Three Soldiers (21 page)

Like a sudden nausea, disgust surged up in him. His mind ceased formulating phrases and thoughts. He gave himself over to disgust as a man who has drunk a great deal, holding on tight to the reins of his will, suddenly gives himself over pellmell to drunkenness.

He lay very still, with his eyes closed, listening to the stir of the ward, the voices of men talking and the fits of coughing that shook the man next him. The smarting pain throbbed monotonously. He felt hungry and wondered vaguely if it were supper time. How little they gave you to eat in the hospital!

He called over to the man in the opposite cot:

“Hay, Stalky, what time is it?”

“It’s after messtime now. Got a good appetite for the steak and onions and French fried potatoes?”

“Shut up.”

A rattling of tin dishes at the other end of the ward made Andrews wriggle up further on his pillow. Verses from the “Shropshire Lad” jingled mockingly through his head:

After he had eaten, he picked up the “Tentation de Saint Antoine,” that lay on the cot beside his immovable legs, and buried himself in it, reading the gorgeously modulated sentences voraciously, as if the book were a drug in which he could drink deep forgetfulness of himself.

He put the book down and closed his eyes. His mind was full of intangible floating glow, like the ocean on a warm night, when every wave breaks into pale flame, and mysterious milky lights keep rising to the surface out of the dark waters and gleaming and vanishing. He became absorbed in the strange fluid harmonies that permeated his whole body, as a grey sky at nightfall suddenly becomes filled with endlessly changing patterns of light and color and shadow.

When he tried to seize hold of his thoughts, to give them definite musical expression in his mind, he found himself suddenly empty, the way a sandy inlet on the beach that has been full of shoals of silver fishes, becomes suddenly empty when a shadow crosses the water, and the man who is watching sees wanly his own reflection instead of the flickering of thousands of tiny silver bodies.

John Andrews awoke to feel a cold hand on his head.

“Feeling all right?” said a voice in his ear.

He found himself looking in a puffy, middle-aged face, with a lean nose and grey eyes, with dark rings under them. Andrews felt the eyes looking him over inquisitively. He saw the red triangle on the man’s khaki sleeve.

“Yes,” he said.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you a little while, buddy.”

“Not a bit; have you got a chair?” said Andrews smiling.

“I don’t suppose it was just right of me to wake you up, but you see it was this way. … You were the next in line, an’ I was afraid I’d forget you, if I skipped you.”

“I understand,” said Andrews, with a sudden determination to take the initiative away from the “Y” man. “How long have you been in France? D’you like the war?” he asked hurriedly.

The “Y” man smiled sadly.

“You seem pretty spry,” he said. “I guess you’re in a hurry to get back at the front and get some more Huns.” He smiled again, with an air of indulgence.

Andrews did not answer.

“No, sonny, I don’t like it here,” the “Y” man said, after a pause. “I wish I was home—but it’s great to feel you’re doing your duty.”

“It must be,” said Andrews.

“Have you heard about the great air raids our boys have pulled off? They’ve bombarded Frankfort; now if they could only wipe Berlin off the map.”

“Say, d’you hate ’em awful hard?” said Andrews in a low voice. “Because, if you do, I can tell you something will tickle you most to death. … Lean over.”

The “Y” man leant over curiously.

“Some German prisoners come to this hospital at six every night to get the garbage; now all you need to do if you really hate ’em so bad is borrow a revolver from one of your officer friends, and just shoot up the convoy. …”

“Say … where were you raised, boy?” The “Y” man sat up suddenly with a look of alarm on his face. “Don’t you know that prisoners are sacred?”

“D’you know what our colonel told us before going into the Argonne offensive? The more prisoners we took, the less grub there’ld be; and do you know what happened to the prisoners that were taken? Why do you hate the Huns?”

“Because they are barbarians, enemies of civilization. You must have enough education to know that,” said the “Y” man, raising his voice angrily. “What church do you belong to?”

“None.”

“But you must have been connected with some church, boy. You can’t have been raised a heathen in America. Every Christian belongs or has belonged to some church or other from baptism.”

“I make no pretensions to Christianity.”

Andrews closed his eyes and turned his head away. He could feel the “Y” man hovering over him irresolutely. After a while he opened his eyes. The “Y” man was leaning over the next bed.

Through the window at the opposite side of the ward he could see a bit of blue sky among white scroll-like clouds, with mauve shadows. He stared at it until the clouds, beginning to grow golden into evening, covered it. Furious, hopeless irritation consumed him. How these people enjoyed hating! At that rate it was better to be at the front. Men were more humane when they were killing each other than when they were talking about it. So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression. Oh, but there must be something more in the world than greed and hatred and cruelty. Were they all shams, too, these gigantic phrases that floated like gaudy kites high above mankind? Kites, that was it, contraptions of tissue paper held at the end of a string, ornaments not to be taken seriously. He thought of all the long procession of men who had been touched by the unutterable futility of the lives of men, who had tried by phrases to make things otherwise, who had taught unworldliness. Dim enigmatic figures they were—Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, Christ; so many of them, and so vague in the silvery mist of history that he hardly knew that they were not his own imagining; Lucretius, St. Francis, Voltaire, Rousseau, and how many others, known and unknown, through the tragic centuries; they had wept, some of them, and some of them had laughed, and their phrases had risen glittering, soap bubbles to dazzle men for a moment, and had shattered. And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, to live his life as he saw it in spite of everything, to proclaim once more the falseness of the gospels under the cover of which greed and fear filled with more and yet more pain the already unbearable agony of human life.

As soon as he got out of the hospital he would desert; the determination formed suddenly in his mind, making the excited blood surge gloriously through his body. There was nothing else to do; he would desert. He pictured himself hobbling away in the dark on his lame legs, stripping his uniform off, losing himself in some out of the way corner of France, or slipping by the sentries to Spain and freedom. He was ready to endure anything, to face any sort of death, for the sake of a few months of liberty in which to forget the degradation of this last year. This was his last run with the pack.

An enormous exhilaration took hold of him. It seemed the first time in his life he had ever determined to act. All the rest had been aimless drifting. The blood sang in his ears. He fixed his eyes on the half-obliterated figures that supported the shields under the beams in the wall opposite. They seemed to be wriggling out of their contorted positions and smiling encouragement to him. He imagined them, warriors out of old tales, on their way to slay dragons in enchanted woods, clever-fingered guildsmen and artisans, cupids and satyrs and fauns, jumping from their niches and carrying him off with them in a headlong rout, to a sound of flutes, on a last forlorn assault on the citadels of pain.

The lights went out, and an orderly came round with chocolate that poured with a pleasant soothing sound into the tin cups. With a greasiness of chocolate in his mouth and the warmth of it in his stomach, John Andrews went to sleep.

There was a stir in the ward when he woke up. Reddish sunlight filtered in through the window opposite, and from outside came a confused noise, a sound of bells ringing and whistles blowing.

Andrews looked past his feet towards Stalky’s cot opposite. Stalky was sitting bolt upright in bed, with his eyes round as quarters.

“Fellers, the war’s over!”

“Put him out.”

“Cut that.”

“Pull the chain.”

“Tie that bull outside,” came from every side of the ward.

“Fellers,” shouted Stalky louder than ever, “it’s straight dope, the war’s over. I just dreamt the Kaiser came up to me on Fourteenth Street and bummed a nickel for a glass of beer. The war’s over. Don’t you hear the whistles?”

“All right; let’s go home.”

“Shut up, can’t you let a feller sleep?”

The ward quieted down again, but all eyes were wide open, men lay strangely still in their cots, waiting, wondering.

“All I can say,” shouted Stalky again, “is that she was some war while she lasted. … What did I tell yer?”

As he spoke the canvas screen in front of the door collapsed and the major appeared with his cap askew over his red face and a brass bell in his hand, which he rang frantically as he advanced into the ward.

“Men,” he shouted in the deep roar of one announcing baseball scores, “the war ended at 4:03 A.M. this morning. … The Armistice is signed. To hell with the Kaiser!” Then he rang the dinner bell madly and danced along the aisle between the rows of cots, holding the head nurse by one hand, who held a little yellow-headed lieutenant by the other hand, who, in turn, held another nurse, and so on. The line advanced jerkily into the ward; the front part was singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and the rear the “Yanks are Coming,” and through it all the major rang his brass bell. The men who were well enough sat up in bed and yelled. The others rolled restlessly about, sickened by the din.

They made the circuit of the ward and filed out, leaving confusion behind them. The dinner bell could be heard faintly in the other parts of the building.

“Well, what d’you think of it, undertaker?” said Andrews.

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

The undertaker turned his small black eyes on Andrews and looked him straight in the face.

“You know what’s the matter with me, don’t yer, outside o’ this wound?”

“No.”

“Coughing like I am, I’d think you’d be more observant. I got t.b., young feller.”

“How do you know that?”

“They’re going to move me out o’ here to a t.b. ward tomorrow.”

“The hell they are!” Andrews’s words were lost in the paroxysm of coughing that seized the man next to him.

Those well enough were singing, Stalky conducting, standing on the end of his cot in his pink Red Cross pajamas, that were too short and showed a long expanse of skinny leg, fuzzy with red hairs. He banged together two bed pans to beat time.

“Home. … I won’t never go home,” said the undertaker when the noise had subsided a little. “D’you know what I wish? I wish the war’d gone on and on until everyone of them bastards had been killed in it.”

“Which bastards?”

“The men who got us fellers over here.” He began coughing again weakly.

“But they’ll be safe if every other human being …” began Andrews. He was interrupted by a thundering voice from the end of the ward.

“Attention!”

went on the song. Stalky glanced towards the end of the ward, and seeing it was the major, dropped the bed pans that smashed at the foot of his cot, and got as far as possible under his blankets.

“Attention!” thundered the major again. A sudden uncomfortable silence fell upon the ward, broken only by the coughing of the man next to Andrews.

“If I hear any more noise from this ward, I’ll chuck everyone of you men out of this hospital; if you can’t walk you’ll have to crawl. … The war may be over, but you men are in the Army, and don’t you forget it.”

The major glared up and down the lines of cots. He turned on his heel and went out of the door, glancing angrily as he went at the overturned screen. The ward was still. Outside whistles blew and churchbells rang madly, and now and then there was a sound of singing.

The snow beat against the windows and pattered on the tin roof of the lean-to, built against the side of the hospital, that went by the name of sun parlor. It was a dingy place, decorated by strings of dusty little paper flags that one of the “Y” men had festooned about the slanting beams of the ceiling to celebrate Christmas. There were tables with torn magazines piled on them, and a counter where cracked white cups were ranged waiting for one of the rare occasions when cocoa could be bought. In the middle of the room, against the wall of the main building, a stove was burning, about which sat several men in hospital denims talking in drowsy voices. Andrews watched them from his seat by the window, looking at their broad backs bent over towards the stove and at the hands that hung over their knees, limp from boredom. The air was heavy with a smell of coal gas mixed with carbolic from men’s clothes, and stale cigarette smoke. Behind the cups at the counter a “Y” man, a short, red-haired man with freckles, read the Paris edition of the
New York Herald.
Andrews, in his seat by the window, felt permeated by the stagnation about him: He had a sheaf of pencilled music-papers on his knees, that he rolled and unrolled nervously, staring at the stove and the motionless backs of the men about it. The stove roared a little, the “Y” man’s paper rustled, men’s voices came now and then in a drowsy whisper, and outside the snow beat evenly and monotonously against the window panes. Andrews pictured himself vaguely walking fast through the streets, with the snow stinging his face and the life of a city swirling about him, faces flushed by the cold, bright eyes under hatbrims, looking for a second into his and passing on; slim forms of women bundled in shawls that showed vaguely the outline of their breasts and hips. He wondered if he would ever be free again to walk at random through city streets. He stretched his legs out across the floor in front of him; strange, stiff, tremulous legs they were, but it was not the wounds that gave them their leaden weight. It was the stagnation of the life about him that he felt sinking into every crevice of his spirit, so that he could never shake it off, the stagnation of dusty ruined automatons that had lost all life of their own, whose limbs had practised the drill manual so long that they had no movements of their own left, who sat limply, sunk in boredom, waiting for orders.

Andrews was roused suddenly from his thoughts; he had been watching the snowflakes in their glittering dance just outside the window pane, when the sound of someone rubbing his hands very close to him made him look up. A little man with chubby cheeks and steel-grey hair very neatly flattened against his skull, stood at the window rubbing his fat little white hands together and making a faint unctuous puffing with each breath. Andrews noticed that a white clerical collar enclosed the little man’s pink neck, that starched cuffs peeped from under the well-tailored sleeves of his officer’s uniform. Sam Brown belt and puttees, too, were highly polished. On his shoulder was a demure little silver cross. Andrews’s glance had reached the pink cheeks again, when he suddenly found a pair of steely eyes looking sharply into his.

“You look quite restored, my friend,” said a chanting clerical voice.

“I suppose I am.”

“Splendid, splendid. … But do you mind moving into the end of the room? That’s it.” He followed Andrews, saying in a deprecatory tone: “We’re going to have just a little bit of a prayer and then I have some interesting things to tell you boys.”

The red-headed “Y” man had left his seat and stood in the center of the room, his paper still dangling from his hand, saying in a bored voice: “Please fellows, move down to the end. … Quiet, please. … Quiet, please.”

The soldiers shambled meekly to the folding chairs at the end of the room and after some chattering were quiet. A couple of men left, and several tiptoed in and sat in the front row. Andrews sank into a chair with a despairing sort of resignation, and burying his face in his hands stared at the floor between his feet.

“Fellers,” went on the bored voice of the “Y” man, “let me introduce the Reverend Dr. Skinner, who—” the “Y” man’s voice suddenly took on deep patriotic emotion—“who has just come back from the Army of Occupation in Germany.”

At the words “Army of Occupation,” as if a spring had been touched, everybody clapped and cheered.

The Reverend Dr. Skinner looked about his audience with smiling confidence and raised his hands for silence, so that the men could see the chubby pink palms.

“First, boys, my dear friends, let us indulge in a few moments of silent prayer to our Great Creator,” his voice rose and fell in the suave chant of one accustomed to going through the episcopal liturgy for the edification of well-dressed and well-fed congregations. “Inasmuch as He has vouchsafed us safety and a mitigation of our afflictions, and let us pray that in His good time He may see fit to return us whole in limb and pure in heart to our families, to the wives, mothers, and to those whom we will some day honor with the name of wife, who eagerly await our return; and that we may spend the remainder of our lives in useful service of the great country for whose safety and glory we have offered up our youth a willing sacrifice. … Let us pray!”

Silence fell dully on the room. Andrews could hear the self-conscious breathing of the men about him, and the rustling of the snow against the tin roof. A few feet scraped. The voice began again after a long pause, chanting:

“Our Father which art in Heaven …”

At the “Amen” everyone lifted his head cheerfully. Throats were cleared, chairs scraped. Men settled themselves to listen.

“Now, my friends, I am going to give you in a few brief words a little glimpse into Germany, so that you may be able to picture to yourselves the way your comrades of the Army of Occupation manage to make themselves comfortable among the Huns. … I ate my Christmas dinner in Coblenz. What do you think of that? Never had I thought that a Christmas would find me away from my home and loved ones. But what unexpected things happen to us in this world! Christmas in Coblenz under the American flag!”

He paused a moment to allow a little scattered clapping to subside.

“The turkey was fine, too, I can tell you. … Yes, our boys in Germany are very, very comfortable, and just waiting for the word, if necessary, to continue their glorious advance to Berlin. For I am sorry to say, boys, that the Germans have not undergone the change of heart for which we had hoped. They have, indeed, changed the name of their institutions, but their spirit they have not changed. … How grave a disappointment it must be to our great President, who has exerted himself so to bring the German people to reason, to make them understand the horror that they alone have brought deliberately upon the world! Alas! Far from it. Indeed, they have attempted with insidious propaganda to undermine the morale of our troops. …” A little storm of muttered epithets went through the room. The Reverend Dr. Skinner elevated his chubby pink palms and smiled benignantly … “to undermine the morale of our troops; so that the most stringent regulations have had to be made by the commanding general to prevent it. Indeed, my friends, I very much fear that we stopped too soon in our victorious advance; that Germany should have been utterly crushed. But all we can do is watch and wait, and abide by the decision of those great men who in a short time will be gathered together at the Conference at Paris. … Let me, boys, my dear friends, express the hope that you may speedily be cured of your wounds, ready again to do willing service in the ranks of the glorious army that must be vigilant for some time yet, I fear, to defend, as Americans and Christians, the civilization you have so nobly saved from a ruthless foe. … Let us all join together in singing the hymn,
‘Stand up, stand up for Jesus,’
which I am sure you all know.”

The men got to their feet, except for a few who had lost their legs, and sang the first verse of the hymn unsteadily. The second verse petered out altogether, leaving only the “Y” man and the Reverend Dr. Skinner singing away at the top of their lungs.

The Reverend Dr. Skinner pulled out his gold watch and looked at it frowning.

“Oh, my, I shall miss the train,” he muttered. The “Y” man helped him into his voluminous trench coat and they both hurried out of the door.

“Those are some puttees he had on, I’ll tell you,” said the legless man who was propped in a chair near the stove.

Andrews sat down beside him, laughing. He was a man with high cheekbones and powerful jaws to whose face the pale brown eyes and delicately pencilled lips gave a look of great gentleness. Andrews did not look at his body.

“Somebody said he was a Red Cross man giving out cigarettes. … Fooled us that time,” said Andrews.

“Have a butt? I’ve got one,” said the legless man. With a large shrunken hand that was the transparent color of alabaster he held out a box of cigarettes.

“Thanks.” When Andrews struck a match he had to lean over the legless man to light his cigarette for him. He could not help glancing down the man’s tunic at the drab trousers that hung limply from the chair. A cold shudder went through him; he was thinking of the zigzag scars on his own thighs.

“Did you get it in the legs, too, Buddy?” asked the legless man, quietly.

“Yes, but I had luck. … How long have you been here?”

“Since Christ was a corporal. Oh, I doan know. I’ve been here since two weeks after my outfit first went into the lines. … That was on November 16th, 1917. … Didn’t see much of the war, did I? … Still, I guess I didn’t miss much.”

“No. … But you’ve seen enough of the army.”

“That’s true. … I guess I wouldn’t mind the war if it wasn’t for the army.”

“They’ll be sending you home soon, won’t they?”

“Guess so. … Where are you from?”

“New York,” said Andrews.

“I’m from Cranston, Wisconsin. D’you know that country? It’s a great country for lakes. You can canoe for days an’ days without a portage. We have a camp on Big Loon Lake. We used to have some wonderful times there … lived like wild men. I went for a trip for three weeks once without seeing a house. Ever done much canoeing?”

“Not so much as I’d like to.”

“That’s the thing to make you feel fit. First thing you do when you shake out of your blankets is jump in an’ have a swim. Gee, it’s great to swim when the morning mist is still on the water an’ the sun just strikes the tops of the birch trees. Ever smelt bacon cooking? I mean out in the woods, in a frying pan over some sticks of pine and beech wood. … Some great old smell, isn’t it? … And after you’ve paddled all day, an’ feel tired and sunburned right to the palms of your feet, to sit around the fire with some trout roastin’ in the ashes and hear the sizzlin’ the bacon makes in the pan. … O boy!” He stretched his arms wide.

“God, I’d like to have wrung that damn little parson’s neck,” said Andrews suddenly.

“Would you?” The legless man turned brown eyes on Andrews with a smile. “I guess he’s about as much to blame as anybody is … guys like him. … I guess they have that kind in Germany, too.”

“You don’t think we’ve made the world quite as safe for Democracy as it might be?” said Andrews in a low voice.

“Hell, how should I know? I bet you never drove an ice wagon. … I did, all one summer down home. … It was some life. Get up at three o’clock in the morning an’ carry a hundred or two hundred pounds of ice into everybody’s ice box. That was the life to make a feller feel fit. I was goin’ around with a big Norwegian named Olaf, who was the strongest man I ever knew. An’ drink! He was the boy could drink. I once saw him put away twenty-five dry Martini cocktails an’ swim across the lake on top of it. … I used to weigh a hundred and eighty pounds, and he could pick me up with one hand and put me across his shoulder. … That was the life to make a feller feel fit. Why, after bein’ out late the night before, we’d jump up out of bed at three o’clock feeling springy as a cat.”

“What’s he doing now?” asked Andrews.

“He died on the transport coming ’cross here. Died o’ the flu. … I met a feller came over in his regiment. They dropped him overboard when they were in sight of the Azores. … Well, I didn’t die of the flu. Have another butt?”

“No, thanks,” said Andrews.

They were silent. The fire roared in the stove. No one was talking. The men lolled in chairs somnolently. Now and then someone spat. Outside of the window Andrews could see the soft white dancing of the snowflakes. His limbs felt very heavy; his mind was permeated with dusty stagnation like the stagnation of old garrets and lumber rooms, where, among superannuated bits of machinery and cracked grimy crockery, lie heaps of broken toys.

John Andrews sat on a bench in a square full of linden trees, with the pale winter sunshine full on his face and hands. He had been looking up through his eyelashes at the sun, that was the color of honey, and he let his dazzled glance sink slowly through the black lacework of twigs, down the green trunks of the trees to the bench opposite where sat two nurse-maids and, between them, a tiny girl with a face daintily colored and lifeless like a doll’s face, and a frilled dress under which showed small ivory knees and legs encased in white socks and yellow sandals. Above the yellow halo of her hair floated, with the sun shining through it, as through a glass of claret, a bright carmine balloon which the child held by a string. Andrews looked at her for a long time, enraptured by the absurd daintiness of the figure between the big bundles of flesh of the nurse-maids. The thought came to him suddenly that months had gone by,— was it only months?—since his hands had touched anything soft, since he had seen any flowers. The last was a flower an old woman had given him in a village in the Argonne, an orange marigold, and he remembered how soft the old woman’s withered lips had been against his cheek when she had leaned over and kissed him. His mind suddenly lit up, as with a strain of music, with a sense of the sweetness of quiet lives worn away monotonously in the fields, in the grey streets of little provincial towns, in old kitchens full of fragrance of herbs and tang of smoke from the hearth, where there are pots on the window-sill full of basil in flower.