Three Soldiers

by John Dos Passos

  “He’s right, Andy,” said Henslowe in a low voice.

  “Please don’t talk any more about it. You’ve told me all that before,” said Andrews sharply. He threw himself back on the bed and rolled over towards the wall.

  They were silent a long time. A sound of voices and footsteps drifted up from the courtyard.

  “But, look here, Andy,” said Henslowe nervously stroking his moustache. “You care much more about your work than any abstract idea of asserting your right of individual liberty. Even if you don’t get caught. … I think the chances of getting caught are mighty slim if you use your head. … But even if you don’t, you haven’t enough money to live for long over here, you haven’t. …”

  “Don’t you think I’ve thought of all that? I’m not crazy, you know. I’ve figured up the balance perfectly sanely. The only thing is, you fellows can’t understand. Have you ever been in a labor battalion? Have you ever had a man you’d been chatting with five minutes before deliberately knock you down? Good God, you don’t know what you are talking about, you two. … I’ve got to be free, now. I don’t care at what cost. Being free’s the only thing that matters.”

  Andrews lay on his back talking towards the ceiling.

  Henslowe was on his feet, striding nervously about the room.

  “As if anyone was ever free,” he muttered.

  “All right, quibble, quibble. You can argue anything away if you want to. Of course, cowardice is the best policy, necessary for survival. The man who’s got most will to live is the most cowardly … go on.”

  Andrews’s voice was shrill and excited, breaking occasionally like a half-grown boy’s voice.

  “Andy, what on earth’s got hold of you? … God, I hate to go away this way,” added Henslowe after a pause.

  “I’ll pull through all right, Henny. I’ll probably come to see you in Syria, disguised as an Arab sheik.” Andrews laughed excitedly.

  “If I thought I’d do any good, I’d stay. … But there’s nothing I can do. Everybody’s got to settle their own affairs, in their own damn fool way. So long, Walters.”

  Walters and Henslowe shook hands absently.

  Henslowe came over to the bed and held out his hand to Andrews.

  “Look, old man, you will be as careful as you can, won’t you? And write me care American Red Cross, Jerusalem. I’ll be damned anxious, honestly.”

  “Don’t you worry, we’ll go travelling together yet,” said Andrews, sitting up and taking Henslowe’s hand.

  They heard Henslowe’s steps fade down the stairs and then ring for a moment on the pavings of the courtyard.

  Walters moved his chair over beside Andrews’s bed.

  “Now, look, let’s have a man-to-man talk, Andrews. Even if you want to ruin your life, you haven’t a right to. There’s your family, and haven’t you any patriotism? … Remember, there is such a thing as duty in the world.”

  Andrews sat up and said in a low, furious voice, pausing between each word:

  “I can’t explain it. … But I shall never put a uniform on again. … So for Christ’s sake shut up.”

  “All right, do what you goddam please; I’m through with you.” Walters suddenly flashed into a rage. He began undressing silently. Andrews lay a long while flat on his back in the bed, staring at the ceiling, then he too undressed, put the light out, and got into bed.

  The rue des Petits-Jardins was a short street in a district of warehouses. A grey, windowless wall shut out the light along all of one side. Opposite was a cluster of three old houses leaning together as if the outer ones were trying to support the beetling mansard roof of the center house. Behind them rose a huge building with rows and rows of black windows. When Andrews stopped to look about him, he found the street completely deserted. The ominous stillness that had brooded over the city during all the walk from his room near the Pantheon seemed here to culminate in sheer desolation. In the silence he could hear the light padding noise made by the feet of a dog that trotted across the end of the street. The house with the mansard roof was number eight. The front of the lower storey had once been painted in chocolate-color, across the top of which was still decipherable the sign: “Charbon, Bois. Lhomond.” On the grimed window beside the door, was painted in white: “Débit de Boissons.”

  Andrews pushed on the door, which opened easily. Somewhere in the interior a bell jangled, startlingly loud after the silence of the street. On the wall opposite the door was a speckled mirror with a crack in it, the shape of a star, and under it a bench with three marble-top tables. The zinc bar filled up the third wall. In the fourth was a glass door pasted up with newspapers. Andrews walked over to the bar. The jangling of the bell faded to silence. He waited, a curious uneasiness gradually taking possession of him. Anyways, he thought, he was wasting his time; he ought to be doing something to arrange his future. He walked over to the street door. The bell jangled again when he opened it. At the same moment a man came out through the door the newspapers were pasted over. He was a stout man in a dirty white shirt stained to a brownish color round the armpits and caught in very tightly at the waist by the broad elastic belt that held up his yellow corduroy trousers. His face was flabby, of a greenish color; black eyes looked at Andrews fixedly through barely open lids, so that they seemed long slits above the cheekbones. “That’s the Chink,” thought Andrews.

  “Well,” said the man, taking his place behind the bar with his legs far apart.

  “A beer, please,” said Andrews.

  “There isn’t any.”

  “A glass of wine then.”

  The man nodded his head, and keeping his eyes fastened on Andrews all the while, strode out of the door again.

  A moment later, Chrisfield came out, with rumpled hair, yawning, rubbing an eye with the knuckles of one fist.

  “Lawsie, Ah juss woke up, Andy. Come along in back.”

  Andrews followed him through a small room with tables and benches, down a corridor where the reek of ammonia bit into his eyes, and up a staircase littered with dirt and garbage. Chrisfield opened a door directly on the stairs, and they stumbled into a large room with a window that gave on the court. Chrisfield closed the door carefully, and turned to Andrews with a smile.

  “Ah was right smart ’askeered ye wouldn’t find it, Andy.”

  “So this is where you live?”

  “Um hum, a bunch of us lives here.”

  A wide bed without coverings, where a man in olive-drab slept rolled in a blanket, was the only furniture of the room.

  “Three of us sleeps in that bed,” said Chrisfield.

  “Who’s that?” cried the man in the bed, sitting up suddenly.

  “All right, Al, he’s a buddy o’ mine,” said Chrisfield. “He’s taken off his uniform.”

  “Jesus, you got guts,” said the man in the bed.

  Andrews looked at him sharply. A piece of towelling, splotched here and there with dried blood, was wrapped round his head, and a hand, swathed in bandages, was drawn up to his body. The man’s mouth took on a twisted expression of pain as he let his head gradually down to the bed again.

  “Gosh, what did you do to yourself?” cried Andrews.

  “I tried to hop a freight at Marseilles.”

  “Needs practice to do that sort o’ thing,” said Chrisfield, who sat on the bed, pulling his shoes off. “Ah’m goin’ to git back to bed, Andy. Ah’m juss dead tired. Ah chucked cabbages all night at the market. They give ye a job there without askin’ no questions.”

  “Have a cigarette.” Andrews sat down on the foot of the bed and threw a cigarette towards Chrisfield. “Have one?” he asked Al.

  “No. I couldn’t smoke. I’m almost crazy with this hand. One of the wheels went over it. … I cut what was left of the little finger off with a razor.” Andrews could see the sweat rolling down his cheek as he spoke.

  “Christ, that poor beggar’s been havin’ a time, Andy. We was ’askeert to get a doctor, and we all didn’t know what to do.”

 
; “I got some pure alcohol an’ washed it in that. It’s not infected. I guess it’ll be all right.”

  “Where are you from, Al?” asked Andrews.

  “’Frisco. Oh, I’m goin’ to try to sleep. I haven’t slept a wink for four nights.”

  “Why don’t you get some dope?”

  “Oh, we all ain’t had a cent to spare for anythin’, Andy.”

  “Oh, if we had kale we could live like kings—not,” said Al in the middle of a nervous little giggle.

  “Look, Chris,” said Andrews, “I’ll halve with you. I’ve got five hundred francs.”

  “Jesus Gawd, man, don’t kid about anything like that.”

  “Here’s two hundred and fifty. … It’s not so much as it sounds.”

  Andrews handed him five fifty-franc notes.

  “Say, how did you come to bust loose?” said Al, turning his head towards Andrews.

  “I got away from a labor battalion one night. That’s all.”

  “Tell me about it, buddy. I don’t feel my hand so much when I’m talking to somebody. … I’d be home now if it wasn’t for a gin mill in Alsace. Say, don’t ye think that big headgear they sport up there is awful good looking? Got my goat every time I saw one. … I was comin’ back from leave at Grenoble, an’ I went through Strasburg. Some town. My outfit was in Coblenz. That’s where I met up with Chris here. Anyway, we was raisin’ hell round Strasburg, an’ I went into a gin mill down a flight of steps. Gee, everything in that town’s plumb picturesque, just like a kid I used to know at home whose folks were Eytalian used to talk about when he said how he wanted to come overseas. Well, I met up with a girl down there, who said she’d just come down to a place like that to look for her brother who was in the foreign legion.”

  Andrews and Chrisfield laughed.

  “What you laughin’ at?” went on Al in an eager taut voice. “Honest to Gawd. I’m goin’ to marry her if I ever get out of this. She’s the best little girl I ever met up with. She was waitress in a restaurant, an’ when she was off duty she used to wear that there Alsatian costume. … Hell, I just stayed on. Every day, I thought I’d go away the next day. … Anyway, the war was over. I warn’t a damn bit of use. … Hasn’t a fellow got any rights at all? Then the M.P.’s started cleanin’ up Strasburg after A.W.O.L.’s, an’ I beat it out of there, an’ Christ, it don’t look as if I’d ever be able to get back.”

  “Say,Andy,” said Chrisfield, suddenly, “let’s go down after some booze.”

  “All right.”

  “Say, Al, do you want me to get you anything at the drug store?”

  “No. I won’t do anythin’ but lay low and bathe it with alcohol now and then, against infection. Anyways, it’s the first of May. You’ll be crazy to go out. You might get pulled. They say there’s riots going on.”

  “Gosh, I forgot it was the first of May,” cried Andrews. “They’re running a general strike to protest against the war with Russia and …”

  “A guy told me,” interrupted Al, in a shrill voice, “there might be a revolution.”

  “Come along, Andy,” said Chris from the door.

  On the stairs Andrews felt Chrisfield’s hand squeezing his arm hard.

  “Say, Andy,” Chris put his lips close to Andrews’s ear and spoke in a rasping whisper. “You’re the only one that knows … you know what. You an’ that sergeant. Doan you say anythin’ so that the guys here kin ketch on, d’ye hear?”

  “All right, Chris, I won’t, but man alive, you oughtn’t to lose your nerve about it. You aren’t the only one who ever shot an … ”

  “Shut yer face, d’ye hear?” muttered Chrisfield savagely.

  They went down the stairs in silence. In the room next to the bar they found the Chink reading a newspaper.

  “Is he French?” whispered Andrews.

  “Ah doan know what he is. He ain’t a white man, Ah’ll wager that,” said Chris, “but he’s square.”

  “D’you know anything about what’s going on?” asked Andrews in French, going up to the Chink.

  “Where?” The Chink got up, flashing a glance at Andrews out of the corners of his slit-like eyes.

  “Outside, in the streets, in Paris, anywhere where people are out in the open and can do things. What do you think about the revolution?”

  The Chink shrugged his shoulders.

  “Anything’s possible,” he said.

  “D’you think they really can overthrow the army and the government in one day, like that?”

  “Who?” broke in Chrisfield.

  “Why, the people, Chris, the ordinary people like you and me, who are tired of being ordered round, who are tired of being trampled down by other people just like them, who’ve had the luck to get in right with the system.”

  “D’you know what I’ll do when the revolution comes?” broke in the Chink with sudden intensity, slapping himself on the chest with one hand. “I’ll go straight to one of those jewelry stores, rue Royale, and fill my pockets and come home with my hands full of diamonds.”

  “What good’ll that do you?”

  “What good? I’ll bury them back there in the court and wait. I’ll need them in the end. D’you know what it’ll mean, your revolution? Another system! When there’s a system there are always men to be bought with diamonds. That’s what the world’s like.”

  “But they won’t be worth anything. It’ll only be work that is worth anything.”

  “We’ll see,” said the Chink.

  “D’you think it could happen, Andy, that there’d be a revolution, an’ there wouldn’t be any more armies, an’ we’d be able to go round like we are civilians? Ah doan think so. Fellers like us ain’t got it in ’em to buck the system, Andy.”

  “Many a system’s gone down before; it will happen again.”

  “They’re fighting the Garde Républicaine now before the Gare de l’Est,” said the Chink in an expressionless voice. “What do you want down here? You’ld better stay in the back. You never know what the police may put over on us.”

  “Give us two bottles of vin blank, Chink,” said Chrisfield.

  “When’ll you pay?”

  “Right now. This guy’s given me fifty francs.”

  “Rich, are you?” said the Chink with hatred in his voice, turning to Andrews. “Won’t last long at that rate. Wait here.”

  He strode into the bar, closing the door carefully after him. A sudden jangling of the bell was followed by a sound of loud voices and stamping feet. Andrews and Chrisfield tiptoed into the dark corridor, where they stood a long time, waiting, breathing the foul air that stung their nostrils with the stench of plaster-damp and rotting wine. At last the Chink came back with three bottles of wine.

  “Well, you’re right,” he said to Andrews. “They are putting up barricades on the Avenue Magenta.”

  On the stairs they met a girl sweeping. She had untidy hair that straggled out from under a blue handkerchief tied under her chin, and a pretty-colored fleshy face. Chrisfield caught her up to him and kissed her, as he passed.

  “We all calls her the dawg-faced girl,” he said to Andrews in explanation. “She does our work. Ah like to had a fight with Slippery over her yisterday. … Didn’t Ah, Slippery?”

  When he followed Chrisfield into the room, Andrews saw a man sitting on the window ledge smoking. He was dressed as a second lieutenant, his puttees were brilliantly polished, and he smoked through a long, amber cigarette-holder. His pink nails were carefully manicured.

  “This is Slippery, Andy,” said Chrisfield. “This guy’s an ole buddy o’ mine. We was bunkies together a hell of a time, wasn’t we, Andy?”

  “You bet we were.”

  “So you’ve taken your uniform off, have you? Mighty foolish,” said Slippery. “Suppose they nab you?”

  “It’s all up now anyway. I don’t intend to get nabbed,” said Andrews.

  “We got booze,” said Chrisfield.

  Slippery had taken dice from his pocket and was throwing them meditatively
on the floor between his feet, snapping his fingers with each throw.

  “I’ll shoot you one of them bottles, Chris,” he said.

  Andrews walked over to the bed. Al was stirring uneasily, his face flushed and his mouth twitching.

  “Hello,” he said. “What’s the news?”

  “They say they’re putting up barricades near the Gare de l’Est. It may be something.”

  “God, I hope so. God, I wish they’d do everything here like they did in Russia; then we’d be free. We couldn’t go back to the States for a while, but there wouldn’t be no M.P.’s to hunt us like we were criminals. … I’m going to sit up a while and talk.” Al giggled hysterically for a moment.

  “Have a swig of wine?” asked Andrews.

  “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?”