I
The uncovered garbage cans clattered as they were thrown one by one into
the truck. Dust, and a smell of putrid things, hung in the air about the
men as they worked. A guard stood by with his legs wide apart, and his
rifle-butt on the pavement between them. The early mist hung low,
hiding the upper windows of the hospital. From the door beside which the
garbage cans were ranged came a thick odor of carbolic. The last garbage
can rattled into place on the truck, the four prisoners and the guard
clambered on, finding room as best they could among the cans, from which
dripped bloody bandages, ashes, and bits of decaying food, and the truck
rumbled off towards the incinerator, through the streets of Paris that
sparkled with the gaiety of early morning.
The prisoners wore no tunics; their shirts and breeches had dark stains
of grease and dirt; on their hands were torn canvas gloves. The guard
was a sheepish, pink-faced youth, who kept grinning apologetically, and
had trouble keeping his balance when the truck went round corners.
“How many days do they keep a guy on this job, Happy?” asked a boy with
mild blue eyes and a creamy complexion, and reddish curly hair.
“Damned if I know, kid; as long as they please, I guess,” said the
bull-necked man next him, who had a lined prize fighter's face, with a
heavy protruding jaw.
Then, after looking at the boy for a minute, with his face twisted into
an astonished sort of grin, he went on: “Say, kid, how in hell did you
git here? Robbin' the cradle, Oi call it, to send you here, kid.”
“I stole a Ford,” the boy answered cheerfully.
“Like hell you did!”
“Sold it for five hundred francs.”
Happy laughed, and caught hold of an ash can to keep from being thrown
out of the jolting truck.
“Kin ye beat that, guard?” he cried. “Ain't that somethin'?”
The guard sniggered.
“Didn't send me to Leavenworth 'cause I was so young,” went on the kid
placidly.
“How old are you, kid?” asked Andrews, who was leaning against the
driver's seat.
“Seventeen,” said the boy, blushing and casting his eyes down.
“He must have lied like hell to git in this goddam army,” boomed the
deep voice of the truck driver, who had leaned over to spit s long
squirt of tobacco juice.
The truck driver jammed the brakes on. The garbage cans banged against
each other.
The Kid cried out in pain: “Hold your horses, can't you? You nearly
broke my leg.”
The truck driver was swearing in a long string of words.
“Goddam these dreamin', skygazin' sons of French bastards. Why don't
they get out of your way? Git out an' crank her up, Happy.”
“Guess a feller'd be lucky if he'd break his leg or somethin'; don't you
think so, Skinny?” said the fourth prisoner in a low voice.
“It'll take mor'n a broken leg to git you out o' this labor battalion,
Hoggenback. Won't it, guard?” said Happy, as he climbed on again.
The truck jolted away, trailing a haze of cinder dust and a sour stench
of garbage behind it. Andrews noticed all at once that they were
going down the quais along the river. Notre Dame was rosy in the misty
sunlight, the color of lilacs in full bloom. He looked at it fixedly
a moment, and then looked away. He felt very far from it, like a man
looking at the stars from the bottom of a pit.
“My mate, he's gone to Leavenworth for five years,” said the Kid when
they had been silent some time listening to the rattle of the garbage
cans as the trucks jolted over the cobbles.
“Helped yer steal the Ford, did he?” asked Happy.
“Ford nothin'! He sold an ammunition train. He was a railroad man. He
was a mason, that's why he only got five years.”
“I guess five years in Leavenworth's enough for anybody,” muttered
Hoggenback, scowling. He was a square-shouldered dark man, who always
hung his head when he worked.
“We didn't meet up till we got to Paris; we was on a hell of a party
together at the Olympia. That's where they picked us up. Took us to the
Bastille. Ever been in the Bastille?”
“I have,” said Hoggenback.
“Ain't no joke, is it?”
“Christ!” said Hoggenback. His face flushed a furious red. He turned
away and looked at the civilians walking briskly along the early morning
streets, at the waiters in shirt sleeves swabbing off the cafe tables,
at the women pushing handcarts full of bright-colored vegetables over
the cobblestones.
“I guess they ain't nobody gone through what we guys go through with,”
said Happy. “It'd be better if the ole war was still a' goin', to my
way o' thinkin'. They'd chuck us into the trenches then. Ain't so low as
this.”
“Look lively,” shouted the truck driver, as the truck stopped in a dirty
yard full of cinder piles. “Ain't got all day. Five more loads to get
yet.”
The guard stood by with angry face and stiff limbs; for he feared there
were officers about, and the prisoners started unloading the garbage
cans; their nostrils were full of the stench of putrescence; between
their lips was a gritty taste of cinders.
The air in the dark mess shack was thick with steam from the kitchen at
one end. The men filed past the counter, holding out their mess kits,
into which the K. P.'s splashed the food. Occasionally someone stopped
to ask for a larger helping in an ingratiating voice. They ate packed
together at long tables of roughly planed boards, stained from the
constant spilling of grease and coffee and still wet from a perfunctory
scrubbing. Andrews sat at the end of a bench, near the door through
which came the glimmer of twilight, eating slowly, surprised at
the relish with which he ate the greasy food, and at the exhausted
contentment that had come over him almost in spite of himself.
Hoggenback sat opposite him.
“Funny,” he said to Hoggenback, “it's not really as bad as I thought it
would be.”
“What d'you mean, this labor battalion? Hell, a feller can put up with
anything; that's one thing you learn in the army.”
“I guess people would rather put up with things than make an effort to
change them.”
“You're goddam right. Got a butt?”
Andrews handed him a cigarette. They got to their feet and walked out
into the twilight, holding their mess kits in front of them. As they
were washing their mess kits in a tub of greasy water, where bits of
food floated in a thick scum, Hoggenback suddenly said in a low voice:
“But it all piles up, Buddy; some day there'll be an accountin'. D'you
believe in religion?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. I come of folks as done their own accountin'. My father
an' my gran'father before him. A feller can't eat his bile day after
day, day after day.”
“I'm afraid he can, Hoggenback,” broke in Andrews. They walked towards
the barracks.
“Goddam it, no,” cried Hoggenback aloud. “There comes a point where you
can't eat yer bile any more, where it don't do no good to cuss. Then you
runs amuck.” Hanging his head he went slowly into the barracks.
Andrews leaned against the outside of the building, staring up at the
sky. He was trying desperately to think, to pull together a few threads
of his life in this moment of respite from the nightmare. In five
minutes the bugle would din in his ears, and he would be driven into
the barracks. A tune came to his head that he played with eagerly for a
moment, and then, as memory came to him, tried to efface with a shudder
of disgust.
“There's the smile that makes you happy,
There's the smile that makes you sad.”
It was almost dark. Two men walked slowly by in front of him.
“Sarge, may I speak to you?” came a voice in a whisper.
The sergeant grunted.
“I think there's two guys trying to break loose out of here.”
“Who? If you're wrong it'll be the worse for you, remember that.”
“Surley an' Watson. I heard 'em talkin' about it behind the latrine.”
“Damn fools.”
“They was sayin' they'd rather be dead than keep up this life.”
“They did, did they?”
“Don't talk so loud, Sarge. It wouldn't do for any of the fellers to
know I was talkin' to yer. Say, Sarge...” the voice became whining,
“don't you think I've nearly served my time down here?”
“What do I know about that? 'Tain't my job.”
“But, Sarge, I used to be company clerk with my old outfit. Don't
ye need a guy round the office?” Andrews strode past them into the
barracks. Dull fury possessed him. He took off his clothes and got
silently into his blankets.
Hoggenback and Happy were talking beside his bunk.
“Never you mind,” said Hoggenback, “somebody'll get that guy sooner or
later.”
“Git him, nauthin'! The fellers in that camp was so damn skeered they
jumped if you snapped yer fingers at 'em. It's the discipline. I'm
tellin' yer, it gits a feller in the end,” said Happy.
Andrews lay without speaking, listening to their talk, aching in every
muscle from the crushing work of the day.
“They court-martialled that guy, a feller told me,” went on Hoggenback.
“An' what d'ye think they did to him? Retired on half pay. He was a
major.”
“Gawd, if I iver git out o' this army, I'll be so goddam glad,” began
Happy. Hoggenback interrupted:
“That you'll forgit all about the raw deal they gave you, an' tell
everybody how fine ye liked it.”
Andrews felt the mocking notes of the bugle outside stabbing his ears.
A non-com's voice roared: “Quiet,” from the end of the building, and the
lights went out. Already Andrews could hear the deep breathing of men
asleep. He lay awake, staring into the darkness, his body throbbing with
the monotonous rhythms of the work of the day. He seemed still to hear
the sickening whine in the man's voice as he talked to the sergeant
outside in the twilight. “And shall I be reduced to that?” he was asking
himself.
Andrews was leaving the latrine when he heard a voice call softly,
“Skinny.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Come here, I want to talk to you.” It was the Kid's voice. There was no
light in the ill-smelling shack that served for a latrine. Outside they
could hear the guard humming softly to himself as he went back and forth
before the barracks door.
“Let's you and me be buddies, Skinny.”
“Sure,” said Andrews.
“Say, what d'you think the chance is o' cuttin' loose?”
“Pretty damn poor,” said Andrews.
“Couldn't you just make a noise like a hoop an' roll away?”
They giggled softly.
Andrews put his hand on the boy's arm.
“But, Kid, it's too risky. I got in this fix by taking a risk. I don't
feel like beginning over again, and if they catch you, it's desertion.
Leavenworth for twenty years, or life. That'd be the end of everything.”
“Well, what the hell's this?”
“Oh, I don't know; they've got to let us out some day.”
“Sh... sh....”
Kid put his hand suddenly over Andrews's mouth. They stood rigid, so
that they could hear their hearts pounding.
Outside there was a brisk step on the gravel. The sentry halted and
saluted. The steps faded into the distance, and the sentry's humming
began again.
“They put two fellers in the jug for a month for talking like we are....
In solitary,” whispered Kid.
“But, Kid, I haven't got the guts to try anything now.”
“Sure you have, Skinny. You an' me's got more guts than all the rest of
'em put together. God, if people had guts, you couldn't treat 'em like
they were curs. Look, if I can ever get out o' this, I've got a hunch I
can make a good thing writing movie scenarios. I want to get on in the
world, Skinny.”
“But, Kid, you won't be able to go back to the States.”
“I don't care. New Rochelle's not the whole world. They got the movies
in Italy, ain't they?”
“Sure. Let's go to bed.”
“All right. Look, you an' me are buddies from now on, Skinny.”
Andrews felt the Kid's hand press his arm.
In his dark, airless bunk, in the lowest of three tiers, Andrews lay
awake a long time, listening to the snores and the heavy breathing
about him. Thoughts fluttered restlessly in his head, but in his blank
hopelessness he could only frown and bite his lips, and roll his head
from side to side on the rolled-up tunic he used for a pillow, listening
with desperate attention to the heavy breathing of the men who slept
above him and beside him.
When he fell asleep he dreamed that he was alone with Genevieve Rod
in the concert hall of the Schola Cantorum, and that he was trying
desperately hard to play some tune for her on the violin, a tune he kept
forgetting, and in the agony of trying to remember, the tears streamed
down his cheeks. Then he had his arms round Genevieve's shoulders and
was kissing her, kissing her, until he found that it was a wooden board
he was kissing, a wooden board on which was painted a face with broad
forehead and great pale brown eyes, and small tight lips, and all the
while a boy who seemed to be both Chrisfield and the Kid kept telling
him to run or the M.P.'s would get him. Then he sat frozen in icy terror
with a bottle in his hand, while a frightful voice behind him sang very
loud:
“There's the smile that makes you happy,
There's the smile that makes you sad.”
The bugle woke him, and he sat up with such a start that he hit his head
hard against the bunk above him. He lay back cringing from the pain like
a child. But he had to hurry desperately to get his clothes on in time
for roll call. It was with a feeling of relief that he found that mess
was not ready, and that men were waiting in line outside the kitchen
shack, stamping their feet and clattering their mess kits as they moved
about through the chilly twilight of the spring morning. Andrews found
he was standing behind Hoggenback.
“How's she comin', Skinny?” whispered Hoggenback, in his low mysterious
voice.
“Oh, we're all in the same boat,” said Andrews with a laugh.
“Wish it'd sink,” muttered the other man. “D'ye know,” he went on after
a pause, “I kinder thought an edicated guy like you'd be able to keep
out of a mess like this. I wasn't brought up without edication, but I
guess I didn't have enough.”
“I guess most of 'em can; I don't sec that it's much to the point. A man
suffers as much if he doesn't know how to read and write as if he had a
college education.”
“I dunno, Skinny. A feller who's led a rough life can put up with an
awful lot. The thing is, Skinny, I might have had a commission if I
hadn't been so damned impatient.... I'm a lumberman by trade, and my
dad's cleaned up a pretty thing in war contracts jus' a short time
ago. He could have got me in the engineers if I hadn't gone off an'
enlisted.”
“Why did you?”
“I was restless-like. I guess I wanted to see the world. I didn't care
about the goddam war, but I wanted to see what things was like over
here.”
“Well, you've seen,” said Andrews, smiling.
“In the neck,” said Hoggenback, as he pushed out his cup for coffee.
In the truck that was taking them to work, Andrews and the Kid sat side
by side on the jouncing backboard and tried to talk above the rumble of
the exhaust.
“Like Paris?” asked the Kid.
“Not this way,” said Andrews.
“Say, one of the guys said you could parlay French real well. I want
you to teach me. A guy's got to know languages to get along in this
country.”
“But you must know some.”
“Bedroom French,” said the Kid, laughing.
“Well?”
“But if I want to write a movie scenario for an Eytalian firm, I can't
just write 'voulay-vous couchezavecmoa' over and over again.”
“But you'll have to learn Italian, Kid.”
“I'm goin' to. Say, ain't they taking us a hell of a ways today,
Skinny?”
“We're goin' to Passy Wharf to unload rock,” said somebody in a
grumbling voice.
“No, it's a cement... cement for the stadium we're presentin' the French
Nation. Ain't you read in the 'Stars and Stripes' about it?”
“I'd present 'em with a swift kick, and a hell of a lot of other people,
too.”
“So we have to sweat unloadin' cement all day,” muttered Hoggenback, “to
give these goddam frawgs a stadium.”
“If it weren't that it'd be somethin' else.”
“But, ain't we got folks at home to work for?” cried Hoggenback.
“Mightn't all this sweat be doin' some good for us? Building a stadium!
My gawd!”
“Pile out there.... Quick!” rasped a voice from the driver's seat.
Through the haze of choking white dust, Andrews got now and then a
glimpse of the grey-green river, with its tugboats sporting their white
cockades of steam and their long trailing plumes of smoke, and its
blunt-nosed barges and its bridges, where people walked jauntily back
and forth, going about their business, going where they wanted to go.
The bags of cement were very heavy, and the unaccustomed work sent
racking pains through his back. The biting dust stung under his finger
nails, and in his mouth and eyes. All the morning a sort of refrain
went through his head: “People have spent their lives... doing only
this. People have spent their lives doing only this.” As he crossed and
recrossed the narrow plank from the barge to the shore, he looked at the
black water speeding seawards and took extraordinary care not to let
his foot slip. He did not know why, for one-half of him was thinking how
wonderful it would be to drown, to forget in eternal black silence the
hopeless struggle. Once he saw the Kid standing before the sergeant in
charge in an attitude of complete exhaustion, and caught a glint of his
blue eyes as he looked up appealingly, looking like a child begging out
of a spanking. The sight amused him, and he said to himself: “If I had
pink cheeks and cupid's bow lips, I might be able to go through life
on my blue eyes”; and he pictured the Kid, a fat, cherubic old man,
stepping out of a white limousine, the way people do in the movies, and
looking about him with those same mild blue eyes. But soon he forgot
everything in the agony of the heavy cement bags bearing down on his
back and hips.
In the truck on the way back to the mess the Kid, looking fresh and
smiling among the sweating men, like ghosts from the white dust,
talking hoarsely above the clatter of the truck, sidled up very close to
Andrews.
“D'you like swimmin', Skinny?”
“Yes. I'd give a lot to get some of this cement dust off me,” said
Andrews, without interest.
“I once won a boy's swimmin' race at Coney,” said the Kid. Andrews did
not answer.
“Were you in the swimmin' team or anything like that, Skinny, when you
went to school?”
“No.... It would be wonderful to be in the water, though. I used to swim
way out in Chesapeake Bay at night when the water was phosphorescent.”
Andrews suddenly found the Kid's blue eyes, bright as flames from
excitement, staring into his.
“God, I'm an ass,” he muttered.
He felt the Kid's fist punch him softly in the back. “Sergeant said they
was goin' to work us late as hell tonight,” the Kid was saying aloud to
the men round him.
“I'll be dead if they do,” muttered Hoggenback.
“An' you a lumberjack!”
“It ain't that. I could carry their bloody bags two at a time if I
wanted ter. A feller gets so goddam mad, that's all; so goddam mad.
Don't he, Skinny?” Hoggenback turned to Andrews and smiled.
Andrews nodded his head.
After the first two or three bags Andrews carried in the afternoon, it
seemed as if every one would be the last he could possibly lift. His
back and thighs throbbed with exhaustion; his face and the tips of his
fingers felt raw from the biting cement dust.
When the river began to grow purple with evening, he noticed that two
civilians, young men with buff-colored coats and canes, were watching
the gang at work.
“They says they's newspaper reporters, writing up how fast the army's
being demobilized,” said one man in an awed voice.
“They come to the right place.”
“Tell 'em we're leavin' for home now. Loadin' our barracks bags on the
steamer.”
The newspaper men were giving out cigarettes. Several men grouped round
them. One shouted out:
“We're the guys does the light work. Blackjack Pershing's own pet labor
battalion.”
“They like us so well they just can't let us go.”
“Damn jackasses,” muttered Hoggenback, as, with his eyes to the ground,
he passed Andrews. “I could tell 'em some things'd make their goddam
ears buzz.”
“Why don't you?”
“What the hell's the use? I ain't got the edication to talk up to guys
like that.”
The sergeant, a short, red-faced man with a mustache clipped very short,
went up to the group round the newspaper men.
“Come on, fellers, we've got a hell of a lot of this cement to get in
before it rains,” he said in a kindly voice; “the sooner we get it in,
the sooner we get off.”
“Listen to that bastard, ain't he juss too sweet for pie when there's
company?” muttered Hoggenback on his way from the barge with a bag of
cement.
The Kid brushed past Andrews without looking at him.
“Do what I do, Skinny,” he said.
Andrews did not turn round, but his heart started thumping very fast.
A dull sort of terror took possession of him. He tried desperately to
summon his will power, to keep from cringing, but he kept remembering
the way the room had swung round when the M.P. had hit him, and heard
again the cold voice of the lieutenant saying: “One of you men teach him
how to salute.” Time dragged out interminably.
At last, coming back to the edge of the wharf, Andrews saw that there
were no more bags in the barge. He sat down on the plank, too exhausted
to think. Blue-grey dusk was closing down on everything. The Passy
bridge stood out, purple against a great crimson afterglow.
The Kid sat down beside him, and threw an arm trembling with excitement
round his shoulders.
“The guard's lookin' the other way. They won't miss us till they get to
the truck.... Come on, Skinny,” he said in a low, quiet voice.
Holding on to the plank, he let himself down into the speeding water.
Andrews slipped after him, hardly knowing what he was doing. The icy
water closing about his body made him suddenly feel awake and vigorous.
As he was swept by the big rudder of the barge, he caught hold of
the Kid, who was holding on to a rope. They worked their way without
speaking round to the outer side of the rudder. The swift river tugging
savagely at them made it hard to hold on.
“Now they can't see us,” said the Kid between clenched teeth. “Can you
work your shoes an' pants off?”'
Andrews started struggling with one boot, the Kid helping to hold him up
with his free hand.
“Mine are off,” he said. “I was all fixed.” He laughed, though his teeth
were chattering.
“All right. I've broken the laces,” said Andrews.
“Can you swim under water?”
Andrews nodded.
“We want to make for that bunch of barges the other side of the bridge.
The barge people'll hide us.”
“How d'ye know they will?”
The Kid had disappeared.
Andrews hesitated a moment, then let go his hold and started swimming
with the current for all his might.
At first he felt strong and exultant, but very soon he began to feel
the icy grip of the water bearing him down; his arms and legs seemed
to stiffen. More than against the water, he was struggling against
paralysis within him, so that he thought that every moment his limbs
would go rigid. He came to the surface and gasped for air. He had a
second's glimpse of figures, tiny like toy soldiers, gesticulating
wildly on the deck of the barge. The report of a rifle snapped through
the air. He dove again, without thinking, as if his body were working
independently of his mind.
The next time he came up, his eyes were blurred from the cold. There was
a taste of blood in his mouth. The shadow of the bridge was just above
him. He turned on his back for a second. There were lights on the
bridge. A current swept him past one barge and then another. Certainty
possessed him that he was going to be drowned. A voice seemed to sob
in his ears grotesquely: “And so John Andrews was drowned in the Seine,
drowned in the Seine, in the Seine.”
Then he was kicking and fighting in a furious rage against the coils
about him that wanted to drag him down and away. The black side of a
barge was slipping up stream beside him with lightning speed. How fast
those barges go, he thought. Then suddenly he found that he had hold of
a rope, that his shoulders were banging against the bow of a small boat,
while in front of him, against the dull purple sky, towered the rudder
of the barge. A strong warm hand grasped his shoulder from behind, and
he was being drawn up and up, over the bow of the boat that hurt his
numbed body like blows, out of the clutching coils of the water.
“Hide me, I'm a deserter,” he said over and over again in French. A
brown and red face with a bristly white beard, a bulbous, mullioned sort
of face, hovered over him in the middle of a pinkish mist.