Chrisfield's eyes were fixed on the leaves at the tops of the walnut
trees, etched like metal against the bright colorless sky, edged with
flicks and fringes of gold where the sunlight struck them. He stood
stiff and motionless at attention, although there was a sharp pain in
his left ankle that seemed swollen enough to burst the worn boot. He
could feel the presence of men on both sides of him, and of men again
beyond them. It seemed as if the stiff line of men in olive-drab,
standing at attention, waiting endlessly for someone to release them
from their erect paralysis, must stretch unbroken round the world.
He let his glance fall to the trampled grass of the field where the
regiment was drawn up. Somewhere behind him he could hear the clinking
of spurs at some officer's heels. Then there was the sound of a motor on
the road suddenly shut off, and there were steps coming down the line
of men, and a group of officers passed hurriedly, with a businesslike
stride, as if they did nothing else all their lives. Chrisfield made out
eagles on tight khaki shoulders, then a single star and a double star,
above which was a red ear and some grey hair; the general passed too
soon for him to make out his face. Chrisfield swore to himself a little
because his ankle hurt so. His eyes travelled back to the fringe of the
trees against the bright sky. So this was what he got for those weeks
in dugouts, for all the times he had thrown himself on his belly in the
mud, for the bullets he had shot into the unknown at grey specks that
moved among the grey mud. Something was crawling up the middle of his
back. He wasn't sure if it were a louse or if he were imagining it. An
order had been shouted. Automatically he had changed his position to
parade rest. Somewhere far away a little man was walking towards the
long drab lines. A wind had come up, rustling the stiff leaves of the
grove of walnut trees. The voice squeaked above it, but Chrisfield could
not make out what it said. The wind in the trees made a vast rhythmic
sound like the churning of water astern of the transport he had come
over on. Gold flicks and olive shadows danced among the indented
clusters of leaves as they swayed, as if sweeping something away,
against the bright sky. An idea came into Chrisfield's head. Suppose
the leaves should sweep in broader and broader curves until they should
reach the ground and sweep and sweep until all this was swept away,
all these pains and lice and uniforms and officers with maple leaves
or eagles or single stars or double stars or triple stars on their
shoulders. He had a sudden picture of himself in his old comfortable
overalls, with his shirt open so that the wind caressed his neck like
a girl blowing down it playfully, lying on a shuck of hay under the hot
Indiana sun. Funny he'd thought all that, he said to himself. Before
he'd known Andy he'd never have thought of that. What had come over him
these days?
The regiment was marching away in columns of fours. Chrisfield's ankle
gave him sharp hot pain with every step. His tunic was too tight and the
sweat tingled on his back. All about him were sweating irritated faces;
the woollen tunics with their high collars were like straight-jackets
that hot afternoon. Chrisfield marched with his fists clenched; he
wanted to fight somebody, to run his bayonet into a man as he ran it
into the dummy in that everlasting bayonet drill, he wanted to strip
himself naked, to squeeze the wrists of a girl until she screamed.
His company was marching past another company that was lined up to be
dismissed in front of a ruined barn which had a roof that sagged in the
middle like an old cow's back. The sergeant stood in front of them with
his arms crossed, looking critically at the company that marched past.
He had a white heavy face and black eyebrows that met over his nose.
Chrisfield stared hard at him as he passed, but Sergeant Anderson did
not seem to recognize him. It gave him a dull angry feeling as if he'd
been cut by a friend.
The company melted suddenly into a group of men unbuttoning their
shirts and tunics in front of the little board shanty where they were
quartered, which had been put up by the French at the time of the Marne,
years before, so a man had told Andy.
“What are you dreamin' about, Indiana?” said Judkins, punching
Chrisfield jovially in the ribs.
Chrisfield doubled his fists and gave him a smashing blow in the jaw
that Judkins warded of just in time.
Judkins's face flamed red. He swung with a long bent arm.
“What the hell d'you think this is?” shouted somebody. “What's he want
to hit me for?” spluttered Judkins, breathless.
Men had edged in between them.
“Lemme git at him.”
“Shut up, you fool,” said Andy, drawing Chrisfield away. The company
scattered sullenly. Some of the men lay down in the long uncut grass in
the shade of the ruins of the house, one of the walls of which made a
wall of the shanty where they lived. Andrews and Chrisfield strolled in
silence down the road, kicking their feet into the deep dust. Chrisfield
was limping. On both sides of the road were fields of ripe wheat, golden
under the sun. In the distance were low green hills fading to blue, pale
yellow in patches with the ripe grain. Here and there a thick clump
of trees or a screen of poplars broke the flatness of the long smooth
hills. In the hedgerows were blue cornflowers and poppies in all colors
from carmine to orange that danced in the wind on their wiry stalks. At
the turn in the road they lost the noise of the division and could hear
the bees droning in the big dull purple cloverheads and in the gold
hearts of the daisies.
“You're a wild man, Chris. What the hell came over you to try an' smash
poor old Judkie's jaw? He could lick you anyway. He's twice as heavy as
you are.”
Chrisfield walked on in silence.
“God, I should think you'ld have had enough of that sort of thing....
I should think you'ld be sick of wanting to hurt people. You don't like
pain yourself, do you?”
Andrews spoke in spurts, bitterly, his eyes on the ground.
“Ah think Ah sprained ma goddam ankle when Ah tumbled off the back o'
the truck yesterday.”
“Better go on sick call.... Say, Chris, I'm sick of this business....
Almost like you'd rather shoot yourself than keep on.”
“Ah guess you're gettin' the dolefuls, Andy. Look... let's go in
swimmin'. There's a lake down the road.”
“I've got my soap in my pocket. We can wash a few cooties off.”
“Don't walk so goddam fast...Andy, you got more learnin' than I have.
You ought to be able to tell what it is makes a feller go crazy like
that.... Ah guess Ah got a bit o' the devil in me.”
Andrews was brushing the soft silk of a poppy petal against his face.
“I wonder if it'ld have any effect if I ate some of these,” he said.
“Why?”
“They say you go to sleep if you lie down in a poppy-field. Wouldn't you
like to do that, Chris, an' not wake up till the war was over and you
could be a human being again.”
Andrews bit into the green seed capsule he held in his hand. A milky
juice came out.
“It's bitter...I guess it's the opium,” he said.
“What's that?”
“A stuff that makes you go to sleep and have wonderful dreams. In
China....”
“Dreams,” interrupted Chrisfield. “Ah had one of them last night.
Dreamed Ah saw a feller that had shot hisself that I saw one time
reconnoitrin' out in the Bringy Wood.”
“What was that?”
“Nawthin', juss a Fritzie had shot hisself.”
“Better than opium,” said Andrews, his voice trembling with sudden
excitement.
“Ah dreamed the flies buzzin' round him was aeroplanes.... Remember the
last rest village?”
“And the major who wouldn't close the window? You bet I do!”
They lay down on the grassy bank that sloped from the road to the pond.
The road was hidden from them by the tall reeds through which the wind
lisped softly. Overhead huge white cumulus clouds, piled tier on tier
like fantastic galleons in full sail, floated, changing slowly in a
greenish sky. The reflection of clouds in the silvery glisten of the
pond's surface was broken by clumps of grasses and bits of floating
weeds. They lay on their backs for some time before they started taking
their clothes off, looking up at the sky, that seemed vast and free,
like the ocean, vaster and freer than the ocean.
“Sarge says a delousin' machine's comin' through this way soon.”
“We need it, Chris.”
Andrews pulled his clothes off slowly.
“It's great to feel the sun and the wind on your body, isn't it, Chris?”
Andrews walked towards the pond and lay flat on his belly on the fine
soft grass near the edge.
“It's great to have your body there, isn't it?” he said in a dreamy
voice. “Your skin's so soft and supple, and nothing in the world has the
feel a muscle has.... Gee, I don't know what I'd do without my body.”
Chrisfield laughed.
“Look how ma ole ankle's raised.... Found any cooties yet?” he said.
“I'll try and drown 'em,” said Andrews. “Chris, come away from those
stinking uniforms and you'll feel like a human being with the sun on
your flesh instead of like a lousy soldier.”
“Hello, boys,” came a high-pitched voice unexpectedly. A “Y” man with
sharp nose and chin had come up behind them.
“Hello,” said Chrisfield sullenly, limping towards the water.
“Want the soap?” said Andrews.
“Going to take a swim, boys?” asked the “Y” man. Then he added in a tone
of conviction, “That's great.”
“Better come in, too,” said Andrews.
“Thanks, thanks.... Say, if you don't mind my suggestion, why don't you
fellers get under the water.... You see there's two French girls looking
at you from the road.” The “Y” man giggled faintly.
“They don't mind,” said Andrews soaping, himself vigorously.
“Ah reckon they lahk it,” said Chrisfield.
“I know they haven't any morals.... But still.”
“And why should they not look at us? Maybe there won't be many people
who get a chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever seen what a little splinter of a shell does to a feller's
body?” asked Andrews savagely. He splashed into the shallow water and
swam towards the middle of the pond.
“Ye might ask 'em to come down and help us pick the cooties off,” said
Chrisfield and followed in Andrews's wake. In the middle he lay on a
sand bank in the warm shallow water and looked back at the “Y” man, who
still stood on the bank. Behind him were other men undressing, and
soon the grassy slope was filled with naked men and yellowish grey
underclothes, and many dark heads and gleaming backs were bobbing up
and down in the water. When he came out, he found Andrews sitting
cross-legged near his clothes. He reached for his shirt and drew it on
him.
“God, I can't make up my mind to put the damn thing on again,” said
Andrews in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself; “I feel
so clean and free. It's like voluntarily taking up filth and slavery
again.... I think I'll just walk off naked across the fields.”
“D'you call serving your country slavery, my friend?” The “Y” man, who
had been roaming among the bathers, his neat uniform and well-polished
boots and puttees contrasting strangely with the mud-clotted,
sweat-soaked clothing of the men about him, sat down on the grass beside
Andrews.
“You're goddam right I do.”
“You'll get into trouble, my boy, if you talk that way,” said the “Y”
man in a cautious voice.
“Well, what is your definition of slavery?”
“You must remember that you are a voluntary worker in the cause of
democracy.... You're doing this so that your children will be able to
live peaceful....”
“Ever shot a man?”
“No.... No, of course not, but I'd have enlisted, really I would. Only
my eyes are weak.”
“I guess so,” said Andrews under his breath. “Remember that your women
folks, your sisters and sweethearts and mothers, are praying for you at
this instant.”
“I wish somebody'd pray me into a clean shirt,” said Andrews, starting
to get into his clothes. “How long have you been over here?”
“Just three months.” The man's sallow face, with its pinched nose and
chin lit up. “But, boys, those three months have been worth all the
other years of my min--” he caught himself--“life.... I've heard the
great heart of America beat. O boys, never forget that you are in a
great Christian undertaking.”
“Come on, Chris, let's beat it.” They left the “Y” man wandering among
the men along the bank of the pond, to which the reflection of the
greenish silvery sky and the great piled white clouds gave all the free
immensity of space. From the road they could still hear his high pitched
voice.
“And that's what'll survive you and me,” said Andrews.
“Say, Andy, you sure can talk to them guys,” said Chris admiringly.
“What's the use of talking? God, there's a bit of honeysuckle still in
bloom. Doesn't that smell like home to you, Chris?”
“Say, how much do they pay those 'Y' men, Andy?”
“Damned if I know.”
They were just in time to fall into line for mess. In the line everyone
was talking and laughing, enlivened by the smell of food and the tinkle
of mess-kits. Near the field kitchen Chrisfield saw Sergeant Anderson
talking with Higgins, his own sergeant. They were laughing together,
and he heard Anderson's big voice saying jovially, “We've pulled through
this time, Higgins.... I guess we will again.” The two sergeants looked
at each other and cast a paternal, condescending glance over their men
and laughed aloud.
Chrisfield felt powerless as an ox under the yoke. All he could do was
work and strain and stand at attention, while that white-faced Anderson
could lounge about as if he owned the earth and laugh importantly like
that. He held out his plate. The K.P. splashed the meat and gravy into
it. He leaned against the tar-papered wall of the shack, eating his food
and looking sullenly over at the two sergeants, who laughed and
talked with an air of leisure while the men of their two companies ate
hurriedly as dogs all round them.
Chrisfield glanced suddenly at Anderson, who sat in the grass at the
back of the house, looking out over the wheat fields, while the smoke of
a cigarette rose in spirals about his face and his fair hair. He looked
peaceful, almost happy. Chrisfield clenched his fists and felt the
hatred of that other man rising stingingly within him.
“Guess Ah got a bit of the devil in me,” he thought.
The windows were so near the grass that the faint light had a greenish
color in the shack where the company was quartered. It gave men's faces,
tanned as they were, the sickly look of people who work in offices, when
they lay on their blankets in the bunks made of chicken wire, stretched
across mouldy scantlings. Swallows had made their nests in the peak
of the roof, and their droppings made white dobs and blotches on the
floorboards in the alley between the bunks, where a few patches of
yellow grass had not yet been completely crushed away by footsteps. Now
that the shack was empty, Chrisfield could hear plainly the peep-peep of
the little swallows in their mud nests. He sat quiet on the end of one
of the bunks, looking out of the open door at the blue shadows that were
beginning to lengthen on the grass of the meadow behind. His hands, that
had got to be the color of terra cotta, hung idly between his legs. He
was whistling faintly. His eyes, in their long black eyelashes, were
fixed on the distance, though he was not thinking. He felt a comfortable
unexpressed well-being all over him. It was pleasant to be alone in the
barracks like this, when the other men were out at grenade practice.
There was no chance of anyone shouting orders at him.
A warm drowsiness came over him. From the field kitchen alongside came
the voice of a man singing:
“O my girl's a lulu, every inch a lulu,
Is Lulu, that pretty lil' girl o' mi-ine.”
In their mud nests the young swallows twittered faintly overhead. Now
and then there was a beat of wings and a big swallow skimmed into the
shack. Chrisfield's cheeks began to feel very softly flushed. His head
drooped over on his chest. Outside the cook was singing over and over
again in a low voice, amid a faint clatter of pans:
“O my girl's a lulu, every inch a lulu,
Is Lulu, that pretty lil' girl o' mi-ine.”
Chrisfield fell asleep.
He woke up with a start. The shack was almost dark. A tall man stood out
black against the bright oblong of the door.
“What are you doing here?” said a deep snarling voice.
Chrisfield's eyes blinked. Automatically he got to his feet; it might be
an officer. His eyes focussed suddenly. It was Anderson's face that was
between him and the light. In the greenish obscurity the skin looked
chalk-white in contrast to the heavy eyebrows that met over the nose and
the dark stubble on the chin.
“How is it you ain't out with the company?”
“Ah'm barracks guard,” muttered Chrisfield. He could feel the blood
beating in his wrists and temples, stinging his eyes like fire. He was
staring at the floor in front of Anderson's feet.
“Orders was all the companies was to go out an' not leave any guard.”
“Ah!'
“We'll see about that when Sergeant Higgins comes in. Is this place
tidy?”
“You say Ah'm a goddamed liar, do ye?” Chrisfield felt suddenly cool and
joyous. He felt anger taking possession of him. He seemed to be standing
somewhere away from himself watching himself get angry.
“This place has got to be cleaned up.... That damn General may come back
to look over quarters,” went on Anderson coolly.
“You call me a goddam liar,” said Chrisfield again, putting as much
insolence as he could summon into his voice. “Ah guess you doan'
remember me.”
“Yes, I know, you're the guy tried to run a knife into me once,” said
Anderson coolly, squaring his shoulders. “I guess you've learned a
little discipline by this time. Anyhow you've got to clean this place
up. God, they haven't even brushed the birds' nests down! Must be some
company!” said Anderson with a half laugh.
“Ah ain't agoin' to neither, fur you.”
“Look here, you do it or it'll be the worse for you,” shouted the
sergeant in his deep rasping voice.
“If ever Ah gits out o' the army Ah'm goin' to shoot you. You've picked
on me enough.” Chrisfield spoke slowly, as coolly as Anderson.
“Well, we'll see what a court-martial has to say to that.”
“Ah doan give a hoot in hell what ye do.”
Sergeant Anderson turned on his heel and went out, twisting the corner
button of his tunic in his big fingers. Already the sound of tramping
feet was heard and the shouted order, “Dis-missed.” Then men crowded
into the shack, laughing and talking. Chrisfield sat still on the end
of the bunk, looking at the bright oblong of the door. Outside he saw
Anderson talking to Sergeant Higgins. They shook hands, and Anderson
disappeared. Chrisfield heard Sergeant Higgins call after him.
“I guess the next time I see you I'll have to put my heels together an'
salute.”
Andersen's booming laugh faded as he walked away.
Sergeant Higgins came into the shack and walked straight up to
Chrisfield, saying in a hard official voice:
“You're under arrest.... Small, guard this man; get your gun and
cartridge belt. I'll relieve you so you can get mess.”
He went out. Everyone's eyes were turned curiously on Chrisfield. Small,
a red-faced man with a long nose that hung down over his upper lip,
shuffled sheepishly over to his place beside Chrisfield's cot and let
the butt of his rifle come down with a bang on the floor. Somebody
laughed. Andrews walked up to them, a look of trouble in his blue eyes
and in the lines of his lean tanned cheeks.
“What's the matter, Chris?” he asked in a low voice.
“Tol' that bastard Ah didn't give a hoot in hell what he did,” said
Chrisfield in a broken voice.
“Say, Andy, I don't think I ought ter let anybody talk to him,” said
Small in an apologetic tone. “I don't see why Sarge always gives me all
his dirty work.”
Andrews walked off without replying.
“Never mind, Chris; they won't do nothin' to ye,” said Jenkins, grinning
at him good-naturedly from the door.
“Ah doan give a hoot in hell what they do,” said Chrisfield again.
He lay back in his bunk and looked at the ceiling. The barracks was full
of a bustle of cleaning up. Judkins was sweeping the floor with a broom
made of dry sticks. Another man was knocking down the swallows' nests
with a bayonet. The mud nests crumbled and fell on the floor and
the bunks, filling the air with a flutter of feathers and a smell of
birdlime. The little naked bodies, with their orange bills too big for
them, gave a soft plump when they hit the boards of the floor, where
they lay giving faint gasping squeaks. Meanwhile, with shrill little
cries, the big swallows flew back and forth in the shanty, now and then
striking the low roof.
“Say, pick 'em up, can't yer?” said Small. Judkins was sweeping the
little gasping bodies out among the dust and dirt.
A stoutish man stooped and picked the little birds up one by one,
puckering his lips into an expression of tenderness. He made his two
hands into a nest-shaped hollow, out of which stretched the long necks
and the gaping orange mouths. Andrews ran into him at the door.
“Hello, Dad,” he said. “What the hell?”
“I just picked these up.”
“So they couldn't let the poor little devils stay there? God! it looks
to me as if they went out of their way to give pain to everything, bird,
beast or man.”
“War ain't no picnic,” said Judkins.
“Well, God damn it, isn't that a reason for not going out of your way to
raise more hell with people's feelings than you have to?”
A face with peaked chin and nose on which was stretched a
parchment-colored skin appeared in the door.
“Hello, boys,” said the “Y” man. “I just thought I'd tell you I'm going
to open the canteen tomorrow, in the last shack on the Beaucourt road.
There'll be chocolate, ciggies, soap, and everything.”
Everybody cheered. The “Y” man beamed.
His eye lit on the little birds in Dad's hands.
“How could you?” he said. “An American soldier being deliberately cruel.
I would never have believed it.”
“Ye've got somethin' to learn,” muttered Dad, waddling out into the
twilight on his bandy legs.
Chrisfield had been watching the scene at the door with unseeing eyes.
A terrified nervousness that he tried to beat off had come over him. It
was useless to repeat to himself again and again that he didn't give a
damn; the prospect of being brought up alone before all those officers,
of being cross-questioned by those curt voices, frightened him. He would
rather have been lashed. Whatever was he to say, he kept asking himself;
he would get mixed up or say things he didn't mean to, or else he
wouldn't be able to get a word out at all. If only Andy could go up with
him, Andy was educated, like the officers were; he had more learning
than the whole shooting-match put together. He'd be able to defend
himself, and defend his friends, too, if only they'd let him.
“I felt just like those little birds that time they got the bead on our
trench at Boticourt,” said Jenkins, laughing.
Chrisfield listened to the talk about him as if from another world.
Already he was cut off from his outfit. He'd disappear and they'd never
know or care what became of him.
The mess-call blew and the men filed out. He could hear their talk
outside, and the sound of their mess-kits as they opened them. He lay
on his bunk staring up into the dark. A faint blue light still came
from outside, giving a curious purple color to Small's red face and long
drooping nose at the end of which hung a glistening drop of moisture.
Chrisfield found Andrews washing a shirt in the brook that flowed
through the ruins of the village the other side of the road from the
buildings where the division was quartered. The blue sky flicked with
pinkish-white clouds gave a shimmer of blue and lavender and white to
the bright water. At the bottom could be seen battered helmets and bits
of equipment and tin cans that had once held meat. Andrews turned his
head; he had a smudge of mud down his nose and soapsuds on his chin.
“Hello, Chris,” he said, looking him in the eyes with his sparkling blue
eyes, “how's things?” There was a faint anxious frown on his forehead.
“Two-thirds of one month's pay an' confined to quarters,” said
Chrisfield cheerfully.
“Gee, they were easy.”
“Um-hum, said Ah was a good shot an' all that, so they'd let me off this
time.”
Andrews started scrubbing at his shirt again.
“I've got this shirt so full of mud I don't think I ever will get it
clean,” he said.
“Move ye ole hide away, Andy. Ah'll wash it. You ain't no good for
nothin'.”
“Hell no, I'll do it.”
“Move ye hide out of there.”
“Thanks awfully.”
Andrews got to his feet and wiped the mud off his nose with his bare
forearm.
“Ah'm goin' to shoot that bastard,” said Chrisfield, scrubbing at the
shirt.
“Don't be an ass, Chris.”
“Ah swear to God Ah am.”
“What's the use of getting all wrought up. The thing's over. You'll
probably never see him again.”
“Ah ain't all het up.... Ah'm goin' to do it though.” He wrung the shirt
out carefully and flipped Andrews in the face with it. “There ye are,”
he said.
“You're a good fellow, Chris, even if you are an ass.”
“Tell me we're going into the line in a day or two.”
“There's been a devil of a lot of artillery going up the road; French,
British, every old kind.”
“Tell me they's raisin' hell in the Oregon forest.”
They walked slowly across the road. A motorcycle despatch-rider whizzed
past them.
“It's them guys has the fun,” said Chrisfield.
“I don't believe anybody has much.”
“What about the officers?”
“They're too busy feeling important to have a real hell of a time.”
The hard cold rain beat like a lash in his; face. There was no light
anywhere and no sound but the hiss of the rain in the grass. His eyes
strained to see through the dark until red and yellow blotches danced
before them. He walked very slowly and carefully, holding something very
gently in his hand under his raincoat. He felt himself full of a strange
subdued fury; he seemed to be walking behind himself spying on his own
actions, and what he saw made him feel joyously happy, made him want to
sing.
He turned so that the rain beat against his cheek. Under his helmet
he felt his hair full of sweat that ran with the rain down his glowing
face. His fingers clutched very carefully the smooth stick he had in his
hand.
He stopped and shut his eyes for a moment; through the hiss of the rain
he had heard a sound of men talking in one of the shanties. When he shut
his eyes he saw the white face of Anderson before him, with its unshaven
chin and the eyebrows that met across the nose.
Suddenly he felt the wall of a house in front of him. He put out his
hand. His hand jerked back from the rough wet feel of the tar paper,
as if it had touched something dead. He groped along the wall, stepping
very cautiously. He felt as he had felt reconnoitering in the Bringy
Wood. Phrases came to his mind as they had then. Without thinking
what they meant, the words Make the world safe for Democracy formed
themselves in his head. They were very comforting. They occupied his
thoughts. He said them to himself again and again. Meanwhile his free
hand was fumbling very carefully with the fastening that held the
wooden shutter over a window. The shutter opened a very little, creaking
loudly, louder than the patter of rain on the roof of the shack. A
stream of water from the roof was pouring into his face.
Suddenly a beam of light transformed everything, cutting the darkness in
two. The rain glittered like a bead curtain. Chrisfield was looking into
a little room where a lamp was burning. At a table covered with printed
blanks of different size sat a corporal; behind him was a bunk and
a pile of equipment. The corporal was reading a magazine. Chrisfield
looked at him a long time; his fingers were tight about the smooth
stick. There was no one else in the room.
A sort of panic seized Chrisfield; he strode away noisily from the
window and pushed open the door of the shack.
“Where's Sergeant Anderson?” he asked in a breathless voice of the first
man he saw.
“Corp's there if it's anything important,” said the man. “Anderson's
gone to an O. T. C. Left day before yesterday.”
Chrisfield was out in the rain again. It was beating straight in his
face, so that his eyes were full of water. He was trembling. He had
suddenly become terrified. The smooth stick he held seemed to burn him.
He was straining his ears for an explosion. Walking straight before him
down the road, he went faster and faster as if trying to escape from it.
He stumbled on a pile of stones. Automatically he pulled the string out
of the grenade and threw it far from him.
There was a minute's pause.
Red flame spurted in the middle of the wheatfield. He felt the sharp
crash in his eardrums.
He walked fast through the rain. Behind him, at the door of the shack,
he could hear excited voices. He walked recklessly on, the rain blinding
him. When he finally stepped into the light he was so dazzled he could
not see who was in the wine shop.
“Well, I'll be damned, Chris,” said Andrews's voice. Chrisfield blinked
the rain out of his lashes. Andrews sat writing with a pile of papers
before him and a bottle of champagne. It seemed to Chrisfield to soothe
his nerves to hear Andy's voice. He wished he would go on talking a long
time without a pause.
“If you aren't the crowning idiot of the ages,” Andrews went on in a low
voice. He took Chrisfield by the arm and led him into the little back
room, where was a high bed with a brown coverlet and a big kitchen table
on which were the remnants of a meal.
“What's the matter? Your arm's trembling like the devil. But why.... O
pardon, Crimpette. C'est un ami.... You know Crimpette, don't you?” He
pointed to a youngish woman who had just appeared from behind the bed.
She had a flabby rosy face and violet circles under her eyes, dark as
if they'd been made by blows, and untidy hair. A dirty grey muslin
dress with half the hooks off held in badly her large breasts and
flabby figure. Chrisfield looked at her greedily, feeling his furious
irritation flame into one desire.
“What's the matter with you, Chris? You're crazy to break out of
quarters this way?”
“Say, Andy, git out o' here. Ah ain't your sort anyway.... Git out o'
here.”
“You're a wild man. I'll grant you that.... But I'd just as soon be your
sort as anyone else's.... Have a drink.”
“Not now.”
Andrews sat down with his bottle and his papers, pushing away the broken
plates full of stale food to make a place on the greasy table. He took
a gulp out of the bottle, that made him cough, then put the end of his
pencil in his mouth and stared gravely at the paper.
“No, I'm your sort, Chris,” he said over his shoulder, “only they've
tamed me. O God, how tame I am.”
Chrisfield did not listen to what he was saying. He stood in front of
the woman, staring in her face. She looked at him in a stupid frightened
way. He felt in his pockets for some money. As he had just been paid he
had a fifty-franc note. He spread it out carefully before her. Her eyes
glistened. The pupils seemed to grow smaller as they fastened on the bit
of daintily colored paper. He crumpled it up suddenly in his fist and
shoved it down between her breasts.
Some time later Chrisfield sat down in front of Andrews. He still had
his wet slicker on.
“Ah guess you think Ah'm a swine,” he said in his normal voice. “Ah
guess you're about right.”
“No, I don't,” said Andrews. Something made him put his hand on
Chrisfield's hand that lay on the table. It had a feeling of cool
health.
“Say, why were you trembling so when you came in here? You seem all
right now.”
“Oh, Ah dunno,'” said Chrisfield in a soft resonant voice.
They were silent for a long while. They could hear the woman's footsteps
going and coming behind them.
“Let's go home,” said Chrisfield.
“All right.... Bonsoir, Crimpette.”
Outside the rain had stopped. A stormy wind had torn the clouds to rags.
Here and there clusters of stars showed through. They splashed merrily
through the puddles. But here and there reflected a patch of stars when
the wind was not ruffling them.
“Christ, Ah wish Ah was like you, Andy,” said Chrisfield.
“You don't want to be like me, Chris. I'm no sort of a person at all.
I'm tame. O you don't know how damn tame I am.”
“Learnin' sure do help a feller to git along in the world.”
“Yes, but what's the use of getting along if you haven't any world to
get along in? Chris, I belong to a crowd that just fakes learning. I
guess the best thing that can happen to us is to get killed in this
butchery. We're a tame generation.... It's you that it matters to kill.”
“Ah ain't no good for anythin'.... Ah doan give a damn.... Lawsee, Ah
feel sleepy.”
As they slipped in the door of their quarters, the sergeant looked at
Chrisfield searchingly. Andrews spoke up at once.
“There's some rumors going on at the latrine, Sarge. The fellows from
the Thirty-second say we're going to march into hell's halfacre about
Thursday.”
“A lot they know about it.”
“That's the latest edition of the latrine news.”
“The hell it is! Well, d'you want to know something, Andrews.... It'll
be before Thursday, or I'm a Dutchman.”
Sergeant Higgins put on a great air of mystery.
Chrisfield went to his bunk, undressed quietly and climbed into his
blankets. He stretched his arms languidly a couple of times, and while
Andrews was still talking to the sergeant, fell asleep.