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

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 stateroom; 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.

“You sick?” a man asked Fuselli.

“Naw, I’m not sick; but Sarge sent me to get some stuff for some guys that’s too sick to move.”

“An awful lot o’ sickness on this boat.”

“Two fellers died this mornin’ in that there room,” said another man solemnly, pointing over his shoulder with a jerk of the thumb. “Ain’t buried ‘em yet. It’s too rough.”

“What’d they die of?” asked Fuselli eagerly.

“Spinal somethin’….”

“Menegitis,” broke in a man at the end of the line.

“Say, that’s awful catchin’ ain’t it?”

“It sure is.”

“Where does it hit yer?” asked Fuselli.

“Yer neck swells up, an’ then you juss go stiff all over,” came the man’s voice from the end of the line.

There was a silence. From the direction of the infirmary a man with a packet of medicines in his hand began making his way towards the door.

“Many guys in there?” asked Fuselli in a low voice as the man brushed past him.

When the door closed again the man beside Fuselli, who was tall and broad shouldered with heavy black eyebrows, burst out, as if he were saying something he’d been trying to keep from saying for a long while:

“It won’t be right if that sickness gets me; indeed it won’t…. I’ve got a girl waitin’ for me at home. It’s two years since I ain’t touched a woman all on account of her. It ain’t natural for a fellow to go so long as that.

“Why didn’t you marry her before you left?” somebody asked mockingly.

“Said she didn’t want to be no war bride, that she could wait for me better if I didn’t.”

Several men laughed.

“It wouldn’t be right if I took sick an’ died of this sickness, after keepin’ myself clean on account of that girl…. It wouldn’t be right,” the man muttered again to Fuselli.

Fuselli was picturing himself lying in his bunk with a swollen neck, while his arms and legs stiffened, stiffened.

A red-faced man half way up the passage started speaking:

“When I thinks to myself how much the folks need me home, it makes me feel sort o’ confident-like, I dunno why. I juss can’t cash in my checks, that’s all.” He laughed jovially.

No one joined in the laugh.

“Is it awfully catchin’?” asked Fuselli of the man next him.

“Most catchin’ thing there is,” he answered solemnly. “The worst of it is,” another man was muttering in a shrill hysterical voice, “bein’ thrown over to the sharks. Gee, they ain’t got a right to do that, even if it is war time, they ain’t got a right to treat a Christian like he was a dead dawg.”

“They got a right to do anythin’ they goddam please, buddy. Who’s goin’ to stop ‘em I’d like to know,” cried the red-faced man.

“If he was an awficer, they wouldn’t throw him over like that,” came the shrill hysterical voice again.

“Cut that,” said someone else, “no use gettin’ in wrong juss for the sake of talkin’.”

“But ain’t it dangerous, waitin’ round up here so near where those fellers are with that sickness,” whispered Fuselli to the man next him.

“Reckon it is, buddy,” came the other man’s voice dully.

Fuselli started making his way toward the door.

“Lemme out, fellers, I’ve got to puke,” he said. “Shoot,” he was thinking, “I’ll tell ‘em the place was closed; they’ll never come to look.”

As he opened the door he thought of himself crawling back to his bunk and feeling his neck swell and his hands burn with fever and his arms and legs stiffen until everything would be effaced in the blackness of death. But the roar of the wind and the lash of the spray as he staggered back along the deck drowned all other thought.

 

Fuselli and another man carried the dripping garbage-can up the ladder that led up from the mess hall. It smelt of rancid grease and coffee grounds and greasy juice trickled over their fingers as they struggled with it. At last they burst out on to the deck where a free wind blew out of the black night. They staggered unsteadily to the rail and emptied the pail into the darkness. The splash was lost in the sound of the waves and of churned water fleeing along the sides. Fuselli leaned over the rail and looked down at the faint phosphorescence that was the only light in the whole black gulf. He had never seen such darkness before. He clutched hold of the rail with both hands, feeling lost and terrified in the blackness, in the roaring of the wind in his ears and the sound of churned water fleeing astern. The alternative was the stench of below decks.

“I’ll bring down the rosie, don’t you bother,” he said to the other man, kicking the can that gave out a ringing sound as he spoke.

He strained his eyes to make out something. The darkness seemed to press in upon his eyeballs, blinding him. Suddenly he noticed voices near him. Two men were talking.

“I ain’t never seen the sea before this, I didn’t know it was like this.”

“We’re in the zone, now.”

“That means we may go down any minute.”

“Yare.”

“Christ, how black it is…. It’ld be awful to drown in the dark like this.”

“It’ld be over soon.”

“Say, Fred, have you ever been so skeered that…?”

“D’you feel askeert?”

“Feel my hand, Fred…. No…. There it is. God, it’s so hellish black you can’t see yer own hand.”

“It’s cold. Why are you shiverin’ so? God, I wish I had a drink.”

“I ain’t never seen the sea before…I didn’t know…”

Fuselli heard distinctly the man’s teeth chattering in the darkness.

“God, pull yerself together, kid. You can’t be skeered like this.”

“O God.”

There was a long pause. Fuselli heard nothing but the churned water speeding along the ship’s side and the wind roaring in his ears.

“I ain’t never seen the sea before this time, Fred, an’ it sort o’ gits my goat, all this sickness an’ all…. They dropped three of ‘em overboard yesterday.”

“Hell, kid, don’t think of it.”

“Say, Fred, if I…if I…if you’re saved, Fred, an’ not me, you’ll write to my folks, won’t you?”

“Indeed I will. But I reckon you an’ me’ll both go down together.”

“Don’t say that. An’ you won’t forget to write that girl I gave you the address of?”

“You’ll do the same for me.”

“Oh, no, Fred, I’ll never see land…. Oh, it’s no use. An’ I feel so well an’ husky…. I don’t want to die. I can’t die like this.”

“If it