Three Soldiers (25 page)

“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.”

Behind the desk, crouched over a heap of typewritten reports, sat a little man with scanty sandy hair, who screwed up his eyes and smiled when Andrews approached the desk.

“Well, did you fix it up for me?” he asked.

“Fix what?” said Andrews.

“Oh, I thought you were someone else.” The smile left the regimental sergeant-major’s thin lips. “What do you want?”

“Why, Regimental Sergeant-Major, can you tell me anything about a scheme to send enlisted men to colleges over here? Can you tell me who to apply to?”

“According to what general orders? And who told you to come and see me about it, anyway?”

“Have you heard anything about it?”

“No, nothing definite. I’m busy now anyway. Ask one of your own non-coms to find out about it.” He crouched once more over the papers.

Andrews was walking towards the door, flushing with annoyance, when he saw that the man at the desk by the window was jerking his head in a peculiar manner, just in the direction of the regimental sergeant-major and then towards the door. Andrews smiled at him and nodded. Outside the door, where an orderly sat on a short bench reading a torn
Saturday Evening Post,
Andrews waited. The hall was part of what must have been a ballroom, for it had a much-scarred hardwood floor and big spaces of bare plaster framed by gilt- and lavender-colored mouldings, which had probably held tapestries. The partition of unplaned boards that formed other offices cut off the major part of a highly decorated ceiling where cupids with crimson-daubed bottoms swam in all attitudes in a sea of pink- and blue- and lavender-colored clouds, wreathing themselves coyly in heavy garlands of waxy hothouse flowers, while cornucopias spilling out squashy fruits gave Andrews a feeling of distinct insecurity as he looked up from below.

“Say are you a Kappa Mu?”

Andrews looked down suddenly and saw in front of him the man who had signalled to him in the regimental sergeant-major’s office.

“Are you a Kappa Mu?” he asked again.

“No, not that I know of,” stammered Andrews puzzled.

“What school did you go to?”

“Harvard.”

“Harvard. … Guess we haven’t got a chapter there. … I’m from North Western. Anyway you want to go to school in France here if you can. So do I.”

“Don’t you want to come and have a drink?”

The man frowned, pulled his overseas cap down over his forehead, where the hair grew very low, and looked about him mysteriously.

“Yes,” he said.

They splashed together down the muddy village street.

“We’ve got thirteen minutes before tattoo. … My name’s Walters, what’s yours?” He spoke in a low voice in short staccato phrases.

“Andrews.”

“Andrews, you’ve got to keep this dark. If everybody finds out about it we’re through. It’s a shame you’re not a Kappa Mu, but college men have got to stick together, that’s the way I look at it.”

“Oh, I’ll keep it dark enough,” said Andrews.

“It’s too good to be true. The general order isn’t out yet, but I’ve seen a preliminary circular. What school d’you want to go to?”

“Sorbonne, Paris.”

“That’s the stuff. D’you know the back room at Baboon’s?”

Walters turned suddenly to the left up an alley, and broke through a hole in a hawthorn hedge.

“A guy’s got to keep his eyes and ears open if he wants to get anywhere in this army,” he said.

As they ducked in the back door of a cottage, Andrews caught a glimpse of the billowy line of a tile roof against the lighter darkness of the sky. They sat down on a bench built into a chimney where a few sticks made a splutter of flames.

“Monsieur désire?” A red-faced girl with a baby in her arms came up to them.

“That’s Babette; Baboon I call her,” said Walters with a laugh.

“Chocolat,” said Walters.

“That’ll suit me all right. It’s my treat, remember.”

“I’m not forgetting it. Now let’s get to business. What you do is this. You write an application. I’ll make that out for you on the type-writer tomorrow and you meet me here at eight tomorrow night and I’ll give it to you. … You sign it at once and hand it in to your sergeant. See?”

“This’ll just be a preliminary application; when the order’s out you’ll have to make another.”

The woman, this time without the baby, appeared out of the darkness of the room with a candle and two cracked bowls from which steam rose, faint primrose-color in the candle light.