Читать книгу 3 books to know World War I - August Nemo, John Dos Passos, Ellen Glasgow - Страница 16

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MEADVILLE STOOD NEAR the camp gate, watching the motor trucks go by on the main road. Grey, lumbering, and mud-covered, they throbbed by sloughing in and out of the mud holes in the worn road in an endless train stretching as far as he could see into the town and as far as he could see up the road.

He stood with his legs far apart and spat into the center of the road; then he turned to the corporal who had been in the Red Sox outfield and said:

“I'll be goddamed if there ain't somethin' doin'!”

“A hell of a lot doin',” said the corporal, shaking his head.

“Seen that guy Daniels who's been to the front?”

“No.”

“Well, he says hell's broke loose. Hell's broke loose!”

“What's happened?... Be gorry, we may see some active service,” said Meadville, grinning. “By God, I'd give the best colt on my ranch to see some action.”

“Got a ranch?” asked the corporal.

The motor trucks kept on grinding past monotonously; their drivers were so splashed with mud it was hard to see what uniform they wore.

“What d'ye think?” asked Meadville. “Think I keep store?”

Fuselli walked past them towards the town.

“Say, Fuselli,” shouted Meadville. “Corporal says hell's broke loose out there. We may smell gunpowder yet.”

Fuselli stopped and joined them.

“I guess poor old Bill Grey's smelt plenty of gunpowder by this time,” he said.

“I wish I had gone with him,” said Meadville. “I'll try that little trick myself now the good weather's come on if we don't get a move on soon.”

“Too damn risky!”

“Listen to the kid. It'll be too damn risky in the trenches.... Or do you think you're goin' to get a cushy job in camp here?”

“Hell, no! I want to go to the front. I don't want to stay in this hole.”

“Well?”

“But ain't no good throwin' yerself in where it don't do no good.... A guy wants to get on in this army if he can.”

“What's the good o' gettin' on?” said the corporal. “Won't get home a bit sooner.”

“Hell! but you're a non-com.”

Another train of motor trucks went by, drowning their Talk.

Fuselli was packing medical supplies in a box in a great brownish warehouse full of packing cases where a little sun filtered in through the dusty air at the corrugated sliding tin doors. As he worked, he listened to Daniels talking to Meadville who worked beside him.

“An' the gas is the goddamndest stuff I ever heard of,” he was saying. “I've seen fellers with their arms swelled up to twice the size like blisters from it. Mustard gas, they call it.”

“What did you get to go to the hospital?” said Meadville.

“Only pneumonia,” said Daniels, “but I had a buddy who was split right in half by a piece of a shell. He was standin' as near me as you are an' was whistlin' 'Tipperary' under his breath when all at once there was a big spurt o' blood an' there he was with his chest split in half an' his head hangin' a thread like.”

Meadville moved his quid of tobacco from one cheek to the other and spat on to the sawdust of the floor. The men within earshot stopped working and looked admiringly at Daniels.

“Well; what d'ye reckon's goin' on at the front now?” said Meadville.

“Damned of I know. The goddam hospital at Orleans was so full up there was guys in stretchers waiting all day on the pavement outside. I know that.... Fellers there said hell'd broke loose for fair. Looks to me like the Fritzies was advancin'.”

Meadville looked at him incredulously.

“Those skunks?” said Fuselli. “Why they can't advance. They're starvin' to death.”

“The hell they are,” said Daniels. “I guess you believe everything you see in the papers.”

Eyes looked at Daniels indignantly. They all went on working in silence.

Suddenly the lieutenant, looking strangely flustered, strode into the warehouse, leaving the tin door open behind him.

“Can anyone tell me where Sergeant Osler is?”

“He was here a few minutes ago,” spoke up Fuselli.

“Well, where is he now?” snapped the lieutenant angrily.

“I don't know, sir,” mumbled Fuselli, flushing.

“Go and see if you can find him.”

Fuselli went off to the other end of the warehouse. Outside the door he stopped and bit off a cigarette in a leisurely fashion. His blood boiled sullenly. How the hell should he know where the top sergeant was? They didn't expect him to be a mind-reader, did they? And all the flood of bitterness that had been collecting in his spirit seethed to the surface. They had not treated him right, He felt full of hopeless anger against this vast treadmill to which he was bound. The endless succession of the days, all alike, all subject to orders, to the interminable monotony of drills and line-ups, passed before his mind. He felt he couldn't go on, yet he knew that he must and would go on, that there was no stopping, that his feet would go on beating in time to the steps of the treadmill.

He caught sight of the sergeant coming towards the warehouse, across the new green grass, scarred by the marks of truck wheels.

“Sarge,” he called. Then he went up to him mysteriously. “The loot wants to see you at once in Warehouse B.”

He slouched back to his work, arriving just in time to hear the lieutenant say in a severe voice to the sergeant:

“Sergeant, do you know how to draw up court-martial papers?”

“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant, a look of surprise on his face. He followed the precise steps of the lieutenant out of the door.

Fuselli had a moment of panic terror, during which he went on working methodically, although his hands trembled. He was searching his memory for some infringement of a regulation that might be charged against him. The terror passed as fast as it had come. Of course he had no reason to fear. He laughed softly to himself. What a fool he'd been to get scared like that, and a summary court-martial couldn't do much to you anyway. He went on working as fast and as carefully as he could, through the long monotonous afternoon.

That night nearly the whole company gathered in a group at the end of the barracks. Both sergeants were away. The corporal said he knew nothing, and got sulkily into bed, where he lay, rolled in his blankets, shaken by fit after fit of coughing.

At last someone said:

“I bet that kike Eisenstein's turned out to be a spy.”

“I bet he has too.”

“He's foreign born, ain't he? Born in Poland or some goddam place.”

“He always did talk queer.”

“I always thought,” said Fuselli, “he'd get into trouble talking the way he did.”

“How'd he talk?” asked Daniels.

“Oh, he said that war was wrong and all that goddamed pro-German stuff.”

“D'ye know what they did out at the front?” said Daniels. “In the second division they made two fellers dig their own graves and then shot 'em for sayin' the war was wrong.”

“Hell, they did?”

“You're goddam right, they did. I tell you, fellers, it don't do to monkey with the buzz-saw in this army.”

“For God's sake shut up. Taps has blown. Meadville, turn the lights out!” said the corporal angrily. The barracks was dark, full of a sound of men undressing in their bunks, and of whispered talk.

The company was lined up for morning mess. The sun that had just risen was shining in rosily through the soft clouds of the sky. The sparrows kept up a great clattering in the avenue of plane trees. Their riotous chirping could be heard above the sound of motors starting that came from a shed opposite the mess shack.

The sergeant appeared suddenly; walking past with his shoulders stiff, so that everyone knew at once that something important was going on.

“Attention, men, a minute,” he said.

Mess kits clattered as the men turned round.

“After mess I want you to go immediately to barracks and roll your packs. After that every man must stand by his pack until orders come.” The company cheered and mess kits clattered together like cymbals.

“As you were,” shouted the top sergeant jovially.

Gluey oatmeal and greasy bacon were hurriedly bolted down, and every man in the company, his heart pounding, ran to the barracks to do up his pack, feeling proud under the envious eyes of the company at the other end of the shack that had received no orders.

When the packs were done up, they sat on the empty hunks and drummed their feet against the wooden partitions waiting.

“I don't suppose we'll leave here till hell freezes over,” said Meadville, who was doing up the last strap on his pack.

“It's always like this.... You break your neck to obey orders an'...”

“Outside!” shouted the sergeant, poking his head in the door.

“Fall in! Atten-shun!”

The lieutenant in his trench coat and in a new pair of roll puttees stood facing the company, looking solemn.

“Men,” he said, biting off his words as a man bites through a piece of hard stick candy; “one of your number is up for courtmartial for possibly disloyal statements found in a letter addressed to friends at home. I have been extremely grieved to find anything of this sort in any company of mine; I don't believe there is another man in the company... low enough to hold... entertain such ideas....”

Every man in the company stuck out his chest, vowing inwardly to entertain no ideas at all rather than run the risk of calling forth such disapproval from the lieutenant. The lieutenant paused:

“All I can say is if there is any such man in the company, he had better keep his mouth shut and be pretty damn careful what he writes home.... Dismissed!”

He shouted the order grimly, as if it were the order for the execution of the offender.

“That goddam skunk Eisenstein,” said someone.

The lieutenant heard it as he walked away. “Oh, sergeant,” he said familiarly; “I think the others have got the right stuff in them.”

The company went into the barracks and waited.

The sergeant-major's office was full of a clicking of typewriters, and was overheated by a black stove that stood in the middle of the floor, letting out occasional little puffs of smoke from a crack in the stove pipe. The sergeant-major was a small man with a fresh boyish face and a drawling voice who lolled behind a large typewriter reading a magazine that lay on his lap.

Fuselli slipped in behind the typewriter and stood with his cap in his hand beside the sergeant-major's chair.

“Well what do you want?” asked the sergeant-major gruffly.

“A feller told me, Sergeant-Major, that you was look-in' for a man with optical experience;” Fuselli's voice was velvety.

“Well?”

“I worked three years in an optical-goods store at home in Frisco.”

“What's your name, rank, company?”

“Daniel Fuselli, Private 1st-class, Company C, medical supply warehouse.”

“All right, I'll attend to it.”

“But, sergeant.”

“All right; out with what you've got to say, quick.” The sergeant-major fingered the leaves of his magazine impatiently.

“My company's all packed up to go. The transfer'll have to be today, sergeant.”

“Why the hell didn't you come in earlier?... Stevens, make out a transfer to headquarters company and get the major to sign it when he goes through.... That's the way it always is,” he cried, leaning back tragically in his swivel chair. “Everybody always puts everything off on me at the last minute.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Fuselli, smiling. The sergeant-major ran his hand through his hair and took up his magazine again peevishly.

Fuselli hurried back to barracks where he found the company still waiting. Several men were crouched in a circle playing craps. The rest lounged in their bare bunks or fiddled with their packs. Outside it had begun to rain softly, and a smell of wet sprouting earth came in through the open door. Fuselli sat on the floor beside his bunk throwing his knife down so that it stuck in the boards between his knees. He was whistling softly to himself. The day dragged on. Several times he heard the town clock strike in the distance.

At last the top sergeant came in, shaking the water off his slicker, a serious, important expression on his face.

“Inspection of medical belts,” he shouted. “Everybody open up their belt and lay it on the foot of their bunk and stand at attention on the left side.”

The lieutenant and a major appeared suddenly at one end of the barracks and came through slowly, pulling the little packets out of the belts. The men looked at them out of the corners of their eyes. As they examined the belts, they chatted easily, as if they had been alone.

“Yes,” said the major. “We're in for it this time.... That damned offensive.”

“Well, we'll be able to show 'em what we're good for,” said the lieutenant, laughing. “We haven't had a chance yet.”

“Hum! Better mark that belt, lieutenant, and have it changed. Been to the front yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Hum, well.... You'll look at things differently when you have,” said the major.

The lieutenant frowned.

“Well, on the whole, lieutenant, your outfit is in very good shape.... At ease, men!” The lieutenant and the major stood at the door a moment raising the collars of their coats; then they dove out into the rain.

A few minutes later the sergeant came in.

“All right, get your slickers on and line up.”

They stood lined up in the rain for a long while. It was a leaden afternoon. The even clouds had a faint coppery tinge. The rain beat in their faces, making them tingle. Fuselli was looking anxiously at the sergeant. At last the lieutenant appeared.

“Attention!” cried the sergeant.

The roll was called and a new man fell in at the end of the line, a tall man with large protruding eyes like a calf's.

“Private 1st-class Daniel Fuselli, fall out and report to headquarters company!”

Fuselli saw a look of surprise come over men's faces. He smiled wanly at Meadville.

“Sergeant, take the men down to the station.”

“Squads, right,” cried the sergeant. “March!”

The company tramped off into the streaming rain.

Fuselli went back to the barracks, took off his pack and slicker and wiped the water off his face.

The rails gleamed gold in the early morning sunshine above the deep purple cinders of the track. Fuselli's eyes followed the track until it curved into a cutting where the wet clay was a bright orange in the clear light. The station platform, where puddles from the night's rain glittered as the wind ruffled them, was empty. Fuselli started walking up and down with his hands in his pockets. He had been sent down to unload some supplies that were coming on that morning's train. He felt free and successful since he joined the headquarters company! At last, he told himself, he had a job where he could show what he was good for. He walked up and down whistling shrilly.

A train pulled slowly into the station. The engine stopped to take water and the couplings clanked all down the line of cars. The platform was suddenly full of men in khaki, stamping their feet, running up and down shouting.

“Where you guys goin'?” asked Fuselli.

“We're bound for Palm Beach. Don't we look it?” someone snarled in reply.

But Fuselli had seen a familiar face. He was shaking hands with two browned men whose faces were grimy with days of travelling in freight cars.

“Hullo, Chrisfield. Hullo, Andrews!” he cried. “When did you fellows get over here?”

“Oh, 'bout four months ago,” said Chrisfield, whose black eyes looked at Fuselli searchingly. “Oh! Ah 'member you. You're Fuselli. We was at trainin' camp together. 'Member him, Andy?”

“Sure,” said Andrews. “How are you makin' out?”

“Fine,” said Fuselli. “I'm in the optical department here.”

“Where the hell's that?”

“Right here.” Fuselli pointed vaguely behind the station.

“We've been training about four months near Bordeaux,” said Andrews; “and now we're going to see what it's like.”

The whistle blew and the engine started puffing hard. Clouds of white steam filled the station platform, where the soldiers scampered for their cars.

“Good luck!” said Fuselli; but Andrews and Chrisfield had already gone. He saw them again as the train pulled out, two brown and dirt-grimed faces among many other brown and dirt-grimed faces. The steam floated up tinged with yellow in the bright early morning air as the last car of the train disappeared round the curve into the cutting.

The dust rose thickly about the worn broom. As it was a dark morning, very little light filtered into the room full of great white packing cases, where Fuselli was sweeping. He stopped now and then and leaned on his broom. Far away he heard a sound of trains shunting and shouts and the sound of feet tramping in unison from the drill ground. The building where he was was silent. He went on sweeping, thinking of his company tramping off through the streaming rain, and of those fellows he had known in training Camp in America, Andrews and Chrisfield, jolting in box cars towards the front, where Daniel's buddy had had his chest split in half by a piece of shell. And he'd written home he'd been made a corporal. What was he going to do when letters came for him, addressed Corporal Dan Fuselli? Putting the broom away, he dusted the yellow chair and the table covered with order slips that stood in the middle of the piles of packing boxes. The door slammed somewhere below and there was a step on the stairs that led to the upper part of the warehouse. A little man with a monkey-like greyish-brown face and spectacles appeared and slipped out of his overcoat, like a very small bean popping out of a very large pod.

The sergeant's stripes looked unusually wide and conspicuous on his thin arm.

He grunted at Fuselli, sat down at the desk, and began at once peering among the order slips.

“Anything in our mailbox this morning?” he asked Fuselli in a hoarse voice.

“It's all there, sergeant,” said Fuselli.

The sergeant peered about the desk some more.

“Ye'll have to wash that window today,” he said after a pause. “Major's likely to come round here any time.... Ought to have been done yesterday.”

“All right,” said Fuselli dully.

He slouched over to the corner of the room, got the worn broom and began sweeping down the stairs. The dust rose about him, making him cough. He stopped and leaned on the broom. He thought of all the days that had gone by since he'd last seen those fellows, Andrews and Chrisfield, at training camp in America; and of all the days that would go by. He started sweeping again, sweeping the dust down from stair to stair.

Fuselli sat on the end of his bunk. He had just shaved. It was a Sunday morning and he looked forward to having the afternoon off. He rubbed his face on his towel and got to his feet. Outside, the rain fell in great silvery sheets, so that the noise on the tarpaper roof of the barracks was almost deafening.

Fuselli noticed, at the other end of the row of bunks, a group of men who all seemed to be looking at the same thing. Rolling down his sleeves, with his tunic hitched over one arm, he walked down to see what was the matter. Through the patter of the rain, he heard a thin voice say:

“It ain't no use, sergeant, I'm sick. I ain't a' goin' to get up.”

“The kid's crazy,” someone beside Fuselli said, turning away.

“You get up this minute,” roared the sergeant. He was a big man with black hair who looked like a lumberman. He stood over the bunk. In the bunk at the end of a bundle of blankets was the chalk-white face of Stockton. The boy's teeth were clenched, and his eyes were round and protruding, it seemed from terror.

“You get out o' bed this minute,” roared the sergeant again.

The boy; was silent; his white cheeks quivered.

“What the hell's the matter with him?”

“Why don't you yank him out yourself, Sarge?”

“You get out of bed this minute,” shouted the sergeant again, paying no attention.

The men gathered about walked away. Fuselli watched fascinated from a little distance.

“All right, then, I'll get the lieutenant. This is a court-martial offence. Here, Morton and Morrison, you're guards over this man.”

The boy lay still in his blankets. He closed his eyes. By the way the blanket rose and fell over his chest, they could see that he was breathing heavily.

“Say, Stockton, why don't you get up, you fool?”' said Fuselli. “You can't buck the whole army.”

The boy didn't answer.

Fuselli walked away.

“He's crazy,” he muttered.

The lieutenant was a stoutish red-faced man who came in puffing followed by the tall sergeant. He stopped and shook the water off his Campaign hat. The rain kept up its deafening patter on the roof.

“Look here, are you sick? If you are, report sick call at once,” said the lieutenant in an elaborately kind voice.

The boy looked at him dully and did not answer.

“You should get up and stand at attention when an officer speaks to you.

“I ain't goin' to get up,” came the thin voice.

The officer's red face became crimson.

“Sergeant, what's the matter with the man?” he asked in a furious tone.

“I can't do anything with him, lieutenant. I think he's gone crazy.”

“Rubbish.... Mere insubordination.... You're under arrest, d'ye hear?” he shouted towards the bed.

There was no answer. The rain pattered hard on the roof.

“Have him brought down to the guardhouse, by force if necessary,” snapped the lieutenant. He strode towards the door. “And sergeant, start drawing up court-martial papers at once.” The door slammed behind him.

“Now you've got to get him up,” said the sergeant to the two guards.

Fuselli walked away.

“Ain't some people damn fools?” he said to a man at the other end of the barracks. He stood looking out of the window at the bright sheets of the rain.

“Well, get him up,” shouted the sergeant.

The boy lay with his eyes closed, his chalk-white face half-hidden by the blankets; he was very still.

“Well, will you get up and go to the guardhouse, or have we to carry you there?” shouted the sergeant.

The guards laid hold of him gingerly and pulled him up to a sitting posture.

“All right, yank him out of bed.”

The frail form in khaki shirt and whitish drawers was held up for a moment between the two men. Then it fell a limp heap on the floor.

“Say, Sarge, he's fainted.”

“The hell he has.... Say, Morrison, ask one of the orderlies to come up from the Infirmary.”

“He ain't fainted.... The kid's dead,” said the other man.

“Give me a hand.”

The sergeant helped lift the body on the bed again. “Well, I'll be goddamned,” said the sergeant.

The eyes had opened. They covered the head with a blanket.