John Passos - Three Soldiers

“Sure, it may set me up a bit; thanks.” He drank greedily from the bottle, spilling a little over his chin.

“Say, is your face badly cut up, Al?”

“No, it’s just scotched, skin’s off; looks like beefsteak, I reckon… Ever been to Strasburg?”

“No.”

“Man, that’s the town. And the girls in that costume… Whee!”

“Say, you’re from San Francisco, aren’t you?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I wonder if you knew a fellow I knew at training camp, a kid named Fuselli from ’Frisco?”

“Knew him! Jesus, man, he’s the best friend I’ve got… Ye don’t know where he is now, do you?”

“I saw him here in Paris two months ago.”

“Well, I’ll be damned… God, that’s great!” Al’s voice was staccato from excitement. “So you knew Dan at training camp? The last letter from him was ’bout a year ago. Dan’d just got to be corporal. He’s a damn clever kid, Dan is, an’ ambitious too, one of the guys always makes good… Gawd, I’d hate to see him this way. D’you know, we used to see a hell of a lot of each other in ’Frisco, an’ he always used to tell me how he’d make good before I did. He was goddam right, too. Said I was too soft about girls… Did ye know him real well?”

“Yes. I even remember that he used to tell me about a fellow he knew who was called Al… He used to tell me about how you two used to go down to the harbor and watch the big liners come in at night, all aflare with lights through the Golden Gate. And he used to tell you he’d go over to Europe in one, when he’d made his pile.”

“That’s why Strasburg made me think of him,” broke in Al, tremendously excited. “’Cause it was so picturesque like… But honest, I’ve tried hard to make good in this army. I’ve done everything a feller could. An’ all I did was to get into a cushy job in the regimental office… But Dan, Gawd, he may even be an officer by this time.”

“No, he’s not that,” said Andrews. “Look here, you ought to keep quiet with that hand of yours.”

“Damn my hand. Oh, it’ll heal all right if I forget about it. You see, my foot slipped when they shunted a car I was just climbing into, an’… I guess I ought to be glad I wasn’t killed. But, gee, when I think that if I hadn’t been a fool about that girl I might have been home by now… ”

“The Chink says they’re putting up barricades on the Avenue Magenta.”

“That means business, kid!”

“Business nothin’,” shouted Slippery from where he and Chrisfield leaned over the dice on the tile floor in front of the window. “One tank an’ a few husky Senegalese’ll make your goddam socialists run so fast they won’t stop till they get to Dijon… You guys ought to have more sense.” Slippery got to his feet and came over to the bed, jingling the dice in his hand. “It’ll take more’n a handful o’ socialists paid by the Boches to break the army. If it could be broke, don’t ye think people would have done it long ago?”

“Shut up a minute. Ah thought Ah heard somethin’,” said Chrisfield suddenly, going to the window. They held their breath. The bed creaked as Al stirred uneasily in it.

“No, warn’t anythin’; Ah’d thought Ah’d heard people singin’.”

“The Internationale,” cried Al.

“Shut up,” said Chrisfield in a low gruff voice.

Through the silence of the room they heard steps on the stairs.

“All right, it’s only Smiddy,” said Slippery, and he threw the dice down on the tiles again.

The door opened slowly to let in a tall, stoop-shouldered man with a long face and long teeth.

“Who’s the frawg?” he asked in a startled way, with one hand on the door knob.

“All right, Smiddy; it ain’t a frawg; it’s a guy Chris knows. He’s taken his uniform off.’

“’Lo, buddy,” said Smiddy, shaking Andrews’ hand. “Gawd, you look like a frawg.”

“That’s good,” said Andrews.

“There’s hell to pay,” broke out Smiddy breathlessly. “You know Gus Evans and the little black-haired guy goes ’round with him? They been picked up. I seen ’em myself with some M. P.’s at Place de la Bastille. An’ a guy I talked to under the bridge where I slep’ last night said a guy’d tole him they were goin’ to clean the A.W.O.L.’s out o’ Paris if they had to search through every house in the place.”

“If they come here they’ll git somethin’ they ain’t lookin’ for,” muttered Chrisfield.

“I’m goin’ down to Nice; getting too hot around here,” said Slippery. “I’ve got travels orders in my pocket now.”

“How did you get ’em?”

“Easy as pie,” said Slippery, lighting a cigarette and puffing affectedly towards the ceiling. “I met up with a guy, a second loot, in the Knickerbocker Bar. We gets drunk together, an’ goes on a party with two girls I know. In the morning I get up bright an’ early, and now I’ve got five thousand francs, a leave slip and a silver cigarette case, an’ Lootenant J. B. Franklin’s runnin’ around sayin’ how he was robbed by a Paris whore, or more likely keepin’ damn quiet about it. That’s my system.”

“But, gosh darn it, I don’t see how you can go around with a guy an’ drink with him, an’ then rob him,” cried Al from the bed.

“No different from cleaning a guy up at craps.”

“Well?”

“An’ suppose that feller knew that I was only a bloody private. Don’t you think he’d have turned me over to the M.P.’s like winkin’?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Al. “They’re juss like you an me, skeered to death they’ll get in wrong, but they won’t light on a feller unless they have to.”

“That’s a goddam lie,” cried Chrisfield. “They like ridin’ yer. A doughboy’s less’n a dawg to ’em. Ah’d shoot anyone of ’em lake Ah’d shoot a nigger.”

Andrews was watching Chrisfield’s face; it suddenly flushed red. He was silent abruptly. His eyes met Andrews’ eyes with a flash of fear.

“They’re all sorts of officers, like they’re all sorts of us,” Al was insisting.

“But you damn fools, quit arguing,” cried Smiddy. “What the hell are we goin’ to do? It ain’t safe here no more, that’s how I look at it.”

They were silent.

At last Chrisfield said:

“What you goin’ to do, Andy?”

“I hardly know. I think I’ll go out to St. Germain to see a boy I know there who works on a farm to see if it’s safe to take a job there. I won’t stay in Paris. Then there’s a girl here I want to look up. I must see her.” Andrews broke off suddenly, and started walking back and forth across the end of the room.

“You’d better be damn careful; they’ll probably shoot you if they catch you,” said Slippery.

Andrews shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, I’d rather be shot than go to Leavenworth for twenty years, Gawd! I would,” cried Al.

“How do you fellers eat here?” asked Slippery. “We buy stuff an’ the dawg-faced girl cooks it for us.”

“Got anything for this noon?”

“I’ll go see if I can buy some stuff,” said Andrews. “It’s safer for me to go out than for you.”

“All right, here’s twenty francs,” said Slippery, handing Andrews a bill with an offhand gesture.

Chrisfield followed Andrews down the stairs. When they reached the passage at the foot of the stairs, he put his hand on Andrews’s shoulder and whispered:

“Say, Andy, d’you think there’s anything in that revolution business? Ah hadn’t never thought they could buck the system thataway.”

“They did in Russia.”

“Then we’d be free, civilians, like we all was before the draft. But that ain’t possible, Andy; that ain’t possible, Andy.”