like in the song, “When It's Apple Blossom Time in
Normandy.” Men in spiked helmets who looked like firemen kept charging
through, like the Ku-Klux Klan in the movies, jumping from their horses
and setting fire to buildings with strange outlandish gestures, spitting
babies on their long swords. Those were the Huns. Then there were flags
blowing very hard in the wind, and the sound of a band. The Yanks were
coming. Everything was lost in a scene from a movie in which khaki-clad
regiments marched fast, fast across the scene. The memory of the
shouting that always accompanied it drowned out the picture. “The guns
must make a racket, though,” he added as an after-thought.

“Atten-shun!

“Forwa--ard, march!”

The long street of the camp was full of the tramping of feet. They were
off. As they passed through the gate Fuselli caught a glimpse of Chris
standing with his arm about Andrews's shoulders. They both waved.
Fuselli grinned and expanded his chest. They were just rookies still. He
was going overseas.

The weight of the pack tugged at his shoulders and made his feet heavy
as if they were charged with lead. The sweat ran down his close-clipped
head under the overseas cap and streamed into his eyes and down the
sides of his nose. Through the tramp of feet he heard confusedly
cheering from the sidewalk. In front of him the backs of heads and the
swaying packs got smaller, rank by rank up the street. Above them flags
dangled from windows, flags leisurely swaying in the twilight. But
the weight of the pack, as the column marched under arc lights glaring
through the afterglow, inevitably forced his head to droop forward. The
soles of boots and legs wrapped in puttees and the bottom strap of the
pack of the man ahead of him were all he could see. The pack seemed
heavy enough to push him through the asphalt pavement. And all about him
was the faint jingle of equipment and the tramp of feet. Every part of
him was full of sweat. He could feel vaguely the steam of sweat that
rose from the ranks of struggling bodies about him. But gradually he
forgot everything but the pack tugging at his shoulders, weighing down
his thighs and ankles and feet, and the monotonous rhythm of his feet
striking the pavement and of the other feet, in front of him, behind
him, beside him, crunching, crunching.



The train smelt of new uniforms on which the sweat had dried, and of
the smoke of cheap cigarettes. Fuselli awoke with a start. He had been
asleep with his head on Bill Grey's shoulder. It was already broad
daylight. The train was jolting slowly over cross-tracks in some dismal
suburb, full of long soot-smeared warehouses and endless rows of freight
cars, beyond which lay brown marshland and slate-grey stretches of
water.

“God! that must be the Atlantic Ocean,” cried Fuselli in excitement.

“Ain't yer never seen it before? That's the Perth River,” said Bill Grey
scornfully.

“No, I come from the Coast.”

They stuck their heads out of the window side by side so that their
cheeks touched.

“Gee, there's some skirts,” said Bill Grey. The train jolted to a stop.
Two untidy red-haired girls were standing beside the track waving their
hands.

“Give us a kiss,” cried Bill Grey.

“Sure,” said a girl,--“anythin' fer one of our boys.”

She stood on tiptoe and Grey leaned far out of the window, just managing
to reach the girl's forehead.

Fuselli felt a flush of desire all over him.

“Hol' onter my belt,” he said. “I'll kiss her right.”

He leaned far out, and, throwing his arms around the girl's pink gingham
shoulders, lifted her off the ground and kissed her furiously on the
lips.

“Lemme go, lemme go,” cried the girl. Men leaning out of the other
windows of the car cheered and shouted.

Fuselli kissed her again and then dropped her.

“Ye're too rough, damn ye,” said the girl angrily.

A man from one of the windows yelled, “I'll go an' tell mommer”; and
everybody laughed. The train moved on. Fuselli looked about him proudly.
The image of Mabe giving him the five-pound box of candy rose a moment
in his mind.

“Ain't no harm in havin' a little fun. Don't mean nothin',” he said
aloud.

“You just wait till we hit France. We'll hit it up some with the
Madimerzels, won't we, kid?” said Bill Grey, slapping Fuselli on the
knee.

     “Beautiful Katy,
      Ki-Ki-Katy,
      You're the only gugugu-girl that I adore;
      And when the mo-moon shines
      Over the cowshed,
      I'll be waiting at the ki-ki-ki-kitchen door.”

Everybody sang as the thumping of wheels over rails grew faster. Fuselli
looked about contentedly at the company sprawling over their packs and
equipment in the smoky car.

“It's great to be a soldier,” he said to Bill Grey. “Ye kin do anything
ye goddam please.”



“This,” said the corporal, as the company filed into barracks identical
to those they had left two days before, “is an embarkation camp, but I'd
like to know where the hell we embark at.” He twisted his face into a
smile, and then shouted with lugubrious intonation: “Fall in for mess.”

It was pitch dark in that part of the camp. The electric lights had a
sparse reddish glow. Fuselli kept straining his eyes, expecting to see a
wharf and the masts of a ship at the end of every alley. The line filed
into a dim mess hall, where a thin stew was splashed into the mess
kits. Behind the counter of the kitchen the non-coms, the jovial first
sergeant, and the businesslike sergeant who looked like a preacher, and
the wrinkled-faced corporal who had been on the Red Sox outfield, could
be seen eating steak. A faint odor of steak frying went through the mess
hall and made the thin chilly stew utterly tasteless in comparison.

Fuselli looked enviously towards the kitchen and thought of the day
when he would be a non-com too. “I got to get busy,” he said to himself
earnestly. Overseas, under fire, he'd have a chance to show what he was
worth; and he pictured himself heroically carrying a wounded captain
back to a dressing tent, pursued by fierce-whiskered men with spiked
helmets like firemen's helmets.

The strumming of a guitar came strangely down the dark street of the
camp.

“Some guy sure can play,” said Bill Grey who, with his hands in his
pockets, slouched along beside Fuselli.

They looked in the door of one of the barracks. A lot of soldiers were
sitting in a ring round two tall negroes whose black faces and chests
glistened like jet in the faint light.

“Come on, Charley, give us another,” said someone.

“Do Ah git it now, or mus' Ah hesit-ate?”

One negro began chanting while the other strummed carelessly on the
guitar.

“No, give us the 'Titanic.'”

The guitar strummed in a crooning rag-time for a moment. The negro's
voice broke into it suddenly, pitched high.

“Dis is de song ob de Titanic, Sailin' on de sea.”

The guitar strummed on. There had been a tension in the negro's
voice that had made everyone stop talking. The soldiers looked at him
curiously.

     “How de Titanic ran in dat cole iceberg,
      How de Titanic ran in dat cole iceberg
      Sailin' on de sea.”

His voice was confidential and soft, and the guitar strummed to the
same sobbing rag-time. Verse after verse the voice grew louder and the
strumming faster.

     “De Titanic's sinkin' in de deep blue,
      Sinkin' in de deep blue, deep blue,
      Sinkin' in de sea.
      O de women an' de chilen a-floatin' in de sea,
      O de women an' de chilen a-floatin' in de sea,
      Roun' dat cole iceberg,
      Sung 'Nearer, my gawd, to Thee,'
      Sung 'Nearer, my gawd, to Thee,
      Nearer to Thee.'”

The guitar was strumming the hymn-tune. The negro was singing with every
cord in his throat taut, almost sobbing.

A man next to Fuselli took careful aim and spat into the box of sawdust
in the middle of the ring of motionless soldiers.

The guitar played the rag-time again, fast, almost mockingly. The negro
sang in low confidential tones.

     “O de women an' de chilen dey sank in de sea.
      O de women an' de chilen dey sank in de sea,
      Roun' dat cole iceberg.”

Before he had finished a bugle blew in the distance. Everybody
scattered.

Fuselli and Bill Grey went silently back to their barracks.

“It must be an awful thing to drown in the sea,” said Grey as he rolled
himself in his blankets. “If one of those bastard U-boats...”

“I don't give a damn,” said Fuselli boisterously; but as he lay staring
into the darkness, cold terror stiffened him suddenly. He thought for a
moment of deserting, pretending he was sick, anything to keep from going
on the transport.

     “O de women an' de chilen dey sank in de sea,
      Roun” dat cole iceberg.”

He could feel himself going down through icy water. “It's a hell of a
thing to send a guy over there to drown,” he said to himself, and he
thought of the hilly streets of San Francisco, and the glow of the
sunset over the harbor and ships coming in through the Golden Gate. His
mind went gradually blank and he went to sleep.


The column was like some curious khaki-colored carpet, hiding the road
as far as you could see. In Fuselli's company the men were shifting
their weight from one foot to the other, muttering, “What the hell a'
they waiting for now?” Bill Grey, next to Fuselli in the ranks, stood
bent double so as to take the weight of his pack off his shoulders. They
were at a cross-roads on fairly high ground so that they could see the
long sheds and barracks of the camp stretching away in every direction,
in rows and rows, broken now and then by a grey drill field. In front
of them the column stretched to the last bend in the road, where it
disappeared on a hill among mustard-yellow suburban houses.

Fuselli was excited. He kept thinking of the night before, when he had
helped the sergeant distribute emergency rations, and had carried about
piles of boxes of hard bread, counting them carefully without a mistake.
He felt full of desire to do things, to show what he was good for.
“Gee,” he said to himself, “this war's a lucky thing for me. I might
have been in the R.C. Vicker Company's store for five years an' never
got a raise, an' here in the army I got a chance to do almost anything.”

Far ahead down the road the column was beginning to move. Voices
shouting orders beat crisply on the morning air. Fuselli's heart was
thumping. He felt proud of himself and of the company--the damn best
company in the whole outfit. The company ahead was moving, it was their
turn now.

“Forwa--ard, march!”

They were lost in the monotonous tramp of feet. Dust rose from the road,
along which like a drab brown worm crawled the column.


A sickening unfamiliar smell choked their nostrils.

“What are they taking us down here for?”

“Damned if I know.”

They were filing down ladders into the terrifying pit which the hold of
the ship seemed to them. Every man had a blue card in his hand with a
number on it. In a dim place like an empty warehouse they stopped. The
sergeant shouted out:

“I guess this is our diggings. We'll have to make the best of it.” Then
he disappeared.

Fuselli looked about him. He was sitting in one of the lowest of three
tiers of bunks roughly built of new pine boards. Electric lights placed
here and there gave a faint reddish tone to the gloom, except at the
ladders, where high-power lamps made a white glare. The place was full
of tramping of feet and the sound of packs being thrown on bunks as
endless files of soldiers poured in down every ladder. Somewhere down
the alley an officer with a shrill voice was shouting to his men: “Speed
it up there; speed it up there.” Fuselli sat on his bunk looking at the
terrifying confusion all about, feeling bewildered and humiliated. For
how many days would they be in that dark pit? He suddenly felt angry.
They had no right to treat a feller like that. He was a man, not a bale
of hay to be bundled about as anybody liked.

“An' if we're torpedoed a fat chance we'll have down here,” he said
aloud.

“They got sentries posted to keep us from goin up on deck,” said
someone.

“God damn them. They treat you like you was a steer being taken over for
meat.”

“Well, you're not a damn sight more. Meat for the guns.”

A little man lying in one of the upper bunks had spoken suddenly,
contracting his sallow face into a curious spasm, as if the words had
burst from him in spite of an effort to keep them in.

Everybody looked up at him angrily.

“That goddam kike Eisenstein,” muttered someone.

“Say, tie that bull outside,” shouted Bill Grey good-naturedly.

“Fools,” muttered Eisenstein, turning over and burying his face in his
hands.

“Gee, I wonder what it is makes it smell so funny down here,” said
Fuselli.


Fuselli lay flat on deck resting his head on his crossed arms. When he
looked straight up he could see a lead-colored mast sweep back and
forth across the sky full of clouds of light grey and silver and dark
purplish-grey showing yellowish at the edges. When he tilted his head a
little to one side he could see Bill Grey's heavy colorless face and the
dark bristles of his unshaven chin and his mouth a little twisted to the
left, from which a cigarette dangled unlighted. Beyond were heads
and bodies huddled together in a mass of khaki overcoats and life
preservers. And when the roll tipped the deck he had a view of moving
green waves and of a steamer striped grey and white, and the horizon, a
dark taut line, broken here and there by the tops of waves.

“O God, I feel sick,” said Bill Grey, taking the cigarette out of his
mouth and looking at it revengefully.

“I'd be all right if everything didn't stink so. An' that mess hall.
Nearly makes a guy puke to think of it.” Fuselli spoke in a whining
voice, watching the top of the mast move like a pencil scrawling on
paper, back and forth across the mottled clouds.

“You belly-achin' again?” A brown moon-shaped face with thick black
eyebrows and hair curling crisply about a forehead with many horizontal
wrinkles rose from the deck on the other side of Fuselli.

“Get the hell out of here.”

“Feel sick, sonny?” came the deep voice again, and the dark eyebrows
contracted in an expression of sympathy. “Funny, I'd have my sixshooter
out if I was home and you told me to get the hell out, sonny.”

“Well, who wouldn't be sore when they have to go on K.P.?” said Fuselli
peevishly.

“I ain't been down to mess in three days. A feller who lives on the
plains like I do ought to take to the sea like a duck, but it don't seem
to suit me.”

“God, they're a sick lookin' bunch I have to sling the hash to,” said
Fuselli more cheerfully. “I don't know how they get that way. The
fellers in our company ain't that way. They look like they was askeered
somebody was going to hit 'em. Ever noticed that, Meadville?”

“Well, what d'ye expect of you guys who live in the city all your lives
and don't know the butt from the barrel of a gun an' never straddled
anything more like a horse than a broomstick. Ye're juss made to be
sheep. No wonder they have to herd you round like calves.” Meadville got
to his feet and went unsteadily to the rail, keeping, as he threaded his
way through the groups that covered the transport's after deck, a little
of his cowboy's bow-legged stride.

“I know what it is that makes men's eyes blink when they go down to that
putrid mess,” came a nasal voice.

Fuselli turned round.

Eisenstein was sitting in the place Meadville had just left.

“You do, do you?”

“It's part of the system. You've got to turn men into beasts before ye
can get 'em to act that way. Ever read Tolstoi?”

“No. Say, you want to be careful how you go talkin' around the way you
do.” Fuselli lowered his voice confidentially. “I heard of a feller
bein' shot at Camp Merritt for talkin' around.”

“I don't care.... I'm a desperate man,” said Eisenstein.

“Don't ye feel sick? Gawd, I do.... Did you get rid o' any of it,
Meadville?”

“Why don't they fight their ole war somewhere a man can get to on a
horse?... Say that's my seat.”

“The place was empty.... I sat down in it,” said Eisenstein, lowering
his head sullenly.

“You kin have three winks to get out o' my place,” said Meadville,
squaring his broad shoulders.

“You are stronger than me,” said Eisenstein, moving off.

“God, it's hell not to have a gun,” muttered Meadville as he settled
himself on the deck again. “D'ye know, sonny, I nearly cried when I
found I was going to be in this damn medical corps? I enlisted for the
tanks. This is the first time in my life I haven't had a gun. I even
think I had one in my cradle.”

“That's funny,” said Fuselli.

The sergeant appeared suddenly in the middle of the group, his face red.

“Say, fellers,” he said in a low voice, “go down an' straighten out the
bunks as fast as you goddam can. They're having an inspection. It's a
hell of a note.”

They all filed down the gang planks into the foul-smelling hold, where
there was no light but the invariable reddish glow of electric bulbs.
They had hardly reached their bunks when someone called, “Attention!”

Three officers stalked by, their firm important tread a little disturbed
by the rolling. Their heads were stuck forward and they peered from side
to side among the bunks with the cruel, searching glance of hens looking
for worms.



“Fuselli,” said the first sergeant, “bring up the record book to my
stateroom; 213 on the lower deck.”

“All right, Sarge,” said Fuselli with alacrity. He admired the first
sergeant and wished he could imitate his jovial, domineering manner.

It was the first time he had been in the upper part of the ship. It
seemed a different world. The long corridors with red carpets, the white
paint and the gilt mouldings on the partitions, the officers strolling
about at their ease--it all made him think of the big liners he used to
watch come in through the Golden Gate, the liners he was going to Europe
on some day, when he got rich. Oh, if he could only get to be a sergeant
first-class, all this comfort and magnificence would be his. He found
the number and knocked on the door. Laughter and loud talking came from
inside the stateroom.

“Wait a sec!” came an unfamiliar voice.

“Sergeant Olster here?”

“Oh, it's one o' my gang,” came the sergeant's voice. “Let him in. He
won't peach on us.”

The door opened and he saw Sergeant Olster and two other young men
sitting with their feet dangling over the red varnished boards that
enclosed the bunks. They were talking gaily, and had glasses in their
hands.

“Paris is some town, I can tell you,” one was saying. “They say the
girls come up an' put their arms round you right in the main street.”

“Here's the records, sergeant,” said Fuselli stiffly in his best
military manner.

“Oh thanks.... There's nothing else I want,” said the sergeant, his
voice more jovial than ever. “Don't fall overboard like the guy in
Company C.”

Fuselli laughed as he closed the door, growing serious suddenly on
noticing that one of the young men wore in his shirt the gold bar of a
second lieutenant.

“Gee,” he said to himself. “I ought to have saluted.”

He waited a moment outside the closed door of the stateroom, listening
to the talk and the laughter, wishing he were one of that merry group
talking about women in Paris. He began thinking. Sure he'd get private
first-class as soon as they got overseas. Then in a couple of months he
might be corporal. If they saw much service, he'd move along all right,
once he got to be a non-com.

“Oh, I mustn't get in wrong. Oh, I mustn't get in wrong,” he kept saying
to himself as he went down the ladder into the hold. But he forgot
everything in the seasickness that came on again as he breathed in the
fetid air.



The deck now slanted down in front of him, now rose so that he was
walking up an incline. Dirty water slushed about from one side of the
passage to the other with every lurch of the ship. When he reached the
door the whistling howl of the wind through the hinges and cracks made
Fuselli hesitate a long time with his hand on the knob. The moment he
turned the knob the door flew open and he was in the full sweep of the
wind. The deck was deserted. The wet ropes strung along it shivered
dismally in the wind. Every other moment came the rattle of spray, that
rose up in white fringy trees to windward and smashed against him like
hail. Without closing the door he crept forward along the deck, clinging
as hard as he could to the icy rope. Beyond the spray he could see huge
marbled green waves rise in constant succession out of the mist. The
roar of the wind in his ears confused him and terrified him. It seemed
ages before he reached the door of the forward house that opened on a
passage that smelt of drugs; and breathed out air, where men waited in
a packed line, thrown one against the other by the lurching of the boat,
to get into the dispensary. The roar of the wind came to them faintly,
and only now and then the hollow thump of a wave against the bow.

“You sick?” a man asked Fuselli.

“Naw, I'm not sick; but Sarge sent me to get some stuff for some guys
that's too sick to move.”

“An awful lot o' sickness on this boat.”

“Two fellers died this mornin' in that there room,” said another man
solemnly, pointing over his shoulder with a jerk of the thumb. “Ain't
buried 'em yet. It's too rough.”

“What'd they die of?” asked Fuselli eagerly.

“Spinal somethin'....”

“Menegitis,” broke in a man at the end of the line.

“Say, that's awful catchin' ain't it?”

“It sure is.”

“Where does it hit yer?” asked Fuselli.

“Yer neck swells up, an' then you juss go stiff all over,” came the
man's voice from the end of the line.

There was a silence. From the direction of the infirmary a man with a
packet of medicines in his hand began making his way towards the door.

“Many guys in there?” asked Fuselli in a low voice as the man brushed
past him.

When the door closed again the man beside Fuselli, who was tall and
broad shouldered with heavy black eyebrows, burst out, as if he were
saying something he'd been trying to keep from saying for a long while:

“It won't be right if that sickness gets me; indeed it won't.... I've
got a girl waitin' for me at home. It's two years since I ain't touched
a woman all on account of her. It ain't natural for a fellow to go so
long as that.

“Why didn't you marry her before you left?” somebody asked mockingly.

“Said she didn't want to be no war bride, that she could wait for me
better if I didn't.”

Several men laughed.

“It wouldn't be right if I took sick an' died of this sickness, after
keepin' myself clean on account of that girl.... It wouldn't be right,”
 the man muttered again to Fuselli.

Fuselli was picturing himself lying in his bunk with a swollen neck,
while his arms and legs stiffened, stiffened.

A red-faced man half way up the passage started speaking:

“When I thinks to myself how much the folks need me home, it makes
me feel sort o' confident-like, I dunno why. I juss can't cash in my
checks, that's all.” He laughed jovially.

No one joined in the laugh.

“Is it awfully catchin'?” asked Fuselli of the man next him.

“Most catchin' thing there is,” he answered solemnly. “The worst of
it is,” another man was muttering in a shrill hysterical voice, “bein'
thrown over to the sharks. Gee, they ain't got a right to do that, even
if it is war time, they ain't got a right to treat a Christian like he
was a dead dawg.”

“They got a right to do anythin' they goddam please, buddy. Who's goin'
to stop 'em I'd like to know,” cried the red-faced man.

“If he was an awficer, they wouldn't throw him over like that,” came the
shrill hysterical voice again.

“Cut that,” said someone else, “no use gettin' in wrong juss for the
sake of talkin'.”

“But ain't it dangerous, waitin' round up here so near where those
fellers are with that sickness,” whispered Fuselli to the man next him.

“Reckon it is, buddy,” came the other man's voice dully.

Fuselli started making his way toward the door.

“Lemme out, fellers, I've got to puke,” he said. “Shoot,” he was
thinking, “I'll tell 'em the place was closed; they'll never come to
look.”

As he opened the door he thought of himself crawling back to his bunk
and feeling his neck swell and his hands burn with fever and his arms
and legs stiffen until everything would be effaced in the blackness
of death. But the roar of the wind and the lash of the spray as he
staggered back along the deck drowned all other thought.



Fuselli and another man carried the dripping garbage-can up the ladder
that led up from the mess hall. It smelt of rancid grease and coffee
grounds and greasy juice trickled over their fingers as they struggled
with it. At last they burst out on to the deck where a free wind blew
out of the black night. They staggered unsteadily to the rail and
emptied the pail into the darkness. The splash was lost in the sound of
the waves and of churned water fleeing along the sides. Fuselli leaned
over the rail and looked down at the faint phosphorescence that was
the only light in the whole black gulf. He had never seen such darkness
before. He clutched hold of the rail with both hands, feeling lost and
terrified in the blackness, in the roaring of the wind in his ears
and the sound of churned water fleeing astern. The alternative was the
stench of below decks.

“I'll bring down the rosie, don't you bother,” he said to the other man,
kicking the can that gave out a ringing sound as he spoke.

He strained his eyes to make out something. The darkness seemed to press
in upon his eyeballs, blinding him. Suddenly he noticed voices near him.
Two men were talking.

“I ain't never seen the sea before this, I didn't know it was like
this.”

“We're in the zone, now.”

“That means we may go down any minute.”

“Yare.”

“Christ, how black it is.... It'ld be awful to drown in the dark like
this.”

“It'ld be over soon.”

“Say, Fred, have you ever been so skeered that...?”

“D'you feel a-skeert?”

“Feel my hand, Fred.... No.... There it is. God, it's so hellish black
you can't see yer own hand.”

“It's cold. Why are you shiverin' so? God, I wish I had a drink.”

“I ain't never seen the sea before...I didn't know...”

Fuselli heard distinctly the man's teeth chattering in the darkness.

“God, pull yerself together, kid. You can't be skeered like this.”

“O God.”

There was a long pause. Fuselli heard nothing but the churned water
speeding along the ship's side and the wind roaring in his ears.

“I ain't never seen the sea before this time, Fred, an' it sort o'
gits my goat, all this sickness an' all.... They dropped three of 'em
overboard yesterday.”

“Hell, kid, don't think of it.”

“Say, Fred, if I... if I... if you're saved, Fred, an' not me, you'll
write to my folks, won't you?”

“Indeed I will. But I reckon you an' me'll both go down together.”

“Don't say that. An' you won't forget to write that girl I gave you the
address of?”

“You'll do the same for me.”

“Oh, no, Fred, I'll never see land.... Oh, it's no use. An' I feel so
well an' husky.... I don't want to die. I can't die like this.”

“If it only wasn't so goddam black.”




PART TWO: THE METAL COOLS                            I

It was purplish dusk outside the window. The rain fell steadily making
long flashing stripes on the cracked panes, beating a hard monotonous
tattoo on the tin roof overhead. Fuselli had taken off his wet slicker
and stood in front of the window looking out dismally at the rain.
Behind him was the smoking stove into which a man was poking wood, and
beyond that a few broken folding chairs on which soldiers sprawled in
attitudes of utter boredom, and the counter where the “Y” man stood with
a set smile doling out chocolate to a line of men that filed past.

“Gee, you have to line up for everything here, don't you?” Fuselli
muttered.

“That's about all you do do in this hell-hole, buddy,” said a man beside
him.

The man pointed with his thumb at the window and said again:

“See that rain? Well, I been in this camp three weeks and it ain't
stopped rainin' once. What d'yer think of that fer a country?”

“It certainly ain't like home,” said Fuselli. “I'm going to have some
chauclate.”

“It's damn rotten.”

“I might as well try it once.”

Fuselli slouched over to the end of the line and stood waiting his turn.
He was thinking of the steep streets of San Francisco and the glimpses
he used to get of the harbor full of yellow lights, the color of amber
in a cigarette holder, as he went home from work through the blue dusk.
He had begun to think of Mabe handing him the five-pound box of candy
when his attention was distracted by the talk of the men behind him. The
man next to him was speaking with hurried nervous intonation. Fuselli
could feel his breath on the back of his neck.

“I'll be goddamned,” the man said, “was you there too? Where d'you get
yours?”

“In the leg; it's about all right, though.”

“I ain't. I won't never be all right. The doctor says I'm all right now,
but I know I'm not, the lyin' fool.”

“Some time, wasn't it?”

“I'll be damned to hell if I do it again. I can't sleep at night
thinkin' of the shape of the Fritzies' helmets. Have you ever thought
that there was somethin' about the shape of them goddam helmets...?”

“Ain't they just or'nary shapes?” asked Fuselli, half turning round. “I
seen 'em in the movies.” He laughed apologetically.

“Listen to the rookie, Tub, he's seen 'em in the movies!” said the man
with the nervous twitch in his voice, laughing a croaking little laugh.
“How long you been in this country, buddy?”

“Two days.”

“Well, we only been here two months, ain't we, Tub?”

“Four months; you're forgettin', kid.”

The “Y” man turned his set smile on Fuselli while he filled his tin cup
up with chocolate.

“How much?”

“A franc; one of those looks like a quarter,” said the “Y” man, his
well-fed voice full of amiable condescension.

“That's a hell of a lot for a cup of chauclate,” said Fuselli.

“You're at the war, young man, remember that,” said the “Y” man
severely. “You're lucky to get it at all.”

A cold chill gripped Fuselli's spine as he went back to the stove to
drink the chocolate. Of course he mustn't crab. He was in the war
now. If the sergeant had heard him crabbing, it might have spoiled his
chances for a corporalship. He must be careful. If he just watched out
and kept on his toes, he'd be sure to get it.

“And why ain't there no more chocolate, I want to know?” the nervous
voice of the man who had stood in line behind Fuselli rose to a sudden
shriek. Everybody looked round. The “Y” man was moving his head from
side to side in a flustered way, saying in a shrill little voice:

“I've told you there's no more. Go away!”

“You ain't got no right to tell me to go away. You got to get me some
chocolate. You ain't never been at the front, you goddam slacker.” The
man was yelling at the top of his lungs. He had hold of the counter with
two hands and swayed from side to side. His friend was trying to pull
him away.

“Look here, none of that, I'll report you,” said the “Y” man. “Is there
a non-commissioned officer in the hut?”

“Go ahead, you can't do nothin'. I can't never have nothing done worse
than what's been done to me already.” The man's voice had reached a
sing-song fury.

“Is there a non-commissioned officer in the room?” The “Y” man kept
looking from side to side. His little eyes were hard and spiteful and
his lips were drawn up in a thin straight line.

“Keep quiet, I'll get him away,” said the other man in a low voice.
“Can't you see he's not...?”

A strange terror took hold of Fuselli. He hadn't expected things to be
like that. When he had sat in the grandstand in the training camp
and watched the jolly soldiers in khaki marching into towns, pursuing
terrified Huns across potato fields, saving Belgian milk-maids against
picturesque backgrounds.

“Does many of 'em come back that way?” he asked a man beside him.

“Some do. It's this convalescent camp.” The man and his friend stood
side by side near the stove talking in low voices.

“Pull yourself together, kid,” the friend was saying.

“All right, Tub; I'm all right now, Tub. That slacker got my goat, that
was all.”

Fuselli was looking at him curiously. He had a yellow parchment face and
a high, gaunt forehead going up to sparse, curly brown hair. His eyes
had a glassy look about them when they met Fuselli's. He smiled amiably.

“Oh, there's the kid who's seen Fritzies' helmets in the movies.... Come
on, buddy, come and have a beer at the English canteen.”

“Can you get beer?”

“Sure, over in the English camp.” They went out into the slanting
rain. It was nearly dark, but the sky had a purplish-red color that was
reflected a little on the slanting sides of tents and on the roofs
of the rows of sheds that disappeared into the rainy mist in every
direction. A few lights gleamed, a very bright polished yellow. They
followed a board-walk that splashed mud up from the puddles under the
tramp of their heavy boots.

At one place they flattened themselves against the wet flap of a tent
and saluted as an officer passed waving a little cane jauntily.

“How long does a fellow usually stay in these rest camps?” asked
Fuselli.

“Depends on what's goin' on out there,” said Tub, pointing carelessly to
the sky beyond the peaks of the tents.

“You'll leave here soon enough. Don't you worry, buddy,” said the man
with the nervous voice. “What you in?”

“Medical Replacement Unit.”

“A medic are you? Those boys didn't last long at the Chateau, did they,
Tub?”

“No, they didn't.”

Something inside Fuselli was protesting; “I'll last out though. I'll
last out though.”

“Do you remember the fellers went out to get poor ole Corporal Jones,
Tub? I'll be goddamned if anybody ever found a button of their pants.”
 He laughed his creaky little laugh. “They got in the way of a torpedo.”

The “wet” canteen was full of smoke and a cosy steam of beer. It was
crowded with red-faced men, with shiny brass buttons on their khaki
uniforms, among whom was a good sprinkling of lanky Americans.

“Tommies,” said Fuselli to himself.

After standing in line a while, Fuselli's cup was handed back to him
across the counter, foaming with beer.

“Hello, Fuselli,” Meadville clapped him on the shoulder. “You found the
liquor pretty damn quick, looks like to me.”

Fuselli laughed.

“May I sit with you fellers?”

“Sure, come along,” said Fuselli proudly, “these guys have been to the
front.”

“You have?” asked Meadville. “The Huns are pretty good scrappers, they
say. Tell me, do you use your rifle much, or is it mostly big gun work?”

“Naw; after all the months I spent learnin' how to drill with my goddam
rifle, I'll be a sucker if I've used it once. I'm in the grenade squad.”

Someone at the end of the room had started singing:

“O Mademerselle from Armenteers,      Parley voo!”

The man with the nervous voice went on talking, while the song roared
about them.

“I don't spend a night without thinkin' o' them funny helmets the
Fritzies wear. Have you ever thought that there was something goddam
funny about the shape o' them helmets?”

“Can the helmets, kid,” said his friend. “You told us all about them
onct.”

“I ain't told you why I can't forgit 'em, have I?”

     “A German officer crossed the Rhine;
          Parley voo?
      A German officer crossed the Rhine;
      He loved the women and liked the wine;
          Hanky Panky, parley voo.... ”

“Listen to this, fellers,” said the man in his twitching nervous voice,
staring straight into Fuselli's eyes. “We made a little attack to
straighten out our trenches a bit just before I got winged. Our barrage
cut off a bit of Fritzie's trench an' we ran right ahead juss about dawn
an' occupied it. I'll be goddamned if it wasn't as quiet as a Sunday
morning at home.”

“It was!” said his friend.

“An' I had a bunch of grenades an' a feller came runnin' up to me,
whisperin', 'There's a bunch of Fritzies playin' cards in a dugout. They
don't seem to know they're captured. We'd better take 'em pris'ners!”

“'Pris'ners, hell,' says I, 'We'll go and clear the buggars out.' So we
crept along to the steps and looked down.... ”

The song had started again:

      “O Mademerselle from Armenteers,
             Parley voo?

“Their helmets looked so damn like toadstools I came near laughin'. An'
they sat round the lamp layin' down the cards serious-like, the way I've
seen Germans do in the Rathskeller at home.”

      “He loved the women and liked the wine,
             Parley voo?

“I lay there lookin' at 'em for a hell of a time, an' then I clicked a
grenade an' tossed it gently down the steps. An' all those funny helmets
like toadstools popped up in the air an' somebody gave a yell an' the
light went out an' the damn grenade went off. Then I let 'em have the
rest of 'em an' went away 'cause one o' 'em was still moanin'-like. It
was about that time they let their barrage down on us and I got mine.”

     “The Yanks are havin' a hell of a time,
            Parley voo?

“An' the first thing I thought of when I woke up was how those goddam
helmets looked. It upsets a feller to think of a thing like that.” His
voice ended in a whine like the broken voice of a child that has been
beaten.

“You need to pull yourself together, kid,” said his friend.

“I know what I need, Tub. I need a woman.”

“You know where you get one?” asked Meadville. “I'd like to get me a
nice little French girl a rainy night like this.”

“It must be a hell of a ways to the town.... They say it's full of M.
P.'s too,” said Fuselli.

“I know a way,” said the man with the nervous voice, “Come on; Tub.”

“No, I've had enough of these goddam frog women.”

They all left the canteen.

As the two men went off down the side of the building, Fuselli heard the
nervous twitching voice through the metallic patter of the rain:

“I can't find no way of forgettin' how funny the helmets looked all
round the lamp... I can't find no way.... ”



Bill Grey and Fuselli pooled their blankets and slept together. They lay
on the hard floor of the tent very close to each other, listening to the
rain pattering endlessly on the drenched canvas that slanted above their
heads.

“Hell, Bill, I'm gettin' pneumonia,” said Fuselli, clearing his nose.

“That's the only thing that scares me in the whole goddam business. I'd
hate to die o' sickness... an' they say another kid's kicked off with
that--what d'they call it?--menegitis.”

“Was that what was the matter with Stein?”

“The corporal won't say.”

“Ole Corp. looks sort o' sick himself,” said Fuselli.

“It's this rotten climate” whispered Bill Grey, in the middle of a fit
of coughing.

“For cat's sake quit that coughin'. Let a feller sleep,” came a voice
from the other side of the tent.

“Go an' get a room in a hotel if you don't like it.”

“That's it, Bill, tell him where to get off.”

“If you fellers don't quit yellin', I'll put the whole blame lot of you
on K. P.,” came the sergeant's good-natured voice.

“Don't you know that taps has blown?”

The tent was silent except for the fast patter of the rain and Bill
Grey's coughing.

“That sergeant gives me a pain in the neck,” muttered Bill Grey
peevishly, when his coughing had stopped, wriggling about under the
blankets.

After a while Fuselli said in a very low voice, so that no one but his
friend should hear:

“Say, Bill, ain't it different from what we thought it was going to be?”

“Yare.”

“I mean fellers don't seem to think about beatin' the Huns at all,
they're so busy crabbin' on everything.”

“It's the guys higher up that does the thinkin',” said Grey
grandiloquently.

“Hell, but I thought it'd be excitin' like in the movies.”

“I guess that was a lot o' talk.”

“Maybe.”

Fuselli went to sleep on the hard floor, feeling the comfortable warmth
of Grey's body along the side of him, hearing the endless, monotonous
patter of the rain on the drenched canvas above his head. He tried to
stay awake a minute to remember what Mabe looked like, but sleep closed
down on him suddenly.

The bugle wrenched them out of their blankets before it was light. It
was not raining. The air was raw and full of white mist that was cold as
snow against their faces still warm from sleep. The corporal called the
roll, lighting matches to read the list. When he dismissed the formation
the sergeant's voice was heard from the tent, where he still lay rolled
in his blankets.

“Say, Corp, go an' tell Fuselli to straighten out Lieutenant Stanford's
room at eight sharp in Officers' Barracks, Number Four.”

“Did you hear, Fuselli?”

“All right,” said Fuselli. His blood boiled up suddenly. This was the
first time he'd had to do servants' work. He hadn't joined the army to
be a slavey to any damned first loot. It was against army regulations
anyway. He'd go and kick. He wasn't going to be a slavey.... He walked
towards the door of the tent, thinking what he'd say to the sergeant.
But he noticed the corporal coughing into his handkerchief with an
expression of pain on his face. He turned and strolled away. It would
get him in wrong if he started kicking like that. Much better shut his
mouth and put up with it. The poor old corp couldn't last long at this
rate. No, it wouldn't do to get in wrong.

At eight, Fuselli, with a broom in his hand, feeling dull fury pounding
and fluttering within him, knocked on the unpainted board door.

“Who's that?”

“To clean the room, sir,” said Fuselli. “Come back in about twenty
minutes,” came the voice of the lieutenant.

“All right, sir.”

Fuselli leaned against the back of the barracks and smoked a cigarette.
The air stung his hands as if they had been scraped by a nutmeg-grater.
Twenty minutes passed slowly. Despair seized hold of him. He was so far
from anyone who cared about him, so lost in the vast machine. He was
telling himself that he'd never get on, would never get up where he
could show what he was good for. He felt as if he were in a treadmill.
Day after day it would be like this,--the same routine, the same
helplessness. He looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes had passed. He
picked up his broom and moved round to the lieutenant's room.

“Come in,” said the lieutenant carelessly. He was in his shirtsleeves,
shaving. A pleasant smell of shaving soap filled the dark clapboard
room, which had no furniture but three cots and some officers' trunks.
He was a red-faced young man with flabby cheeks and dark straight
eyebrows. He had taken command of the company only a day or two before.

“Looks like a decent feller,” thought Fuselli.

“What's your name?” asked the lieutenant, speaking into the small nickel
mirror, while he ran the safety razor obliquely across his throat. He
stuttered a little. To Fuselli he seemed to speak like an Englishman.

“Fuselli.”

“Italian parentage, I presume?”

“Yes,” said Fuselli sullenly, dragging one of the cots away from the
wall.

“Parla Italiano?”

“You mean, do I speak Eyetalian? Naw, sir,” said Fuselli emphatically,
“I was born in Frisco.”

“Indeed? But get me some more water, will you, please?”

When Fuselli came back, he stood with his broom between his knees,
blowing on his hands that were blue and stiff from carrying the heavy
bucket. The lieutenant was dressed and was hooking the top hook of the
uniform carefully. The collar made a red mark on his pink throat.

“All right; when you're through, report back to the Company.” The
lieutenant went out, drawing on a pair of khaki-colored gloves with a
satisfied and important gesture.

Fuselli walked back slowly to the tents where the Company was quartered,
looking about him at the long lines of barracks, gaunt and dripping in
the mist, at the big tin sheds of the cook shacks where the cooks and K.
P.'s in greasy blue denims were slouching about amid a steam of cooking
food.

Something of the gesture with which the lieutenant drew on his gloves
caught in the mind of Fuselli. He had seen peoople make gestures
like that in the movies, stout dignified people in evening suits. The
president of the Company that owned the optical goods store, where he
had worked, at home in Frisco, had had something of that gesture about
him.

And he pictured himself drawing on a pair of gloves that way,
importantly, finger by finger, with a little wave, of self-satisfaction
when the gesture was completed.... He'd have to get that corporalship.

“There's a long, long trail a-winding Through no man's land in France.”

The company sang lustily as it splashed through the mud down a grey road
between high fences covered with great tangles of barbed wire, above
which peeked the ends of warehouses and the chimneys of factories.

The lieutenant and the top sergeant walked side by side chatting, now
and then singing a little of the song in a deprecating way. The corporal
sang, his eyes sparkling with delight. Even the sombre sergeant who
rarely spoke to anyone, sang. The company strode along, its ninety-six
legs splashing jauntily through the deep putty-colored puddles. The
packs swayed merrily from side to side as if it were they and not the
legs that were walking.

“There's a long, long trail a-winding Through no man's land in France.”

At last they were going somewhere. They had separated from the
contingent they had come over with. They were all alone now. They were
going to be put to work. The lieutenant strode along importantly.
The sergeant strode along importantly. The corporal strode along
importantly. The right guard strode along more importantly than anyone.
A sense of importance, of something tremendous to do, animated the
company like wine, made the packs and the belts seem less heavy, made
their necks and shoulders less stiff from struggling with the weight of
the packs, made the ninety-six legs tramp jauntily in spite of the oozy
mud and the deep putty-colored puddles.

It was cold in the dark shed of the freight station where they waited.
Some gas lamps flickered feebly high up among the rafters, lighting up
in a ghastly way white piles of ammunition boxes and ranks and ranks of
shells that disappeared in the darkness. The raw air was full of
coal smoke and a smell of freshly-cut boards. The captain and the top
sergeant had disappeared. The men sat about, huddled in groups, sinking
as far as they could into their overcoats, stamping their numb wet feet
on the mud-covered cement of the floor. The sliding doors were shut.
Through them came a monotonous sound of cars shunting, of buffers
bumping against buffers, and now and then the shrill whistle of an
engine.

“Hell, the French railroads are rotten,” said someone.

“How d'you know?” snapped Eisenstein, who sat on a box away from the
rest with his lean face in his hands staring at his mud-covered boots.

“Look at this,” Bill Grey made a disgusted gesture towards the ceiling.
“Gas. Don't even have electric light.”

“Their trains run faster than ours,” said Eisenstein.

“The hell they do. Why, a fellow back in that rest camp told me that it
took four or five days to get anywhere.”

“He was stuffing you,” said Eisenstein. “They used to run the fastest
trains in the world in France.”

“Not so fast as the 'Twentieth Century.' Goddam, I'm a railroad man and
I know.”

“I want five men to help me sort out the eats,” said the top sergeant,
coming suddenly out of the shadows. “Fuselli, Grey, Eisenstein,
Meadville, Williams... all right, come along.”

“Say, Sarge, this guy says that frog trains are faster than our trains.
What d'ye think o' that?”

The sergeant put on his comic expression. Everybody got ready to laugh.

“Well, if he'd rather take the side-door Pullmans we're going to get
aboard tonight than the 'Sunset Limited,' he's welcome. I've seen 'em.
You fellers haven't.”

Everybody laughed. The top sergeant turned confidentially to the five
men who followed him into a small well-lighted room that looked like a
freight office.

“We've got to sort out the grub, fellers. See those cases? That's three
days' rations for the outfit. I want to sort it into three lots, one for
each car. Understand?”

Fuselli pulled open one of the boxes. The cans of bully beef flew under
his fingers. He kept looking out of the corner of his eye at Eisenstein,
who seemed very skilful in a careless way. The top sergeant stood
beaming at them with his legs wide apart. Once he said something in
a low voice to the corporal. Fuselli thought he caught the words:
“privates first-class,” and his heart started thumping hard. In a few
minutes the job was done, and everybody stood about lighting cigarettes.

“Well, fellers,” said Sergeant Jones, the sombre man who rarely spoke,
“I certainly didn't reckon when I used to be teachin' and preachin' and
tendin' Sunday School and the like that I'd come to be usin' cuss words,
but I think we got a damn good company.”

“Oh, we'll have you sayin' worse things than 'damn' when we get you out
on the front with a goddam German aeroplane droppin' bombs on you,” said
the top sergeant, slapping him on the back. “Now, I want you five men to
look out for the grub.” Fuselli's chest swelled. “The company'll be in
charge of the corporal for the night. Sergeant Jones and I have got to
be with the lieutenant, understand?”

They all walked back to the dingy room where the rest of the company
waited huddled in their coats, trying to keep their importance from
being too obvious in their step.

“I've really started now,” thought Fuselli to himself. “I've really
started now.”



The bare freight car clattered and rumbled monotonously over the rails.
A bitter cold wind blew up through the cracks in the grimy splintered
boards of the floor. The men huddled in the corners of the car, curled
up together like puppies in a box. It was pitch black. Fuselli lay half
asleep, his head full of curious fragmentary dreams, feeling through his
sleep the aching cold and the unending clattering rumble of the wheels
and the bodies and arms and legs muffled in coats and blankets pressing
against him. He woke up with a start. His teeth were chattering. The
clanking rumble of wheels seemed to be in his head. His head was being
dragged along, bumping over cold iron rails. Someone lighted a match.
The freight car's black swaying walls, the packs piled in the center,
the bodies heaped in the corners where, out of khaki masses here and
there gleamed an occasional white face or a pair of eyes--all showed
clear for a moment and then vanished again in the utter blackness.
Fuselli pillowed his head in the crook of someone's arm and tried to go
to sleep, but the scraping rumble of wheels over rails was too loud;
he stayed with open eyes staring into the blackness, trying to draw his
body away from the blast of cold air that blew up through a crack in the
floor.

When the first greyness began filtering into the car, they all stood up
and stamped and pounded each other and wrestled to get warm.

When it was nearly light, the train stopped and they opened the sliding
doors. They were in a station, a foreign-looking station where the walls
were plastered with unfamiliar advertisements. “V-E-R-S-A-I-L-L-E-S”;
Fuselli spelt out the name.

“Versales,” said Eisenstein. “That's where the kings of France used to
live.”

The train started moving again slowly. On the platform stood the top
sergeant.

“How d'ye sleep,” he shouted as the car passed him. “Say, Fuselli,
better start some grub going.”

“All right, Sarge,” said Fuselli.

The sergeant ran back to the front of the car and climbed on. With a
delicious feeling of leadership, Fuselli divided up the bread and the
cans of bully beef and the cheese. Then he sat on his pack eating dry
bread and unsavoury beef, whistling joyfully, while the train
rumbled and clattered along through a strange, misty-green
countryside,--whistling joyfully because he was going to the front,
where there would be glory and excitement, whistling joyfully because he
felt he was getting along in the world.



It was noon. A pallid little sun like a toy balloon hung low in the
reddish-grey sky. The train had stopped on a siding in the middle of a
russet plain. Yellow poplars, faint as mist, rose slender against the
sky along a black shining stream that swirled beside the track. In
the distance a steeple and a few red roofs were etched faintly in the
greyness.

The men stood about balancing first on one foot and then on the other,
stamping to get warm. On the other side of the river an old man with an
oxcart had stopped and was looking sadly at the train.

“Say, where's the front?” somebody shouted to him.

Everybody took up the cry; “Say, where's the front?”

The old man waved his hand, shook his head and shouted to the oxen. The
oxen took up again their quiet processional gait and the old man walked
ahead of them, his eyes on the ground.

“Say, ain't the frogs dumb?”

“Say, Dan,” said Bill Grey, strolling away from a group of men he had
been talking to. “These guys say we are going to the Third Army.”

“Say, fellers,” shouted Fuselli. “They say we're going to the Third
Army.”

“Where's that?”

“In the Oregon forest,” ventured somebody.

“That's at the front, ain't it?”

At that moment the lieutenant strode by. A long khaki muffler was thrown
carelessly round his neck and hung down his back.

“Look here, men,” he said severely, “the orders are to stay in the
cars.”

The men slunk back into the cars sullenly.

A hospital train passed, clanking slowly over the cross-tracks. Fuselli
looked fixedly at the dark enigmatic windows, at the red crosses, at
the orderlies in white who leaned out of the doors, waving their hands.
Somebody noticed that there were scars on the new green paint of the
last car.

“The Huns have been shooting at it.”

“D'ye hear that? The Huns tried to shoot up that hospital train.”

Fuselli remembered the pamphlet “German Atrocities” he had read one
night in the Y. M. C. A. His mind became suddenly filled with pictures
of children with their arms cut off, of babies spitted on bayonets,
of women strapped on tables and violated by soldier after soldier. He
thought of Mabe. He wished he were in a combatant service; he wanted
to fight, fight. He pictured himself shooting dozens of men in green
uniforms, and he thought of Mabe reading about it in the papers. He'd
have to try to get into a combatant service. No, he couldn't stay in the
medics.

The train had started again. Misty russet fields slipped by and dark
clumps of trees that gyrated slowly waving branches of yellow and brown
leaves and patches of black lace-work against the reddish-grey sky.
Fuselli was thinking of the good chance he had of getting to be
corporal.



At night. A dim-lighted station platform. The company waited in two
lines, each man sitting on his pack. On the opposite platform crowds
of little men in blue with mustaches and long, soiled overcoats that
reached almost to their feet were shouting and singing. Fuselli watched
them with a faint disgust.

“Gee, they got funny lookin' helmets, ain't they?”

“They're the best fighters in the world,” said Eisenstein, “not that
that's sayin' much about a man.”

“Say, that's an M. P.,” said Bill Grey, catching Fuselli's arm. “Let's
go ask him how near the front we are. I thought I heard guns a minute
ago.”

“Did you? I guess we're in for it now,” said Fuselli. “Say, buddy, how
near the front are we?” they spoke together excitedly.

“The front?” said the M. P., who was a red-faced Irishman with a
crushed nose. “You're 'way back in the middle of France.” The M. P.
spat disgustedly. “You fellers ain't never goin' to the front, don't you
worry.”

“Hell!” said Fuselli.

“I'll be goddamned if I don't get there somehow,” said Bill Grey,
squaring his jaw.

A fine rain was falling on the unprotected platform. On the other side
the little men in blue were singing a song Fuselli could not understand,
drinking out of their ungainly-looking canteens.

Fuselli announced the news to the company. Everybody clustered round
him cursing. But the faint sense of importance it gave him did not
compensate for the feeling he had of being lost in the machine, of being
as helpless as a sheep in a flock. Hours passed. They stamped about the
platform in the fine rain or sat in a row on their packs, waiting for
orders. A grey belt appeared behind the trees. The platform began to
take on a silvery gleam. They sat in a row on their packs, waiting.



                             II

The company stood at attention lined up outside of their barracks, a
long wooden shack covered with tar paper, in front of them was a row of
dishevelled plane trees with white trunks that looked like ivory in the
faint ruddy sunlight. Then there was a rutted road on which stood a
long line of French motor trucks with hunched grey backs like elephants.
Beyond these were more plane trees and another row of barracks covered
with tar paper, outside of which other companies were lined up standing
at attention.

A bugle was sounding far away.

The lieutenant stood at attention very stiffly. Fuselli's eyes followed
the curves of his brilliantly-polished puttees up to the braid on his
sleeves.

“Parade rest!” shouted the lieutenant in a muffled voice.

Feet and hands moved in unison.

Fuselli was thinking of the town. After retreat you could go down the
irregular cobbled street from the old fair-ground where the camp was
to a little square where there was a grey stone fountain and a gin-mill
where you could sit at an oak table and have beer and eggs and fried
potatoes served you by a girl with red cheeks and plump white appetizing
arms.

“Attention!”

Feet and hands moved in unison again. They could hardly hear the bugle,
it was so faint.

“Men, I have some appointments to announce,” said the lieutenant, facing
the company and taking on an easy conversational tone. “At rest!...
You've done good work in the storehouse here, men. I'm glad I have such
a willing bunch of men under me. And I certainly hope that we can manage
to make as many promotions as possible--as many as possible.”

Fuselli's hands were icy, and his heart was pumping the blood so fast to
his ears that he could hardly hear.

“The following privates to private first-class, read the lieutenant in
a routine voice: “Grey, Appleton, Williams, Eisenstein,
Porter...Eisenstein will be company clerk.... “ Fuselli was almost ready
to cry. His name was not on the list. The sergeant's voice came after a
long pause, smooth as velvet.

“You forget Fuselli, sir.”

“Oh, so I did,” the lieutenant laughed--a small dry laugh.--“And
Fuselli.”

“Gee, I must write Mabe tonight,” Fuselli was saying to himself. “She'll
be a proud kid when she gets that letter.”

“Companee dis... missed!”, shouted the sergeant genially.

     “O Madermoiselle from Armenteers,
           Parley voo?
      O Madermoiselle from Armenteers,

struck up the sergeant in his mellow voice.

The front room of the cafe was full of soldiers. Their khaki hid the
worn oak benches and the edges of the square tables and the red tiles
of the floor. They clustered round the tables, where glasses and bottles
gleamed vaguely through the tobacco smoke. They stood in front of the
bar, drinking out of bottles, laughing, scraping their feet on
the floor. A stout girl with red cheeks and plump white arms moved
contentedly among them, carrying away empty bottles, bringing back full
ones, taking the money to a grim old woman with a grey face and eyes
like bits of jet, who stared carefully at each coin, fingered it with
her grey hands and dropped it reluctantly into the cash drawer. In the
corner sat Sergeant Olster with a flush on his face, and the corporal
who had been on the Red Sox outfield and another sergeant, a big
man with black hair and a black mustache. About them clustered, with
approbation and respect in their faces, Fuselli, Bill Grey and
Meadville the cowboy, and Earl Williams, the blue-eyed and yellow-haired
drug-clerk.

“O the Yanks are having the hell of a time,     Parley voo?”

They pounded their bottles on the table in time to the song.

“It's a good job,” the top sergeant said, suddenly interrupting the
song. “You needn't worry about that, fellers. I saw to it that we got
a good job.... And about getting to the front, you needn't worry about
that. We'll all get to the front soon enough.... Tell me--this war is
going to last ten years.”

“I guess we'll all be generals by that time, eh, Sarge?” said Williams.
“But, man, I wish I was back jerkin' soda water.”

“It's a great life if you don't weaken,” murmured Fuselli automatically.

“But I'm beginnin' to weaken,” said Williams. “Man, I'm homesick. I
don't care who knows it. I wish I could get to the front and be done
with it.”

“Say, have a heart. You need a drink,” said the top sergeant, banging
his fist on the table. “Say, mamselle, mame shows, mame shows!”

“I didn't know you could talk French, Sarge,” said Fuselli.

“French, hell!” said the top sergeant. “Williams is the boy can talk
French.”

“Voulay vous couchay aveck moy.... That's all I know.”

Everybody laughed.

“Hey, mamzelle,” cried the top sergeant. “Voulay vous couchay aveck moy?
We We, champagne.” Everybody laughed, uproariously.

The girl slapped his head good-naturedly.

At that moment a man stamped noisily into the cafe, a tall
broad-shouldered man in a loose English tunic, who had a swinging
swagger that made the glasses ring on all the tables. He was humming
under his breath and there was a grin on his broad red face. He went
up to the girl and pretended to kiss her, and she laughed and talked
familiarly with him in French.

“There's wild Dan Cohan,” said the dark-haired sergeant. “Say, Dan,
Dan.”

“Here, yer honor.”

“Come over and have a drink. We're going to have some fizzy.”

“Never known to refuse.”

They made room for him on the bench.

“Well, I'm confined to barracks,” said Dan Cohan. “Look at me!” He
laughed and gave his head a curious swift jerk to one side. “Compree?”

“Ain't ye scared they'll nab you?” said Fuselli.

“Nab me, hell, they can't do nothin' to me. I've had three
court-martials already and they're gettin' a fourth up on me.”

Dan Cohan pushed his head to one side and laughed. “I got a friend. My
old boss is captain, and he's goin' to fix it up. I used to alley around
politics chez moy. Compree?”

The champagne came and Dan Cohan popped the cork up to the ceiling with
dexterous red fingers.

“I was just wondering who was going to give me a drink,” he said. “Ain't
had any pay since Christ was a corporal. I've forgotten what it looks
like.”

The champagne fizzed into the beer-glasses.

“This is the life,” said Fuselli.

“Ye're damn right, buddy, if yer don't let them ride yer,” said Dan.

“What they got yer up for now, Dan?”

“Murder.”

“Murder, hell! How's that?”

“That is, if that bloke dies.”

“The hell you say!”

“It all started by that goddam convoy down from Nantes...Bill Rees an'
me.... They called us the shock troops.--Hy! Marie! Ancore champagne,
beaucoup.--I was in the Ambulance service then. God knows what rotten
service I'm in now.... Our section was on repo and they sent some of us
fellers down to Nantes to fetch a convoy of cars back to Sandrecourt. We
started out like regular racers, just the chassis, savey? Bill Rees
an' me was the goddam tail of the peerade. An' the loot was a hell of a
blockhead that didn't know if he was coming or going.”

“Where the hell's Nantes?” asked the top sergeant, as if it had just
slipped his mind.

“On the coast,” answered Fuselli. “I seen it on the map.”

“Nantes's way off to hell and gone anyway,” said wild Dan Cohan, taking
a gulp of champagne that he held in his mouth a moment, making his mouth
move like a cow ruminating.

“An' as Bill Rees an' me was the tail of the peerade an' there was lots
of cafes and little gin-mills, Bill Rees an' me'd stop off every now and
then to have a little drink an' say 'Bonjour' to the girls an' talk to
the people, an' then we'd go like a bat out of hell to catch up. Well, I
don't know if we went too fast for 'em or if they lost the road or what,
but we never saw that goddam convoy from the time we went out of Nantes.
Then we thought we might as well see a bit of the country, compree?...
An' we did, goddam it.... We landed up in Orleans, soused to the gills
and without any gas an' with an M. P; climbing up on the dashboard.”

“Did they nab you, then?”

“Not a bit of it,” said wild Dan Cohen, jerking his head to one side.
“They gave us gas and commutation of rations an' told us to go on in
the mornin'. You see we put up a good line of talk, compree?... Well,
we went to the swankiest restaurant.... You see we had on those bloody
British uniforms they gave us when the O. D. gave out, an' the M. P.'s
didn't know just what sort o' birds we were. So we went and ordered up a
regular meal an' lots o' vin rouge an' vin blank an' drank a few cognacs
an' before we knew it we were eating dinner with two captains and a
sergeant. One o' the captains was the drunkest man I ever did see....
Good kid! We all had dinner and Bill Rees says, 'Let's go for a
joy-ride.' An' the captains says, 'Fine,' and the sergeant would have
said, 'Fine,' but he was so goggle-eyed drunk he couldn't. An' we
started off!... Say, fellers, I'm dry as hell! Let's order up another
bottle.”

“Sure,” said everyone.

     “Ban swar, ma cherie,
      Comment allez vous?”

“Encore champagne, Marie, gentille!”

“Well,” he went on, “we went like a bat out of hell along a good state
road, and it was all fine until one of the captains thought we ought to
have a race. We did.... Compree? The flivvers flivved all right, but
the hell of it was we got so excited about the race we forgot about the
sergeant an' he fell off an' nobody missed him. An' at last we all pull
up before a gin-mill an' one captain says, 'Where's the sergeant?' an'
the other captain says there hadn't been no sergeant. An' we all had a
drink on that. An' one captain kept sayin', 'It's all imagination.
Never was a sergeant. I wouldn't associate with a sergeant, would I,
lootenant?' He kept on calling me lootenant.... Well that was how they
got this new charge against me. Somebody picked up the sergeant an' he
got concussion o' the brain an' there's hell to pay, an' if the poor
buggar croaks.... I'm it.... Compree? About that time the captains start
wantin' to go to Paris, an' we said we'd take 'em, an' so we put all the
gas in my car an' the four of us climbed on that goddam chassis an' off
we went like a bat out of hell! It'ld all have been fine if I wasn't
lookin' cross-eyed.... We piled up in about two minutes on one of those
nice little stone piles an' there we were. We all got up an' one o' the
captains had his arm broke, an' there was hell to pay, worse than losing
the sergeant. So we walked on down the road. I don't know how it got to
be daylight. But we got to some hell of a town or other an' there was
two M. P.'s all ready to meet us.... Compree?... Well, we didn't mess
around with them captains. We just lit off down a side street an' got
into a little cafe an' went in back an' had a hell of a lot o' cafe o'
lay. That made us feel sort o' good an' I says to Bill, 'Bill, we've got
to get to headquarters an' tell 'em that we accidentally smashed up
our car, before the M. P.'s get busy.' An' he says, 'You're goddamned
right,' an' at that minute I sees an M. P. through a crack in the door
comin' into the cafe. We lit out into the garden and made for the wall.
We got over that, although we left a good piece of my pants in the
broken glass. But the hell of it was the M. P.'s got over too an' they
had their pop-guns out. An' the last I saw of Bill Rees was--there was a
big fat woman in a pink dress washing clothes in a big tub, an' poor
ole Bill Rees runs head on into her an' over they both goes into the
washtub. The M. P.'s got him all right. That's how I got away. An' the
last I saw of Bill Rees he was squirming about on top of the washtub
like he was swimmin', an' the fat woman was sittin' on the ground
shaking her fist at him. Bill Rees was the best buddy I ever had.”

He paused and poured the rest of the champagne in his glass and wiped
the sweat off his face with his big red hand.

“You ain't stringin' us, are you?” asked Fuselli.

“You just ask Lieutenant Whitehead, who's defending me in the
court-martial, if I'm stringin' yer. I been in the ring, kid, and you
can bet your bottom dollar that a man's been in the ring'll tell the
truth.”

“Go on, Dan,” said the sergeant.

“An' I never heard a word about Bill Rees since. I guess they got him
into the trenches and made short work of him.”

Dan Cohan paused to light a cigarette.

“Well, one o' the M. P.'s follows after me and starts shootin'. An'
don't you believe I ran. Gee, I was scared! But I was in luck 'cause
a Frenchman had just started his camion an' I jumped in and said the
gendarmes were after me. He was white, that frog was. He shot the juice
into her an' went off like a bat out of hell an' there was a hell of a
lot of traffic on the road because there was some damn-fool attack or
other goin' on. So I got up to Paris.... An' then it'ld all have been
fine if I hadn't met up with a Jane I knew. I still had five hundred
francs on me, an' so we raised hell until one day we was havin' dinner
in the cafe de Paris, both of us sort of jagged up, an' we didn't have
enough money to pay the bill an' Janey made a run for it, but an M. P.
got me an' then there was hell to pay.... Compree? They put me in the
Bastille, great place.... Then they shipped me off to some damn camp
or other an' gave me a gun an' made me drill for a week an' then they
packed a whole gang of us, all A. W. O. L's, into a train for the front.
That was nearly the end of little Daniel again. But when we was in
Vitry-le-Francois, I chucked my rifle out of one window and jumped out
of the other an' got on a train back to Paris an' went an' reported to
headquarters how I'd smashed the car an' been in the Bastille an' all,
an' they were sore as hell at the M. P.'s an' sent me out to a section
an' all went fine until I got ordered back an' had to alley down to this
goddam camp. Ah' now I don't know what they're goin' to do to me.”

“Gee whiz!”

“It's a great war, I tell you, Sarge. It's a great war. I wouldn't have
missed it.”

Across the room someone was singing.

“Let's drown 'em out,” said the top sergeant boisterously.

     “O Mademerselle from Armenteers,
      Parley voo?”

“Well, I've got to get the hell out of here,” said wild Dan Cohan,
after a minute. “I've got a Jane waitin' for me. I'm all fixed up,...
Compree?”

He swaggered out singing:

     “Bon soir, ma cherie,
      Comment alley vous?
      Si vous voulez
      Couche avec moi....”

The door slammed behind him, leaving the cafe quiet.

Many men had left. Madame had taken up her knitting and Marie of the
plump white arms sat beside her, leaning her head back among the bottles
that rose in tiers behind the bars.

Fuselli was staring at a door on one side of the bar. Men kept opening
it and looking in and closing it again with a peculiar expression on
their faces. Now and then someone would open it with a smile and go into
the next room, shuffling his feet and closing the door carefully behind
him.

“Say, I wonder what they've got there,” said the top sergeant, who had
been staring at the door. “Mush be looked into, mush be looked into,” he
added, laughing drunkenly.

“I dunno,” said Fuselli. The champagne was humming in his head like a
fly against a window pane. He felt very bold and important.

The top sergeant got to his feet unsteadily.

“Corporal, take charge of the colors,” he said, and walked to the door.
He opened it a little, peeked in; winked elaborately to his friends and
skipped into the other room, closing the door carefully behind him.

The corporal went over next. He said, “Well, I'll be damned,” and walked
straight in, leaving the door ajar. In a moment it was closed from the
inside.

“Come on, Bill, let's see what the hell they got in there,” said
Fuselli.

“All right, old kid,” said Bill Grey. They went together over to the
door. Fuselli opened it and looked in. He let out a breath through his
teeth with a faint whistling sound.

“Gee, come in, Bill,” he said, giggling.

The room was small, nearly filled up by a dining table with a red cloth.
On the mantel above the empty fireplace were candlesticks with dangling
crystals that glittered red and yellow and purple in the lamplight,
in front of a cracked mirror that seemed a window into another dingier
room. The paper was peeling off the damp walls, giving a mortuary smell
of mildewed plaster that not even the reek of beer and tobacco had done
away with.

“Look at her, Bill, ain't she got style?” whispered Fuselli.

Bill Grey grunted.

“Say, d'ye think the Jane that feller was tellin' us he raised hell with
in Paris was like that?”

At the end of the table, leaning on her elbows, was a woman with black
frizzy hair cut short, that stuck out from her head in all directions.
Her eyes were dark and her lips red with a faint swollen look. She
looked with a certain defiance at the men who stood about the walls and
sat at the table.

The men stared at her silently. A big man with red hair and a heavy
jaw who sat next her kept edging up nearer. Someone knocked against the
table making the bottles and liqueur glasses clustered in the center
jingle.

“She ain't clean; she's got bobbed hair,” said the man next Fuselli.

The woman said something in French.

Only one man understood it. His laugh rang hollowly in the silent room
and stopped suddenly.

The woman looked attentively at the faces round her for a moment,
shrugged her shoulders, and began straightening the ribbon on the hat
she held on her lap.

“How the hell did she get here? I thought the M. P.'s ran them out of
town the minute they got here,” said one man.

The woman continued plucking at her hat.

“You venay Paris?” said a boy with a soft voice who sat near her. He had
blue eyes and a milky complexion, faintly tanned, that went strangely
with the rough red and brown faces in the room.

“Oui; de Paris,” she said after a pause, glancing suddenly in the boy's
face.

“She's a liar, I can tell you that,” said the red-haired man, who by
this time had moved his chair very close to the woman's.

“You told him you came from Marseilles, and him you came from Lyon,”
 said the boy with the milky complexion, smiling genially. “Vraiment de
ou venay vous?”

“I come from everywhere,” she said, and tossed the hair back from her
face.

“Travelled a lot?” asked the boy again.

“A feller told me,” said Fuselli to Bill Grey, “that he'd talked to a
girl like that who'd been to Turkey an' Egypt I bet that girl's seen
some life.”

The woman jumped to her feet suddenly screaming with rage. The man with
the red hair moved away sheepishly. Then he lifted his large dirty hands
in the air.

“Kamarad,” he said.

Nobody laughed. The room was silent except for feet scraping
occasionally on the floor.

She put her hat on and took a little box from the chain bag in her lap
and began powdering her face, making faces into the mirror she held in
the palm of her hand.

The men stared at her.

“Guess she thinks she's the Queen of the May,” said one man, getting to
his feet. He leaned across the table and spat into the fireplace. “I'm
going back to barracks.” He turned to the woman and shouted in a voice
full of hatred, “Bon swar.”

The woman was putting the powder puff away in her jet bag. She did not
look up; the door closed sharply.

“Come along,” said the woman, suddenly, tossing her head back. “Come
along one at a time; who go with me first?”

Nobody spoke. The men stared at her silently. There was no sound except
that of feet scraping occasionally on the floor.



                              III

The oatmeal flopped heavily into the mess-kit. Fuselli's eyes were still
glued together with sleep. He sat at the dark greasy bench and took a
gulp of the scalding coffee that smelt vaguely of dish rags. That woke
him up a little. There was little talk in the mess shack. The men, that
the bugle had wrenched out of their blankets but fifteen minutes before,
sat in rows, eating sullenly or blinking at each other through the misty
darkness. You could hear feet scraping in the ashes of the floor
and mess kits clattering against the tables and here and there a man
coughing. Near the counter where the food was served out one of the
cooks swore interminably in a whiny sing-sing voice.

“Gee, Bill, I've got a head,” said Fuselli.

“Ye're ought to have,” growled Bill Grey. “I had to carry you up into
the barracks. You said you were goin' back and love up that goddam
girl.”

“Did I?” said Fuselli, giggling.

“I had a hell of a time getting you past the guard.”

“Some cognac!... I got a hangover now,” said Fuselli.

“I'm goddamned if I can go this much longer.”

“What?”

They were washing their mess-kits in the tub of warm water thick with
grease from the hundred mess-kits that had gone before, in front of the
shack. An electric light illumined faintly the wet trunk of a plane tree
and the surface of the water where bits of oatmeal floated and coffee
grounds,--and the garbage pails with their painted signs: WET GARBAGE,
DRY GARBAGE; and the line of men who stood waiting to reach the tub.

“This hell of a life!” said Bill Grey, savagely.

“What d'ye mean?”

“Doin' nothin' but pack bandages in packin' cases and take bandages out
of packin' cases. I'll go crazy. I've tried gettin' drunk; it don't do
no good.”

“Gee; I've got a head,” said Fuselli.

Bill Grey put his heavy muscular hand round Fuselli's shoulder as they
strolled towards the barracks.

“Say, Dan, I'm goin' A. W. O. L.”

“Don't ye do it, Bill. Hell, look at the chance we've got to get ahead.
We can both of us get promoted if we don't get in wrong.”

“I don't give a hoot in hell for all that.... What d'ye think I got in
this goddamed army for? Because I thought I'd look nice in the uniform?”

Bill Grey thrust his hands into his pockets and spat dismally in front
of him.

“But, Bill, you don't want to stay a buck private, do you?”

“I want to get to the front.... I don't want to stay here till I get in
the jug for being spiffed or get a court-martial.... Say, Dan, will you
come with me?”

“Hell, Bill, you ain't goin'. You're just kiddin', ain't yer? They'll
send us there soon enough. I want to get to be a corporal,”--he puffed
out his chest a little--“before I go to the front, so's to be able to
show what I'm good for. See, Bill?”

A bugle blew.

“There's fatigue, an' I ain't done my bunk.”

“Me neither.... They won't do nothin', Dan.... Don't let them ride yer,
Dan.”

They lined up in the dark road feeling the mud slopping under their
feet. The ruts were full of black water, in which gleamed a reflection
of distant electric lights.

“All you fellows work in Storehouse A today,” said the sergeant, who had
been a preacher, in his sad, drawling voice. “Lieutenant says that's all
got to be finished by noon. They're sending it to the front today.”

Somebody let his breath out in a whistle of surprise.

“Who did that?”

Nobody answered.

“Dismissed!” snapped the sergeant disgustedly.

They straggled off into the darkness towards one of the lights, their
feet splashing confusedly in the puddles.

Fuselli strolled up to the sentry at the camp gate. He was picking his
teeth meditatively with the splinter of a pine board.

“Say, Phil, you couldn't lend me a half a dollar, could you?” Fuselli
stopped, put his hands in his pockets and looked at the sentry with the
splinter sticking out of a corner of his mouth.

“Sorry, Dan,” said the other man; “I'm cleaned out. Ain't had a cent
since New Year's.”

“Why the hell don't they pay us?”

“You guys signed the pay roll yet?”

“Sure. So long!”



Fuselli strolled on down the dark road, where the mud was frozen into
deep ruts, towards the town. It was still strange to him, this town of
little houses faced with cracked stucco, where the damp made grey stains
and green stains, of confused red-tiled roofs, and of narrow cobbled
streets that zigzagged in and out among high walls overhung with
balconies. At night, when it was dark except for where a lamp in
a window spilt gold reflections out on the wet street or the light
streamed out from a store or a cafe, it was almost frighteningly unreal.
He walked down into the main square, where he could hear the fountain
gurgling. In the middle he stopped indecisively, his coat unbuttoned,
his hands pushed to the bottom of his trousers pockets, where they
encountered nothing but the cloth. He listened a long time to the
gurgling of the fountain and to the shunting of trains far away in the
freight yards. “An' this is the war,” he thought. “Ain't it queer? It's
quieter than it was at home nights.” Down the street at the end of the
square a band of white light appeared, the searchlight of a staff car.
The two eyes of the car stared straight into his eyes, dazzling him,
then veered off to one side and whizzed past, leaving a faint smell of
gasoline and a sound of voices. Fuselli watched the fronts of houses
light up as the car made its way to the main road. Then the town was
dark and silent again.

He strolled across the square towards the Cheval Blanc, the large cafe
where the officers went.

“Button yer coat,” came a gruff voice. He saw a stiff tall figure at the
edge of the curve. He made out the shape of the pistol holster that
hung like a thin ham at the man's thigh. An M. P. He buttoned his coat
hurriedly and walked off with rapid steps.

He stopped outside a cafe that had “Ham and Eggs” written in white paint
on the window and looked in wistfully. Someone from behind him put two
big hands over his eyes. He wriggled his head free.

“Hello, Dan,” he said. “How did you get out of the jug?”

“I'm a trusty, kid,” said Dan Cohan. “Got any dough?”

“Not a damn cent!”

“Me neither.... Come on in anyway,” said Cohan. “I'll fix it up with
Marie.” Fuselli followed doubtfully. He was a little afraid of Dan
Cohan; he remembered how a man had been court-martialed last week for
trying to bolt out of a cafe without paying for his drinks.

He sat down at a table near the door. Dan had disappeared into the back
room. Fuselli felt homesick. He was thinking how long it was since, he
had had a letter from Mabe. “I bet she's got another feller,” he told
himself savagely. He tried to remember how she looked, but he had to
take out his watch and peep in the back before he could make out if
her nose were straight or snub. He looked up, clicking the watch in his
pocket. Marie of the white arms was coming laughing out of the inner
room. Her large firm breasts, neatly held in by the close-fitting
blouse, shook a little when she laughed. Her cheeks were very red and
a strand of chestnut hair hung down along her neck. She picked it up
hurriedly and caught it up with a hairpin, walking slowly into the
middle of the room as she did so with her hands behind her head. Dan
Cohan followed her into the room, a broad grin on his face.

“All right, kid,” he said. “I told her you'ld pay when Uncle Sam came
across. Ever had any Kummel?”

“What the hell's that?”

“You'll see.”

They sat down before a dish of fried eggs at the table in the corner,
the favoured table, where Marie herself often sat and chatted, when
wizened Madame did not have her eye upon her.

Several men drew up their chairs. Wild Dan Cohan always had an audience.

“Looks like there was going to be another offensive at Verdun,” said Dan
Cohan. Someone answered vaguely.

“Funny how little we know about what's going on out there,” said one
man. “I knew more about the war when I was home in Minneapolis than I do
here.”

“I guess we're lightin' into 'em all right,” said Fuselli in a patriotic
voice.

“Hell! Nothin' doin' this time o' year anyway,” said Cohan. A grin
spread across his red face. “Last time I was at the front the Boche had
just made a coup de main and captured a whole trenchful.”

“Of who?”

“Of Americans--of us!”

“The hell you say!”

“That's a goddam lie,” shouted a black-haired man with an ill-shaven
jaw, who had just come in. “There ain't never been an American captured,
an' there never will be, by God!”

“How long were you at the front, buddy,” asked Cohan coolly. “I guess
you been to Berlin already, ain't yer?”

“I say that any man who says an American'ld let himself be captured by
a stinkin' Hun, is a goddam liar,” said the man with the ill-shaven jaw,
sitting down sullenly.

“Well, you'd better not say it to me,” said Cohan laughing, looking
meditatively at one of his big red fists.

There had been a look of apprehension on Marie's face. She looked at
Cohan's fist and shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

Another crowd had just slouched into the cafe.

“Well if that isn't wild Dan! Hello, old kid, how are you?”

“Hello, Dook!”

A small man in a coat that looked almost like an officer's coat, it
was so well cut, was shaking hands effusively with Cohan. He wore a
corporal's stripes and a British aviator's fatigue cap. Cohan made room
for him on the bench.

“What are you doing in this hole, Dook?” The man twisted his mouth so
that his neat black mustache was a slant.

“G. O. 42,” he said.

“Battle of Paris?” said Cohan in a sympathetic voice. “Battle of Nice!
I'm going back to my section soon. I'd never have got a court-martial if
I'd been with my outfit. I was in the Base Hospital 15 with pneumonia.”

“Tough luck!”

“It was a hell of a note.”

“Say, Dook, your outfit was working with ours at Chamfort that time,
wasn't it?”

“You mean when we evacuated the nut hospital?”

“Yes, wasn't that hell?” Dan Cohan gulped down half a glass of red wine,
smacked his thick lips, and began in his story-telling voice:

“Our section had just come out of Verdun where we'd been getting hell
for three weeks on the Bras road. There was one little hill where we'd
have to get out and shove every damn time, the mud was so deep, and
God, it stank there with the shells turning up the ground all full
of mackabbies as the poilus call them.... Say, Dook, have you got any
money?”

“I've got some,” said Dook, without enthusiasm.

“Well, the champagne's damn good here. I'm part of the outfit in this
gin mill; they'll give it to you at a reduction.”

“All right!”

Dan Cohan turned round and whispered something to Marie. She laughed and
dived down behind the curtain.

“But that Chamfort was worse yet. Everybody was sort o' nervous because
the Germans had dropped a message sayin' they'd give 'em three days
to clear the hospital out, and that then they'd shell hell out of the
place.”

“The Germans done that! Quit yer kiddin',” said Fuselli.

“They did it at Souilly, too,” said Dook. “Hell, yes.... A funny thing
happened there. The hospital was in a big rambling house, looked like an
Atlantic City hotel.... We used to run our car in back and sleep in it.
It was where we took the shell-shock cases, fellows who were roarin'
mad, and tremblin' all over, and some of 'em paralysed like.... There
was a man in the wing opposite where we slept who kept laugh-in'. Bill
Rees was on the car with me, and we laid in our blankets in the bottom
of the car and every now and then one of us'ld turn over and whisper:
'Ain't this hell, kid?' 'cause that feller kept laughin' like a man who
had just heard a joke that was so funny he couldn't stop laughin'. It
wasn't like a crazy man's laugh usually is. When I first heard it I
thought it was a man really laughin', and I guess I laughed too. But it
didn't stop.... Bill Rees an' me laid in our car shiverin', listenin'
to the barrage in the distance with now and then the big noise of an
aeroplane bomb, an' that feller laughin', laughin', like he'd just
heard a joke, like something had struck him funny.” Cohan took a gulp of
champagne and jerked his head to one side. “An that damn laughin'
kept up until about noon the next day when the orderlies strangled the
feller.... Got their goat, I guess.”

Fuselli was looking towards the other side of the room, where a faint
murmur of righteous indignation was rising from the dark man with the
unshaven jaw and his companions. Fuselli was thinking that it wasn't
good to be seen round too much with a fellow like Cohan, who talked
about the Germans notifying hospitals before they bombarded them and who
was waiting for a court-martial. Might get him in wrong. He slipped out
of the cafe into the dark. A dank wind blew down the irregular street,
ruffling the reflected light in the puddles, making a shutter bang
interminably somewhere. Fuselli went to the main square again, casting
an envious glance in the window of the Cheval Blanc, where he saw
officers playing billiards in a well-lighted room painted white and
gold, and a blond girl in a raspberry-colored shirtwaist enthroned
haughtily behind the bar. He remembered the M. P. and automatically
hastened his steps. In a narrow street the other side of the square he
stopped before the window of a small grocery shop and peered inside,
keeping carefully out of the oblong of light that showed faintly the
grass-grown cobbles and the green and grey walls opposite. A girl sat
knitting beside the small counter with her two little black feet placed
demurely side by side on the edge of a box full of red beets. She was
very small and slender. The lamplight gleamed on her black hair, done
close to her head. Her face was in the shadow. Several soldiers lounged
awkwardly against the counter and the jambs of the door, following her
movements with their eyes as dogs watch a plate of meat being moved
about in a kitchen.

After a little the girl rolled up her knitting and jumped to her feet,
showing her face,--an oval white face with large dark lashes and an
impertinent mouth. She stood looking at the soldiers who stood about her
in a circle, then twisted up her mouth in a grimace and disappeared into
the inner room.

Fuselli walked to the end of the street where there was a bridge over a
small stream. He leaned on the cold stone rail and looked into the water
that was barely visible gurgling beneath between rims of ice.

“O this is a hell of a life,” he muttered.

He shivered in the cold wind but remained leaning over the water. In
the distance trains rumbled interminably, giving him a sense of vast
desolate distances. The village clock struck eight. The bell had a soft
note like the bass string of a guitar. In the darkness Fuselli could
almost see the girl's face grimacing with its broad impertinent lips. He
thought of the sombre barracks and men sitting about on the end of their
cots. Hell, he couldn't go back yet. His whole body was taut with desire
for warmth and softness and quiet. He slouched back along the narrow
street cursing in a dismal monotone. Before the grocery store he
stopped. The men had gone. He went in jauntily pushing his cap a little
to one side so that some of his thick curly hair came out over his
forehead. The little bell in the door clanged.

The girl came out of the inner room. She gave him her hand
indifferently.

“Comment ca va! Yvonne? Bon?”

His pidgin-French made her show her little pearly teeth in a smile.

“Good,” she said in English.

They laughed childishly.

“Say, will you be my girl, Yvonne?”

She looked in his eyes and laughed.

“Non compris,” she said.

“We, we; voulez vous et' ma fille?”

She shrieked with laughter and slapped him hard on the cheek. “Venez,”
 she said, still laughing. He followed her. In the inner room was a
large oak table with chairs round it. At the end Eisenstein and a French
soldier were talking excitedly, so absorbed in what they were saying
that they did not notice the other two. Yvonne took the Frenchman by the
hair and pulled his head back and told him, still laughing, what Fuselli
had said. He laughed.

“No, you must not say that,” he said in English, turning to Fuselli.

Fuselli was angry and sat down sullenly at the end of the table, keeping
his eyes on Yvonne. She drew the knitting out of the pocket of her apron
and holding it up comically between two fingers, glanced towards the
dark corner of the room where an old woman with a lace cap on her head
sat asleep, and then let herself fall into a chair.

“Boom!” she said.

Fuselli laughed until the tears filled his eyes. She laughed too. They
sat a long while looking at each other and giggling, while Eisenstein
and the Frenchman talked. Suddenly Fuselli caught a phrase that startled
him.

“What would you Americans do if revolution broke out in France?”

“We'd do what we were ordered to,” said Eisenstein bitterly. “We're a
bunch of slaves.” Fuselli noticed that Eisenstein's puffy sallow face
was flushed and that there was a flash in his eyes he had never seen
before.

“How do you mean, revolution?” asked Fuselli in a puzzled voice.

The Frenchman turned black eyes searchingly upon him.

“I mean, stop the butchery,--overthrow the capitalist government.--The
social revolution.”

“But you're a republic already, ain't yer?”

“As much as you are.”

“You talk like a socialist,” said Fuselli. “They tell me they shoot guys
in America for talkin' like that.”

“You see!” said Eisenstein to the Frenchman.

“Are they all like that?”

“Except a very few. It's hopeless,” said Eisenstein, burying his face in
his hands. “I often think of shooting myself.”

“Better shoot someone else,” said the Frenchman. “It will be more
useful.”

Fuselli stirred uneasily in his chair.

“Where'd you fellers get that stuff anyway?” he asked. In his mind he
was saying: “A kike and a frog, that's a good combination.”

His eye caught Yvonne's and they both laughed, Yvonne threw her knitting
ball at him. It rolled down under the table and they both scrambled
about under the chairs looking for it.

“Twice I have thought it was going to happen,” said the Frenchman.

“When was that?”

“A little while ago a division started marching on Paris.... And when I
was in Verdun.... O there will be a revolution.... France is the country
of revolutions.”

“We'll always be here to shoot you down,” said Eisenstein.

“Wait till you've been in the war a little while. A winter in the
trenches will make any army ready for revolution.”

“But we have no way of learning the truth. And in the tyranny of the
army a man becomes a brute, a piece of machinery. Remember you are freer
than we are. We are worse than the Russians!”

“It is curious!... O but you must have some feeling of civilization. I
have always heard that Americans were free and independent. Will they
let themselves be driven to the slaughter always?”

“O I don't know.” Eisenstein got to his feet. “We'd better be getting to
barracks. Coming, Fuselli?” he said.

“Guess so,” said Fuselli indifferently, without getting up.

Eisenstein and the Frenchman went out into the shop.

“Bon swar,” said Fuselli, softly, leaning across the table. “Hey,
girlie?”

He threw himself on his belly on the wide table and put his arms round
her neck and kissed her, feeling everything go blank in a flame of
desire.

She pushed him away calmly with strong little arms.

“Stop!” she said, and jerked her head in the direction of the old woman
in the chair in the dark corner of the room. They stood side by side
listening to her faint wheezy snoring. He put his arms round her and
kissed her long on the mouth.

“Demain,” he said.

She nodded her head.

Fuselli walked fast up the dark street towards the camp. The blood
pounded happily through his veins. He caught up with Eisenstein.

“Say, Eisenstein,” he said in a comradely voice, “I don't think you
ought to go talking round like that. You'll get yourself in too deep one
of these days.”

“I don't care!”

“But, hell, man, you don't want to get in the wrong that bad. They shoot
fellers for less than you said.”

“Let them.”

“Christ, man, you don't want to be a damn fool,” expostulated Fuselli.

“How old are you, Fuselli?”

“I'm twenty now.”

“I'm thirty. I've lived more, kid. I know what's good and what's bad.
This butchery makes me unhappy.”

“God, I know. It's a hell of a note. But who brought it on? If somebody
had shot that Kaiser.”

Eisenstein laughed bitterly. At the entrance of camp Fuselli lingered a
moment watching the small form of Eisenstein disappear with its curious
waddly walk into the darkness.

“I'm going to be damn careful who I'm seen goin' into barracks with,” he
said to himself. “That damn kike may be a German spy or a secret-service
officer.” A cold chill of terror went over him, shattering his mood
of joyous self-satisfaction. His feet slopped in the puddles, breaking
through the thin ice, as he walked up the road towards the barracks. He
felt as if people were watching him from everywhere out of the darkness,
as if some gigantic figure were driving him forward through the
darkness, holding a fist over his head, ready to crush him.

When he was rolled up in his blankets in the bunk next to Bill Grey, he
whispered to his friend:

“Say, Bill, I think I've got a skirt all fixed up in town.”

“Who?”

“Yvonne--don't tell anybody.”

Bill Grey whistled softly.

“You're some highflyer, Dan.”

Fuselli chuckled.

“Hell, man, the best ain't good enough for me.”

“Well, I'm going to leave you,” said Bill Grey.

“When?”

“Damn soon. I can't go this life. I don't see how you can.”

Fuselli did not answer. He snuggled warmly into his blankets, thinking
of Yvonne and the corporalship.



In the light of the one flickering lamp that made an unsteady circle of
reddish glow on the station platform Fuselli looked at his pass. From
Reveille on February fourth to Reveille on February fifth he was a
free man. His eyes smarted with sleep as he walked up and down the
cold station platform. For twenty-four hours he wouldn't have to obey
anybody's orders. Despite the loneliness of going away on a train in a
night like this in a strange country Fuselli was happy. He clinked the
money in his pocket.

Down the track a red eye appeared and grew nearer. He could hear the
hard puffing of the engine up the grade. Huge curves gleamed as the
engine roared slowly past him. A man with bare arms black with coal dust
was leaning out of the cab, lit up from behind by a yellowish red glare.
Now the cars were going by, flat cars with guns, tilted up like the
muzzles of hunting dogs, freight cars out of which here and there peered
a man's head. The train almost came to a stop. The cars clanged one
against the other all down the train. Fuselli was looking into a pair of
eyes that shone in the lamplight; a hand was held out to him.

“So long, kid,” said a boyish voice. “I don't know who the hell you are,
but so long; good luck.”

“So long,” stammered Fuselli. “Going to the front?”

“Yer goddam right,” answered another voice.

The train took up speed again; the clanging of car against car ceased
and in a moment they were moving fast before Fuselli's eyes. Then the
station was dark and empty again, and he was watching the red light grow
smaller and paler while the train rumbled on into the darkness.



A confusion of gold and green and crimson silks and intricate designs of
naked pink-fleshed cupids filled Fuselli's mind, when, full of wonder,
he walked down the steps of the palace out into the faint ruddy sunlight
of the afternoon. A few names, Napoleon, Josephine, the Empire, that had
never had significance in his mind before, flared with a lurid
gorgeous light in his imagination like a tableau of living statues at a
vaudeville theatre.

“They must have had a heap of money, them guys,” said the man who was
with him, a private in Aviation. “Let's go have a drink.”

Fuselli was silent and absorbed in his thoughts. Here was something that
supplemented his visions of wealth and glory that he used to tell Al
about, when they'd sit and watch the big liners come in, all glittering
with lights, through the Golden Gate.

“They didn't mind having naked women about, did they?” said the private
in Aviation, a morose foul-mouthed little man who had been in the woolen
business. “D'ye blame them?”

“No, I can't say's I do.... I bet they was immoral, them guys,” he
continued vaguely.

They wandered about the streets of Fontainebleau listlessly, looking
into shop windows, staring at women, lolling on benches in the parks
where the faint sunlight came through a lacework of twigs purple and
crimson and yellow, that cast intricate lavender-grey shadows on the
asphalt.

“Let's go have another drink,” said the private in Aviation.

Fuselli looked at his watch; they had hours before train time.

A girl in a loose dirty blouse wiped off the table.

“Vin blank,” said the other man.

“Mame shows,” said Fuselli.

His head was full of gold and green mouldings and silk and crimson
velvet and intricate designs in which naked pink-fleshed cupids writhed
indecently. Some day, he was saying to himself, he'd make a hell of a
lot of money and live in a house like that with Mabe; no, with Yvonne,
or with some other girl.

“Must have been immoral, them guys,” said the private in Aviation,
leering at the girl in the dirty blouse.

Fuselli remembered a revel he'd seen in a moving picture of “Quo Vadis,”
 people in bath robes dancing around with large cups in their hands and
tables full of dishes being upset.

“Cognac, beaucoup,” said the private in Aviation.

“Mame shows,” said Fuselli.

The cafe was full of gold and green silks, and great brocaded beds
with heavy carvings above them, beds in which writhed, pink-fleshed and
indecent, intricate patterns of cupids.

Somebody said, “Hello, Fuselli.”

He was on the train; his ears hummed and his head had an iron band
round it. It was dark except for the little light that flickered in the
ceiling. For a minute he thought it was a goldfish in a bowl, but it was
a light that flickered in the ceiling.

“Hello, Fuselli,” said Eisenstein. “Feel all right?”

“Sure,” said Fuselli with a thick voice. “Why shouldn't I?”

“How did you find that house?” said Eisenstein seriously.

“Hell, I don't know,” muttered Fuselli. “I'm goin' to sleep.”

His mind was a jumble. He remembered vast halls full of green and gold
silks, and great beds with crowns over them where Napoleon and Josephine
used to sleep. Who were they? O yes, the Empire,--or was it the
Abdication? Then there were patterns of flowers and fruits and cupids,
all gilded, and a dark passage and stairs that smelt musty, where he and
the man in Aviation fell down. He remembered how it felt to rub his nose
hard on the gritty red plush carpet of the stairs. Then there were women
in open-work skirts standing about, or were those the pictures on the
walls? And there was a bed with mirrors round it. He opened his eyes.
Eisenstein was talking to him. He must have been talking to him for some
time.

“I look at it this way,” he was saying. “A feller needs a little of that
to keep healthy. Now, if he's abstemious and careful...”

Fuselli went to sleep. He woke up again thinking suddenly: he must
borrow that little blue book of army regulations. It would be useful to
know that in case something came up. The corporal who had been in the
Red Sox outfield had been transferred to a Base Hospital. It was t.
b. so Sergeant Osier said. Anyway they were going to appoint an acting
corporal. He stared at the flickering little light in the ceiling.

“How did you get a pass?” Eisenstein was asking.

“Oh, the sergeant fixed me up with one,” answered Fuselli mysteriously.

“You're in pretty good with the sergeant, ain't yer?” said Eisenstein.

Fuselli smiled deprecatingly.

“Say, d'ye know that little kid Stockton?”

“The white-faced little kid who's clerk in that outfit that has the
other end of the barracks?”

“That's him,” said Eisenstein. “I wish I could do something to help that
kid. He just can't stand the discipline.... You ought to see him wince
when the red-haired sergeant over there yells at him.... The kid looks
sicker every day.”

“Well, he's got a good soft job: clerk,” said Fuselli.

“Ye think it's soft? I worked twelve hours day before yesterday getting
out reports,” said Eisenstein, indignantly. “But the kid's lost it and
they keep ridin' him for some reason or other. It hurts a feller to see
that. He ought to be at home at school.”

“He's got to take his medicine,” said Fuselli.

“You wait till we get butchered in the trenches. We'll see how you like
your medicine,” said Eisenstein.

“Damn fool,” muttered Fuselli, composing himself to sleep again.



The bugle wrenched Fuselli out of his blankets, half dead with sleep.

“Say, Bill, I got a head again,” he muttered. There was no answer. It
was only then that he noticed that the cot next to his was empty. The
blankets were folded neatly at the foot. Sudden panic seized him. He
couldn't get along without Bill Grey, he said to himself, he wouldn't
have anyone to go round with. He looked fixedly at the empty cot.

“Attention!”

The company was lined up in the dark with their feet in the mud puddles
of the road. The lieutenant strode up and down in front of them with the
tail of his trench coat sticking out behind. He had a pocket flashlight
that he kept flashing at the gaunt trunks of trees, in the faces of the
company, at his feet, in the puddles of the road.

“If any man knows anything about the whereabouts of Private 1st-class
William Grey, report at once, as otherwise we shall have to put him down
A. W. O. L. You know what that means?” The lieutenant spoke in short
shrill periods, chopping off the ends of his words as if with a hatchet.

No one said anything.

“I guess he's S. O. L.”; this from someone behind Fuselli.

“And I have one more announcement to make, men,” said the lieutenant
in his natural voice. “I'm going to appoint Fuselli, 1st-class private,
acting corporal.”

Fuselli's knees were weak under him. He felt like shouting and dancing
with joy. He was glad it was dark so that no one could see how excited
he was.

“Sergeant, dismiss the company,” said the lieutenant bringing his voice
back to its military tone.

“Companee dis-missed!” said out the sergeant jovially.

In groups, talking with crisp voices, cheered by the occurrence of
events, the company straggled across the great stretch of mud puddles
towards the mess shack.



                             IV

Yvonne tossed the omelette in the air. It landed sizzling in the pan
again, and she came forward into the light, holding the frying pan
before her. Behind her was the dark stove and above it a row of copper
kettles that gleamed through the bluish obscurity. She flicked the
omelette out of the pan into the white dish that stood in the middle of
the table, full in the yellow lamplight.

“Tiens,” she said, brushing a few stray hairs off her forehead with the
back of her hand.

“You're some cook,” said Fuselli getting to his feet. He had been
sprawling on a chair in the other end of the kitchen, watching Yvonne's
slender body in tight black dress and blue apron move in and out of the
area of light as she got dinner ready. A smell of burnt butter with a
faint tang of pepper in it, filled the kitchen, making his mouth water.

“This is the real stuff,” he was saying to himself,--“like home.”

He stood with his hands deep in his pockets and his head thrown back,
watching her cut the bread, holding the big loaf to her chest and
pulling the knife towards her, she brushed some crumbs off her dress
with a thin white hand.

“You're my girl, Yvonne; ain't yer?” Fuselli put his arms round her.

“Sale bete,” she said, laughing and pushing him away.

There was a brisk step outside and another girl came into the kitchen, a
thin yellow-faced girl with a sharp nose and long teeth.

“Ma cousine.... Mon 'tit americain.” They both laughed. Fuselli blushed
as he shook the girl's hand.

“Il est beau, hein?” said Yvonne gruffly.

“Mais, ma petite, il est charmant, vot' americain!” They laughed
again. Fuselli who did not understand laughed too, thinking to himself,
“They'll let the dinner get cold if they don't sit down soon.”

“Get maman, Dan,” said Yvonne. Fuselli went into the shop through
the room with the long oak table. In the dim light that came from the
kitchen he saw the old woman's white bonnet. Her face was in shadow but
there was a faint gleam of light in her small beady eyes.

“Supper, ma'am,” he shouted.

Grumbling in her creaky little voice, the old woman followed him back
into the kitchen.

Steam, gilded by the lamplight, rose in pillars to the ceiling from the
big tureen of soup.

There was a white cloth on the table and a big loaf of bread at the end.
The plates, with borders of little roses on them, seemed, after the army
mess, the most beautiful things Fuselli had ever seen. The wine bottle
was black beside the soup tureen and the wine in the glasses cast a dark
purple stain on the cloth.

Fuselli ate his soup silently understanding very little of the French
that the two girls rattled at each other. The old woman rarely spoke and
when she did one of the girls would throw her a hasty remark that hardly
interrupted their chatter.

Fuselli was thinking of the other men lining up outside the dark mess
shack and the sound the food made when it flopped into the mess kits. An
idea came to him. He'd have to bring Sarge to see Yvonne. They could set
him up to a feed. “It would help me to stay in good with him,” He had
a minute's worry about his corporalship. He was acting corporal right
enough, but he wanted them to send in his appointment.

The omelette melted in his mouth.

“Damn bon,” he said to Yvonne with his mouth full.

She looked at him fixedly.

“Bon, bon,” he said again.

“You.... Dan, bon,” she said and laughed. The cousin was looking from
one to the other enviously, her upper lip lifted away from her teeth in
a smile.

The old woman munched her bread in a silent preoccupied fashion.

“There's somebody in the store,” said Fuselli after a long pause. “Je
irey.” He put his napkin down and went out wiping his mouth on the back
of his hand. Eisenstein and a chalky-faced boy were in the shop.

“Hullo! are you keepin' house here?” asked Eisenstein.

“Sure,” said Fuselli conceitedly.

“Have you got any chawclit?” asked the chalky-faced boy in a thin
bloodless voice.

Fuselli looked round the shelves and threw a cake of chocolate down on
the counter.

“Anything else?”

“Nothing, thank you, corporal. How much is it?”

Whistling “There's a long, long trail a-winding,” Fuselli strode back
into the inner room.

“Combien chocolate?” he asked.

When he had received the money, he sat down at his place at table again,
smiling importantly. He must write Al about all this, he was thinking,
and he was wondering vaguely whether Al had been drafted yet.

After dinner the women sat a long time chatting over their coffee, while
Fuselli squirmed uneasily on his chair, looking now and then at his
watch. His pass was till twelve only; it was already getting on to ten.
He tried to catch Yvonne's eye, but she was moving about the kitchen
putting things in order for the night, and hardly seemed to notice him.
At last the old woman shuffled into the shop and there was the sound
of a key clicking hard in the outside door. When she came back, Fuselli
said good-night to everyone and left by the back door into the court.
There he leaned sulkily against the wall and waited in the dark,
listening to the sounds that came from the house. He could see shadows
passing across the orange square of light the window threw on the
cobbles of the court. A light went on in an upper window, sending a
faint glow over the disorderly tiles of the roof of the shed opposite.
The door opened and Yvonne and her cousin stood on the broad stone
doorstep chattering. Fuselli had pushed himself in behind a big hogshead
that had a pleasant tang of old wood damp with sour wine. At last the
heads of the shadows on the cobbles came together for a moment and the
cousin clattered across the court and out into the empty streets. Her
rapid footsteps died away. Yvonne's shadow was still in the door:

“Dan,” she said softly.

Fuselli came out from behind the hogshead, his whole body flushing with
delight. Yvonne pointed to his shoes. He took them off, and left them
beside the door. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to eleven.

“Viens,” she said.

He followed her, his knees trembling a little from excitement, up the
steep stairs.



The deep broken strokes of the town clock had just begun to strike
midnight when Fuselli hurried in the camp gate. He gave up his pass
jauntily to the guard and strolled towards his barracks. The long shed
was pitch black, full of a sound of deep breathing and of occasional
snoring. There was a thick smell of uniform wool on which the sweat had
dried. Fuselli undressed without haste, stretching his arms luxuriously.
He wriggled into his blankets feeling cool and tired, and went to sleep
with a smile of self-satisfaction on his lips.



The companies were lined up for retreat, standing stiff as toy soldiers
outside their barracks. The evening was almost warm. A little playful
wind, oozing with springtime, played with the swollen buds on the plane
trees. The sky was a drowsy violet color, and the blood pumped hot and
stinging through the stiffened arms and legs of the soldiers who stood
at attention. The voices of the non-coms were particularly harsh and
metallic this evening. It was rumoured that a general was about. Orders
were shouted with fury.

Standing behind the line of his company, Fuselli's chest was stuck out
until the buttons of his tunic were in danger of snapping off. His shoes
were well-shined, and he wore a new pair of puttees, wound so tightly
that his legs ached.

At last the bugle sounded across the silent camp.

“Parade rest!” shouted the lieutenant.

Fuselli's mind was full of the army regulations which he had been
studying assiduously for the last week. He was thinking of an imaginary
examination for the corporalship, which he would pass, of course.

When the company was dismissed, he went up familiarly to the top
sergeant:

“Say, Sarge, doin' anything this evenin'?”

“What the hell can a man do when he's broke?” said the top sergeant.

“Well, you come down town with me. I want to introjuce you to somebody.”

“Great!”

“Say, Sarge, have they sent that appointment in yet?”

“No, they haven't, Fuselli,” said the top sergeant. “It's all made out,”
 he added encouragingly.

They walked towards the town silently. The evening was silvery-violet.
The few windows in the old grey-green houses that were lighted shone
orange.

“Well, I'm goin' to get it, ain't I?”

A staff car shot by, splashing them with mud, leaving them a glimpse of
officers leaning back in the deep cushions.

“You sure are,” said the top sergeant in his good-natured voice.

They had reached the square. They saluted stiffly as two officers
brushed past them.

“What's the regulations about a feller marryin' a French girl?” broke
out Fuselli suddenly.

“Thinking of getting hitched up, are you?”

“Hell, no.” Fuselli was crimson. “I just sort o' wanted to know.”

“Permission of C. O., that's all I know of.”

They had stopped in front of the grocery shop. Fuselli peered in through
the window. The shop was full of soldiers lounging against the counter
and the walls. In the midst of them, demurely knitting, sat Yvonne.

“Let's go and have a drink an' then come back,” said Fuselli.

They went to the cafe where Marie of the white arms presided. Fuselli
paid for two hot rum punches.

“You see it's this way, Sarge,” he said confidentially, “I wrote all my
folks at home I'd been made corporal, an' it'ld be a hell of a note to
be let down now.”

The top sergeant was drinking his hot drink in little sips. He smiled
broadly and put his hand paternal-fashion on Fuselli's knee.

“Sure; you needn't worry, kid. I've got you fixed up all right,” he
said; then he added jovially, “Well, let's go see that girl of yours.”

They went out into the dark streets, where the wind, despite the smell
of burnt gasolene and army camps, had a faint suavity, something like
the smell of mushrooms; the smell of spring.

Yvonne sat under the lamp in the shop, her feet up on a box of canned
peas, yawning dismally. Behind her on the counter was the glass case
full of yellow and greenish-white cheeses. Above that shelves rose to
the ceiling in the brownish obscurity of the shop where gleamed faintly
large jars and small jars, cans neatly placed in rows, glass jars and
vegetables. In the corner, near the glass curtained door that led to the
inner room, hung clusters of sausages large and small, red, yellow,
and speckled. Yvonne jumped up when Fuselli and the sergeant opened the
door.

“You are good,” she said. “Je mourrais de cafard.” They laughed.

“You know what that mean--cafard?”

“Sure.”

“It is only since the war. Avant la guerre on ne savais pas ce que
c'etait le cafard. The war is no good.”

“Funny, ain't it?” said Fuselli to the top sergeant, “a feller can't
juss figure out what the war is like.”

“Don't you worry. We'll all get there,” said the top sergeant knowingly.

“This is the sarjon, Yvonne,” said Fuselli.

“Oui, oui, je sais,” said Yvonne, smiling at the top sergeant. They sat
in the little room behind the shop and drank white wine, and talked as
best they could to Yvonne, who, very trim in her black dress and blue
apron, perched on the edge of her chair with her feet in tiny pumps
pressed tightly together, and glanced now and then at the elaborate
stripes on the top sergeant's arm.



Fuselli strode familiarly into the grocery shop, whistling, and threw
open the door to the inner room. His whistling stopped in the middle of
a bar.

“Hello,” he said in an annoyed voice.

“Hello, corporal,” said Eisenstein. Eisenstein, his French soldier
friend, a lanky man with a scraggly black heard and burning black eyes,
and Stockton, the chalky-faced boy, were sitting at the table that
filled up the room, chatting intimately and gaily with Yvonne, who
leaned against the yellow wall beside the Frenchman and showed all her
little pearly teeth in a laugh. In the middle of the dark oak table was
a pot of hyacinths and some glasses that had had wine in them. The
odor of the hyacinths hung in the air with a faint warm smell from the
kitchen.

After a second's hesitation, Fuselli sat down to wait until the others
should leave. It was long after pay-day and his pockets were empty, so
he had nowhere else to go.

“How are they treatin' you down in your outfit now?” asked Eisenstein of
Stockton, after a silence.

“Same as ever,” said Stockton in his thin voice, stuttering a little....
“Sometimes I wish I was dead.”

“Hum,” said Eisenstein, a curious expression of understanding on his
flabby face. “We'll be civilians some day.”

“I won't” said Stockton.

“Hell,” said Eisenstein. “You've got to keep your upper lip stiff. I
thought I was goin' to die in that troopship coming over here. An' when
I was little an' came over with the emigrants from Poland, I thought I
was goin' to die. A man can stand more than he thinks for.... I never
thought I could stand being in the army, bein' a slave like an' all
that, an' I'm still here. No, you'll live long and be successful yet.”
 He put his hand on Stockton's shoulder. The boy winced and drew his
chair away. “What for you do that? I ain't goin' to hurt you,” said
Eisenstein.

Fuselli looked at them both with a disgusted interest.

“I'll tell you what you'd better do, kid,” he said condescendingly. “You
get transferred to our company. It's an Al bunch, ain't it, Eisenstein?
We've got a good loot an' a good top-kicker, an' a damn good bunch o'
fellers.”

“Our top-kicker was in here a few minutes ago,” said Eisenstein.

“He was?” asked Fuselli. “Where'd he go?”

“Damned if I know.”

Yvonne and the French soldier were talking in low voices, laughing a
little now and then. Fuselli leaned back in his chair looking at them,
feeling out of things, wishing despondently that he knew enough French
to understand what they were saying. He scraped his feet angrily back
and forth on the floor. His eyes lit on the white hyacinths. They made
him think of florists' windows at home at Eastertime and the noise and
bustle of San Francisco's streets. “God, I hate this rotten hole,” he
muttered to himself. He thought of Mabe. He made a noise with his lips.
Hell, she was married by this time. Anyway Yvonne was the girl for him.
If he could only have Yvonne to himself; far away somewhere, away from
the other men and that damn frog and her old mother. He thought of
himself going to the theatre with Yvonne. When he was a sergeant he
would be able to afford that sort of thing. He counted up the months. It
was March. Here he'd been in Europe five months and he was still only a
corporal, and not that yet. He clenched his fists with impatience.
But once he got to be a non-com it would go faster, he told himself
reassuringly.

He leaned over and sniffed loudly at the hyacinths.

“They smell good,” he said. “Que disay vous, Yvonne?”

Yvonne looked at him as if she had forgotten that he was in the room.
Her eyes looked straight into his, and she burst out laughing. Her
glance had made him feel warm all over, and he leaned back in his chair
again, looking at her slender body so neatly cased in its black dress
and at her little head with its tightly-done hair, with a comfortable
feeling of possession.

“Yvonne, come over here,” he said, beckoning with his head. She looked
from him to the Frenchman provocatively. Then she came over and stood
behind him.

“Que voulez-vous?”

Fuselli glanced at Eisenstein. He and Stockton were deep in excited
conversation with the Frenchman again. Fuselli heard that uncomfortable
word that always made him angry, he did not know why, “Revolution.”

“Yvonne,” he said so that only she could hear, “what you say you and me
get married?”

“Marries.... moi et toi?” asked Yvonne in a puzzled voice.

“We we.”

She looked him in the eyes a moment, and then threw hack her head in a
paroxysm of hysterical laughter.

Fuselli flushed scarlet, got to his feet and strode out, slamming the
door behind him so that the glass rang. He walked hurriedly back to
camp, splashed with mud by the long lines of grey motor trucks that were
throbbing their way slowly through the main street, each with a yellow
eye that lit up faintly the tailboards of the truck ahead. The barracks
were dark and nearly empty. He sat down at the sergeant's desk and
began moodily turning over the pages of the little blue book of Army
Regulations.



The moonlight glittered in the fountain at the end of the main square
of the town. It was a warm dark night of faint clouds through which the
moon shone palely as through a thin silk canopy. Fuselli stood by the
fountain smoking a cigarette, looking at the yellow windows of the
Cheval Blanc at the other end of the square, from which came a sound of
voices and of billiard balls clinking. He stood quiet letting the acrid
cigarette smoke drift out through his nose, his ears full of the silvery
tinkle of the water in the fountain beside him. There were little drifts
of warm and chilly air in the breeze that blew fitfully from the west.
Fuselli was waiting. He took out his watch now and then and strained his
eyes to see the time, but there was not light enough. At last the deep
broken note of the bell in the church spire struck once. It must be half
past ten.

He started walking slowly towards the street where Yvonne's grocery
shop was. The faint glow of the moon lit up the grey houses with the
shuttered windows and tumultuous red roofs full of little dormers and
skylights. Fuselli felt deliciously at ease with the world. He could
almost feel Yvonne's body in his arms and he smiled as he remembered
the little faces she used to make at him. He slunk past the shuttered
windows of the shop and dove into the darkness under the arch that led
to the court. He walked cautiously, on tiptoe, keeping close to the
moss-covered wall, for he heard voices in the court. He peeped round
the edge of the building and saw that there were several people in the
kitchen door talking. He drew his head back into the shadow. But he
had caught a glimpse of the dark round form of the hogshead beside the
kitchen door. If he only could get behind that as he usually did, he
would be hidden until the people went away.

Keeping well in the shadow round the edge of the court, he slipped to
the other side, and was just about to pop himself in behind the hogshead
when he noticed that someone was there before him.

He caught his breath and stood still, his heart thumping. The figure
turned and in the dark he recognised the top sergeant's round face.

“Keep quiet, can't you?” whispered the top sergeant peevishly.

Fuselli stood still with his fists clenched. The blood flamed through
his head, making his scalp tingle.

Still the top sergeant was the top sergeant, came the thought. It
would never do to get in wrong with him. Fuselli's legs moved him
automatically back into a corner of the court, where he leaned against
the damp wall; glaring with smarting eyes at the two women who stood
talking outside the kitchen door, and at the dark shadow behind the
hogshead. At last, after several smacking kisses, the women went away
and the kitchen door closed. The bell in the church spire struck eleven
slowly and mournfully. When it had ceased striking, Fuselli heard a
discreet tapping and saw the shadow of the top sergeant against the
door. As he slipped in, Fuselli heard the top sergeant's good-natured
voice in a large stage whisper, followed by a choked laugh from Yvonne.
The door closed and the light was extinguished, leaving the court in
darkness except for a faint marbled glow in the sky.

Fuselli strode out, making as much noise as he could with his heels on
the cobble stones. The streets of the town were silent under the pale
moon. In the square the fountain sounded loud and metallic. He gave up
his pass to the guard and strode glumly towards the barracks. At the
door he met a man with a pack on his back.

“Hullo, Fuselli,” said a voice he knew. “Is my old bunk still there?”

“Damned if I know,” said Fuselli; “I thought they'd shipped you home.”

The corporal who had been on the Red Sox outfield broke into a fit of
coughing.

“Hell, no,” he said. “They kep' me at that goddam hospital till they saw
I wasn't goin' to die right away, an' then they told me to come back to
my outfit. So here I am!”

“Did they bust you?” said Fuselli with sudden eagerness.

“Hell, no. Why should they? They ain't gone and got a new corporal, have
they?”

“No, not exactly,” said Fuselli.



                             V

Meadville stood near the camp gate, watching the motor trucks go by
on the main road. Grey, lumbering, and mud-covered, they throbbed by
sloughing in and out of the mud holes in the worn road in an endless
train stretching as far as he could see into the town and as far as he
could see up the road.

He stood with his legs far apart and spat into the center of the road;
then he turned to the corporal who had been in the Red Sox outfield and
said:

“I'll be goddamed if there ain't somethin' doin'!”

“A hell of a lot doin',” said the corporal, shaking his head.

“Seen that guy Daniels who's been to the front?”

“No.”

“Well, he says hell's broke loose. Hell's broke loose!”

“What's happened?... Be gorry, we may see some active service,” said
Meadville, grinning. “By God, I'd give the best colt on my ranch to see
some action.”

“Got a ranch?” asked the corporal.

The motor trucks kept on grinding past monotonously; their drivers were
so splashed with mud it was hard to see what uniform they wore.

“What d'ye think?” asked Meadville. “Think I keep store?”

Fuselli walked past them towards the town.

“Say, Fuselli,” shouted Meadville. “Corporal says hell's broke loose out
there. We may smell gunpowder yet.”

Fuselli stopped and joined them.

“I guess poor old Bill Grey's smelt plenty of gunpowder by this time,”
 he said.

“I wish I had gone with him,” said Meadville. “I'll try that little
trick myself now the good weather's come on if we don't get a move on
soon.”

“Too damn risky!”

“Listen to the kid. It'll be too damn risky in the trenches.... Or do
you think you're goin' to get a cushy job in camp here?”

“Hell, no! I want to go to the front. I don't want to stay in this
hole.”

“Well?”

“But ain't no good throwin' yerself in where it don't do no good.... A
guy wants to get on in this army if he can.”

“What's the good o' gettin' on?” said the corporal. “Won't get home a
bit sooner.”

“Hell! but you're a non-com.”

Another train of motor trucks went by, drowning their Talk.



Fuselli was packing medical supplies in a box in a great brownish
warehouse full of packing cases where a little sun filtered in through
the dusty air at the corrugated sliding tin doors. As he worked, he
listened to Daniels talking to Meadville who worked beside him.

“An' the gas is the goddamndest stuff I ever heard of,” he was saying.
“I've seen fellers with their arms swelled up to twice the size like
blisters from it. Mustard gas, they call it.”

“What did you get to go to the hospital?” said Meadville.

“Only pneumonia,” said Daniels, “but I had a buddy who was split right
in half by a piece of a shell. He was standin' as near me as you are an'
was whistlin' 'Tipperary' under his breath when all at once there was a
big spurt o' blood an' there he was with his chest split in half an' his
head hangin' a thread like.”

Meadville moved his quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other and spat
on to the sawdust of the floor. The men within earshot stopped working
and looked admiringly at Daniels.

“Well; what d'ye reckon's goin' on at the front now?” said Meadville.

“Damned of I know. The goddam hospital at Orleans was so full up there
was guys in stretchers waiting all day on the pavement outside. I know
that.... Fellers there said hell'd broke loose for fair. Looks to me
like the Fritzies was advancin'.”

Meadville looked at him incredulously.

“Those skunks?” said Fuselli. “Why they can't advance. They're starvin'
to death.”

“The hell they are,” said Daniels. “I guess you believe everything you
see in the papers.”

Eyes looked at Daniels indignantly. They all went on working in silence.

Suddenly the lieutenant, looking strangely flustered, strode into the
warehouse, leaving the tin door open behind him.

“Can anyone tell me where Sergeant Osler is?”

“He was here a few minutes ago,” spoke up Fuselli.

“Well, where is he now?” snapped the lieutenant angrily.

“I don't know, sir,” mumbled Fuselli, flushing.

“Go and see if you can find him.”

Fuselli went off to the other end of the warehouse. Outside the door he
stopped and bit off a cigarette in a leisurely fashion. His blood boiled
sullenly. How the hell should he know where the top sergeant was? They
didn't expect him to be a mind-reader, did they? And all the flood
of bitterness that had been collecting in his spirit seethed to the
surface. They had not treated him right, He felt full of hopeless
anger against this vast treadmill to which he was bound. The endless
succession of the days, all alike, all subject to orders, to the
interminable monotony of drills and line-ups, passed before his mind. He
felt he couldn't go on, yet he knew that he must and would go on, that
there was no stopping, that his feet would go on beating in time to the
steps of the treadmill.

He caught sight of the sergeant coming towards the warehouse, across the
new green grass, scarred by the marks of truck wheels.

“Sarge,” he called. Then he went up to him mysteriously. “The loot wants
to see you at once in Warehouse B.”

He slouched back to his work, arriving just in time to hear the
lieutenant say in a severe voice to the sergeant:

“Sergeant, do you know how to draw up court-martial papers?”

“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, a look of surprise on his face. He
followed the precise steps of the lieutenant out of the door.

Fuselli had a moment of panic terror, during which he went on working
methodically, although his hands trembled. He was searching his memory
for some infringement of a regulation that might be charged against him.
The terror passed as fast as it had come. Of course he had no reason to
fear. He laughed softly to himself. What a fool he'd been to get scared
like that, and a summary court-martial couldn't do much to you anyway.
He went on working as fast and as carefully as he could, through the
long monotonous afternoon.

That night nearly the whole company gathered in a group at the end
of the barracks. Both sergeants were away. The corporal said he knew
nothing, and got sulkily into bed, where he lay, rolled in his blankets,
shaken by fit after fit of coughing.

At last someone said:

“I bet that kike Eisenstein's turned out to be a spy.”

“I bet he has too.”

“He's foreign born, ain't he? Born in Poland or some goddam place.”

“He always did talk queer.”

“I always thought,” said Fuselli, “he'd get into trouble talking the way
he did.”

“How'd he talk?” asked Daniels.

“Oh, he said that war was wrong and all that goddamed pro-German stuff.”

“D'ye know what they did out at the front?” said Daniels. “In the second
division they made two fellers dig their own graves and then shot 'em
for sayin' the war was wrong.”

“Hell, they did?”

“You're goddam right, they did. I tell you, fellers, it don't do to
monkey with the buzz-saw in this army.”

“For God's sake shut up. Taps has blown. Meadville, turn the lights
out!” said the corporal angrily. The barracks was dark, full of a sound
of men undressing in their bunks, and of whispered talk.



The company was lined up for morning mess. The sun that had just risen
was shining in rosily through the soft clouds of the sky. The sparrows
kept up a great clattering in the avenue of plane trees. Their riotous
chirping could be heard above the sound of motors starting that came
from a shed opposite the mess shack.

The sergeant appeared suddenly; walking past with his shoulders stiff,
so that everyone knew at once that something important was going on.

“Attention, men, a minute,” he said.

Mess kits clattered as the men turned round.

“After mess I want you to go immediately to barracks and roll your
packs. After that every man must stand by his pack until orders come.”
 The company cheered and mess kits clattered together like cymbals.

“As you were,” shouted the top sergeant jovially.

Gluey oatmeal and greasy bacon were hurriedly bolted down, and every
man in the company, his heart pounding, ran to the barracks to do up his
pack, feeling proud under the envious eyes of the company at the other
end of the shack that had received no orders.

When the packs were done up, they sat on the empty hunks and drummed
their feet against the wooden partitions waiting.

“I don't suppose we'll leave here till hell freezes over,” said
Meadville, who was doing up the last strap on his pack.

“It's always like this.... You break your neck to obey orders an'...”

“Outside!” shouted the sergeant, poking his head in the door.

“Fall in! Atten-shun!”

The lieutenant in his trench coat and in a new pair of roll puttees
stood facing the company, looking solemn.

“Men,” he said, biting off his words as a man bites through a piece
of hard stick candy; “one of your number is up for courtmartial for
possibly disloyal statements found in a letter addressed to friends at
home. I have been extremely grieved to find anything of this sort in
any company of mine; I don't believe there is another man in the
company... low enough to hold... entertain such ideas....”

Every man in the company stuck out his chest, vowing inwardly to
entertain no ideas at all rather than run the risk of calling forth such
disapproval from the lieutenant. The lieutenant paused:

“All I can say is if there is any such man in the company, he had better
keep his mouth shut and be pretty damn careful what he writes home....
Dismissed!”

He shouted the order grimly, as if it were the order for the execution
of the offender.

“That goddam skunk Eisenstein,” said someone.

The lieutenant heard it as he walked away. “Oh, sergeant,” he said
familiarly; “I think the others have got the right stuff in them.”

The company went into the barracks and waited.



The sergeant-major's office was full of a clicking of typewriters, and
was overheated by a black stove that stood in the middle of the floor,
letting out occasional little puffs of smoke from a crack in the stove
pipe. The sergeant-major was a small man with a fresh boyish face and a
drawling voice who lolled behind a large typewriter reading a magazine
that lay on his lap.

Fuselli slipped in behind the typewriter and stood with his cap in his
hand beside the sergeant-major's chair.

“Well what do you want?” asked the sergeant-major gruffly.

“A feller told me, Sergeant-Major, that you was look-in' for a man with
optical experience;” Fuselli's voice was velvety.

“Well?”

“I worked three years in an optical-goods store at home in Frisco.”

“What's your name, rank, company?”

“Daniel Fuselli, Private 1st-class, Company C, medical supply
warehouse.”

“All right, I'll attend to it.”

“But, sergeant.”

“All right; out with what you've got to say, quick.” The sergeant-major
fingered the leaves of his magazine impatiently.

“My company's all packed up to go. The transfer'll have to be today,
sergeant.”

“Why the hell didn't you come in earlier?... Stevens, make out a
transfer to headquarters company and get the major to sign it when he
goes through.... That's the way it always is,” he cried, leaning back
tragically in his swivel chair. “Everybody always puts everything off on
me at the last minute.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Fuselli, smiling. The sergeant-major ran his hand
through his hair and took up his magazine again peevishly.

Fuselli hurried back to barracks where he found the company still
waiting. Several men were crouched in a circle playing craps. The rest
lounged in their bare bunks or fiddled with their packs. Outside it had
begun to rain softly, and a smell of wet sprouting earth came in through
the open door. Fuselli sat on the floor beside his bunk throwing his
knife down so that it stuck in the boards between his knees. He was
whistling softly to himself. The day dragged on. Several times he heard
the town clock strike in the distance.

At last the top sergeant came in, shaking the water off his slicker, a
serious, important expression on his face.

“Inspection of medical belts,” he shouted. “Everybody open up their belt
and lay it on the foot of their bunk and stand at attention on the left
side.”

The lieutenant and a major appeared suddenly at one end of the barracks
and came through slowly, pulling the little packets out of the belts.
The men looked at them out of the corners of their eyes. As they
examined the belts, they chatted easily, as if they had been alone.

“Yes,” said the major. “We're in for it this time.... That damned
offensive.”

“Well, we'll be able to show 'em what we're good for,” said the
lieutenant, laughing. “We haven't had a chance yet.”

“Hum! Better mark that belt, lieutenant, and have it changed. Been to
the front yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Hum, well.... You'll look at things differently when you have,” said
the major.

The lieutenant frowned.

“Well, on the whole, lieutenant, your outfit is in very good shape....
At ease, men!” The lieutenant and the major stood at the door a moment
raising the collars of their coats; then they dove out into the rain.

A few minutes later the sergeant came in.

“All right, get your slickers on and line up.”

They stood lined up in the rain for a long while. It was a leaden
afternoon. The even clouds had a faint coppery tinge. The rain beat in
their faces, making them tingle. Fuselli was looking anxiously at the
sergeant. At last the lieutenant appeared.

“Attention!” cried the sergeant.

The roll was called and a new man fell in at the end of the line, a tall
man with large protruding eyes like a calf's.

“Private 1st-class Daniel Fuselli, fall out and report to headquarters
company!”

Fuselli saw a look of surprise come over men's faces. He smiled wanly at
Meadville.

“Sergeant, take the men down to the station.”

“Squads, right,” cried the sergeant. “March!”

The company tramped off into the streaming rain.

Fuselli went back to the barracks, took off his pack and slicker and
wiped the water off his face.



The rails gleamed gold in the early morning sunshine above the deep
purple cinders of the track. Fuselli's eyes followed the track until
it curved into a cutting where the wet clay was a bright orange in the
clear light. The station platform, where puddles from the night's rain
glittered as the wind ruffled them, was empty. Fuselli started walking
up and down with his hands in his pockets. He had been sent down to
unload some supplies that were coming on that morning's train. He felt
free and successful since he joined the headquarters company! At last,
he told himself, he had a job where he could show what he was good for.
He walked up and down whistling shrilly.

A train pulled slowly into the station. The engine stopped to take water
and the couplings clanked all down the line of cars. The platform was
suddenly full of men in khaki, stamping their feet, running up and down
shouting.

“Where you guys goin'?” asked Fuselli.

“We're bound for Palm Beach. Don't we look it?” someone snarled in
reply.

But Fuselli had seen a familiar face. He was shaking hands with two
browned men whose faces were grimy with days of travelling in freight
cars.

“Hullo, Chrisfield. Hullo, Andrews!” he cried. “When did you fellows get
over here?”

“Oh, 'bout four months ago,” said Chrisfield, whose black eyes looked
at Fuselli searchingly. “Oh! Ah 'member you. You're Fuselli. We was at
trainin' camp together. 'Member him, Andy?”

“Sure,” said Andrews. “How are you makin' out?”

“Fine,” said Fuselli. “I'm in the optical department here.”

“Where the hell's that?”

“Right here.” Fuselli pointed vaguely behind the station.

“We've been training about four months near Bordeaux,” said Andrews;
“and now we're going to see what it's like.”

The whistle blew and the engine started puffing hard. Clouds of white
steam filled the station platform, where the soldiers scampered for
their cars.

“Good luck!” said Fuselli; but Andrews and Chrisfield had already gone.
He saw them again as the train pulled out, two brown and dirt-grimed
faces among many other brown and dirt-grimed faces. The steam floated
up tinged with yellow in the bright early morning air as the last car of
the train disappeared round the curve into the cutting.



The dust rose thickly about the worn broom. As it was a dark morning,
very little light filtered into the room full of great white packing
cases, where Fuselli was sweeping. He stopped now and then and leaned on
his broom. Far away he heard a sound of trains shunting and shouts and
the sound of feet tramping in unison from the drill ground. The building
where he was was silent. He went on sweeping, thinking of his company
tramping off through the streaming rain, and of those fellows he had
known in training Camp in America, Andrews and Chrisfield, jolting in
box cars towards the front, where Daniel's buddy had had his chest split
in half by a piece of shell. And he'd written home he'd been made a
corporal. What was he going to do when letters came for him, addressed
Corporal Dan Fuselli? Putting the broom away, he dusted the yellow chair
and the table covered with order slips that stood in the middle of the
piles of packing boxes. The door slammed somewhere below and there was a
step on the stairs that led to the upper part of the warehouse. A little
man with a monkey-like greyish-brown face and spectacles appeared and
slipped out of his overcoat, like a very small bean popping out of a
very large pod.

The sergeant's stripes looked unusually wide and conspicuous on his thin
arm.

He grunted at Fuselli, sat down at the desk, and began at once peering
among the order slips.

“Anything in our mailbox this morning?” he asked Fuselli in a hoarse
voice.

“It's all there, sergeant,” said Fuselli.

The sergeant peered about the desk some more.

“Ye'll have to wash that window today,” he said after a pause.
“Major's likely to come round here any time.... Ought to have been done
yesterday.”

“All right,” said Fuselli dully.

He slouched over to the corner of the room, got the worn broom and began
sweeping down the stairs. The dust rose about him, making him cough.
He stopped and leaned on the broom. He thought of all the days that had
gone by since he'd last seen those fellows, Andrews and Chrisfield,
at training camp in America; and of all the days that would go by. He
started sweeping again, sweeping the dust down from stair to stair.



Fuselli sat on the end of his bunk. He had just shaved. It was a Sunday
morning and he looked forward to having the afternoon off. He rubbed his
face on his towel and got to his feet. Outside, the rain fell in great
silvery sheets, so that the noise on the tarpaper roof of the barracks
was almost deafening.

Fuselli noticed, at the other end of the row of bunks, a group of
men who all seemed to be looking at the same thing. Rolling down his
sleeves, with his tunic hitched over one arm, he walked down to see what
was the matter. Through the patter of the rain, he heard a thin voice
say:

“It ain't no use, sergeant, I'm sick. I ain't a' goin' to get up.”

“The kid's crazy,” someone beside Fuselli said, turning away.

“You get up this minute,” roared the sergeant. He was a big man with
black hair who looked like a lumberman. He stood over the bunk. In the
bunk at the end of a bundle of blankets was the chalk-white face of
Stockton. The boy's teeth were clenched, and his eyes were round and
protruding, it seemed from terror.

“You get out o' bed this minute,” roared the sergeant again.

The boy; was silent; his white cheeks quivered.

“What the hell's the matter with him?”

“Why don't you yank him out yourself, Sarge?”

“You get out of bed this minute,” shouted the sergeant again, paying no
attention.

The men gathered about walked away. Fuselli watched fascinated from a
little distance.

“All right, then, I'll get the lieutenant. This is a court-martial
offence. Here, Morton and Morrison, you're guards over this man.”

The boy lay still in his blankets. He closed his eyes. By the way
the blanket rose and fell over his chest, they could see that he was
breathing heavily.

“Say, Stockton, why don't you get up, you fool?”' said Fuselli. “You
can't buck the whole army.”

The boy didn't answer.

Fuselli walked away.

“He's crazy,” he muttered.

The lieutenant was a stoutish red-faced man who came in puffing followed
by the tall sergeant. He stopped and shook the water off his Campaign
hat. The rain kept up its deafening patter on the roof.

“Look here, are you sick? If you are, report sick call at once,” said
the lieutenant in an elaborately kind voice.

The boy looked at him dully and did not answer.

“You should get up and stand at attention when an officer speaks to you.

“I ain't goin' to get up,” came the thin voice.

The officer's red face became crimson.

“Sergeant, what's the matter with the man?” he asked in a furious tone.

“I can't do anything with him, lieutenant. I think he's gone crazy.”

“Rubbish.... Mere insubordination.... You're under arrest, d'ye hear?”
 he shouted towards the bed.

There was no answer. The rain pattered hard on the roof.

“Have him brought down to the guardhouse, by force if necessary,”
 snapped the lieutenant. He strode towards the door. “And sergeant, start
drawing up court-martial papers at once.” The door slammed behind him.

“Now you've got to get him up,” said the sergeant to the two guards.

Fuselli walked away.

“Ain't some people damn fools?” he said to a man at the other end of the
barracks. He stood looking out of the window at the bright sheets of the
rain.

“Well, get him up,” shouted the sergeant.

The boy lay with his eyes closed, his chalk-white face half-hidden by
the blankets; he was very still.

“Well, will you get up and go to the guardhouse, or have we to carry you
there?” shouted the sergeant.

The guards laid hold of him gingerly and pulled him up to a sitting
posture.

“All right, yank him out of bed.”

The frail form in khaki shirt and whitish drawers was held up for a
moment between the two men. Then it fell a limp heap on the floor.

“Say, Sarge, he's fainted.”

“The hell he has.... Say, Morrison, ask one of the orderlies to come up
from the Infirmary.”

“He ain't fainted.... The kid's dead,” said the other man.

“Give me a hand.”

The sergeant helped lift the body on the bed again. “Well, I'll be
goddamned,” said the sergeant.

The eyes had opened. They covered the head with a blanket.




PART THREE: MACHINES                            I

The fields and the misty blue-green woods slipped by slowly as the box
car rumbled and jolted over the rails, now stopping for hours on sidings
amid meadows, where it was quiet and where above the babel of voices
of the regiment you could hear the skylarks, now clattering fast over
bridges and along the banks of jade-green rivers where the slim poplars
were just coming into leaf and where now and then a fish jumped. The men
crowded in the door, grimy and tired, leaning on each other's shoulders
and watching the plowed lands slip by and the meadows where the
golden-green grass was dappled with buttercups, and the villages of
huddled red roofs lost among pale budding trees and masses of peach
blossom. Through the smells of steam and coal smoke and of unwashed
bodies in uniforms came smells of moist fields and of manure from
fresh-sowed patches and of cows and pasture lands just coming into
flower.

“Must be right smart o'craps in this country.... Ain't like that damn
Polignac, Andy?” said Chrisfield.

“Well, they made us drill so hard there wasn't any time for the grass to
grow.”

“You're damn right there warn't.”

“Ah'd lak te live in this country a while,” said Chrisfield.

“We might ask 'em to let us off right here.”

“Can't be that the front's like this,” said Judkins, poking his head
out between Andrews's and Chrisfield's heads so that the bristles of his
unshaven chin rubbed against 

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