There were tiny green frogs in one of the putty-colored puddles by the
roadside. John Andrews fell out of the slowly advancing column a moment
to look at them. The frogs' triangular heads stuck out of the water in
the middle of the puddle. He leaned over, his hands on his knees, easing
the weight of the equipment on his back. That way he could see their
tiny jewelled eyes, topaz-colored. His eyes felt as if tears were coming
to them with tenderness towards the minute lithe bodies of the frogs.
Something was telling him that he must run forward and fall into line
again, that he must shamble on through the mud, but he remained staring
at the puddle, watching the frogs. Then he noticed his reflection in the
puddle. He looked at it curiously. He could barely see the outlines of
a stained grimacing mask, and the silhouette of the gun barrel slanting
behind it. So this was what they had made of him. He fixed his eyes
again on the frogs that swam with elastic, leisurely leg strokes in the
putty-colored water.
Absently, as if he had no connection with all that went on about him, he
heard the twang of bursting shrapnel down the road. He had straightened
himself wearily and taken a step forward, when he found himself sinking
into the puddle. A feeling of relief came over him. His legs sunk in
the puddle; he lay without moving against the muddy bank. The frogs had
gone, but from somewhere a little stream of red was creeping out slowly
into the putty-colored water. He watched the irregular files of men in
olive-drab shambling by. Their footsteps drummed in his ears. He felt
triumphantly separated from them, as if he were in a window somewhere
watching soldiers pass, or in a box of a theater watching some dreary
monotonous play. He drew farther and farther away from them until they
had become very small, like toy soldiers forgotten among the dust in a
garret. The light was so dim he couldn't see, he could only hear their
feet tramping interminably through the mud.
John Andrews was on a ladder that shook horribly. A gritty sponge in
his hand, he was washing the windows of a barracks. He began in the left
hand corner and soaped the small oblong panes one after the other. His
arms were like lead and he felt that he would fall from the shaking
ladder, but each time he turned to look towards the ground before
climbing down he saw the top of the general's cap and the general's
chin protruding from under the visor, and a voice snarled: “Attention,”
terrifying him so that the ladder shook more than ever; and he went
on smearing soap over the oblong panes with the gritty sponge through
interminable hours, though every joint in his body was racked by the
shaking of the ladder. Bright light flared from inside the windows which
he soaped, pane after pane, methodically. The windows were mirrors.
In each pane he saw his thin face, in shadow, with the shadow of a gun
barrel slanting beside it. The jolting stopped suddenly. He sank into a
deep pit of blackness.
A shrill broken voice was singing in his ear:
“There's a girl in the heart of Maryland
With a heart that belongs to me-e.”
John Andrews opened his eyes. It was pitch black, except for a series of
bright yellow oblongs that seemed to go up into the sky, where he could
see the stars. His mind became suddenly acutely conscious. He began
taking account of himself in a hurried frightened way. He craned his
neck a little. In the darkness he could make out the form of a man
stretched out flat beside him who kept moving his head strangely from
side to side, singing at the top of his lungs in a shrill broken
voice. At that moment Andrews noticed that the smell of carbolic was
overpoweringly strong, that it dominated all the familiar smells of
blood and sweaty clothes. He wriggled his shoulders so that he could
feel the two poles of the stretcher. Then he fixed his eyes again in
the three bright yellow oblongs, one above the other, that rose into the
darkness. Of course, they were windows; he was near a house.
He moved his arms a little. They felt like lead, but unhurt. Then he
realized that his legs were on fire. He tried to move them; everything
went black again in a sudden agony of pain. The voice was still
shrieking in his ears:
“There's a girl in the heart of Maryland
With a heart that belongs to me-e.”
But another voice could be heard, softer, talking endlessly in tender
clear tones:
“An' he said they were goin' to take me way down south where there was a
little house on the beach, all so warm an' quiet...”
The song of the man beside him rose to a tuneless shriek, like a
phonograph running down:
“An' Mary-land was fairy-land
When she said that mine she'd be...”
Another voice broke in suddenly in short spurts of whining groans that
formed themselves into fragments of drawn-out intricate swearing. And
all the while the soft voice went on. Andrews strained his ears to hear
it.
It soothed his pain as if some cool fragrant oil were being poured over
his body.
“An' there'll be a garden full of flowers, roses an' hollyhocks, way
down there in the south, an' it'll be so warm an' quiet, an' the sun'll
shine all day, and the sky'll be so blue...”
Andrews felt his lips repeating the words like lips following a prayer.
“--An' it'll be so warm an' quiet, without any noise at all. An' the
garden'll be full of roses an'...”
But the other voices kept breaking in, drowning out the soft voice with
groans, and strings of whining oaths.
“An' he said I could sit on the porch, an' the sun'll be so warm an'
quiet, an' the garden'll smell so good, an' the beach'll be all white,
an' the sea...”
Andrews felt his head suddenly rise in the air and then his feet. He
swung out of the darkness into a brilliant white corridor. His legs
throbbed with flaming agony. The face of a man with a cigarette in his
mouth peered close to his. A hand fumbled at his throat, where the tag
was, and someone read:
“Andrews, 1.432.286.”
But he was listening to the voice out in the dark, behind him, that
shrieked in rasping tones of delirium:
“There's a girl in the heart of Mary-land
With a heart that belongs to me-e.”
Then he discovered that he was groaning. His mind became entirely taken
up in the curious rhythm of his groans. The only parts of his body
that existed were his legs and something in his throat that groaned and
groaned. It was absorbing. White figures hovered about him, he saw the
hairy forearms of a man in shirt sleeves, lights glared and went out,
strange smells entered at his nose and circulated through his whole
body, but nothing could distract his attention from the singsong of his
groans.
Rain fell in his face. He moved his head from side to side, suddenly
feeling conscious of himself. His mouth was dry, like leather; he put
out his tongue to try to catch raindrops in it. He was swung roughly
about in the stretcher. He lifted his head cautiously, feeling a great
throb of delight that he still could lift his head.
“Keep yer head down, can't yer?” snarled a voice beside him. He had seen
the back of a man in a gleaming wet slicker at the end of the stretcher.
“Be careful of my leg, can't yer?” he found himself whining over and
over again. Then suddenly there was a lurch that rapped his head against
the crosspiece of the stretcher, and he found himself looking up at a
wooden ceiling from which the white paint had peeled in places. He smelt
gasoline and could hear the throb of an engine. He began to think back;
how long was it since he had looked at the little frogs in the puddle?
A vivid picture came to his mind of the puddle with its putty-colored
water and the little triangular heads of the frogs. But it seemed as
long ago as a memory of childhood; all of his life before that was not
so long as the time that had gone by since the car had started. And he
was jolting and swinging about in the stretcher, clutching hard with his
hands at the poles of the stretcher. The pain in his legs grew worse;
the rest of his body seemed to shrivel under it. From below him came a
rasping voice that cried out at every lurch of the ambulance. He fought
against the desire to groan, but at last he gave in and lay lost in the
monotonous singsong of his groans.
The rain was in his face again for a moment, then his body was tilted.
A row of houses and russet trees and chimney pots against a leaden sky
swung suddenly up into sight and were instantly replaced by a ceiling
and the coffred vault of a staircase. Andrews was still groaning softly,
but his eyes fastened with sudden interest on the sculptured rosettes of
the coffres and the coats of arms that made the center of each section
of ceiling. Then he found himself staring in the face of the man who
was carrying the lower end of the stretcher. It was a white face with
pimples round the mouth and good-natured, watery blue eyes. Andrews
looked at the eyes and tried to smile, but the man carrying the
stretcher was not looking at him.
Then after more endless hours of tossing about on the stretcher, lost in
a groaning agony of pain, hands laid hold of him roughly and pulled his
clothes off and lifted him on a cot where he lay gasping, breathing in
the cool smell of disinfectant that hung about the bedclothes. He heard
voices over his head.
“Isn't bad at all... this leg wound.... I thought you said we'd have to
amputate?”
“Well, what's the matter with him, then?”
“Maybe shell-shock....”
A cold sweat of terror took hold of Andrews. He lay perfectly still with
his eyes closed. Spasm after spasm of revolt went through him. No, they
hadn't broken him yet; he still had hold of his nerves, he kept saying
to himself. Still, he felt that his hands, clasped across his belly,
were trembling. The pain in his legs disappeared in the fright in which
he lay, trying desperately to concentrate his mind on something outside
himself. He tried to think of a tune to hum to himself, but he only
heard again shrieking in his ears the voice which, it seemed to him
months and years ago, had sung:
“There's a girl in the heart of Maryland
With a heart that belo-ongs to me-e.”
The voice shrieking the blurred tune and the pain in his legs mingled
themselves strangely, until they seemed one and the pain seemed merely a
throbbing of the maddening tune.
He opened his eyes. Darkness fading into a faint yellow glow. Hastily
he took stock of himself, moved his head and his arms. He felt cool and
very weak and quiet; he must have slept a long time. He passed his rough
dirty, hand over his face. The skin felt soft and cool. He pressed his
cheek on the pillow and felt himself smiling contentedly, he did not
know why.
The Queen of Sheba carried a parasol with little vermilion bells all
round it that gave out a cool tinkle as she walked towards him. She wore
her hair in a high headdress thickly powdered with blue iris powder, and
on her long train, that a monkey held up at the end, were embroidered
in gaudy colors the signs of the zodiac. She was not the Queen of Sheba,
she was a nurse whose face he could not see in the obscurity, and,
sticking an arm behind his head in a deft professional manner, she gave
him something to drink from a glass without looking at him. He said
“Thank you,” in his natural voice, which surprised him in the silence;
but she went off without replying and he saw that it was a trayful of
glasses that had tinkled as she had come towards him.
Dark as it was he noticed the self-conscious tilt of the nurse's body
as she walked silently to the next cot, holding the tray of glasses
in front of her. He twisted his head round on the pillow to watch how
gingerly she put her arm under the next man's head to give him a drink.
“A virgin,” he said to himself, “very much a virgin,” and he found
himself giggling softly, notwithstanding the twinges of pain from his
legs. He felt suddenly as if his spirit had awakened from a long torpor.
The spell of dejection that had deadened him for months had slipped
off. He was free. The thought came to him gleefully, that as long as he
stayed in that cot in the hospital no one would shout orders at him. No
one would tell him to clean his rifle. There would be no one to
salute. He would not have to worry about making himself pleasant to the
sergeant. He would lie there all day long, thinking his own thoughts.
Perhaps he was badly enough wounded to be discharged from the army.
The thought set his heart beating like mad. That meant that he, who
had given himself up for lost, who had let himself be trampled down
unresistingly into the mud of slavery, who had looked for no escape from
the treadmill but death, would live. He, John Andrews, would live.
And it seemed inconceivable that he had ever given himself up, that
he had ever let the grinding discipline have its way with him. He saw
himself vividly once more as he had seen himself before his life had
suddenly blotted itself out, before he had become a slave among slaves.
He renumbered the garden where, in his boyhood, he had sat dreaming
through the droning summer afternoons under the crepe myrtle bushes,
while the cornfields beyond rustled and shimmered in the heat. He
remembered the day he had stood naked in the middle of a base room
while the recruiting sergeant prodded him and measured him. He wondered
suddenly what the date was. Could it be that it was only a year ago? Yet
in that year all the other years of his life had been blotted out. But
now he would begin living again. He would give up this cowardly cringing
before external things. He would be recklessly himself.
The pain in his legs was gradually localizing itself into the wounds.
For a while he struggled against it to go on thinking, but its constant
throb kept impinging in his mind until, although he wanted desperately
to comb through his pale memories to remember, if ever so faintly,
all that had been vivid and lusty in his life, to build himself a new
foundation of resistance against the world from which he could start
afresh to live, he became again the querulous piece of hurt flesh, the
slave broken on the treadmill; he began to groan.
Cold steel-gray light filtered into the ward, drowning the yellow glow
which first turned ruddy and then disappeared. Andrews began to make out
the row of cots opposite him, and the dark beams of the ceiling above
his head. “This house must be very old,” he said to himself, and the
thought vaguely excited him. Funny that the Queen of Sheba had come to
his head, it was ages since he'd thought of all that. From the girl at
the cross-roads singing under her street-lamp to the patrician pulling
roses to pieces from the height of her litter, all the aspects'
half-guessed, all the imaginings of your desire... that was the Queen
of Sheba. He whispered the words aloud, “la reine de Saba, la reine de
Saba”; and, with a tremor of anticipation of the sort he used to feel
when he was a small boy the night before Christmas, with a sense of
new; things in store for him, he pillowed his head on his arm and went
quietly to sleep.
“Ain't it juss like them frawgs te make a place like this' into a
hauspital?” said the orderly, standing with his feet wide apart and his
hands on his hips, facing a row of cots and talking to anyone who felt
well enough to listen. “Honest, I doan see why you fellers doan all cash
in yer! checks in this hole.... There warn't even electric light till we
put it in.... What d'you think o' that? That shows how much the goddam
frawgs care....” The orderly was a short man with a sallow, lined face
and large yellow teeth. When he smiled the horizontal lines in his
forehead and the lines that ran from the sides of his nose to the ends
of his mouth deepened so that his face looked as if it were made up to
play a comic part in the movies.
“It's kind of artistic, though, ain't it?” said Applebaum, whose cot
was next Andrews's,--a skinny man with large, frightened eyes and an
inordinately red face that looked as if the skin had been peeled off.
“Look at the work there is on that ceiling. Must have cost some dough
when it was noo.”
“Wouldn't be bad as a dance hall with a little fixin' up, but a
hauspital; hell!”
Andrews lay, comfortable in his cot, looking into the ward out of
another world. He felt no connection with the talk about him, with the
men who lay silent or tossed about groaning in the rows of narrow cots
that filled the Renaissance hall. In the yellow glow of the electric
lights, looking beyond the orderly's twisted face and narrow head, he
could see very faintly, where the beams of the ceiling sprung from the
wall, a row of half-obliterated shields supported by figures carved
out of the grey stone of the wall, handed satyrs with horns and goats'
beards and deep-set eyes, little squat figures of warriors and townsmen
in square hats with swords between their bent knees, naked limbs twined
in scrolls of spiked acanthus leaves, all seen very faintly, so that
when the electric lights swung back and forth in the wind made by
the orderly's hurried passing, they all seemed to wink and wriggle in
shadowy mockery of the rows of prostrate bodies in the room beneath
them. Yet they were familiar, friendly to Andrews. He kept feeling
a half-formulated desire to be up there too, crowded under a beam,
grimacing through heavy wreaths of pomegranates and acanthus leaves, the
incarnation of old rich lusts, of clear fires that had sunk to dust ages
since. He felt at home in that spacious hall, built for wide gestures
and stately steps, in which all the little routine of the army seemed
unreal, and the wounded men discarded automatons, broken toys laid away
in rows.
Andrews was snatched out of his thoughts. Applebaum was speaking to him;
he turned his head.
“How d'you loike it bein' wounded, buddy?”
“Fine.”
“Foine, I should think it was.... Better than doin' squads right all
day.”
“Where did you get yours?”
“Ain't got only one arm now.... I don't give a damn.... I've driven my
last fare, that's all.”
“How d'you mean?”
“I used to drive a taxi.”
“That's a pretty good job, isn't it?”
“You bet, big money in it, if yer in right.”
“So you used to be a taxi-driver, did you?” broke in the orderly.
“That's a fine job.... When I was in the Providence Hospital half
the fractures was caused by taxis. We had a little girl of six in the
children's ward had her feet cut clean off at the ankles by a taxi.
Pretty yellow hair she had, too. Gangrene.... Only lasted a day....
Well, I'm going off, I guess you guys wish you was going to be where I'm
goin' to be tonight.... That's one thing you guys are lucky in, don't
have to worry about propho.” The orderly wrinkled his face up and winked
elaborately.
“Say, will you do something for me?” asked Andrews.
“Sure, if it ain't no trouble.”
“Will you buy me a book?”
“Ain't ye got enough with all the books at the 'Y'?”
“No.... This is a special book,” said Andrews smiling, “a French book.”
“A French book, is it? Well, I'll see what I can do. What's it called?”
“By Flaubert.... Look, if you've got a piece of paper 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
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 they'll be safe if every other human being....” began Andrews. He
was interrupted by a thundering voice from the end of the ward.
“Attention!”
“Home, boys, home; it's home we want to be.”
went on the song. Stalky glanced towards the end of the ward, and seeing
it was the major, dropped the bed pans that smashed at the foot of his
cot, and got as far as possible under his blankets.
“Attention!” thundered the major again. A sudden uncomfortable silence
fell upon the ward; broken only by the coughing of the man next to
Andrews.
“If I hear any more noise from this ward, I'll chuck everyone of you men
out of this hospital; if you can't walk you'll have to crawl.... The war
may be over, but you men are in the Army, and don't you forget it.”
The major glared up and down the lines of cots. He turned on his heel
and went out of the door, glancing angrily as he went at the overturned
screen. The ward was still. Outside whistles blew and churchbells rang
madly, and now and then there was a sound of singing.