John Passos - 3 books to know World War I

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

Fuselli turned round.

Eisenstein was sitting in the place Meadville had just left.

“You do, do you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That's funny,” said Fuselli.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wait a sec!” came an unfamiliar voice.

“Sergeant Olster here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You sick?” a man asked Fuselli.

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

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

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

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

“Spinal somethin'....”

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

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

“It sure is.”

“Where does it hit yer?” asked Fuselli.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several men laughed.

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

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

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