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Three Soldiers

J >> John Dos Passos >> Three Soldiers



Etext transcribed by Eve Sobol, South Bend, IN, USA





THREE SOLDIERS

JOHN DOS PASSOS

1921



CONTENTS

PART ONE: MAKING THE MOULD

PART TWO: THE METAL COOLS

PART THREE: MACHINES

PART FOUR: RUST

PART FIVE: THE WORLD OUTSIDE

PART SIX: UNDER THE WHEELS


"Les contemporains qui souffrent de certaines choses ne peuvent
s'en souvenir qu'avec une horreur qui paralyse tout autre plaisir,
meme celui de lire un conte."

STENDHAL


PART ONE: MAKING THE MOULD

I

The company stood at attention, each man looking straight before
him at the empty parade ground, where the cinder piles showed
purple with evening. On the wind that smelt of barracks and
disinfectant there was a faint greasiness of food cooking. At the
other side of the wide field long lines of men shuffled slowly
into the narrow wooden shanty that was the mess hall. Chins down,
chests out, legs twitching and tired from the afternoon's
drilling, the company stood at attention. Each man stared straight
in front of him, some vacantly with resignation, some trying to
amuse themselves by noting minutely every object in their field of
vision,--the cinder piles, the long shadows of the barracks and
mess halls where they could see men standing about, spitting,
smoking, leaning against clapboard walls. Some of the men in line
could hear their watches ticking in their pockets.

Someone moved, his feet making a crunching noise in the cinders.

The sergeant's voice snarled out: "You men are at attention. Quit
yer wrigglin' there, you!"

The men nearest the offender looked at him out of the corners of
their eyes.

Two officers, far out on the parade ground, were coming towards
them. By their gestures and the way they walked, the men at
attention could see that they were chatting about something that
amused them. One of the officers laughed boyishly, turned away and
walked slowly back across the parade ground. The other, who was
the lieutenant, came towards them smiling. As he approached his
company, the smile left his lips and he advanced his chin, walking
with heavy precise steps.

"Sergeant, you may dismiss the company." The lieutenant's voice
was pitched in a hard staccato.

The sergeant's hand snapped up to salute like a block signal.
"Companee dis...missed," he rang out.

The row of men in khaki became a crowd of various individuals with
dusty boots and dusty faces. Ten minutes later they lined up and
marched in a column of fours to mess. A few red filaments of
electric lights gave a dusty glow in the brownish obscurity where
the long tables and benches and the board floors had a faint smell
of garbage mingled with the smell of the disinfectant the tables
had been washed off with after the last meal. The men, holding
their oval mess kits in front of them, filed by the great tin
buckets at the door, out of which meat and potatoes were splashed
into each plate by a sweating K.P. in blue denims.

"Don't look so bad tonight," said Fuselli to the man opposite him
as he hitched his sleeves up at the wrists and leaned over his
steaming food. He was sturdy, with curly hair and full vigorous
lips that he smacked hungrily as he ate.

"It ain't," said the pink flaxen-haired youth opposite him, who
wore his broad-brimmed hat on the side of his head with a certain
jauntiness:

"I got a pass tonight," said Fuselli, tilting his head vainly.

"Goin' to tear things up?"

"Man...I got a girl at home back in Frisco. She's a good kid."

"Yer right not to go with any of the girls in this goddam town....
They ain't clean, none of 'em.... That is if ye want to go
overseas."

The flaxen-haired youth leaned across the table earnestly.

"I'm goin' to git some more chow: Wait for me, will yer?" said
Fuselli.

"What yer going to do down town?" asked the flaxen-haired youth
when Fuselli came back.

"Dunno,--run round a bit an' go to the movies," he answered,
filling his mouth with potato.

"Gawd, it's time fer retreat." They overheard a voice behind them.

Fuselli stuffed his mouth as full as he could and emptied the
rest of his meal reluctantly into the garbage pail.

A few moments later he stood stiffly at attention in a khaki row
that was one of hundreds of other khaki rows, identical, that
filled all sides of the parade ground, while the bugle blew
somewhere at the other end where the flag-pole was. Somehow it
made him think of the man behind the desk in the office of the
draft board who had said, handing him the papers sending him to
camp, "I wish I was going with you," and had held out a white bony
hand that Fuselli, after a moment's hesitation, had taken in his
own stubby brown hand. The man had added fervently, "It must be
grand, just grand, to feel the danger, the chance of being potted
any minute. Good luck, young feller.... Good luck." Fuselli
remembered unpleasantly his paper-white face and the greenish look
of his bald head; but the words had made him stride out of the
office sticking out his chest, brushing truculently past a
group of men in the door. Even now the memory of it, mixing with
the strains of the national anthem made him feel important,
truculent.

"Squads right!" same an order. Crunch, crunch, crunch in the
gravel. The companies were going back to their barracks. He wanted
to smile but he didn't dare. He wanted to smile because he had a
pass till midnight, because in ten minutes he'd be outside the
gates, outside the green fence and the sentries and the strands of
barbed wire. Crunch, crunch, crunch; oh, they were so slow in
getting back to the barracks and he was losing time, precious free
minutes. "Hep, hep, hep," cried the sergeant, glaring down the
ranks, with his aggressive bulldog expression, to where someone had
fallen out of step.

The company stood at attention in the dusk. Fuselli was biting the
inside of his lips with impatience. Minutes at last, as if
reluctantly, the sergeant sang out:

"Dis...missed."

Fuselli hurried towards the gate, brandishing his pass with an
important swagger.

Once out on the asphalt of the street, he looked down the long row
of lawns and porches where violet arc lamps already contested the
faint afterglow, drooping from their iron stalks far above the
recently planted saplings of the avenue. He stood at the corner
slouched against a telegraph pole, with the camp fence, surmounted
by three strands of barbed wire, behind him, wondering which way he
would go. This was a hell of a town anyway. And he used to think he
wanted to travel round and see places.--"Home'll be good enough for
me after this," he muttered. Walking down the long street towards
the centre of town, where was the moving-picture show, he thought of
his home, of the dark apartment on the ground floor of a seven-
storey house where his aunt lived. "Gee, she used to cook swell," he
murmured regretfully.

On a warm evening like this he would have stood round at the
corner where the drugstore was, talking to fellows he knew,
giggling when the girls who lived in the street, walking arm and
arm, twined in couples or trios, passed by affecting ignorance of
the glances that followed them. Or perhaps he would have gone
walking with Al, who worked in the same optical-goods store, down
through the glaring streets of the theatre and restaurant quarter,
or along the wharves and ferry slips, where they would have sat
smoking and looking out over the dark purple harbor, with its
winking lights and its moving ferries spilling swaying reflections
in the water out of their square reddish-glowing windows. If they
had been lucky, they would have seen a liner come in through the
Golden Gate, growing from a blur of light to a huge moving
brilliance, like the front of a high-class theatre, that towered
above the ferry boats. You could often hear the thump of the screw
and the swish of the bow cutting the calm baywater, and the sound
of a band playing, that came alternately faint and loud. "When I
git rich," Fuselli had liked to say to Al, "I'm going to take a
trip on one of them liners."

"Yer dad come over from the old country in one, didn't he?" Al
would ask.

"Oh, he came steerage. I'd stay at home if I had to do that. Man,
first class for me, a cabin de lux, when I git rich."

But here he was in this town in the East, where he didn't know
anybody and where there was no place to go but the movies.

"'Lo, buddy," came a voice beside him. The tall youth who had sat
opposite at mess was just catching up to him. "Goin' to the
movies?"

"Yare, nauthin' else to do."

"Here's a rookie. Just got to camp this mornin'," said the tall
youth, jerking his head in the direction of the man beside him.

"You'll like it. Ain't so bad as it seems at first," said Fuselli
encouragingly.

"I was just telling him," said the other, "to be careful
as hell not to get in wrong. If ye once get in wrong in this
damn army...it's hell."

"You bet yer life...so they sent ye over to our company, did they,
rookie? Ain't so bad. The sergeant's sort o' decent if yo're in
right with him, but the lieutenant's a stinker.... Where you
from?"

"New York," said the rookie, a little man of thirty with an ash-
colored face and a shiny Jewish nose. "I'm in the clothing
business there. I oughtn't to be drafted at all. It's an outrage.
I'm consumptive." He spluttered in a feeble squeaky voice.

"They'll fix ye up, don't you fear," said the tall youth.
"They'll make you so goddam well ye won't know yerself. Yer mother
won't know ye, when you get home, rookie.... But you're in
luck."

"Why?"

"Bein' from New York. The corporal, Tim Sidis, is from New York,
an' all the New York fellers in the company got a graft with
him."

"What kind of cigarettes d'ye smoke?" asked the tall youth.

"I don't smoke."

"Ye'd better learn. The corporal likes fancy ciggies and so does
the sergeant; you jus' slip 'em each a butt now and then. May
help ye to get in right with "em."

"Don't do no good," said Fuselli.... "It's juss luck. But keep
neat-like and smilin' and you'll get on all right. And if they
start to ride ye, show fight. Ye've got to be hard boiled to
git on in this army."

"Ye're goddam right," said the tall youth. "Don't let 'em ride
yer.... What's yer name, rookie?"

"Eisenstein."

"This feller's name's Powers.... Bill Powers. Mine's Fuselli....
Goin' to the movies, Mr. Eisenstein?"

"No, I'm trying to find a skirt." The little man leered wanly.
"Glad to have got ackwainted."

"Goddam kike!" said Powers as Eisenstein walked off up a side
street, planted, like the avenue, with saplings on which the
sickly leaves rustled in the faint breeze that smelt of factories and
coal dust.

"Kikes ain't so bad," said Fuselli, "I got a good friend who's a
kike."



They were coming out of the movies in a stream of people in which
the blackish clothes of factory-hands predominated.

"I came near bawlin' at the picture of the feller leavin' his girl
to go off to the war," said Fuselli.

"Did yer?"

"It was just like it was with me. Ever been in Frisco, Powers?"

The tall youth shook his head. Then he took off his broad-brimmed
hat and ran his fingers over his stubby tow-head.

"Gee, it was some hot in there," he muttered.

"Well, it's like this," said Fuselli. "You have to cross the ferry
to Oakland. My aunt...ye know I ain't got any mother, so I always
live at my aunt's.... My aunt an' her sister-in-law an' Mabe...
Mabe's my girl...they all came over on the ferry-boat, 'spite of
my tellin' 'em I didn't want 'em. An' Mabe said she was mad at me,
'cause she'd seen the letter I wrote Georgine Slater. She was a
toughie, lived in our street, I used to write mash notes to. An' I
kep' tellin' Mabe I'd done it juss for the hell of it, an' that I
didn't mean nawthin' by it. An' Mabe said she wouldn't never
forgive me, an' then I said maybe I'd be killed an' she'd never
see me again, an' then we all began to bawl. Gawd! it was a
mess.... "

"It's hell sayin' good-by to girls," said Powers, understandingly.
"Cuts a feller all up. I guess it's better to go with coosies. Ye
don't have to say good-by to them."

"Ever gone with a coosie?"

"Not exactly," admitted the tall youth, blushing all over his pink
face, so that it was noticeable even under the ashen glare of
the arc lights on the avenue that led towards camp.

"I have," said Fuselli, with a certain pride. "I used to go with
a Portugee girl. My but she was a toughie. I've given all that
up now I'm engaged, though.... But I was tellin' ye.... Well, we
finally made up an' I kissed her an' Mabe said she'd never marry
any one but me. So when we was walkin" up the street I spied a
silk service flag in a winder, that was all fancy with a star all
trimmed up to beat the band, an' I said to myself, I'm goin' to
give that to Mabe, an' I ran in an' bought it. I didn't give a
hoot in hell what it cost. So when we was all kissin' and
bawlin' when I was goin' to leave them to report to the overseas
detachment, I shoved it into her hand, an' said, 'Keep that,
girl, an' don't you forgit me.' An' what did she do but pull out
a five-pound box o' candy from behind her back an' say, 'Don't
make yerself sick, Dan.' An' she'd had it all the time without
my knowin' it. Ain't girls clever?"

"Yare," said the tall youth vaguely.



Along the rows of cots, when Fuselli got back to the barracks,
men were talking excitedly.

"There's hell to pay, somebody's broke out of the jug."

"How?"

"Damned if I know."

"Sergeant Timmons said he made a rope of his blankets."

"No, the feller on guard helped him to get away."

"Like hell he did. It was like this. I was walking by the
guardhouse when they found out about it."

"What company did he belong ter?"

"Dunno."

"What's his name?"


"Some guy on trial for insubordination. Punched an officer in the
jaw."

"I'd a liked to have seen that."

"Anyhow he's fixed himself this time."

"You're goddam right."

"Will you fellers quit talkin'? It's after taps," thundered the
sergeant, who sat reading the paper at a little board desk at the
door of the barracks under the feeble light of one small bulb,
carefully screened. "You'll have the O. D. down on us."

Fuselli wrapped the blanket round his head and prepared to sleep.
Snuggled down into the blankets on the narrow cot, he felt
sheltered from the sergeant's thundering voice and from the cold
glare of officers' eyes. He felt cosy and happy like he had felt
in bed at home, when he had been a little kid. For a moment he
pictured to himself the other man, the man who had punched an
officer's jaw, dressed like he was, maybe only nineteen, the same
age like he was, with a girl like Mabe waiting for him somewhere.
How cold and frightful it must feel to be out of the camp with the
guard looking for you! He pictured himself running breathless down
a long street pursued by a company with guns, by officers whose
eyes glinted cruelly like the pointed tips of bullets. He pulled
the blanket closer round his head, enjoying the warmth and
softness of the wool against his cheek. He must remember to smile
at the sergeant when he passed him off duty. Somebody had said
there'd be promotions soon. Oh, he wanted so hard to be promoted.
It'd be so swell if he could write back to Mabe and tell her to
address her letters Corporal Dan Fuselli. He must be more careful
not to do anything that would get him in wrong with anybody. He
must never miss an opportunity to show them what a clever kid he
was. "Oh, when we're ordered overseas, I'll show them," he thought
ardently, and picturing to himself long movie reels of heroism he
went off to sleep.

A sharp voice beside his cot woke him with a jerk.

"Get up, you."

The white beam of a pocket searchlight was glaring in the face of
the man next to him.

"The O. D." said Fuselli to himself.

"Get up, you," came the sharp voice again.

The man in the next cot stirred and opened his eyes.

"Get up."

"Here, sir," muttered the man in the next cot, his eyes blinking
sleepily in the glare of the flashlight. He got out of bed and
stood unsteadily at attention.

"Don't you know better than to sleep in your O. D. shirt? Take
it off."

"Yes, sir."

"What's your name?"

The man looked up, blinking, too dazed to speak. "Don't know your
own name, eh?" said the officer, glaring at the man savagely,
using his curt voice like a whip.--"Quick, take off yer shirt and
pants and get back to bed."

The Officer of the Day moved on, flashing his light to one side
and the other in his midnight inspection of the barracks.
Intense blackness again, and the sound of men breathing deeply in
sleep, of men snoring. As he went to sleep Fuselli could hear the
man beside him swearing, monotonously, in an even whisper,
pausing now and then to think of new filth, of new
combinations of words, swearing away his helpless anger,
soothing himself to sleep by the monotonous reiteration of his
swearing.

A little later Fuselli woke with a choked nightmare cry. He had
dreamed that he had smashed the O. D. in the jaw and had broken
out of the jug and was running, breathless, stumbling, falling,
while the company on guard chased him down an avenue lined with
little dried-up saplings, gaining on him, while with voices
metallic as the clicking of rifle triggers officers shouted
orders, so that he was certain to be caught, certain to be shot.
He shook himself all over, shaking off the nightmare as a dog
shakes off water, and went back to sleep again, snuggling into
his blankets.



II

John Andrews stood naked in the center of a large bare room, of
which the walls and ceiling and floor were made of raw pine
boards. The air was heavy from the steam heat. At a desk in one
corner a typewriter clicked spasmodically.

"Say, young feller, d'you know how to spell imbecility?"

John Andrews walked over to the desk, told him, and added, "Are
you going to examine me?"

The man went on typewriting without answering. John Andrews stood
in the center of the floor with his arms folded, half amused, half
angry, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, listening
to the sound of the typewriter and of the man's voice as he read
out each word of the report he was copying.

"Recommendation for discharge"...click, click..."Damn this
typewriter.... Private Coe Elbert"...click, click. "Damn these
rotten army typewriters.... Reason...mental deficiency. History of
Case.... " At that moment the recruiting sergeant came back. "Look
here, if you don't have that recommendation ready in ten minutes
Captain Arthurs'll be mad as hell about it, Hill. For God's sake
get it done. He said already that if you couldn't do the work, to
get somebody who could. You don't want to lose your job do you?"

"Hullo," the sergeant's eyes lit on John Andrews, "I'd forgotten
you. Run around the room a little.... No, not that way. Just a
little so I can test yer heart.... God, these rookies are thick."

While he stood tamely being prodded and measured, feeling like a
prize horse at a fair, John Andrews listened to the man at the
typewriter, whose voice went on monotonously. "No...record of
sexual dep.... O hell, this eraser's no good!... pravity or
alcoholism; spent...normal...youth on farm. App-ear-ance normal
though im...say, how many 'm's' in immature?"

"All right, put yer clothes on," said the recruiting sergeant.
"Quick, I can't spend all day. Why the hell did they send you down
here alone?"

"The papers were balled up," said Andrews.

"Scores ten years...in test B," went on the voice of the man at the
typewriter. "Sen...exal ment...m-e-n-t-a-l-i-t-y that of child of
eight. Seems unable...to either.... Goddam this man's writin'. How
kin I copy it when he don't write out his words?"

"All right. I guess you'll do. Now there are some forms to fill
out. Come over here."

Andrews followed the recruiting sergeant to a desk in the far
corner of the room, from which he could hear more faintly the
click, click of the typewriter and the man's voice mumbling
angrily.

"Forgets to obey orders.... Responds to no form of per...suasion.
M-e-m-o-r-y, nil."

"All right. Take this to barracks B.... Fourth building, to the
right; shake a leg," said the recruiting sergeant.

Andrews drew a deep breath of the sparkling air outside. He stood
irresolutely a moment on the wooden steps of the building looking
down the row of hastily constructed barracks. Some were painted
green, some were of plain boards, and some were still mere
skeletons. Above his head great piled, rose-tinted clouds were
moving slowly across the immeasurable free sky. His glance slid
down the sky to some tall trees that flamed bright yellow with
autumn outside the camp limits, and then to the end of the long
street of barracks, where was a picket fence and a sentry walking
to and fro, to and fro. His brows contracted for a moment. Then he
walked with a sort of swagger towards the fourth building to the
right.



John Andrews was washing windows. He stood in dirty blue denims at
the top of a ladder, smearing with a soapy cloth the small panes
of the barrack windows. His nostrils were full of a smell of dust
and of the sandy quality of the soap. A little man with one lined
greyish-red cheek puffed out by tobacco followed him up also on a
ladder, polishing the panes with a dry cloth till they shone and
reflected the mottled cloudy sky. Andrews's legs were tired from
climbing up and down the ladder, his hands were sore from the
grittiness of the soap; as he worked he looked down, without
thinking, on rows of cots where the blankets were all folded the
same way, on some of which men were sprawled in attitudes of utter
relaxation. He kept remarking to himself how strange it was that
he was not thinking of anything. In the last few days his mind
seemed to have become a hard meaningless core.

"How long do we have to do this?" he asked the man who was working
with him. The man went on chewing, so that Andrews thought he was
not going to answer at all. He was just beginning to speak again
when the man, balancing thoughtfully on top of his ladder, drawled
out:

"Four o'clock."

"We won't finish today then?"

The man shook his head and wrinkled his face into a strange spasm
as he spat.

"Been here long?"

"Not so long."

"How long?"

"Three months.... Ain't so long." The man spat again, and climbing
down from his ladder waited, leaning against the wall, until
Andrews should finish soaping his window.

"I'll go crazy if I stay here three months.... I've been here a
week," muttered Andrews between his teeth as he climbed down and
moved his ladder to the next window.

They both climbed their ladders again in silence.

"How's it you're in Casuals?" asked Andrews again.

"Ain't got no lungs."

"Why don't they discharge you?"

"Reckon they're going to, soon."

They worked on in silence for a long time. Andrews stared at the
upper right-hand corner and smeared with soap each pane of the
window in turn. Then he climbed down, moved his ladder, and
started on the next window. At times he would start in the middle
of the window for variety. As he worked a rhythm began pushing its
way through the hard core of his mind, leavening it, making it
fluid. It expressed the vast dusty dullness, the men waiting in
rows on drill fields, standing at attention, the monotony of feet
tramping in unison, of the dust rising from the battalions going
back and forth over the dusty drill fields. He felt the rhythm
filling his whole body, from his sore hands to his legs, tired
from marching back and forth from making themselves the same
length as millions of other legs. His mind began unconsciously,
from habit, working on it, orchestrating it. He could imagine a
vast orchestra swaying with it. His heart was beating faster. He
must make it into music; he must fix it in himself, so that he
could make it into music and write it down, so that orchestras
could play it and make the ears of multitudes feel it, make their
flesh tingle with it.

He went on working through the endless afternoon, climbing up and
down his ladder, smearing the barrack windows with a soapy rag. A
silly phrase took the place of the welling of music in his mind:
"Arbeit und Rhythmus." He kept saying it over and over to himself:
"Arbeit und Rhythmus." He tried to drive the phrase out of his
mind, to bury his mind in the music of the rhythm that had come to
him, that expressed the dusty boredom, the harsh constriction of
warm bodies full of gestures and attitudes and aspirations into
moulds, like the moulds toy soldiers are cast in. The phrase
became someone shouting raucously in his ears: "Arbeit und
Rhythmus,"--drowning everything else, beating his mind hard again,
parching it.

But suddenly he laughed aloud. Why, it was in German. He was being
got ready to kill men who said that. If anyone said that, he was
going to kill him. They were going to kill everybody who spoke
that language, he and all the men whose feet he could hear
tramping on the drill field, whose legs were all being made the
same length on the drill field.

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