Three Soldiers (27 page)

After looking a long while in the window of the café of the Braves Alliés, he walked a little down the street and stood in the same position staring into the Repos du Poilu, where a large sign “American spoken” blocked up half the window. Two officers passed. His hand snapped up to the salute automatically, like a mechanical signal. It was nearly dark. After a while he began to feel serious coolness in the wind, shivered and started to wander aimlessly down the street.

He recognised Walters coming towards him and was going to pass him without speaking when Walters bumped into him, muttered in his ear

“Come to Baboon’s,” and hurried off with his swift business-like stride. Andrews stood irresolutely for a while with his head bent, then went with unresilient steps up the alley, through the hole in the hedge and into Babette’s kitchen. There was no fire. He stared morosely at the grey ashes until he heard Walters’s voice beside him:

“I’ve got you all fixed up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mean … are you asleep, Andrews? They’ve cut a name off the school list, that’s all. Now if you shake a leg and somebody doesn’t get in ahead of you, you’ll be in Paris before you know it.”

“That’s damn decent of you to come and tell me.”

“Here’s your application,” said Walters, drawing a paper out of his pocket. “Take it to the colonel; get him to O.K. it and then rush it up to the sergeant-major’s office yourself. They are making out travel orders now. So long.”

Walters had vanished. Andrews was alone again, staring at the grey ashes. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and hurried off towards headquarters. In the anteroom to the colonel’s office he waited a long while, looking at his boots that were thickly coated with mud. “Those boots will make a bad impression; those boots will make a bad impression,” a voice was saying over and over again inside of him. A lieutenant was also waiting to see the colonel, a young man with pink cheeks and a milky-white forehead, who held his hat in one hand with a pair of khaki-colored kid gloves, and kept passing a hand over his light well-brushed hair. Andrews felt dirty and ill-smelling in his badly-fitting uniform. The sight of this perfect young man in his whipcord breeches, with his manicured nails and immaculately polished puttees exasperated him. He would have liked to fight him, to prove that he was the better man, to outwit him, to make him forget his rank and his important air. … The lieutenant had gone in to see the colonel. Andrews found himself reading a chart of some sort tacked up on the wall. There were names and dates and figures, but he could not make out what it was about.

“All right! Go ahead,” whispered the orderly to him; and he was standing with his cap in his hand before the colonel who was looking at him severely, fingering the papers he had on the desk with a heavily veined hand.

Andrews saluted. The colonel made an impatient gesture.

“May I speak to you, Colonel, about the school scheme?”

“I suppose you’ve got permission from somebody to come to me.”

“No, sir.” Andrews’s mind was struggling to find something to say.

“Well, you’ld better go and get it.”

“But, Colonel, there isn’t time; the travel orders are being made out at this minute. I’ve heard that there’s been a name crossed out on the list.”

“Too late.”

“But, Colonel, you don’t know how important it is. I am a musician by trade; if I can’t get into practice again before being demobilized, I shan’t be able to get a job. … I have a mother and an old aunt dependent on me. My family has seen better days, you see, sir. It’s only by being high up in my profession that I can earn enough to give them what they are accustomed to. And a man in your position in the world, Colonel, must know what even a few months of study in Paris mean to a pianist.”

The colonel smiled.

“Let’s see your application,” he said.

Andrews handed it to him with a trembling hand. The colonel made a few marks on one corner with a pencil.

“Now if you can get that to the sergeant-major in time to have your name included in the orders, well and good.”

Andrews saluted, and hurried out. A sudden feeling of nausea had come over him. He was hardly able to control a mad desire to tear the paper up. “The sons of bitches … the sons of bitches,” he muttered to himself. Still he ran all the way to the square, isolated building where the regimental office was.

He stopped panting in front of the desk that bore the little red card, Regimental Sergeant-Major. The regimental sergeant-major looked up at him enquiringly.

“Here’s an application for School at the Sorbonne, Sergeant. Colonel Wilkins told me to run up to you with it, said he was very anxious to have it go in at once.”

“Too late,” said the regimental sergeant-major.

“But the colonel said it had to go in.”

“Can’t help it. … Too late,” said the regimental sergeant-major.

Andrews felt the room and the men in their olive-drab shirt sleeves at the typewriters and the three nymphs creeping from behind the French War Loan poster whirl round his head. Suddenly he heard a voice behind him:

“Is the name Andrews, John, Sarge?”

“How the hell should I know?” said the regimental sergeant-major.

“Because I’ve got it in the orders already. … I don’t know how it got in.” The voice was Walters’s voice, staccatto and business-like.

“Well, then, why d’you want to bother me about it? Give me that paper.” The regimental sergeant-major jerked the paper out of Andrews’s hand and looked at it savagely.

“All right, you leave tomorrow. A copy of the orders’ll go to your company in the morning,” growled the regimental sergeant-major.

Andrews looked hard at Walters as he went out, but got no glance in return. When he stood in the air again, disgust surged up within him, bitterer than before. The fury of his humiliation made tears start in his eyes. He walked away from the village down the main road, splashing carelessly through the puddles, slipping in the wet clay of the ditches. Something within him, like the voice of a wounded man swearing, was whining in his head long strings of filthy names. After walking a long while he stopped suddenly with his fists clenched. It was completely dark, the sky was faintly marbled by a moon behind the clouds. On both sides of the road rose the tall grey skeletons of poplars. When the sound of his footsteps stopped, he heard a faint lisp of running water. Standing still in the middle of the road, he felt his feelings gradually relax. He said aloud in a low voice several times: “You are a damn fool, John Andrews,” and started walking slowly and thoughtfully back to the village.

Andrews felt an arm put round his shoulder.

“Ah’ve been to hell an’ gone lookin’ for you, Andy,” said Chrisfield’s voice in his ear, jerking him out of the reverie he walked in. He could feel in his face Chrisfield’s breath, heavy with cognac.

“I’m going to Paris tomorrow, Chris,” said Andrews.

“Ah know it, boy. Ah know it. That’s why I was that right smart to talk to you. … You doan want to go to Paris. … Why doan ye come up to Germany with us? Tell me they live like kings up there.”

“All right,” said Andrews, “let’s go to the back room at Babette’s.”

Chrisfield hung on his shoulder, walking unsteadily beside him. At the hole in the hedge Chrisfield stumbled and nearly pulled them both down. They laughed, and still laughing staggered into the dark kitchen, where they found the red-faced woman with her baby sitting beside the fire with no other light than the flicker of the rare flames that shot up from a little mass of wood embers. The baby started crying shrilly when the two soldiers stamped in. The woman got up and, talking automatically to the baby all the while, went off to get a light and wine.

Andrews looked at Chrisfield’s face by the firelight. His cheeks had lost the faint childish roundness they had had when Andrews had first talked to him, sweeping up cigarette butts off the walk in front of the barracks at the training camp.

“Ah tell you, boy, you ought to come with us to Germany … nau-thin’ but whores in Paris.”

“The trouble is, Chris, that I don’t want to live like a king, or a sergeant or a major-general. … I want to live like John Andrews.”

“What yer goin’ to do in Paris, Andy?”

“Study music.”

“Ah guess some day Ah’ll go into a movie show an’ when they turn on the lights, who’ll Ah see but ma ole frien’ Andy raggin’ the scales on the pyaner.”

“Something like that. … How d’you like being a corporal, Chris?”

“O, Ah doan know.” Chrisfield spat on the floor between his feet. “It’s funny, ain’t it? You an’ me was right smart friends onct. … Guess it’s bein’ a non-com.”

Andrews did not answer.

Chrisfield sat silent with his eyes on the fire.

“Well, Ah got him. … Gawd, it was easy,” he said suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“Ah got him, that’s all.”

“You mean … ?”

Chrisfield nodded.

“Um-hum, in the Oregon forest,” he said.

Andrews said nothing. He felt suddenly very tired. He thought of men he had seen in attitudes of death.

“Ah wouldn’t ha’ thought it had been so easy,” said Chrisfield.

The woman came through the door at the end of the kitchen with a candle in her hand. Chrisfield stopped speaking suddenly.

“Tomorrow I’m going to Paris,” cried Andrews boisterously. “It’s the end of soldiering for me.”

“Ah bet it’ll be some sport in Germany, Andy. … Sarge says we’ll be goin’ up to Coab … what’s its name?”

“Coblenz.”

Chrisfield poured a glass of wine out and drank it off, smacking his lips after it and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand.

“D’ye remember, Andy, we was both of us brushin’ cigarette butts at that bloody trainin’ camp when we first met up with each other?”

“Considerable water has run under the bridge since then.”

“Ah reckon we won’t meet up again, mos’ likely.”

“Hell, why not?”

They were silent again, staring at the fading embers of the fire. In the dim edge of the candlelight the woman stood with her hands on her hips, looking at them fixedly.

“Reckon a feller wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he did get out of the army, … now, would he, Andy?”

“So long, Chris. I’m beating it,” said Andrews in a harsh voice, jumping to his feet.

“So long, Andy, ole man. … Ah’ll pay for the drinks.” Chrisfield was beckoning with his hand to the red-faced woman, who advanced slowly through the candlelight.

“Thanks, Chris.”

Andrews strode away from the door. A cold, needle-like rain was falling. He pulled up his coat collar and ran down the muddy village street towards his quarters.

In the opposite corner of the compartment Andrews could see Walters hunched up in an attitude of sleep, with his cap pulled down far over his eyes. His mouth was open, and his head wagged with the jolting of the train. The shade over the light plunged the compartment in dark-blue obscurity, which made the night sky outside the window and the shapes of trees and houses, evolving and pirouetting as they glided by, seem very near. Andrews felt no desire to sleep; he had sat a long time leaning his head against the frame of the window, looking out at the fleeing shadows and the occasional little red-green lights that darted by and the glow of the stations that flared for a moment and were lost in dark silhouettes of unlighted houses and skeleton trees and black hillsides. He was thinking how all the epochs in his life seemed to have been marked out by railway rides at night. The jolting rumble of the wheels made the blood go faster through his veins; made him feel acutely the clattering of the train along the gleaming rails, spurning fields and trees and houses, piling up miles and miles between the past and future. The gusts of cold night air when he opened the window and the faint whiffs of steam and coal gas that tingled in his nostrils excited him like a smile on a strange face seen for a moment in a crowded street. He did not think of what he had left behind. He was straining his eyes eagerly through the darkness towards the vivid life he was going to live. Boredom and abasement were over. He was free to work and hear music and make friends. He drew deep breaths; warm waves of vigor seemed flowing constantly from his lungs and throat to his finger tips and down through his body and the muscles of his legs. He looked at his watch: “One.” In six hours he would be in Paris. For six hours he would sit there looking out at the fleeting shadows of the countryside, feeling in his blood the eager throb of the train, rejoicing in every mile the train carried him away from things past.

Walters still slept, half slipping off the seat, with his mouth open and his overcoat bundled round his head. Andrews looked out of the window, feeling in his nostrils the tingle of steam and coal gas. A phrase out of some translation of the Iliad came to his head: “Ambrosial night, Night ambrosial unending.” But better than sitting round a camp fire drinking wine and water and listening to the boastful yarns of long-haired Achæans, was this hustling through the countryside away from the monotonous whine of past unhappiness, towards joyousness and life.

Andrews began to think of the men he had left behind. They were asleep at this time of night, in barns and barracks, or else standing on guard with cold damp feet, and cold hands which the icy rifle barrel burned when they tended it. He might go far away out of sound of the tramp of marching, away from the smell of overcrowded barracks where men slept in rows like cattle, but he would still be one of them. He would not see an officer pass him without an unconscious movement of servility, he would not hear a bugle without feeling sick with hatred. If he could only express these thwarted lives, the miserable dullness of industrialized slaughter, it might have been almost worth while—for him; for the others, it would never be worth while. “But you’re talking as if you were out of the woods; you’re a soldier still, John Andrews.” The words formed themselves in his mind as vividly as if he had spoken them. He smiled bitterly and settled himself again to watch silhouettes of trees and hedges and houses and hillsides fleeing against the dark sky.

When he awoke the sky was grey. The train was moving slowly, clattering loudly over switches, through a town of wet slate roofs that rose in fantastic patterns of shadow above the blue mist. Walters was smoking a cigarette.

“God! These French trains are rotten,” he said when he noticed that Andrews was awake. “The most inefficient country I ever was in anyway.”

“Inefficiency be damned,” broke in Andrews, jumping up and stretching himself. He opened the window. “The heating’s too damned efficient. … I think we’re near Paris.”

The cold air, with a flavor of mist in it, poured into the stuffy compartment. Every breath was joy. Andrews felt a crazy buoyancy bubbling up in him. The rumbling clatter of the train wheels sang in his ears. He threw himself on his back on the dusty blue seat and kicked his heels in the air like a colt.

“Liven up, for God’s sake, man,” he shouted. “We’re getting near Paris.”

“We are lucky bastards,” said Walters, grinning, with the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “I’m going to see if I can find the rest of the gang.”

Andrews, alone in the compartment, found himself singing at the top of his lungs.

As the day brightened the mist lifted off the flat linden-green fields intersected by rows of leafless poplars. Salmon-colored houses with blue roofs wore already a faintly citified air. They passed brick-kilns and clay-quarries, with reddish puddles of water in the bottom of them; crossed a jade-green river where a long file of canal boats with bright paint on their prows moved slowly. The engine whistled shrilly. They clattered through a small freight yard, and rows of suburban houses began to form, at first chaotically in broad patches of garden-land, and then in orderly ranks with streets between and shops at the corners. A dark-grey dripping wall rose up suddenly and blotted out the view. The train slowed down and went through several stations crowded with people on their way to work,—ordinary people in varied clothes with only here and there a blue or khaki uniform. Then there was more dark-grey wall, and the obscurity of wide bridges under which dusty oil lamps burned orange and red, making a gleam on the wet wall above them, and where the wheels clanged loudly. More freight yards and the train pulled slowly past other trains full of faces and silhouettes of people, to stop with a jerk in a station. And Andrews was standing on the grey cement platform, sniffing smells of lumber and merchandise and steam. His ungainly pack and blanket-roll he carried on his shoulder like a cross. He had left his rifle and cartridge belt carefully tucked out of sight under the seat.

Walters and five other men straggled along the platform towards him, carrying or dragging their packs.

There was a look of apprehension on Walters’s face.

“Well, what do we do now?” he said.

“Do!” cried Andrews, and he burst out laughing.

Prostrate bodies in olive drab hid the patch of tender green grass by the roadside. The company was resting. Chrisfield sat on a stump morosely whittling at a stick with a pocket knife. Judkins was stretched out beside him.

“What the hell do they make us do this damn hikin’ for, Corp?”

“Guess they’re askeered we’ll forgit how to walk.”

“Well, ain’t it better than loafin’ around yer billets all day, thinkin’ an’ cursin’ an’ wishin’ ye was home?” spoke up the man who sat the other side, pounding down the tobacco in his pipe with a thick forefinger.

“It makes me sick, trampin’ round this way in ranks all day with the goddam frawgs starin’ at us an’…”

“They’re laughin’ at us, I bet,” broke in another voice.

“We’ll be movin’ soon to the Army o’ Occupation,” said Chrisfield cheerfully. “In Germany it’ll be a reglar picnic.”

“An’ d’you know what that means?” burst out Judkins, sitting bolt upright. “D’you know how long the troops is goin’ to stay in Germany? Fifteen years.”

“Gawd, they couldn’t keep us there that long, man.”

“They can do anythin’ they goddam please with us. We’re the guys as is gettin’ the raw end of this deal. It ain’t the same with an’ edicated guy like Andrews or Sergeant Coffin or them. They can suck around after ‘Y’ men, an’ officers an’ get on the inside track, an’ all we can do is stand up an’ salute an’ say ‘Yes, lootenant’ an’ ‘No, lootenant’ an’ let ’em ride us all they goddam please. Ain’t that gospel truth, corporal?”

“Ah guess you’re right, Judkie; we gits the raw end of the stick.”

“That damn yellar dawg Andrews goes to Paris an’ gets schoolin’ free an’ all that.”

“Hell, Andy waren’t yellar, Judkins.”

“Well, why did he go bellyachin’ around all the time like he knew more’n the lootenant did?”

“Ah reckon he did,” said Chrisfield.

“Anyway, you can’t say that those guys who went to Paris did a goddam thing more’n any the rest of us did. … Gawd, I ain’t even had a leave yet.”

“Well, it ain’t no use crabbin’.”

“No, onct we git home an’ folks know the way we’ve been treated, there’ll be a great ole investigation. I can tell you that,” said one of the new men.

“It makes you mad, though, to have something like that put over on ye. … Think of them guys in Paris, havin’ a hell of a time with wine an’ women, an’ we stay out here an’ clean our guns an’ drill. … God, I’d like to get even with some of them guys.”

The whistle blew. The patch of grass became unbroken green again as the men lined up along the side of the road.

“Fall in!” called the Sergeant.

“Atten-shun!”

“Right dress!”

“Front! God, you guys haven’t got no snap in yer. … Stick yer belly in, you. You know better than to stand like that.”

“Squads, right! March! Hep, hep, hep!”

The Company tramped off along the muddy road. Their steps were all the same length. Their arms swung in the same rhythm. Their faces were cowed into the same expression, their thoughts were the same. The tramp, tramp of their steps died away along the road.

Birds were singing among the budding trees. The young grass by the roadside kept the marks of the soldiers’ bodies.