Three Soldiers

by John Dos Passos

“Can’t I come to see you tomorrow morning? Then I shall feel more like meeting people, after talking to you a long while. You see, I …” He paused with his eyes on the ground. Then he burst out in a low, passionate voice: “Oh, if I could only get it out of my mind … those tramping feet, those voices shouting orders.”

  His hand trembled when he put it in Geneviève’s hand. She looked in his eyes calmly with her wide brown eyes.

  “How strange you are today, Jean! Anyway, come back early tomorrow.”

  She went in the door. He walked round the house, through the carriage gate, and went off with long strides down the road along the river that led under linden trees to the village.

  Thoughts swarmed teasingly through his head, like wasps about a rotting fruit. So at last he had seen Geneviève, and had held her in his arms and kissed her. And that was all. His plans for the future had never gone beyond that point. He hardly knew what he had expected, but in all the sunny days of walking, in all the furtive days in Paris, he had thought of nothing else. He would see Geneviève and tell her all about himself; he would unroll his life like a scroll before her eyes. Together they would piece together the future. A sudden terror took possession of him. She had failed him. Floods of denial seethed through his mind. It was that he had expected so much; he had expected her to understand him without explanation, instinctively. He had told her nothing. He had not even told her he was a deserter. What was it that had kept him from telling her? Puzzle as he would, he could not formulate it. Only, far within him, the certainty lay like an icy weight: she had failed him. He was alone. What a fool he had been to build his whole life on a chance of sympathy? No. It was rather this morbid playing at phrases that was at fault. He was like a touchy old maid, thinking imaginary results. “Take life at its face value,” he kept telling himself. They loved each other anyway, somehow; it did not matter how. And he was free to work. Wasn’t that enough?

  But how could he wait until tomorrow to see her, to tell her everything, to break down all the silly little barriers between them, so that they might look directly into each other’s lives?

  The road turned inland from the river between garden walls at the entrance to the village. Through half-open doors Andrews got glimpses of neatly-cultivated kitchen-gardens and orchards where silver-leaved boughs swayed against the sky. Then the road swerved again into the village, crowded into a narrow paved street by the white and cream-colored houses with green or grey shutters and pale, red-tiled roofs. At the end, stained golden with lichen, the mauve-grey tower of the church held up its bells against the sky in a belfry of broad pointed arches. In front of the church Andrews turned down a little lane towards the river again, to come out in a moment on a quay shaded by skinny acacia trees. On the corner house, a ramshackle house with roofs and gables projecting in all directions, was a sign: “Rendezvous de la Marine.” The room he stepped into was so low, Andrews had to stoop under the heavy brown beams as he crossed it. Stairs went up from a door behind a worn billiard table in the corner. Mme. Boncour stood between Andrews and the stairs. She was a flabby, elderly woman with round eyes and a round, very red face and a curious smirk about the lips.

  “Monsieur payera un petit peu d’advance, n’est-ce pas, Monsieur?”

  “All right,” said Andrews, reaching for his pocketbook. “Shall I pay you a week in advance?”

  The woman smiled broadly.

  “Si Monsieur désire. … It’s that life is so dear nowadays. Poor people like us can barely get along.”

  “I know that only too well,” said Andrews.

  “Monsieur est étranger …” began the woman in a wheedling tone, when she had received the money.

  “Yes. I was only demobilized a short time ago.”

  “Aha! Monsieur est démobilisé. Monsieur remplira la petite feuille pour la police, n’est-ce pas?”

  The woman brought from behind her back a hand that held a narrow printed slip.

  “All right. I’ll fill it out now,” said Andrews, his heart thumping. Without thinking what he was doing, he put the paper on the edge of the billiard table and wrote: “John Brown, aged 23. Chicago, Ill., EtatsUnis. Musician. Holder of passport No. 1,432,286.”

  “Merci, Monsieur. A bientôt, Monsieur. Au revoir, Monsieur.”

  The woman’s singing voice followed him up the rickety stairs to his room. It was only when he had closed the door that he remembered that he had put down for a passport number his army number. “And why did I write John Brown as a name?” he asked himself.

  “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,

  But his soul goes marching on.

  Glory, glory, hallelujah!

  But his soul goes marching on.”

  He heard the song so vividly that he thought for an instant someone must be standing beside him singing it. He went to the window and ran his hand through his hair. Outside the Loire rambled in great loops towards the blue distance, silvery reach upon silvery reach, with here and there the broad gleam of a sand bank. Opposite were poplars and fields patched in various greens rising to hills tufted with dense shadowy groves. On the bare summit of the highest hill a windmill waved lazy arms against the marbled sky.

  Gradually John Andrews felt the silvery quiet settle about him. He pulled a sausage and a piece of bread out of the pocket of his coat, took a long swig of water from the pitcher on his washstand, and settled himself at the table before the window in front of a pile of ruled sheets of music paper. He nibbled the bread and the sausage meditatively for a long while, then wrote “Arbeit und Rhythmus” in a large careful hand at the top of the paper. After that he looked out of the window without moving, watching the plumed clouds sail like huge slow ships against the slate-blue sky. Suddenly he scratched out what he had written and scrawled above it: “The Body and Soul of John Brown.” He got to his feet and walked about the room with clenched hands.

  “How curious that I should have written that name. How curious that I should have written that name!” he said aloud.

  He sat down at the table again and forgot everything in the music that possessed him.

  The next morning he walked out early along the river, trying to occupy himself until it should be time to go to see Geneviève. The memory of his first days in the army, spent washing windows at the training camp, was very vivid in his mind. He saw himself again standing naked in the middle of a wide, bare room, while the recruiting sergeant measured and prodded him. And now he was a deserter. Was there any sense to it all? Had his life led in any particular direction, since he had been caught haphazard in the treadmill, or was it all chance? A toad hopping across a road in front of a steam roller.

  He stood still, and looked about him. Beyond a clover field was the river with its sand banks and its broad silver reaches. A boy was wading far out in the river catching minnows with a net. Andrews watched his quick movements as he jerked the net through the water. And that boy, too, would be a soldier; the lithe body would be thrown into a mould to be made the same as other bodies, the quick movements would be standardized into the manual at arms, the inquisitive, petulant mind would be battered into servility. The stockade was built; not one of the sheep would escape. And those that were not sheep? They were deserters; every rifle muzzle held death for them; they would not live long. And yet other nightmares had been thrown off the shoulders of men. Every man who stood up courageously to die loosened the grip of the nightmare.

  Andrews walked slowly along the road, kicking his feet into the dust like a schoolboy. At a turning he threw himself down on the grass under some locust trees. The heavy fragrance of their flowers and the grumbling of the bees that hung drunkenly on the white racemes made him feel very drowsy. A cart passed, pulled by heavy white horses; an old man with his back curved like the top of a sunflower stalk hobbled after, using the whip as a walking stick. Andrews saw the old man’s eyes turned on him suspiciously. A faint pang of fright went through him; did the old man know he was a deserter? The cart and the old man had
already disappeared round the bend in the road. Andrews lay a long while listening to the jingle of the harness thin into the distance, leaving him again to the sound of the drowsy bees among the locust blossoms.

  When he sat up, he noticed that through a break in the hedge beyond the slender black trunks of the locusts, he could see rising above the trees the extinguisher-shaped roof of the tower of Geneviève Rod’s house. He remembered the day he had first seen Geneviève, and the boyish awkwardness with which she poured tea. Would he and Geneviève ever find a moment of real contact? All at once a bitter thought came to him. “Or is it that she wants a tame pianist as an ornament to a clever young woman’s drawing room?” He jumped to his feet and started walking fast towards the town again. He would go to see her at once and settle all that forever. The village clock had begun to strike; the clear notes vibrated crisply across the fields: ten.

  Walking back to the village he began to think of money. His room was twenty francs a week. He had in his purse a hundred and twenty-four francs. After fishing in all his pockets for silver, he found three francs and a half more. A hundred and twenty-seven francs fifty. If he could live on forty francs a week, he would have three weeks in which to work on the

  “Body and Soul of John Brown.” Only three weeks; and then he must find work. In any case he would write Henslowe to send him money if he had any; this was no time for delicacy; everything depended on his having money. And he swore to himself that he would work for three weeks, that he would throw the idea that flamed within him into shape on paper, whatever happened. He racked his brains to think of someone in America he could write to for money. A ghastly sense of solitude possessed him. And would Geneviève fail him too?

  Geneviève was coming out by the front door of the house when he reached the carriage gate beside the road.

  She ran to meet him.

  “Good morning. I was on my way to fetch you.”

  She seized his hand and pressed it hard.

  “How sweet of you!”

  “But, Jean, you’re not coming from the village.”

  “I’ve been walking.”

  “How early you must get up!”

  “You see, the sun rises just opposite my window, and shines in on my bed. That makes me get up early.”

  She pushed him in the door ahead of her. They went through the hall to a long high room that had a grand piano and many old high-backed chairs, and in front of the French windows that opened on the garden, a round table of black mahogany littered with books. Two tall girls in muslin dresses stood beside the piano.

  “These are my cousins. … Here he is at last. Monsieur Andrews, ma cousine Berthe et ma cousine Jeanne. Now you’ve got to play to us; we are bored to death with everything we know.”

  “All right. … But I have a great deal to talk to you about later,” said Andrews in a low voice.

  Geneviève nodded understandingly.

  “Why don’t you play us La Reine de Saba, Jean?”

  “Oh, do play that,” twittered the cousins.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d rather play some Bach.”

  “There’s a lot of Bach in that chest in the corner,” cried Geneviève. “It’s ridiculous; everything in the house is jammed with music.”

  They leaned over the chest together, so that Andrews felt her hair brush against his cheek, and the smell of her hair in his nostrils. The cousins remained by the piano.

  “I must talk to you alone soon,” whispered Andrews.

  “All right,” she said, her face reddening as she leaned over the chest.

  On top of the music was a revolver.

  “Look out, it’s loaded,” she said, when he picked it up.

  He looked at her inquiringly. “I have another in my room. You see Mother and I are often alone here, and then, I like firearms. Don’t you?”

  “I hate them,” muttered Andrews.

  “Here’s tons of Bach.”

  “Fine. … Look, Geneviève,” he said suddenly, “lend me that revolver for a few days. I’ll tell you why I want it later.”

  “Certainly. Be careful, because it’s loaded,” she said in an offhand manner, walking over to the piano with two volumes under each arm. Andrews closed the chest and followed her, suddenly bubbling with gaiety. He opened a volume haphazard.

  “To a friend to dissuade him from starting on a journey,” he read. “Oh, I used to know that.”

  He began to play, putting boisterous vigor into the tunes. In a pianissimo passage he heard one cousin whisper to the other:

  “Qu’il a l’air intéressant.”

  “Farouche, n’est-ce pas? Genre révolutionnaire,” answered the other cousin, tittering. Then he noticed that Mme. Rod was smiling at him. He got to his feet.

  “Mais ne vous dérangez pas,” she said.

  A man with white flannel trousers and tennis shoes and a man in black with a pointed grey beard and amused grey eyes had come into the room, followed by a stout woman in hat and veil, with long white cotton gloves on her arms. Introductions were made. Andrews’s spirits began to ebb. All these people were making strong the barrier between him and Geneviève. Whenever he looked at her, some well-dressed person stepped in front of her with a gesture of politeness. He felt caught in a ring of well-dressed conventions that danced about him with grotesque gestures of politeness. All through lunch he had a crazy desire to jump to his feet and shout: “Look at me; I’m a deserter. I’m under the wheels of your system. If your system doesn’t succeed in killing me, it will be that much weaker, it will have less strength to kill others.” There was talk about his demobilization, and his music, and the Schola Cantorum. He felt he was being exhibited. “But they don’t know what they’re exhibiting,” he said to himself with a certain bitter joy.

  After lunch they went out into the grape arbor, where coffee was brought. Andrews sat silent, not listening to the talk, which was about Empire furniture and the new taxes, staring up into the broad sunsplotched leaves of the grape vines, remembering how the sun and shade had danced about Geneviève’s hair when they had been in the arbor alone the day before, turning it all to red flame. Today she sat in shadow, and her hair was rusty and dull. Time dragged by very slowly.

  At last Geneviève got to her feet.

  “You haven’t seen my boat,” she said to Andrews. “Let’s go for a row. I’ll row you about.”

  Andrews jumped up eagerly.

  “Make her be careful, Monsieur Andrews, she’s dreadfully imprudent,” said Madame Rod.

  “You were bored to death,” said Geneviève, as they walked out on the road.

  “No, but those people all seemed to be building new walls between you and me. God knows there are enough already.”

  She looked him sharply in the eyes a second, but said nothing.

  They walked slowly through the sand of the river edge, till they came to an old flat-bottomed boat painted green with an orange stripe, drawn up among the reeds.

  “It will probably sink; can you swim?” she asked, laughing.

  Andrews smiled, and said in a stiff voice:

  “I can swim. It was by swimming that I got out of the army.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I deserted.”

  “When you deserted?”

  Geneviève leaned over to pull on the boat. Their heads almost touching, they pulled the boat down to the water’s edge, then pushed it half out on to the river.

  “And if you are caught?”

  “They might shoot me; I don’t know. Still, as the war is over, it would probably be life imprisonment, or at least twenty years.”

  “You can speak of it as coolly as that?”

  “It is no new idea to my mind.”

  “What induced you to do such a thing?”

  “I was not willing to submit any longer to the treadmill.”

  “Come, let’s go out on the river.”

  Geneviève stepped into the boat and caught up the oars.

  “Now push her off,
and don’t fall in,” she cried.

  The boat glided out into the water. Geneviève began pulling on the oars slowly and regularly. Andrews looked at her without speaking.

  “When you’re tired, I’ll row,” he said after a while.

  Behind them the village, patched white and buff-color and russet and pale red with stucco walls and steep, tiled roofs, rose in an irregular pyramid to the church. Through the wide pointed arches of the belfry they could see the bells hanging against the sky. Below in the river the town was reflected complete, with a great rift of steely blue across it where the wind ruffled the water.

  The oars creaked rhythmically as Geneviève pulled on them.

  “Remember, when you are tired,” said Andrews again after a long pause.

  Geneviève spoke through clenched teeth:

  “Of course, you have no patriotism.”

  “As you mean it, none.”

  They rounded the edge of a sand bank where the current ran hard. Andrews put his hands beside her hands on the oars and pushed with her. The bow of the boat grounded in some reeds under willows.

  “We’ll stay here,” she said, pulling in the oars that flashed in the sun as she jerked them, dripping silver, out of the water.

  She clasped her hands round her knees and leaned over towards him.

  “So that is why you want my revolver. … Tell me all about it, from Chartres,” she said, in a choked voice.

  “You see, I was arrested at Chartres and sent to a labor battalion, the equivalent for your army prison, without being able to get word to my commanding officer in the School Detachment. …” He paused.

  A bird was singing in the willow tree. The sun was under a cloud; beyond the long pale green leaves that fluttered ever so slightly in the wind, the sky was full of silvery and cream-colored clouds, with here and there a patch the color of a robin’s egg. Andrews began laughing softly.

  “But, Geneviève, how silly those words are, those pompous, efficient words: detachment, battalion, commanding officer. It would have all happened anyway. Things reached the breaking point; that was all. I could not submit any longer to the discipline. … Oh, those long Roman words, what millstones they are about men’s necks! That was silly, too; I was quite willing to help in the killing of Germans, I had no quarrel with, out of curiosity or cowardice. … You see, it has taken me so long to find out how the world is. There was no one to show me the way.”