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

man next him. The smarting pain throbbed monotonously. He felt hungry and wondered vaguely if it were supper time. How little they gave you to eat in the hospital!

He called over to the man in the opposite cot:

“Hay, Stalky, what time is it?”

“It’s after messtime now. Got a good appetite for the steak and onions and French fried potatoes?”

“Shut up.”

A rattling of tin dishes at the other end of the ward made Andrews wriggle up further on his pillow. Verses from the “Shropshire Lad” jingled mockingly through his head:

“The world, it was the old world yet, I was I, my things were wet, And nothing now remained to do But begin the game anew.”

After he had eaten, he picked up the “Tentation de Saint Antoine,” that lay on the cot beside his immovable legs, and buried himself in it, reading the gorgeously modulated sentences voraciously, as if the book were a drug in which he could drink deep forgetfulness of himself.

He put the book down and closed his eyes. His mind was full of intangible floating glow, like the ocean on a warm night, when every wave breaks into pale flame, and mysterious milky lights keep rising to the surface out of the dark waters and gleaming and vanishing. He became absorbed in the strange fluid harmonies that permeated his whole body, as a grey sky at nightfall suddenly becomes filled with endlessly changing patterns of light and color and shadow.

When he tried to seize hold of his thoughts, to give them definite musical expression in his mind, he found himself suddenly empty, the way a sandy inlet on the beach that has been full of shoals of silver fishes, becomes suddenly empty when a shadow crosses the water, and the man who is watching sees wanly his own reflection instead of the flickering of thousands of tiny silver bodies.

 

John Andrews awoke to feel a cold hand on his head.

“Feeling all right?” said a voice in his ear.

He found himself looking in a puffy, middle-aged face, with a lean nose and grey eyes, with dark rings under them. Andrews felt the eyes looking him over inquisitively. He saw the red triangle on the man’s khaki sleeve.

“Yes,” he said.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you a little while, buddy.”

“Not a bit; have you got a chair?” said Andrews smiling.

“I don’t suppose it was just right of me to wake you up, but you see it was this way…. You were the next in line, an’ I was afraid I’d forget you, if I skipped you.”

“I understand,” said Andrews, with a sudden determination to take the initiative away from the “Y” man.

“How long have you been in France? D’you like the war?” he asked hurriedly.

The “Y” man smiled sadly.

“You seem pretty spry,” he said. “I guess you’re in a hurry to get back at the front and get some more Huns.” He smiled again, with an air of indulgence.

Andrews did not answer.

“No, sonny, I don’t like it here,” the “Y” man said, after a pause. “I wish I was home—but it’s great to feel you’re doing your duty.”

“It must be,” said Andrews.

“Have you heard about the great air raids our boys have pulled off? They’ve bombarded Frankfort; now if they could only wipe Berlin off the map.”

“Say, d’you hate ‘em awful hard?” said Andrews in a low voice. “Because, if you do, I can tell you something will tickle you most to death…. Lean over.”

The “Y” man leant over curiously. “Some German prisoners come to this hospital at six every night to get the garbage; now all you need to do if you really hate ‘em so bad is borrow a revolver from one of your officer friends, and just shoot up the convoy….”

“Say…where were you raised, boy?” The “Y” man sat up suddenly with a look of alarm on his face. “Don’t you know that prisoners are sacred?”

“D’you know what our colonel told us before going into the Argonne offensive? The more prisoners we took, the less grub there’ld be; and do you know what happened to the prisoners that were taken? Why do you hate the Huns?”

“Because they are barbarians, enemies of civilization. You must have enough education to know that,” said the “Y” man, raising his voice angrily. “What church do you belong to?”

“None.”

“But you must have been connected with some church, boy. You can’t have been raised a heathen in America. Every Christian belongs or has belonged to some church or other from baptism.”

“I make no pretensions to Christianity.”

Andrews closed his eyes and turned his head away. He could feel the “Y” man hovering over him irresolutely. After a while he opened his eyes. The “Y” man was leaning over the next bed.

Through the window at the opposite side of the ward he could see a bit of blue sky among white scroll-like clouds, with mauve shadows. He stared at it until the clouds, beginning to grow golden into evening, covered it. Furious, hopeless irritation consumed him. How these people enjoyed hating! At that rate it was better to be at the front. Men were more humane when they were killing each other than when they were talking about it. So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression. Oh, but there must be something more in the world than greed and hatred and cruelty. Were they all shams, too, these gigantic phrases that floated like gaudy kites high above mankind? Kites, that was it, contraptions of tissue paper held at the end of a string, ornaments not to be taken seriously. He thought of all the long procession of men who had been touched by the unutterable futility of the lives of men, who had tried by phrases to make things otherwise, who had taught unworldliness. Dim enigmatic figures they were—Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, Christ; so many of them, and so vague in the silvery mist of history that he hardly knew that they were not his own imagining; Lucretius, St. Francis, Voltaire, Rousseau, and how many others, known and unknown, through the tragic centuries; they had wept, some of them, and some of them had laughed, and their phrases had risen glittering, soap bubbles to dazzle men for a moment, and had shattered. And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, to live his life as he saw it in spite of everything, to proclaim once more the falseness of the gospels under the cover of which greed and fear filled with more and yet more pain the already unbearable agony of human life.

As soon as he got out of the hospital he would desert; the determination formed suddenly in his mind, making the excited blood surge gloriously through his body. There was nothing else to do; he would desert. He pictured himself hobbling away in the dark on his lame legs, stripping his uniform off, losing himself in some out of the way corner of France, or slipping by the sentries to Spain and freedom. He was ready to endure anything, to face any sort of death, for the sake of a few months of liberty in which to forget the degradation of this last year. This was his last run with the pack.

An enormous exhilaration took hold of him. It seemed the first time in his life he had ever determined to act. All the rest had been aimless drifting. The blood sang m his ears. He fixed his eyes on the half-obliterated figures that supported the shields under the beams in the wall opposite. They seemed to be wriggling out of their contorted positions and smiling encouragement to him. He imagined them, warriors out of old tales, on their way to clay dragons in enchanted woods, clever-fingered guildsmen and artisans, cupids and satyrs and fauns, jumping from their niches and carrying him off with them in a headlong rout, to a sound of flutes, on a last forlorn assault on the citadels of pain.

The lights went out, and an orderly came round with chocolate that poured with a pleasant soothing sound into the tin cups. With a greasiness of chocolate in his mouth and the warmth of it in his stomach, John Andrews went to sleep.

 

There was a stir in the ward when he woke up. Reddish sunlight filtered in through the window opposite, and from outside came a confused noise, a sound of bells ringing and whistles blowing. Andrews looked past his feet towards Stalky’s cot opposite. Stalky was sitting bolt upright in bed, with his eyes round as quarters.

“Fellers, the war’s over!”

“Put him out.”

“Cut that.”

“Pull the chain.”

“Tie that bull outside,” came from every side of the ward.

“Fellers,” shouted Stalky louder than ever, “it’s straight dope, the war’s over. I just dreamt the Kaiser came up to me on Fourteenth Street and bummed a nickel for a glass of beer. The war’s over. Don’t you hear the whistles?”

“All right; let’s go home.”

“Shut up, can’t you let a feller sleep?”

The ward quieted down again, but all eyes were wide open, men lay strangely still in their cots, waiting, wondering.

“All I can say,” shouted Stalky again, “is that she was some war while she lasted…. What did I tell yer?”

As he spoke the canvas screen in front of the door collapsed and the major appeared with his cap askew over his red face and a brass bell in his hand, which he rang frantically as he advanced into the ward.

“Men,” he shouted in the deep roar of one announcing baseball scores, “the war ended at 4:03 A.M. this morning…. The Armistice is signed. To hell with the Kaiser!” Then he rang the dinner bell madly and danced along the aisle between the rows of cots, holding the head nurse by one hand, who held a little yellow-headed lieutenant by the other hand, who, in turn, held another nurse, and so on. The line advanced jerkily into the ward; the front part was singing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and the rear the “Yanks are Coming,” and through it all the major rang his brass bell. The men who were well enough sat up in bed and yelled. The others rolled restlessly about, sickened by the din.

They made the circuit of the ward and filed out, leaving confusion behind them. The dinner bell could be heard faintly in the other parts of the building.

“Well, what d’you think of it, undertaker?” said Andrews.

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

The undertaker turned his small black eyes on Andrews and looked him straight in the face.

“You know what’s the matter with me, don’t yer, outside o’ this wound?”

“No.”

“Coughing like I am, I’d think you’d be more observant. I got t.b., young feller.”

“How do you know that?”

“They’re going to move me out o’ here to a t.b. ward tomorrow.”

“The hell they are!” Andrews’s words were lost in the paroxysm of coughing that seized the man next to him.

“Home, boys, home; it’s home we want to be,”

Those well enough were singing, Stalky conducting, standing on the end of his cot in his pink Red Cross pajamas, that were too short and showed a long expanse of skinny leg, fuzzy with red hairs. He banged together two bed pans to beat time.

“Home…. I won’t never go home,” said the undertaker when the noise had subsided a little. “D’you know what I wish? I wish the war’d gone on and on until everyone of them bastards had been killed in it.”

“Which bastards?”

“The men who got us fellers over here.” He began coughing again weakly.

“But