John Passos - Three Soldiers

“If I get a chance. To finish my course.”

“College man, are ye? So am I. Well, I’ll let you know if I get any general order about it. Can’t do anything without getting a general order about it. Looks to me like it’s all bushwa.”

“I guess you’re right.”

The street was grey dark. Stung by a sense of impotence, surging with despairing rebelliousness, Andrews hurried back towards the buildings where the company was quartered. He would be late for mess. The grey street was deserted. From a window here and there ruddy light streamed out to make a glowing oblong on the wall of a house opposite.

“Goddam it, if ye don’t believe me, you go ask the lootenant… Look here, Toby, didn’t our outfit see hotter work than any goddam engineers’?”

Toby had just stepped into the café, a tall man with a brown bulldog face and a scar on his left cheek. He spoke rarely and solemnly with a Maine coast Yankee twang.

“I reckon so,” was all he said. He sat down on the bench beside the other man who went on bitterly:

“I guess you would reckon so… Hell, man, you ditch diggers ain’t in it.”

“Ditch diggers!” The engineer banged his fist down on the table. His lean pickled face was a furious red. “I guess we don’t dig half so many ditches as the infantry does… an’ when we’ve dug ’em we don’t crawl into ’em an’ stay there like goddam cottontailed jackrabbits.”

“You guys don’t git near enough to the front… ”

“Like goddam cottontailed jackrabbits,” shouted the pickle-faced engineer again, roaring with laughter. “Ain’t that so?” He looked round the room for approval. The benches at the two long tables were filled with infantry men who looked at him angrily. Noticing suddenly that he had no support, he moderated his voice.

“The infantry’s damn necessary, I’ll admit that; but where’d you fellers be without us guys to string the barbed wire for you?”

“There warn’t no barbed wire strung in the Oregon forest where we was, boy. What d’ye want barbed wire when you’re advancin’ for?”

“Look here… I’ll bet you a bottle of cognac my company had more losses than yourn did.”

“Tek him up, Joe,” said Toby, suddenly showing an interest in the conversation.

“All right, it’s a go.”

“We had fifteen killed and twenty wounded,” announced the engineer triumphantly.

“How badly wounded?”

“What’s that to you? Hand over the cognac?”

“Like hell. We had fifteen killed and twenty wounded too, didn’t we, Toby?”

“I reckon you’re right,” said Toby.

“Ain’t I right?” asked the other man, addressing the company generally.

“Sure, goddam right,” muttered voices.

“Well, I guess it’s all off, then,” said the engineer.

“No, it ain’t,” said Toby, “reckon up yer wounded. The feller who’s got the worst wounded gets the cognac. Ain’t that fair?”

“Sure.”

“We’ve had seven fellers sent home already,” said the engineer.

“We’ve had eight. Ain’t we?”

“Sure,” growled everybody in the room.

“How bad was they?”

“Two of ’em was blind,” said Toby.

“Hell,” said the engineer, jumping to his feet as if taking a trick at poker. “We had a guy who was sent home without arms nor legs, and three fellers got t.b. from bein’ gassed.”

John Andrews had been sitting in a corner of the room. He got up. Something had made him think of the mat, he had known in the hospital who had said that was the life to make a feller feel fit. Getting up at three o’clock in the morning, you jumped out of bed just like a cat… He remembered how the olive-drab trousers had dangled empty from the man’s chair.

“That’s nothing; one of our sergeants had to have a new nose grafted on… ”

The village street was dark and deeply rutted with mud. Andrews wandered up and down aimlessly. There was only one other café. That would be just like this one. He couldn’t go back to the desolate barn where he slept. It would be too early to go to sleep. A cold wind blew down the street and the sky was full of vague movement of dark clouds. The partly-frozen mud clotted about his feet as he walked along; he could feel the water penetrating his shoes. Opposite the Y.M.C.A. hut at the end of the street he stopped. After a moment’s indecision he gave a little laugh, and walked round to the back where the door of the “Y” man’s room was.

He knocked twice, half hoping there would be no reply.

Sheffield’s whining high-pitched voice said: “Who is it?”

“Andrews.”

“Come right in… You’re just the man I wanted to see.” Andrews stood with his hand on the knob.

“Do sit down and make yourself right at home.”

Spencer Sheffield was sitting at a little desk in a room with walls of unplaned boards and one small window. Behind the desk were piles of cracker boxes and cardboard cases of cigarettes and in the midst of them a little opening, like that of a railway ticket office, in the wall through which the “Y” man sold his commodities to the long lines of men who would stand for hours waiting meekly in the room beyond.

Andrews was looking round for a chair.

“Oh, I just forgot. I’m sitting in the only chair,” said Spencer Sheffield, laughing, twisting his small mouth into a shape like a camel’s mouth and rolling about his large protruding eyes. “Oh, that’s all right. What I wanted to ask you was: do you know anything about…?”

“Look, do come with me to my room,” interrupted Sheffield. “I’ve got such a nice sitting-room with an open fire, just next to Lieutenant Bleezer… An’ there we’ll talk… about everything. I’m just dying to talk to somebody about the things of the spirit.”

“Do you know anything about a scheme for sending enlisted men to French universities? Men who have not finished their courses.”

“Oh, wouldn’t that be just fine. I tell you, boy, there’s nothing like the U. S. government to think of things like that.”

“But have you heard anything about it?”

“No; but I surely shall… D’you mind switching the light off?… That’s it. Now just follow me. Oh, I do need a rest. I’ve been working dreadfully hard since that Knights of Columbus man came down here. Isn’t it hateful the way they try to run down the ‘Y’?… Now we can have a nice long talk. You must tell me all about yourself.”

“But don’t you really know anything about that university scheme? They say it begins February fifteenth,” Andrews said in a low voice.

“I’ll ask Lieutenant Bleezer if he knows anything about it,” said Sheffield soothingly, throwing an arm around Andrews’s shoulder and pushing him in the door ahead of him.

They went through a dark hall to a little room where a fire burned brilliantly in the hearth, lighting up with tongues of red and yellow a square black walnut table and two heavy armchairs with leather backs and bottoms that shone like lacquer.

“This is wonderful,” said Andrews involuntarily.

“Romantic I call it. Makes you think of Dickens, doesn’t it, and Locksley Hall.”

“Yes,” said Andrews vaguely.

“Have you been in France long?” asked Andrews settling himself in one of the chairs and looking into the dancing flames of the log fire. “Will you smoke?” He handed Sheffield a crumpled cigarette.

“No, thanks, I only smoke special kinds. I have a weak heart. That’s why I was rejected from the army… Oh, but I think it was superb of you to join as a private. It was my dream to do that, to be one of the nameless marching throng.”

“I think it was damn foolish, not to say criminal,” said Andrews sullenly, still staring into the fire.