Three Soldiers (24 page)

In one doorway the vague light from a lamp bracketed in the wall showed two figures, pressed into one by their close embrace. As Andrews walked past, his heavy army boots clattering loud on the wet pavement, they lifted their heads slowly. The boy had violet eyes and pale beardless cheeks; the girl was bareheaded and kept her brown eyes fixed on the boy’s face. Andrews’s heart thumped within him. At last he had found them. He made a step towards them, and then strode on losing himself fast in the cool effacing fog. Again he had been mistaken. The fog swirled about him, hiding wistful friendly faces, hands ready to meet his hands, eyes ready to take fire with his glance, lips cold with the mist, to be crushed under his lips.
From the girl at the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp …

And he walked on alone through the drifting fog.

Andrews left the station reluctantly, shivering in the raw grey mist under which the houses of the village street and the rows of motor trucks and the few figures of French soldiers swathed in long formless coats, showed as vague dark blurs in the confused dawnlight. His body felt flushed and sticky from a night spent huddled in the warm fetid air of an overcrowded compartment. He yawned and stretched himself and stood irresolutely in the middle of the street with his pack biting into his shoulders. Out of sight, behind the dark mass, in which a few ruddy lights glowed, of the station buildings, the engine whistled and the train clanked off into the distance. Andrews listened to its faint reverberation through the mist with a sick feeling of despair. It was the train that had brought him from Paris back to his division.

As he stood shivering in the grey mist he remembered the curious despairing reluctance he used to suffer when he went back to boarding school after a holiday. How he used to go from the station to the school by the longest road possible, taking frantic account of every moment of liberty left him. Today his feet had the same leaden reluctance as when they used to all but refuse to take him up the long sandy hill to the school.

He wandered aimlessly for a while about the silent village hoping to find a café where he could sit for a few minutes to take a last look at himself before plunging again into the grovelling promiscuity of the army. Not a light showed. All the shutters of the shabby little brick and plaster houses were closed. With dull springless steps he walked down the road they had pointed out to him from the R. T. O.

Overhead the sky was brightening giving the mist that clung to the earth in every direction ruddy billowing outlines. The frozen road gave out a faint hard resonance under his footsteps. Occasionally the silhouette of a tree by the roadside loomed up in the mist ahead, its uppermost branches clear and ruddy with sunlight.

Andrews was telling himself that the war was over, and that in a few months he would be free in any case. What did a few months more or less matter? But the sane thoughts were swept recklessly away in the blind panic that was like a stampede of wild steers within him. There was no arguing. His spirit was contorted with revolt so that his flesh twitched and dark splotches danced before his eyes. He wondered vaguely whether he had gone mad. Enormous plans kept rising up out of the tumult of his mind and dissolving suddenly like smoke in a high wind. He would run away and if they caught him, kill himself. He would start a mutiny in his company, he would lash all these men to frenzy by his words, so that they too should refuse to form into Guns, so that they should laugh when the officers got red in the face shouting orders at them, so that the whole division should march off over the frosty hills, without arms, without flags, calling all the men of all the armies to join them, to march on singing, to laugh the nightmare out of their blood. Would not some lightning flash of vision sear people’s consciousness into life again? What was the good of stopping the war if the armies continued?

But that was just rhetoric. His mind was flooding itself with rhetoric that it might keep its sanity. His mind was squeezing out rhetoric like a sponge that he might not see dry madness face to face.

And all the while his hard footsteps along the frozen road beat in his ears bringing him nearer to the village where the division was quartered. He was climbing a long hill. The mist thinned about him and became brilliant with sunlight. Then he was walking in the full sun over the crest of a hill with pale blue sky above his head. Behind him and before him were mist-filled valleys and beyond other ranges of long hills, with reddish-violet patches of woodland, glowing faintly in the sunlight. In the valley at his feet he could see, in the shadow of the hill he stood on, a church tower and a few roofs rising out of the mist, as out of water.

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.