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.
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 Chrisfield's cheek. It was a large square head with closely cropped light hair and porcelain-blue eyes under lids that showed white in the red sunburned face, and a square jaw made a little grey by the sprouting beard.
“Say, Andy, how the hell long have we all been in this goddam train?... Ah've done lost track o' the time....”
“What's the matter; are you gettin' old, Chris?” asked Judkins laughing.
Chrisfield had slipped out of the place he held and began poking himself in between Andrews and Judkins.
“We've been on this train four days and five nights, an' we've got half a day's rations left, so we must be getting somewhere,” said Andrews.
“It can't be like this at the front.”
“It must be spring there as well as here,” said Andrews.
It was a day of fluffy mauve-tinted clouds that moved across the sky, sometimes darkening to deep blue where a small rainstorm trailed across the hills, sometimes brightening to moments of clear sunlight that gave blue shadows to the poplars and shone yellow on the smoke of the engine that puffed on painfully at the head of the long train.
“Funny, ain't it? How li'l everythin' is,” said Chrisfield. “Out Indiana way we wouldn't look at a cornfield that size. But it sort o' reminds me the way it used to be out home in the spring o' the year.”
“I'd like to see Indiana in the springtime,” said Andrews.
“Well you'll come out when the war's over and us guys is all home... won't you, Andy?”
“You bet I will.”
They were going into the suburbs of a town. Rows and clusters of little brick and stucco houses were appearing along the roads. It began to rain from a sky full of lights of amber and lilac color. The slate roofs and the pinkish-grey streets of the town shone cheerfully in the rain. The little patches of garden were all vivid emerald-green. Then they were looking at rows and rows of red chimney pots over wet slate roofs that reflected the bright sky. In the distance rose the purple-grey spire of a church and the irregular forms of old buildings. They passed through a station.
“Dijon,” read Andrews. On the platform were French soldiers in their blue coats and a good sprinkling of civilians.
“Gee, those are about the first real civies I've seen since I came overseas,” said Judkins. “Those goddam country people down at Polignac didn't look like real civilians. There's folks dressed like it was New York.”
They had left the station and were rumbling slowly past interminable freight trains. At last the train came to a dead stop.
A whistle sounded.
“Don't nobody get out,” shouted the sergeant from the car ahead.
“Hell! They keep you in this goddam car like you was a convict,” muttered Chrisfield.
“I'd like to get out and walk around Dijon.”
“O boy!”
“I swear I'd make a bee line for a dairy lunch,” said Judkins.
“Hell of a fine dairy lunch you'll find among those goddam frogs. No, vin blank is all you'ld get in that goddam town.”
“Ah'm goin' to sleep,” said Chrisfield. He stretched himself out on the pile of equipment at the end of the car. Andrews sat down near him and stared at his mud-caked boots, running one of his long hands, as brown as Chrisfield's now, through his light short-cut hair.
Chrisfield lay looking at the gaunt outline of Andrews's face against the light through half-closed eyes. And he felt a warm sort of a smile inside him as he said to himself: “He's a damn good kid.” Then he thought of the spring in the hills of southern Indiana and the mocking-bird singing in the moonlight among the flowering locust trees behind the house. He could almost smell the heavy sweetness of the locust blooms, as he used to smell them sitting on the steps after supper, tired from a day's heavy plowing, while the clatter of his mother's housework came from the kitchen. He didn't wish he was back there, but it was pleasant to think of it now and then, and how the yellow farmhouse looked and the red barn where his father never had been able to find time to paint the door, and the tumble-down cowshed where the shingles were always coming off. He wondered dully what it would be like out there at the front. It couldn't be green and pleasant, the way the country was here. Fellows always said it was hell out there. Well, he didn't give a damn. He went to sleep.
He woke up gradually, the warm comfort of sleep giving place slowly to the stiffness of his uncomfortable position with the hobnails of a boot from the back of a pack sticking into his shoulder. Andrews was sitting in the same position, lost in thought. The rest of the men sat at the open doors or sprawled over the equipment.
Chrisfield got up, stretched himself, yawned, and went to the door to look out. There was a heavy important step on the gravel outside. A large man with black eyebrows that met over his nose and a very black stubbly beard passed the car. There were a sergeants stripes on his arm.
“Say, Andy,” cried Chrisfield, “that bastard is a sergeant.”
“Who's that?” asked Andrews getting up with a smile, his blue eyes looking mildly into Chrisfield's black ones.
“You know who Ah mean.”
Under their heavy tan Chrisfield's rounded cheeks were flushed. His eyes snapped under their long black lashes. His fists were clutched.
“Oh, I know, Chris. I didn't know he was in this regiment.”
“God damn him!” muttered Chrisfield in a low voice, throwing himself down on his packs again.
“Hold your horses, Chris,” said Andrews. “We may all cash in our checks before long... no use letting things worry us.”
“I don't give a damn if we do.”
“Nor do I, now.” Andrews sat down beside Chrisfield again.
After a while the train got jerkily into motion. The wheels rumbled and clattered over the rails and the clots of mud bounced up and down on the splintered boards of the floor. Chrisfield pillowed his head on his arm and went to sleep again, still smarting from the flush of his anger.
Andrews looked out through his fingers at the swaying black box car, at the men sprawled about on the floor, their heads nodding with each jolt, and at the mauve-grey clouds and bits of sparkling blue sky that he could see behind the silhouettes of the heads and shoulders of the men who stood in the doors. The wheels ground on endlessly.
The car stopped with a jerk that woke up all the sleepers and threw one man off his feet. A whistle blew shrilly outside.
“All right, out of the cars! Snap it up; snap it up!” yelled the sergeant.
The men piled out stiffly, handing the equipment out from hand to hand till it formed a confused heap of packs and rifles outside. All down the train at each door there was a confused pile of equipment and struggling men.
“Snap it up.... Full equipment.... Line up!” the sergeant yelled.
The men fell into line slowly, with their packs and rifles. Lieutenants hovered about the edges of the forming lines, tightly belted into their stiff trench coats, scrambling up and down the coal piles of the siding. The men were given “at ease” and stood leaning on their rifles staring at a green water-tank on three wooden legs, over the top of which had been thrown a huge piece of torn grey cheesecloth. When the confused sound of tramping feet subsided, they could hear a noise in the distance, like someone lazily shaking a piece of heavy sheet-iron. The sky was full of little dabs of red, purple and yellow and the purplish sunset light was over everything.
The order came to march. They marched down a rutted road where the puddles were so deep they had continually to break ranks to avoid them. In a little pine-wood on one side were rows of heavy motor trucks and ammunition caissons; supper was cooking in a field kitchen about which clustered the truck drivers in their wide visored caps. Beyond the wood the column turned off into a field behind a little group of stone and stucco houses that had lost their roofs. In the field they halted. The grass was brilliant emerald and the wood and the distant hills were shades of clear deep blue. Wisps of pale-blue mist lay across the field. In the turf here and there were small clean bites, that might have been made by some strange animal. The men looked at them curiously.
“No lights, remember we're in sight of the enemy. A match might annihilate the detachment,” announced the lieutenant dramatically after having given the orders for the pup tents to be set up.
When the tents were ready, the men stood about in the chilly white mist that kept growing denser, eating their cold rations. Everywhere were grumbling snorting voices.
“God, let's turn in, Chris, before our bones are frozen,” said Andrews.
Guards had been posted and walked up and down with a business-like stride, peering now and then suspiciously into the little wood where the truck-drivers were.
Chrisfield and Andrews crawled into their little tent and rolled up together in their blankets, getting as close to each other as they could. At first it was very cold and hard, and they squirmed about restlessly, but gradually the warmth from their bodies filled their thin blankets and their muscles began to relax. Andrews went to sleep first and Chrisfield lay listening to his deep breathing. There was a frown on his face. He was thinking of the man who had walked past the train at Dijon. The last time he had seen that man Anderson was at training camp. He had only been a corporal then. He remembered the day the man had been made corporal. It had not been long before that that Chrisfield had drawn his knife on him, one night in the barracks. A fellow had caught his hand just in time. Anderson had looked a bit pale that time and had walked away. But he'd never spoken a word to Chrisfield since. As he lay with his eyes closed, pressed close against Andrew's limp sleeping body, Chrisfield could see the man's face, the eyebrows that joined across the nose and the jaw, always blackish from the heavy beard, that looked blue when he had just shaved. At last the tenseness of his mind slackened; he thought of women for a moment, of a fair-haired girl he'd seen from the train, and then suddenly crushing sleepiness closed down on him and everything went softly warmly black, as he drifted off to sleep with no sense but the coldness of one side and the warmth of his bunkie's body on the other.
In the middle of the night he awoke and crawled out of the tent. Andrews followed him. Their teeth chattered a little, and they stretched their legs stiffly. It was cold, but the mist had vanished. The stars shone brilliantly. They walked out a little way into the field away from the bunch of tents to make water. A faint rustling and breathing noise, as of animals herded together, came from the sleeping regiment. Somewhere a brook made a shrill gurgling. They strained their ears, but they could hear no guns. They stood side by side looking up at the multitudes of stars.
“That's Orion,” said Andrews.
“What?”
“That bunch of stars there is called Orion. D'you see 'em. It's supposed to look like a man with a bow, but he always looks to me like a fellow striding across the sky.”
“Some stars tonight, ain't there? Gee, what's that?”
Behind the dark hills a glow rose and fell like the glow in a forge.
“The front must be that way,” said Andrews, shivering. “I guess we'll know tomorrow.”
“Yes; tomorrow night we'll know more about it,” said Andrews. They stood silent a moment listening to the noise the brook made.
“God, it's quiet, ain't it? This can't be the front. Smell that?”
“What is it?”
“Smells like an apple tree in bloom somewhere.... Hell, let's git in, before our blankets git cold.”
Andrews was still staring at the group of stars he had said was Orion.
Chrisfield pulled him by the arm. They crawled into their tent again, rolled up together and immediately were crushed under an exhausted sleep.
As far ahead of him as Chrisfield could see were packs and heads with caps at a variety of angles, all bobbing up and down with the swing of the brisk marching time. A fine warm rain was falling, mingling with the sweat that ran down his face. The column had been marching a long time along a straight road that was worn and scarred with heavy traffic. Fields and hedges where clusters of yellow flowers were in bloom had given place to an avenue of poplars. The light wet trunks and the stiff branches hazy with green filed by, interminable, as interminable as the confused tramp of feet and jingle of equipment that sounded in his ears.
“Say, are we goin' towards the front?”
“Goddamned if I know.”
“Ain't no front within miles.”
Men's sentences came shortly through their heavy breathing.
The column shifted over to the side of the road to avoid a train of motor trucks going the other way. Chrisfield felt the heavy mud spurt up over him as truck after truck rumbled by. With the wet back of one hand he tried to wipe it off his face, but the grit, when he rubbed it, hurt his skin, made tender by the rain. He swore long and whiningly, half aloud. His rifle felt as heavy as an iron girder.
They entered a village of plaster-and-timber houses. Through open doors they could see into comfortable kitchens where copper pots gleamed and where the floors were of clean red tiles. In front of some of the houses were little gardens full of crocuses and hyacinths where box-bushes shone a very dark green in the rain. They marched through the square with its pavement of little yellow rounded cobbles, its grey church with a pointed arch in the door, its cafes with names painted over them. Men and women looked out of doors and windows. The column perceptibly slackened its speed, but kept on, and as the houses dwindled and became farther apart along the road the men's hope of stopping vanished. Ears were deafened by the confused tramp of feet on the macadam road. Men's feet seemed as lead, as if all the weight of the pack hung on them. Shoulders, worn callous, began to grow tender and sore under the constant sweating. Heads drooped. Each man's eyes were on the heels of the man ahead of him that rose and fell, rose and fell endlessly. Marching became for each man a personal struggle with his pack, that seemed to have come alive, that seemed something malicious and overpowering, wrestling to throw him.
The rain stopped and the sky brightened a little, taking on pale yellowish lights as if the clouds that hid the sun were growing thin.
The column halted at the edge of a group of farms and barns that scattered along the road. The men sprawled in all directions along the roadside hiding the bright green grass with the mud-color of their uniforms.
Chrisfield lay in the field beside the road, pressing his hot face into the wet sprouting clover. The blood throbbed through his ears. His arms and legs seemed to cleave to the ground, as if he would never be able to move them again. He closed his eyes. Gradually a cold chill began stealing through his body. He sat up and slipped his arms out of the harness of his pack. Someone was handing him a cigarette, and he sniffed a little acrid sweet smoke.
Andrews was lying beside him, his head propped against his pack, smoking, and poking a cigarette towards his friend with a muddy hand. His blue eyes looked strangely from out the flaming red of his mud-splotched face.
Chrisfield took the cigarette, and fumbled in his pocket for a match.
“That nearly did it for me,” said Andrews.
Chrisfield grunted. He pulled greedily on the cigarette.
A whistle blew.
Slowly the men dragged themselves off the ground and fell into line, drooping under the weight of their equipment.
The companies marched off separately.
Chrisfield overheard the lieutenant saying to a sergeant:
“Damn fool business that. Why the hell couldn't they have sent us here in the first place?”
“So we ain't goin' to the front after all?” said the sergeant.
“Front, hell!” said the lieutenant. The lieutenant was a small man who looked like a jockey with a coarse red face which, now that he was angry, was almost purple.
“I guess they're going to quarter us here,” said somebody.
Immediately everybody began saying: “We're going to be quartered here.”
They stood waiting in formation a long while, the packs cutting into their backs and shoulders. At last the sergeant shouted out:
“All right, take yer stuff upstairs.” Stumbling on each others' heels they climbed up into a dark loft, where the air was heavy with the smell of hay and with an acridity of cow manure from the stables below. There was a little straw in the corners, on which those who got there first spread their blankets.
Chrisfield and Andrews tucked themselves in a corner from which through a hole where the tiles had fallen off the roof, they could see down into the barnyard, where white and speckled chickens pecked about with jerky movements. A middle-aged woman stood in the doorway of the house looking suspiciously at the files of khaki-clad soldiers that shuffled slowly into the barns by every door.
An officer went up to her, a little red book in his hand. A conversation about some matter proceeded painfully. The officer grew very red. Andrews threw back his head and laughed, luxuriously rolling from side to side in the straw. Chrisfield laughed too, he hardly knew why. Over their heads they could hear the feet of pigeons on the roof, and a constant drowsy rou-cou-cou-cou.
Through the barnyard smells began to drift... the greasiness of food cooking in the field kitchen.
“Ah hope they give us somethin' good to eat,” said Chrisfield. “Ah'm hongry as a thrasher.”
“So am I,” said Andrews.
“Say, Andy, you kin talk their language a li'l', can't ye?”
Andrews nodded his head vaguely.
“Well, maybe we kin git some aigs or somethin' out of the lady down there. Will ye try after mess?”
“All right.”
They both lay back in the straw and closed their eyes. Their cheeks still burned from the rain. Everything seemed very peaceful; the men sprawled about talking in low drowsy voices. Outside, another shower had come up and beat softly on the tiles of the roof. Chrisfield thought he had never been so comfortable in his life, although his soaked shoes pinched his cold feet and his knees were wet and cold. But in the drowsiness of the rain and of voices talking quietly about him, he fell asleep.
He dreamed he was home in Indiana, but instead of his mother cooking at the stove in the kitchen, there was the Frenchwoman who had stood in the farmhouse door, and near her stood a lieutenant with a little red book in his hand. He was eating cornbread and syrup off a broken plate. It was fine cornbread with a great deal of crust on it, crisp and hot, on which the butter was cold and sweet to his tongue. Suddenly he stopped eating and started swearing, shouting at the top of his lungs: “You goddam...” he started, but he couldn't seem to think of anything more to say. “You goddam...” he started again. The lieutenant looked towards him, wrinkling his black eyebrows that met across his nose. He was Sergeant Anderson. Chris drew his knife and ran at him, but it was Andy his bunkie he had run his knife into. He threw his arms round Andy's body, crying hot tears.... He woke up. Mess kits were clinking all about the dark crowded loft. The men had already started piling down the stairs.
The larks filled the wine-tinged air with a constant chiming of little bells. Chrisfield and Andrews were strolling across a field of white clover that covered the brow of a hill. Below in the valley they could see a cluster of red roofs of farms and the white ribbon of the road where long trains of motor trucks crawled like beetles. The sun had just set behind the blue hills the other side of the shallow valley. The air was full of the smell of clover and of hawthorn from the hedgerows. They took deep breaths as they crossed the field.
“It's great to get away from that crowd,” Andrews was saying.
Chrisfield walked on silently, dragging his feet through the matted clover. A leaden dullness weighed like some sort of warm choking coverlet on his limbs, so that it seemed an effort to walk, an effort to speak. Yet under it his muscles were taut and trembling as he had known them to be before when he was about to get into a fight or to make love to a girl.
“Why the hell don't they let us git into it?” he said suddenly.
“Yes, anything'ld be better than this... wait, wait, wait.”
They walked on, hearing the constant chirrup of the larks, the brush of their feet through the clover, the faint jingle of some coins in Chrisfield's pocket, and in the distance the irregular snoring of an aeroplane motor. As they walked Andrews leaned over from time to time and picked a couple of the white clover flowers.
The aeroplane came suddenly nearer and swooped in a wide curve above the field, drowning every sound in the roar of its exhaust. They made out the figures of the pilot and the observer before the plane rose again and vanished against the ragged purple clouds of the sky. The observer had waved a hand at them as he passed. They stood still in the darkening field, staring up at the sky, where a few larks still hung chirruping.
“Ah'd lahk to be one o' them guys,” said Chrisfield.
“You would?”
“God damn it, Ah'd do anything to git out o' this hellish infantry. This ain't no sort o' life for a man to be treated lahk he was a nigger.”
“No, it's no sort of life for a man.”
“If they'd let us git to the front an' do some fightin' an' be done with it.... But all we do is drill and have grenade practice an' drill again and then have bayonet practice an' drill again. 'Nough to drive a feller crazy.”
“What the hell's the use of talking about it, Chris? We can't be any lower than we are, can we?” Andrews laughed.
“There's that plane again.”
“Where?”
“There, just goin' down behind the piece o' woods.”
“That's where their field is.”
“Ah bet them guys has a good time. Ah put in an application back in trainin' camp for Aviation. Ain't never heard nothing from it though. If Ah had, Ah wouldn't be lower than dirt in this hawg-pen.”
“It's wonderful up here on the hill this evening,” said Andrews, looking dreamily at the pale orange band of light where the sun had set. “Let's go down and get a bottle of wine.”
“Now yo're talkin'. Ah wonder if that girl's down there tonight.”
“Antoinette?”
“Um-hum.... Boy, Ah'd lahk to have her all by ma-self some night.”
Their steps grew brisker as they strode along a grass-grown road that led through high hedgerows to a village under the brow of the hill. It was almost dark under the shadow of the bushes on either side. Overhead the purple clouds were washed over by a pale yellow light that gradually faded to grey. Birds chirped and rustled among the young leaves.
Andrews put his hand on Chrisfield's shoulder.
“Let's walk slow,” he said, “we don't want to get out of here too soon.” He grabbed carelessly at little cluster of hawthorn flowers as he passed them, and seemed reluctant to untangle the thorny branches that caught in his coat and on his loosely wound puttees.
“Hell, man,” said Chrisfield, “we won't have time to get a bellyful. It must be gettin' late already.”
They hastened their steps again and came in a moment to the first tightly shuttered houses of the village.
In the middle of the road was an M.P., who stood with his legs wide apart, waving his “billy” languidly. He had a red face, his eyes were fixed on the shuttered upper window of a house, through the chinks of which came a few streaks of yellow light. His lips were puckered up as if to whistle, but no sound came. He swayed back and forth indecisively. An officer came suddenly out of the little green door of the house in front of the M.P., who brought his heels together with a jump and saluted, holding his hand a long while to his cap. The officer flicked a hand up hastily to his hat, snatching his cigar out of his mouth for an instant. As the officer's steps grew fainter down the road, the M.P. gradually returned to his former position.
Chrisfield and Andrews had slipped by on the other side, and gone in at the door of a small ramshackle house of which the windows were closed by heavy wooden shutters.
“I bet there ain't many of them bastards at the front,” said Chris.
“Not many of either kind of bastards,” said Andrews laughing, as he closed the door behind them. They were in a room that had once been the parlor of a farmhouse. The chandelier with its bits of crystal and the orange-blossoms on a piece of dusty red velvet under a bell glass on the mantelpiece denoted that. The furniture had been taken out, and four square oak tables crowded in. At one of the tables sat three Americans and at another a very young olive-skinned French soldier, who sat hunched over his table looking moodily down into his glass of wine.
A girl in a faded frock of some purplish material that showed the strong curves of her shoulders and breasts slouched into the room, her hands in the pocket of a dark blue apron against which her rounded forearms showed golden brown. Her face had the same golden tan under a mass of dark blonde hair. She smiled when she saw the two soldiers, drawing her thin lips away from her ugly yellow teeth.
“Ca va bien, Antoinette?” asked Andrews.
“Oui,” she said, looking beyond their heads at the French soldier who sat at the other side of the little room.
“A bottle of vin rouge, vite,” said Chrisfield.
“Ye needn't be so damn vite about it tonight, Chris,” said one of the men at the other table.
“Why?”
“Ain't a-goin' to be no roll call. Corporal tole me his-self. Sarge's gone out to git stewed, an' the Loot's away.”
“Sure,” said another man, “we kin stay out as late's we goddam please tonight.”
“There's a new M.P. in town,” said Chrisfield.... “Ah saw him maself.... You did, too, didn't you, Andy?”
Andrews nodded. He was looking at the Frenchman, who sat with his face in shadow and his black lashes covering his eyes. A purplish flash had suffused the olive skin at his cheekbones.
“Oh, boy,” said Chrisfield. “That ole wine sure do go down fast.... Say, Antoinette, got any cognac?”
“I'm going to have some more wine,” said Andrews.
“Go ahead, Andy; have all ye want. Ah want some-thin' to warm ma guts.”
Antoinette brought a bottle of cognac and two small glasses and sat down in an empty chair with her red hands crossed on her apron. Her eyes moved from Chrisfield to the Frenchman and back again.
Chrisfield turned a little round in his chair and looked at the Frenchman, feeling in his eyes for a moment a glance of the man's yellowish-brown eyes.
Andrews leaned back against the wall sipping his dark-colored wine, his eyes contracted dreamily, fixed on the shadow of the chandelier, which the cheap oil-lamp with its tin reflector cast on the peeling plaster of the wall opposite.
Chrisfield punched him.
“Wake up, Andy, are you asleep?”
“No,” said Andy smiling.
“Have a li'l mo' cognac.”
Chrisfield poured out two more glasses unsteadily. His eyes were on Antoinette again. The faded purple frock was hooked at the neck. The first three hooks were undone revealing a V-shape of golden brown skin and a bit of whitish underwear.
“Say, Andy,” he said, putting his arm round his friend's neck and talking into his ear, “talk up to her for me, will yer, Andy?... Ah won't let that goddam frog get her, no, I won't, by Gawd. Talk up to her for me, Andy.”
Andrews laughed.
“I'll try,” he said. “But there's always the Queen of Sheba, Chris.”
“Antoinette, j'ai un ami,” started Andrews, making a gesture with a long dirty hand towards Chris.
Antoinette showed her bad teeth in a smile.
“Joli garcon,” said Andrews.
Antoinette's face became impassive and beautiful again. Chrisfield leaned back in his chair with an empty glass in his hand and watched his friend admiringly.
“Antoinette, mon ami vous... vous admire,” said Andrews in a courtly voice.
A woman put her head in the door. It was the same face and hair as Antoinette's, ten years older, only the skin, instead of being golden brown, was sallow and wrinkled.
“Viens,” said the woman in a shrill voice.
Antoinette got up, brushed heavily against Chrisfield's leg as she passed him and disappeared. The Frenchman walked across the room from his corner, saluted gravely and went out.
Chrisfield jumped to his feet. The room was like a white box reeling about him.
“That frog's gone after her,” he shouted.
“No, he ain't, Chris,” cried someone from the next table. “Sit tight, ole boy. We're bettin' on yer.”
“Yes, sit down and have a drink, Chris,” said Andy. “I've got to have somethin' more to drink. I haven't had a thing to drink all the evening.” He pulled him back into his chair. Chrisfield tried to get up again. Andrews hung on him so that the chair upset. Then both sprawled on the red tiles of the floor.
“The house is pinched!” said a voice.
Chrisfield saw Judkins standing over him, a grin on his large red face. He got to his feet and sat sulkily in his chair again. Andrews was already sitting opposite him, looking impassive as ever.
The tables were full now. Someone was singing in a droning voice.