Three Soldiers

by John Dos Passos

  Among the houses bugles were blowing mess-call.

  The jauntiness of the brassy notes ringing up through the silence was agony to him. How long the day would be. He looked at his watch. It was seven thirty. How did they come to be having mess so late?

  The mist seemed doubly cold and dark when he was buried in it again after his moment of sunlight. The sweat was chilled on his face and streaks of cold went through his clothes, soaked from the effort of carrying the pack. In the village street Andrews met a man he did not know and asked him where the office was. The man, who was chewing something, pointed silently to a house with green shutters on the opposite side of the street.

  At a desk sat Chrisfield smoking a cigarette. When he jumped up Andrews noticed that he had a corporal’s two stripes on his arm.

  “Hello, Andy.”

  They shook hands warmly.

  “A’ you all right now, ole boy?”

  “Sure, I’m fine,” said Andrews. A sudden constraint fell upon them.

  “That’s good,” said Chrisfield.

  “You’re a corporal now. Congratulations.”

  “Um hum. Made me more’n a month ago.”

  They were silent. Chrisfield sat down in his chair again.

  “What sort of a town is this?”

  “It’s a hell-hole, this dump is, a hell-hole.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Goin’ to move soon, tell me. … Army o’ Occupation. But Ah hadn’t ought to have told you that. … Don’t tell any of the fellers.”

  “Where’s the outfit quartered?”

  “Ye won’t know it; we’ve got fifteen new men. No account all of ’em. Second draft men.”

  “Civilians in the town?”

  “You bet. … Come with me, Andy, an Ah’ll tell ’em to give you some grub at the cookshack. No … wait a minute an’ you’ll miss the hike. … Hikes every day since the goddam armistice. They sent out a general order telling ’em to double up on the drill.”

  They heard a voice shouting orders outside and the narrow street filled up suddenly with a sound of boots beating the ground in unison. Andrews kept his back to the window. Something in his legs seemed to be tramping in time with the other legs.

  “There they go,” said Chrisfield. “Loot’s with ’em today. … Want some grub? If it ain’t been punk since the armistice.”

  The “Y” hut was empty and dark; through the grimy windowpanes could be seen fields and a leaden sky full of heavy ocherous light, in which the leafless trees and the fields full of stubble were different shades of dead, greyish brown. Andrews sat at the piano without playing. He was thinking how once he had thought to express all the cramped boredom of this life; the thwarted limbs regimented together, lashed into straight lines, the monotony of servitude. Unconsciously as he thought of it, the fingers of one hand sought a chord, which jangled in the badly tuned piano. “God, how silly!” he muttered aloud, pulling his hands away. Suddenly he began to play snatches of things he knew, distorting them, willfully mutilating the rhythms, mixing into them snatches of ragtime. The piano jangled under his hands, filling the empty hut with clamor. He stopped suddenly, letting his fingers slide from bass to treble, and began to play in earnest.

  There was a cough behind him that had an artificial, discreet ring to it. He went on playing without turning round. Then a voice said:

  “Beautiful, beautiful.”

  Andrews turned to find himself staring into a face of vaguely triangular shape with a wide forehead and prominent eyelids over protruding brown eyes. The man wore a Y.M.C.A. uniform which was very tight for him, so that there were creases running from each button across the front of his tunic.

  “Oh, do go on playing. It’s years since I heard any Debussy.”

  “It wasn’t Debussy.”

  “Oh, wasn’t it? Anyway it was just lovely. Do go on. I’ll just stand here and listen.”

  Andrews went on playing for a moment, made a mistake, started over, made the same mistake, banged on the keys with his fist and turned round again.

  “I can’t play,” he said peevishly.

  “Oh, you can, my boy, you can. … Where did you learn? I would give a million dollars to play like that, if I had it.”

  Andrews glared at him silently.

  “You are one of the men just back from hospital, I presume.”

  “Yes, worse luck.”

  “Oh, I don’t blame you. These French towns are the dullest places; though I just love France, don’t you?” The “Y” man had a faintly whining voice.

  “Anywhere’s dull in the army.”

  “Look, we must get to know each other real well. My name’s Spencer Sheffield … Spencer B. Sheffield. … And between you and me there’s not a soul in the division you can talk to. It’s dreadful not to have intellectual people about one. I suppose you’re from New York.”

  Andrews nodded.

  “Um hum, so am I. You’re probably read some of my things in Vain Endeavor. … What, you’ve never read Vain Endeavor? I guess you didn’t go round with the intellectual set. … Musical people often don’t. … Of course I don’t mean the Village. All anarchists and society women there. …”

  “I’ve never gone round with any set, and I never …”

  “Never mind, we’ll fix that when we all get back to New York. And now you just sit down at that piano and play me Debussy’s ‘Arabesque.’… I know you love it just as much as I do. But first what’s your name?”

  “Andrews.”

  “Folks come from Virginia?”

  “Yes.” Andrews got to his feet.

  “Then you’re related to the Penneltons.”

  “I may be related to the Kaiser for all I know.”

  “The Penneltons … that’s it. You see my mother was a Miss Spencer from Spencer Falls, Virginia, and her mother was a Miss Pennelton, so you and I are cousins. Now isn’t that a coincidence?”

  “Distant cousins. But I must go back to the barracks.”

  “Come in and see me any time,” Spencer B. Sheffield shouted after him. “You know where; back of the shack. And knock twice so I’ll know it’s you.”

  Outside the house where he was quartered Andrews met the new top sergeant, a lean man with spectacles and a little mustache of the color and texture of a scrubbing brush.

  “Here’s a letter for you,” the top sergeant said. “Better look at the new K.P. list I’ve just posted.”

  The letter was from Henslowe. Andrews read it with a smile of pleasure in the faint afternoon light, remembering Henslowe’s constant drawling talk about distant places he had never been to, and the man who had eaten glass, and the day and a half in Paris.

  “Andy,” the letter began, “I’ve got the dope at last. Courses begin in Paris February fifteenth. Apply at once to your C. O. to study somethin’ at University of Paris. Any amount of lies will go. Apply all pull possible via sergeants, lieutenants and their mistresses and laundresses. Yours, Henslowe.”

  His heart thumping, Andrews ran after the sergeant, passing, in his excitement, a lieutenant without saluting him.

  “Look here,” snarled the lieutenant.

  Andrews saluted, and stood stiffly at attention.

  “Why didn’t you salute me?”

  “I was in a hurry, sir, and didn’t see you. I was going on very urgent company business, sir.”

  “Remember that just because the armistice is signed you needn’t think you’re out of the army; at ease.”

  Andrews saluted. The lieutenant saluted, turned swiftly on his heel and walked away.

  Andrews caught up to the sergeant.

  “Sergeant Coffin. Can I speak to you a minute?”

  “I’m in a hell of a hurry.”

  “Have you heard anything about this army students’ corps to send men to universities here in France? Something the Y.M.C.A.’s getting up.”

  “Can’t be for enlisted men. No I ain’t heard a word about it. D’you want to go to school again?”

  �
��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 man 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.

  “You can’t mean that. Or do you mean that you think you had abilities which would have been worth more to your country in another position? … I have many friends who felt that.”

  “No. … I don�
�t think it’s right of a man to go back on himself. … I don’t think butchering people ever does any good … I have acted as if I did think it did good … out of carelessness or cowardice, one or the other; that I think bad.”

  “You mustn’t talk that way” said Sheffield hurriedly. “So you are a musician, are you?” He asked the question with a jaunty confidential air.

  “I used to play the piano a little, if that’s what you mean,” said Andrews.

  “Music has never been the art I had most interest in. But many things have moved me intensely. … Debussy and those beautiful little things of Nevin’s. You must know them. … Poetry has been more my field. When I was young, younger than you are, quite a lad … Oh, if we could only stay young; I am thirty-two.”

  “I don’t see that youth by itself is worth much. It’s the most superb medium there is, though, for other things,” said Andrews. “Well, I must go,” he said. “If you do hear anything about that university scheme, you will let me know, won’t you?”

  “Indeed I shall, dear boy, indeed I shall.”

  They shook hands in jerky dramatic fashion and Andrews stumbled down the dark hall to the door. When he stood out in the raw night air again he drew a deep breath. By the light that streamed out from a window he looked at his watch. There was time to go to the regimental sergeant-major’s office before tattoo.

  At the opposite end of the village street from the Y.M.C.A. hut was a cube-shaped house set a little apart from the rest in the middle of a broad lawn which the constant crossing and recrossing of a staff of cars and trains of motor trucks had turned into a muddy morass in which the wheel tracks crisscrossed in every direction. A narrow board walk led from the main road to the door. In the middle of this walk Andrews met a captain and automatically got off into the mud and saluted.

  The regimental office was a large room that had once been decorated by wan and ill-drawn mural paintings in the manner of Puvis de Chavannes, but the walls had been so chipped and soiled by five years of military occupation that they were barely recognisable. Only a few bits of bare flesh and floating drapery showed here and there above the maps and notices that were tacked on the walls. At the end of the room a group of nymphs in Nile green and pastel blue could be seen emerging from under a French War Loan poster. The ceiling was adorned with an oval of flowers and little plaster cupids in low relief which had also suffered and in places showed the laths. The office was nearly empty. The littered desks and silent typewriters gave a strange air of desolation to the gutted drawing-room. Andrews walked boldly to the furthest desk, where a little red card leaning against the typewriter said “Regimental Sergeant-Major.”