Three Soldiers

by John Dos Passos

  “Goddam it, though, but Ah want to git overseas.”

  “It’s swell over there,” said Fuselli, “everything’s awful pretty-like. Picturesque, they call it. And the people wears peasant costumes. … I had an uncle who used to tell me about it. He came from near Torino.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I dunno. He’s an Eyetalian.”

  “Say, how long does it take to git overseas?”

  “Oh, a week or two,” said Andrews.

  “As long as that?” But the movie had begun again, unfolding scenes of soldiers in spiked helmets marching into Belgian cities full of little milk carts drawn by dogs and old women in peasant costume. There were hisses and catcalls when a German flag was seen, and as the troops were pictured advancing, bayonetting the civilians in wide Dutch pants, the old women with starched caps, the soldiers packed into the stuffy Y.M.C.A. hut shouted oaths at them. Andrews felt blind hatred stirring like something that had a life of its own in the young men about him. He was lost in it, carried away in it, as in a stampede of wild cattle. The terror of it was like ferocious hands clutching his throat. He glanced at the faces round him. They were all intent and flushed, glinting with sweat in the heat of the room.

  As he was leaving the hut, pressed in a tight stream of soldiers moving towards the door, Andrews heard a man say:

  “I never raped a woman in my life, but by God, I’m going to. I’d give a lot to rape some of those goddam German women.”

  “I hate ’em too,” came another voice, “men, women, children and unborn children. They’re either jackasses or full of the lust for power like their rulers are, to let themselves be governed by a bunch of warlords like that.”

  “Ah’d lahk te cepture a German officer an’ make him shine ma boots an’ then shoot him dead,” said Chris to Andrews as they walked down the long row towards their barracks.

  “You would?”

  “But Ah’d a damn side rather shoot somebody else Ah know,” went on Chris intensely. “Don’t stay far from here either. An’ Ah’ll do it too, if he don’t let off pickin’ on me.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “That big squirt Anderson they made a file closer at drill yesterday. He seems te think that just because Ah’m littler than him he can do anything he likes with me.”

  Andrews turned sharply and looked in his companion’s face; something in the gruffness of the boy’s tone startled him. He was not accustomed to this. He had thought of himself as a passionate person, but never in his life had he wanted to kill a man.

  “D’you really want to kill him?”

  “Not now, but he gits the hell started in me, the way he teases me. Ah pulled ma knife on him yisterday. You wasn’t there. Didn’t ye notice Ah looked sort o’ upsot at drill?”

  “Yes … but how old are you, Chris!”

  “Ah’m twenty. You’re older than me, ain’t yer?”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  They were leaning against the wall of their barracks, looking up at the brilliant starry night.

  “Say, is the stars the same over there, overseas, as they is here?”

  “I guess so,” said Andrews, laughing. “Though I’ve never been to see.”

  “Ah never had much schoolin’,” went on Chris. “I lef ’ school when I was twelve, ’cause it warn’t much good, an’ dad drank so the folks needed me to work on the farm.”

  “What do you grow in your part of the country?”

  “Mostly coan. A little wheat an’ tobacca. Then we raised a lot o’ stock. … But Ah was juss going to tell ye Ah nearly did kill a guy once.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Ah was drunk at the time. Us boys round Tallyville was a pretty tough bunch then. We used ter work juss long enough to git some money to tear things up with. An’ then we used to play craps an’ drink whiskey. This happened just at coan-shuckin’ time. Hell, Ah don’t even know what it was about, but Ah got to quarrellin’ with a feller Ah’d been right smart friends with. Then he laid off an’ hit me in the jaw. Ah don’t know what Ah done next, but before Ah knowed it Ah had a hold of a shuckin’ knife and was slashin’ at him with it. A knife like that’s a turruble thing to stab a man with. It took four of ’em to hold me down an’ git it away from me. They didn’t keep me from givin’ him a good cut across the chest, though. Ah was juss crazy drunk at the time. An’ man, if Ah wasn’t a mess to go home, with half ma clothes pulled off and ma shirt torn. Ah juss fell in the ditch an’ slep’ there till daylight an’ got mud all through ma hair. … Ah don’t scarcely tech a drop now, though.”

  “So you’re in a hurry to get overseas, Chris, like me,” said Andrews after a long pause.

  “Ah’ll push that guy Anderson into the sea, if we both go over on the same boat,” said Chrisfield laughing; but he added after a pause: “It would have been hell if Ah’d killed that feller, though. Honest Ah wouldn’t a-wanted to do that.”

  “That’s the job that pays, a violinist,” said somebody.

  “No, it don’t,” came a melancholy drawling voice from a lanky man who sat doubled up with his long face in his hands and his elbows resting on his knees. “Just brings a living wage … a living wage.”

  Several men were grouped at the end of the barracks. From them the long row of cots, with here and there a man asleep or a man hastily undressing, stretched, lighted by occasional feeble electric-light bulbs, to the sergeant’s little table beside the door.

  “You’re gettin’ a dis-charge, aren’t you?” asked a man with a brogue, and the red face of a jovial gorilla, that signified the bartender.

  “Yes, Flannagan, I am,” said the lanky man dolefully.

  “Ain’t he got hard luck?” came a voice from the crowd.

  “Yes, I have got hard luck, Buddy,” said the lanky man, looking at the faces about him out of sunken eyes. “I ought to be getting forty dollars a week and here I am getting seven and in the army besides.”

  “I meant that you were gettin’ out of this goddam army.”

  “The army, the army, the democratic army,” chanted someone under his breath.

  “But, begorry, I want to go overseas and ’ave a look at the ’uns,” said Flannagan, who managed with strange skill to combine a cockney whine with his Irish brogue.

  “Overseas?” took up the lanky man. “If I could have gone an’ studied overseas, I’d be making as much as Kubelik. I had the makings of a good player in me.”

  “Why don’t you go?” asked Andrews, who stood on the outskirts with Fuselli and Chris.

  “Look at me … t. b.,” said the lanky man.

  “Well, they can’t get me over there soon enough,” said Flannagan.

  “Must be funny not bein’ able to understand what folks say. They say ‘we’ over there when they mean ‘yes,’ a guy told me.”

  “Ye can make signs to them, can’t ye?” said Flannagan “an’ they can understand an Irishman anywhere. But ye won’t ’ave to talk to the ’uns. Begorry I’ll set up in business when I get there, what d’ye think of that?”

  Everybody laughed.

  “How’d that do? I’ll start an Irish House in Berlin, I will, and there’ll be O’Casey and O’Ryan and O’Reilly and O’Flarrety, and begod the King of England himself ’ll come an’ set the goddam Kaiser up to a drink.”

  “The Kaiser’ll be strung up on a telephone pole by that time; ye need-n’t worry, Flannagan.”

  “They ought to torture him to death, like they do niggers when they lynch ’em down south.”

  A bugle sounded far away outside on the parade ground. Everyone slunk away silently to his cot.

  John Andrews arranged himself carefully in his blankets, promising himself a quiet time of thought before going to sleep. He needed to lie awake and think at night this way, so that he might not lose entirely the thread of his own life, of the life he would take up again some day if he lived through it. He brushed away the thought of death. It was uninteresting. He didn’t care anyway. But some day he
would want to play the piano again, to write music. He must not let himself sink too deeply into the helpless mentality of the soldier. He must keep his will power.

  No, but that was not what he had wanted to think about. He was so bored with himself. At any cost he must forget himself. Ever since his first year at college he seemed to have done nothing but think about himself, talk about himself. At least at the bottom, in the utterest degradation of slavery, he could find forgetfulness and start rebuilding the fabric of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship and scorn. Scorn—that was the quality he needed. It was such a raw, fantastic world he had suddenly fallen into. His life before this week seemed a dream read in a novel, a picture he had seen in a shop window—it was so different. Could it have been in the same world at all? He must have died without knowing it and been born again into a new, futile hell.

  When he had been a child he had lived in a dilapidated mansion that stood among old oaks and chestnuts, beside a road where buggies and oxcarts passed rarely to disturb the sandy ruts that lay in the mottled shade. He had had so many dreams; lying under the crêpe-myrtle bush at the end of the overgrown garden he had passed the long Virginia afternoons, thinking, while the dryflies whizzed sleepily in the sunlight, of the world he would live in when he grew up. He had planned so many lives for himself: a general, like Caesar, he was to conquer the world and die murdered in a great marble hall; a wandering minstrel, he would go through all countries singing and have intricate endless adventures; a great musician, he would sit at the piano playing, like Chopin in the engraving, while beautiful women wept and men with long, curly hair hid their faces in their hands. It was only slavery that he had not foreseen. His race had dominated for too many centuries for that. And yet the world was made of various slaveries.

  John Andrews lay on his back on his cot while everyone about him slept and snored in the dark barracks. A certain terror held him. In a week the great structure of his romantic world, so full of many colors and harmonies, that had survived school and college and the buffeting of making a living in New York, had fallen in dust about him. He was utterly in the void. “How silly,” he thought; “this is the world as it has appeared to the majority of men, this is just the lower half of the pyramid.”

  He thought of his friends, of Fuselli and Chrisfield and that funny little man Eisenstein. They seemed at home in this army life. They did not seem appalled by the loss of their liberty. But they had never lived in the glittering other world. Yet he could not feel the scorn of them he wanted to feel. He thought of them singing under the direction of the “Y” man:

  “Hail, Hail, the gang’s all here;

  We’re going to get the Kaiser,

  We’re going to get the Kaiser,

  We’re going to get the Kaiser

  Now!”

  He thought of himself and Chrisfield picking up cigarette butts and the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet on the drill field. Where was the connection? Was this all futile madness? They’d come from such various worlds, all these men sleeping about him, to be united in this. And what did they think of it, all these sleepers? Had they too not had dreams when they were boys? Or had the generations prepared them only for this?

  He thought of himself lying under the crêpe-myrtle bush through the hot, droning afternoon, watching the pale magenta flowers flutter down into the dry grass, and felt, again, wrapped in his warm blankets among all these sleepers, the straining of limbs burning with desire to rush untrammelled through some new keen air. Suddenly darkness overspread his mind.

  He woke with a start. The bugle was blowing outside. “All right, look lively!” the sergeant was shouting. Another day.

  IV

  The stars were very bright when Fuselli, eyes stinging with sleep, stumbled out of the barracks. They trembled like bits of brilliant jelly in the black velvet of the sky, just as something inside him trembled with excitement.

  “Anybody know where the electricity turns on?” asked the sergeant in a good-humored voice. “Here it is.” The light over the door of the barracks snapped on, revealing a rotund cheerful man with a little yellow mustache and an unlit cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Grouped about him, in overcoats and caps, the men of the company rested their packs against their knees.

  “All right; line up, men.”

  Eyes looked curiously at Fuselli as he lined up with the rest. He had been transferred into the company the night before.

  “Attenshun,” shouted the sergeant. Then he wrinkled up his eyes and grinned hard at the slip of paper he had in his hand, while the men of his company watched him affectionately.

  “Answer ‘Here’ when your name is called. Allan, B. C.”

  “Yo!” came a shrill voice from the end of the line.

  “Anspach.”

  “Here.”

  Meanwhile outside the other barracks other companies could be heard calling the roll. Somewhere from the end of the street came a cheer.

  “Well, I guess I can tell you now, fellers,” said the sergeant with his air of quiet omniscience, when he had called the last name. “We’re going overseas.”

  Everybody cheered.

  “Shut up, you don’t want the Huns to hear us, do you?”

  The company laughed, and there was a broad grin on the sergeant’s round face.

  “Seem to have a pretty decent top-kicker,” whispered Fuselli to the man next to him.

  “You bet yer, kid, he’s a peach,” said the other man in a voice full of devotion. “This is some company, I can tell you that.”

  “You bet it is,” said the next man along. “The corporal’s in the Red Sox outfield.”

  The lieutenant appeared suddenly in the area of light in front of the barracks. He was a pink-faced boy. His trench coat, a little too large, was very new and stuck out stiffly from his legs.

  “Everything all right, sergeant? Everything all right?” he asked several times, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

  “All ready for entrainment, sir,” said the sergeant heartily.

  “Very good, I’ll let you know the order of march in a minute.”

  Fuselli’s ears pounded with strange excitement. These phrases, “entrainment,” “order of march,” had a businesslike sound. He suddenly started to wonder how it would feel to be under fire. Memories of movies flickered in his mind.

  “Gawd, ain’t I glad to git out o’ this hell-hole,” he said to the man next him.

  “The next one may be more of a hell-hole yet, buddy,” said the sergeant striding up and down with his important confident walk.

  Everybody laughed.

  “He’s some sergeant, our sergeant is,” said the man next to Fuselli. “He’s got brains in his head, that boy has.”

  “All right, break ranks,” said the sergeant, “but if anybody moves away from this barracks, I’ll put him in K.P. till—till he’ll be able to peel spuds in his sleep.”

  The company laughed again. Fuselli noticed with displeasure that the tall man with the shrill voice whose name had been called first on the roll did not laugh but spat disgustedly out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Well, there are bad eggs in every good bunch,” thought Fuselli.

  It gradually grew grey with dawn. Fuselli’s legs were tired from standing so long. Outside all the barracks, as far as he could see up the street, men stood in ragged lines waiting.

  The sun rose hot on a cloudless day. A few sparrows twittered about the tin roof of the barracks.

  “Hell, we’re not goin’ this day.”

  “Why?” asked somebody savagely.

  “Troops always leaves at night.”

  “The hell they do!”

  “Here comes Sarge.”

  Everybody craned their necks in the direction pointed out.

  The sergeant strolled up with a mysterious smile on his face.

  “Put away your overcoats and get out your mess kits.”

  Mess kits clattered and gleamed in the s
lanting rays of the sun. They marched to the mess hall and back again, lined up again with packs and waited some more.

  Everybody began to get tired and peevish. Fuselli wondered where his old friends of the other company were. They were good kids too, Chris and that educated fellow, Andrews. Tough luck they couldn’t have come along.

  The sun rose higher. Men sneaked into the barracks one by one and lay down on the bare cots.

  “What you want to bet we won’t leave this camp for a week yet?” asked someone.

  At noon they lined up for mess again, ate dismally and hurriedly. As Fuselli was leaving the mess hall tapping a tattoo on his kit with two dirty finger nails, the corporal spoke to him in a low voice.

  “Be sure to wash yer kit, buddy. We may have pack inspection.”

  The corporal was a slim yellow-faced man with a wrinkled skin, though he was still young, and an arrow-shaped mouth that opened and shut like the paper mouths children make.

  “All right, corporal,” Fuselli answered cheerfully. He wanted to make a good impression. “Fellers’ll be sayin’ ‘All right, corporal,’ to me soon,” he thought. An idea that he repelled came into his mind. The corporal didn’t look strong. He wouldn’t last long overseas. And he pictured Mabe writing Corporal Dan Fuselli, O.A.R.D.5.

  At the end of the afternoon, the lieutenant appeared suddenly, his face flushed, his trench coat stiffer than ever.

  “All right, sergeant; line up your men,” he said in a breathless voice.

  All down the camp street companies were forming. One by one they marched out in columns of fours and halted with their packs on. The day was getting amber with sunset. Retreat sounded.

  Fuselli’s mind had suddenly become very active. The notes of the bugle and of the band playing “The Star Spangled Banner” sifted into his consciousness through a dream of what it would be like over there. He was in a place like the Exposition ground, full of old men and women in peasant costume, like in the song, “When It’s Apple Blossom Time in Normandy.” Men in spiked helmets who looked like firemen kept charging through, like the Ku-Klux Klan in the movies, jumping from their horses and setting fire to buildings with strange outlandish gestures, spitting babies on their long swords. Those were the Huns. Then there were flags blowing very hard in the wind, and the sound of a band. The Yanks were coming. Everything was lost in a scene from a movie in which khaki-clad regiments marched fast, fast across the scene. The memory of the shouting that always accompanied it drowned out the picture. “The guns must make a racket, though,” he added as an afterthought.