Three Soldiers - John Dos Passos (books to read fiction txt) 📗

and a pencil, I’ll write it down.”

Andrews scrawled the title on the back of an order slip.

“There.”

“What the hell? Who’s Antoine? Gee whiz, I bet that’s hot stuff. I wish I could read French. We’ll have you breakin’ loose out o’ here an’ going down to number four, roo Villiay, if you read that kind o’ book.”

“Has it got pictures?” asked Applebaum. “One feller did break out o’ here a month ago,… Couldn’t stand it any longer, I guess. Well, his wound opened an’ he had a hemorrhage, an’ now he’s planted out in the back lot…. But I’m goin’. Goodnight.” The orderly bustled to the end of the ward and disappeared.

The lights went out, except for the bulb over the nurse’s desk at the end, beside the ornate doorway, with its wreathed pinnacles carved out of the grey stone, which could be seen above the white canvas screen that hid the door.

“What’s that book about, buddy?” asked Applebaum, twisting his head at the end of his lean neck so as to look Andrews full in the face.

“Oh, it’s about a man who wants everything so badly that he decides there’s nothing worth wanting.”

“I guess youse had a college edication,” said Applebaum sarcastically.

Andrews laughed.

“Well, I was goin’ to tell youse about when I used to drive a taxi. I was makin’ big money when I enlisted. Was you drafted?”

“Yes.”

“Well, so was I. I doan think nauthin o’ them guys that are so stuck up ‘cause they enlisted, d’you?”

“Not a hell of a lot.”

“Don’t yer?” came a voice from the other side of Andrews, a thin voice that stuttered. “W-w-well, all I can say is, it’ld have sss-spoiled my business if I hadn’t enlisted. No, sir, nobody can say I didn’t enlist.”

“Well, that’s your look-out,” said Applebaum.

“You’re goddam right, it was.”

“Well, ain’t your business spoiled anyway?”

“No, sir. I can pick it right up where I left off. I’ve got an established reputation.”

“What at?”

“I’m an undertaker by profession; my dad was before me.”

“Gee, you were right at home!” said Andrews.

“You haven’t any right to say that, young feller,” said the undertaker angrily. “I’m a humane man. I won’t never be at home in this dirty butchery.”

The nurse was walking by their cots.

“How can you say such dreadful things?” she said. “But lights are out. You boys have got to keep quiet…. And you,” she plucked at the undertaker’s bedclothes, “just remember what the Huns did in Belgium…. Poor Miss Cavell, a nurse just like I am.”

Andrews closed his eyes. The ward was quiet except for the rasping sound of the snores and heavy breathing of the shattered men all about him. “And I thought she was the Queen of Sheba,” he said to himself, making a grimace in the dark. Then he began to think of the music he had intended to write about the Queen of Sheba before he had stripped his life off in the bare room where they had measured him and made a soldier of him. Standing in the dark in the desert of his despair, he would hear the sound of a caravan in the distance, tinkle of bridles, rasping of horns, braying of donkeys, and the throaty voices of men singing the songs of desolate roads. He would look up, and before him he would see, astride their foaming wild asses, the three green horsemen motionless, pointing at him with their long forefingers. Then the music would burst in a sudden hot whirlwind about him, full of flutes and kettledrums and braying horns and whining bagpipes, and torches would flare red and yellow, making a tent of light about him, on the edges of which would crowd the sumpter mules and the brown mule drivers, and the gaudily caparisoned camels, and the elephants glistening with jewelled harness. Naked slaves would bend their gleaming backs before him as they laid out a carpet at his feet; and, through the flare of torchlight, the Queen, of Sheba would advance towards him, covered with emeralds and dull-gold ornaments, with a monkey hopping behind holding up the end of her long train. She would put her hand with its slim fantastic nails on his shoulder; and, looking into her eyes, he would suddenly feel within reach all the fiery imaginings of his desire. Oh, if he could only be free to work. All the months he had wasted in his life seemed to be marching like a procession of ghosts before his eyes. And he lay in his cot, staring with wide open eyes at the ceiling, hoping desperately that his wounds would be long in healing.

 

Applebaum sat on the edge of his cot, dressed in a clean new uniform, of which the left sleeve hung empty, still showing the creases in which it had been folded.

“So you really are going,” said Andrews, rolling his head over on his pillow to look at him.

“You bet your pants I am, Andy…. An’ so could you, poifectly well, if you’ld talk it up to ‘em a little.”

“Oh, I wish to God I could. Not that I want to go home, now, but …if I could get out of uniform.”

“I don’t blame ye a bit, kid; well, next time, we’ll know better…. Local Board Chairman’s going to be my job.”

Andrews laughed.

“If I wasn’t a sucker….”

“You weren’t the only wewe-one,” came the undertaker’s stuttering voice from behind Andrews.

“Hell, I thought you enlisted, undertaker.”

“Well, I did, by God. but I didn’t think it was going to be like this.”

“What did ye think it was goin’ to be, a picnic?”

“Hell, I doan care about that, or gettin’ gassed, and smashed up, or anythin’, but I thought we was goin’ to put things to rights by comin’ over here…. Look here, I had a lively business in the undertaking way, like my father had had before me…. We did all the swellest work in Tilletsville….”

“Where?” interrupted Applebaum, laughing.

“Tilletsville; don’t you know any geography?”

“Go ahead, tell us about Tilletsville,” said Andrews soothingly.

“Why, when Senator Wallace d-d-deceased there, who d’you think had charge of embalming the body and taking it to the station an’ seeing everything was done fitting? We did…. And I was going to be married to a dandy girl, and I knowed I had enough pull to get fixed up, somehow, or to get a commission even, but there I went like a sucker an’ enlisted in the infantry, too…. But, hell, everybody was saying that we was going to fight to make the world safe for democracy, and that, if a feller didn’t go, no one’ld trade with him any more.”

He started coughing suddenly and seemed unable to stop. At last he said weakly, in a thin little voice between coughs:

“Well, here I am. There ain’t nothing to do about it.”

“Democracy…. That’s democracy, ain’t it: we eat stinkin’ goolash an’ that there fat ‘Y’ woman goes out with Colonels eatin’ chawklate soufflay…. Poifect democracy!… But I tell you what: it don’t do to be the goat.”

“But there’s so damn many more goats than anything else,” said Andrews.

“There’s a sucker born every minute, as Barnum said. You learn that drivin’ a taxicab, if ye don’t larn nothin’ else…. No, sir, I’m goin’ into politics. I’ve got good connections up Hundred and Twenty-fif’ street way…. You see, I’ve got an aunt, Mrs. Sallie Schultz, owns a hotel on a Hundred and Tirty-tird street. Heard of Jim O’Ryan, ain’t yer? Well, he’s a good friend o’ hers; see? Bein’ as they’re both Catholics… But I’m goin’ out this afternoon, see what the town’s like… an ole Ford says the skirts are just peaches an’ cream.”

“He juss s-s-says that to torment a feller,” stuttered the undertaker.

“I wish I were going with you,” said Andrews. “You’ll get well plenty soon enough, Andy, and get yourself marked Class A, and get given a gun, an—‘Over the top, boys!’…to see if the Fritzies won’t make a better shot next time…. Talk about suckers! You’re the most poifect sucker I ever met…. What did you want to tell the loot your legs didn’t hurt bad for? They’ll have you out o’ here before you know it…. Well, I’m goin’ out to see what the mamzelles look like.”

Applebaum, the uniform hanging in folds about his skinny body, swaggered to the door, followed by the envious glances of the whole ward.

“Gee, guess he thinks he’s goin’ to get to be president,” said the undertaker bitterly.

“He probably will,” said Andrews.

He settled himself in his bed again, sinking back into the dull contemplation of the teasing, smarting pain where the torn ligaments of his thighs were slowly knitting themselves together. He tried desperately to forget the pain; there was so much he wanted to think out. If he could only lie perfectly quiet, and piece together the frayed ends of thoughts that kept flickering to the surface of his mind. He counted up the days he had been in the hospital; fifteen! Could it be that long? And he had not thought of anything yet. Soon, as Applebaum said, they’d be putting him in Class A and sending him back to the treadmill, and he would not have reconquered his courage, his dominion over himself. What a coward he had been anyway, to submit. The man beside him kept coughing. Andrews stared for a moment at the silhouette of the yellow face on the pillow, with its pointed nose and small greedy eyes. He thought of the swell undertaking establishment, of the black gloves and long faces and soft tactful voices. That man and his father before him lived by pretending things they didn’t feel, by swathing reality with all manner of crepe and trumpery. For those people, no one ever died, they passed away, they deceased. Still, there had to be undertakers. There was no more stain about that than about any other trade. And it was so as not to spoil his trade that the undertaker had enlisted, and to make the world safe for democracy, too. The phrase came to Andrews’s mind amid an avalanche of popular tunes; of visions of patriotic numbers on the vaudeville stage. He remembered the great flags waving triumphantly over Fifth Avenue, and the crowds dutifully cheering. But those were valid reasons for the undertaker; but for him, John Andrews, were they valid reasons? No. He had no trade, he had not been driven into the army by the force of public opinion, he had not been carried away by any wave of blind confidence in the phrases of bought propagandists. He had not had the strength to live. The thought came to him of all those who, down the long tragedy of history, had given themselves smilingly for the integrity of their thoughts. He had not had the courage to move a muscle for his freedom, but he had been fairly cheerful about risking his life as a soldier, in a cause he believed useless. What right had a man to exist who was too cowardly to stand up for what he thought and felt, for his whole makeup, for everything that made him an individual apart from his fellows, and not a slave to stand cap in hand waiting for someone of stronger will to tell him to act?

Like a sudden nausea, disgust surged up in him. His mind ceased formulating phrases and thoughts. He gave himself over to disgust as a man who has drunk a great deal, holding on tight to the reins of his will, suddenly gives himself over pellmell to drunkenness.

He lay very still, with his eyes closed, listening to the stir of the ward, the voices of men talking and the fits of coughing that shook the