Three Soldiers (4 page)

His voice was confidential and soft, and the guitar strummed to the same sobbing rag-time. Verse after verse the voice grew louder and the strumming faster.

The guitar was strumming the hymn-tune. The negro was singing with every cord in his throat taut, almost sobbing.

A man next to Fuselli took careful aim and spat into the box of sawdust in the middle of the ring of motionless soldiers.

The guitar played the rag-time again, fast, almost mockingly. The negro sang in low confidential tones.

Before he had finished a bugle blew in the distance. Everybody scattered.

Fuselli and Bill Grey went silently back to their barracks.

“It must be an awful thing to drown in the sea,” said Grey as he rolled himself in his blankets. “If one of those bastard U-boats …”

“I don’t give a damn,” said Fuselli boisterously; but as he lay staring into the darkness, cold terror stiffened him suddenly. He thought for a moment of deserting, pretending he was sick, anything to keep from going on the transport.

He could feel himself going down through icy water. “It’s a hell of a thing to send a guy over there to drown,” he said to himself, and he thought of the hilly streets of San Francisco, and the glow of the sunset over the harbor and ships coming in through the Golden Gate. His mind went gradually blank and he went to sleep.

The column was like some curious khaki-colored carpet, hiding the road as far as you could see. In Fuselli’s company the men were shifting their weight from one foot to the other, muttering, “What the hell a’ they waiting for now?” Bill Grey, next to Fuselli in the ranks, stood bent double so as to take the weight of his pack off his shoulders. They were at a cross-roads on fairly high ground so that they could see the long sheds and barracks of the camp stretching away in every direction, in rows and rows, broken now and then by a grey drill field. In front of them the column stretched to the last bend in the road, where it disappeared on a hill among mustard-yellow suburban houses.

Fuselli was excited. He kept thinking of the night before, when he had helped the sergeant distribute emergency rations, and had carried about piles of boxes of hard bread, counting them carefully without a mistake. He felt full of desire to do things, to show what he was good for. “Gee,” he said to himself, “this war’s a lucky thing for me. I might have been in the R. C. Vicker Company’s store for five years an’ never got a raise. An’ here in the army I got a chance to do almost anything.”

Far ahead down the road the column was beginning to move. Voices shouting orders beat crisply on the morning air. Fuselli’s heart was thumping. He felt proud of himself and of the company—the damn best company in the whole outfit. The company ahead was moving, it was their turn now.

“Forwa-ard, march!”

They were lost in the monotonous tramp of feet. Dust rose from the road, along which like a drab brown worm crawled the column.

A sickening unfamiliar smell choked their nostrils.

“What are they taking us down here for?”

“Damned if I know.”

They were filing down ladders into the terrifying pit which the hold of the ship seemed to them. Every man had a blue card in his hand with a number on it. In a dim place like an empty warehouse they stopped. The sergeant shouted out:

“I guess this is our diggings. We’ll have to make the best of it.” Then he disappeared.

Fuselli looked about him. He was sitting in one of the lowest of three tiers of bunks roughly built of new pine boards. Electric lights placed here and there gave a faint reddish tone to the gloom, except at the ladders, where high-power lamps made a white glare. The place was full of tramping of feet and the sound of packs being thrown on bunks as endless files of soldiers poured in down every ladder. Somewhere down the alley an officer with a shrill voice was shouting to his men: “Speed it up there; speed it up there.” Fuselli sat on his bunk looking at the terrifying confusion all about, feeling bewildered and humiliated. For how many days would they be in that dark pit? He suddenly felt angry. They had no right to treat a feller like that. He was a man, not a bale of hay to be bundled about as anybody liked.

“An’ if we’re torpedoed a fat chance we’ll have down here,” he said aloud.

“They got sentries posted to keep us from goin’ up on deck,” said someone.

“God damn them. They treat you like you was a steer being taken over for meat.”

“Well, you’re not a damn sight more. Meat for the guns.”

A little man lying in one of the upper bunks had spoken suddenly, contracting his sallow face into a curious spasm, as if the words had burst from him in spite of an effort to keep them in.

Everybody looked up at him angrily.

“That goddam kike Eisenstein,” muttered someone.

“Say, tie that bull outside,” shouted Bill Grey good-naturedly.

“Fools,” muttered Eisenstein, turning over and burying his face in his hands.

“Gee, I wonder what it is makes it smell so funny down here,” said Fuselli.

Fuselli lay flat on deck resting his head on his crossed arms. When he looked straight up he could see a lead-colored mast sweep back and forth across the sky full of clouds of light grey and silver and dark purplish-grey showing yellowish at the edges. When he tilted his head a little to one side he could see Bill Grey’s heavy colorless face and the dark bristles of his unshaven chin and his mouth a little twisted to the left, from which a cigarette dangled unlighted. Beyond were heads and bodies huddled together in a mass of khaki overcoats and life preservers. And when the roll tipped the deck he had a view of moving green waves and of a steamer striped grey and white, and the horizon, a dark taut line, broken here and there by the tops of waves.

“O God, I feel sick,” said Bill Grey, taking the cigarette out of his mouth and looking at it revengefully.

“I’d be all right if everything didn’t stink so. An’ that mess hall. Nearly makes a guy puke to think of it.” Fuselli spoke in a whining voice, watching the top of the mast move like a pencil scrawling on paper, back and forth across the mottled clouds.

“You belly-achin’ again?” A brown moon-shaped face with thick black eyebrows and hair curling crisply about a forehead with many horizontal wrinkles rose from the deck on the other side of Fuselli.

“Get the hell out of here.”

“Feel sick, sonny?” came the deep voice again, and the dark eyebrows contracted in an expression of sympathy.–“Funny, I’d have my sixshooter out if I was home and you told me to get the hell out, sonny.”

“Well, who wouldn’t be sore when they have to go on K.P.?” said Fuselli peevishly.

“I ain’t been down to mess in three days. A feller who lives on the plains like I do ought to take to the sea like a duck, but it don’t seem to suit me.”

“God, they’re a sick lookin’ bunch I have to sling the hash to,” said Fuselli more cheerfully. “I don’t know how they get that way. The fellers in our company ain’t that way. They look like they was askeered somebody was going to hit ’em. Ever noticed that, Meadville?”

“Well, what d’ye expect of you guys who live in the city all your lives and don’t know the butt from the barrel of a gun an’ never straddled anything more like a horse than a broomstick. Ye’re juss made to be sheep. No wonder they have to herd you round like calves.” Meadville got to his feet and went unsteadily to the rail, keeping, as he threaded his way through the groups that covered the transport’s after deck, a little of his cowboy’s bow-legged stride.

“I know what it is that makes men’s eyes blink when they go down to that putrid mess,” came a nasal voice.

Fuselli turned round.

Eisenstein was sitting in the place Meadville had just left.

“You do, do you?”

“It’s part of the system. You’ve got to turn men into beasts before ye can get ’em to act that way. Ever read Tolstoi?”

“No. Say, you want to be careful how you go talkin’ around the way you do.” Fuselli lowered his voice confidentially. “I heard of a feller bein’ shot at Camp Merritt for talkin’ around.”

“I don’t care. … I’m a desperate man,” said Eisenstein.

“Don’t ye feel sick? Gawd, I do. … Did you get rid o’ any of it, Meadville?”

“Why don’t they fight their ole war somewhere a man can get to on a horse? … Say that’s my seat.”

“The place was empty. … I sat down in it,” said Eisenstein, lowering his head sullenly.

“You kin have three winks to get out o’ my place,” said Meadville, squaring his broad shoulders.

“You are stronger than me,” said Eisenstein, moving off.

‘’God, it’s hell not to have a gun,” muttered Meadville as he settled himself on the deck again. “D’ye know, sonny, I nearly cried when I found I was going to be in this damn medical corps? I enlisted for the tanks. This is the first time in my life I haven’t had a gun. I even think I had one in my cradle.”

“That’s funny,” said Fuselli.

The sergeant appeared suddenly in the middle of the group, his face red.

“Say, fellers,” he said in a low voice, “go down an’ straighten out the bunks as fast as you goddam can. They’re having an inspection. It’s a hell of a note.”

They all filed down the gang planks into the foul-smelling hold, where there was no light but the invariable reddish glow of electric bulbs. They had hardly reached their bunks when someone called, “Attention!”

Three officers stalked by, their firm important tread a little disturbed by the rolling. Their heads were stuck forward and they peered from side to side among the bunks with the cruel, searching glance of hens looking for worms.

“Fuselli,” said the first sergeant, “bring up the record book to my state-room; 213 on the lower deck.”

“All right, Sarge,” said Fuselli with alacrity. He admired the first sergeant and wished he could imitate his jovial, domineering manner.

It was the first time he had been in the upper part of the ship. It seemed a different world. The long corridors with red carpets, the white paint and the gilt mouldings on the partitions, the officers strolling about at their ease—it all made him think of the big liners he used to watch come in through the Golden Gate, the liners he was going to Europe on some day, when he got rich. Oh, if he could only get to be a sergeant first-class, all this comfort and magnificence would be his. He found the number and knocked on the door. Laughter and loud talking came from inside the stateroom.

“Wait a sec!” came an unfamiliar voice.

“Sergeant Olster here?”

“Oh, it’s one o’ my gang,” came the sergeant’s voice. “Let him in. He won’t peach on us.”

The door opened and he saw Sergeant Olster and two other young men sitting with their feet dangling over the red varnished boards that enclosed the bunks. They were talking gaily, and had glasses in their hands.

“Paris is some town, I can tell you,” one was saying. “They say the girls come up an’ put their arms round you right in the main street.”

“Here’s the records, sergeant,” said Fuselli stiffly in his best military manner.

“Oh thanks. … There’s nothing else I want,” said the sergeant, his voice more jovial than ever. “Don’t fall overboard like the guy in Company C.”

Fuselli laughed as he closed the door, growing serious suddenly on noticing that one of the young men wore in his shirt the gold bar of a second lieutenant.

“Gee,” he said to himself. “I ought to have saluted.”

He waited a moment outside the closed door of the stateroom, listening to the talk and the laughter, wishing he were one of that merry group talking about women in Paris. He began thinking. Sure he’d get private first-class as soon as they got overseas. Then in a couple of months he might be corporal. If they saw much service, he’d move along all right, once he got to be a non-com.

“Oh, I mustn’t get in wrong. Oh, I mustn’t get in wrong,” he kept saying to himself as he went down the ladder into the hold. But he forgot everything in the seasickness that came on again as he breathed in the fetid air.

The deck now slanted down in front of him, now rose so that he was walking up an incline. Dirty water slushed about from one side of the passage to the other with every lurch of the ship. When he reached the door the whistling howl of the wind through the hinges and cracks made Fuselli hesitate a long time with his hand on the knob. The moment he turned the knob the door flew open and he was in the full sweep of the wind. The deck was deserted. The wet ropes strung along it shivered dismally in the wind. Every other moment came the rattle of spray, that rose up in white fringy trees to windward and smashed against him like hail. Without closing the door he crept forward along the deck, clinging as hard as he could to the icy rope. Beyond the spray he could see huge marbled green waves rise in constant succession out of the mist. The roar of the wind in his ears confused him and terrified him. It seemed ages before he reached the door of the forward house that opened on a passage that smelt of drugs and breathed out air, where men waited in a packed line, thrown one against the other by the lurching of the boat, to get into the dispensary. The roar of the wind came to them faintly, and only now and then the hollow thump of a wave against the bow.