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WELCOME TO THE 3 Books To Know series, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books.

These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies.

We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is: World War I.

Three Soldiers is a 1921 novel by American writer and critic John Dos Passos. It is one of the American war novels of the First World War, and remains a classic of the realist war novel genre.

During August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the war, British author and social commentator H. G. Wells published a number of articles in London newspapers that subsequently appeared as a book entitled The War That Will End War. Wells blamed the Central Powers for the coming of the war and argued that only the defeat of German militarism could bring about an end to war. Wells used the shorter form of the phrase, "the war to end war", in In the Fourth Year (1918), in which he noted that the phrase "got into circulation" in the second half of 1914. In fact, it had become one of the most common catchphrases of the First World War.

The Amazing Interlude (1918) is a story about Sara Lee Kennedy, an innocent and idealistic nineteen year old American girl from Pennsylvania, who is touched by the plight and suffering of the soldiers battling on the front lines during WWI. Funded by the local women's charity, Sara Lee joins the Red Cross, travels to Europe over her fiancee's objections and meets Henri, an intriguing Belgian spy who helps her setup a soup kitchen near the Belgian front line.

This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topics.

“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.”

PART ONE: MAKING THE MOULD

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.

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

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:

“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.”

“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.

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!” came 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:

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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.

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.

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

“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.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.

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

“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.

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.

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.

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?”

“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:

“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 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.

III

IT WAS SATURDAY MORNING. Directed by the corporal, a bandy-legged Italian who even on the army diet managed to keep a faint odour of garlic about him, three soldiers in blue denims were sweeping up the leaves in the street between the rows of barracks.

“You fellers are slow as molasses.... Inspection in twenty-five minutes,” he kept saying.

The soldiers raked on doggedly, paying no attention. “You don't give a damn. If we don't pass inspection, I get hell—not you. Please queeck. Here, you, pick up all those goddam cigarette butts.”

Andrews made a grimace and began collecting the little grey sordid ends of burnt-out cigarettes. As he leant over he found himself looking into the dark-brown eyes of the soldier who was working beside him. The eyes were contracted with anger and there was a flush under the tan of the boyish face.

“Ah didn't git in this here army to be ordered around by a goddam wop,” he muttered.

“Doesn't matter much who you're ordered around by, you're ordered around just the same,” said Andrews. “Where d'ye come from, buddy?”

“Indiana's ma state. The tornado country.... Git to work; here's that bastard wop comin' around the buildin'.”

Andrews and the Indiana boy went round with a broom and a shovel collecting chewed-out quids of tobacco and cigar butts and stained bits of paper.

“Ma dad uster have a hired man named Andy. Took sick an' died last summer. How long d'ye reckon it'll be before us-guys git overseas?”

“All right, what you fellers stand here for? Go and dump them garbage cans. Lively!” shouted the corporal waddling about importantly on his bandy legs. He kept looking down the row of barracks, muttering to himself, “Goddam.... Time fur inspectin' now, goddam. Won't never pass this time.”

His face froze suddenly into obsequious immobility. He brought his hand up to the brim of his hat. A group of officers strode past him into the nearest building.

John Andrews, coming back from emptying the garbage pails, went in the back door of his barracks.

“Attention!” came the cry from the other end. He made his neck and arms as rigid as possible.

Through the silent barracks came the hard clank of the heels of the officers inspecting.

A sallow face with hollow eyes and heavy square jaw came close to Andrews's eyes. He stared straight before him noting the few reddish hairs on the officer's Adam's apple and the new insignia on either side of his collar.

“The name's Andrews, sergeant,” said the Italian corporal with an obsequious whine in his voice.

The officer addressed Andrews directly, speaking fast and loud. “How long have you been in the army?”

“Don't you know you have to be clean and shaved and ready for inspection every Saturday morning at nine?”

“To teach you not to answer back when an officer addresses you....” The officer spaced his words carefully, lingering on them. As he spoke he glanced out of the corner of his eye at his superior and noticed the major was frowning. His tone changed ever so slightly. “If this ever occurs again you may be sure that disciplinary action will be taken.... Attention there!” At the other end of the barracks a man had moved. Again, amid absolute silence, could be heard the clanking of the officers' heels as the inspection continued.

“Now, fellows, all together,” cried the “Y” man who stood with his arms stretched wide in front of the movie screen. The piano started jingling and the roomful of crowded soldiers roared out:

“Somebody tried to put one over on the 'Y' man and sing 'What the hell do we care?' But you do care, don't you, Buddy?” he shouted.

“Now, once more,” said the “Y” man again, “and lots of guts in the get and lots of kill in the Kaiser. Now all together.... ”

The moving pictures had begun. John Andrews looked furtively about him, at the face of the Indiana boy beside him intent on the screen, at the tanned faces and the close-cropped heads that rose above the mass of khaki-covered bodies about him. Here and there a pair of eyes glinted in the white flickering light from the screen. Waves of laughter or of little exclamations passed over them. They were all so alike, they seemed at moments to be but one organism. This was what he had sought when he had enlisted, he said to himself. It was in this that he would take refuge from the horror of the world that had fallen upon him. He was sick of revolt, of thought, of carrying his individuality like a banner above the turmoil. This was much better, to let everything go, to stamp out his maddening desire for music, to humble himself into the mud of common slavery. He was still tingling with sudden anger from the officer's voice that morning: “Sergeant, who is this man?” The officer had stared in his face, as a man might stare at a piece of furniture.

“Ain't this some film?” Chrisfield turned to him with a smile that drove his anger away in a pleasant feeling of comradeship.

“The part that's comin's fine. I seen it before out in Frisco,” said the man on the other side of Andrews. “Gee, it makes ye hate the Huns.”

The man at the piano jingled elaborately in the intermission between the two parts of the movie.

The Indiana boy leaned in front of John Andrews, putting an arm round his shoulders, and talked to the other man.

“That's goddam funny. You're from the Coast, this feller's from New York, an' Ah'm from ole Indiana, right in the middle.”

“Dunno. Some guys says three weeks and some says six months.... Say, mebbe you'll get into our company. They transferred a lot of men out the other day, an' the corporal says they're going to give us rookies instead.”

“It's swell over there,” said Fuselli, “everything's awful pretty-like. Picturesque, they call it. And the people wears peasant costumes.... I had an uncle who used to tell me about it. He came from near Torino.”

“As long as that?” But the movie had begun again, unfolding scenes of soldiers in spiked helmets marching into Belgian cities full of little milk carts drawn by dogs and old women in peasant costume. There were hisses and catcalls when a German flag was seen, and as the troops were pictured advancing, bayonetting the civilians in wide Dutch pants, the old women with starched caps, the soldiers packed into the stuffy Y. M. C. A. hut shouted oaths at them. Andrews felt blind hatred stirring like something that had a life of its own in the young men about him. He was lost in it, carried away in it, as in a stampede of wild cattle. The terror of it was like ferocious hands clutching his throat. He glanced at the faces round him. They were all intent and flushed, glinting with sweat in the heat of the room.

As he was leaving the hut, pressed in a tight stream of soldiers moving towards the door, Andrews heard a man say:

“I never raped a woman in my life, but by God, I'm going to. I'd give a lot to rape some of those goddam German women.”

“I hate 'em too,” came another voice, “men, women, children and unborn children. They're either jackasses or full of the lust for power like their rulers are, to let themselves be governed by a bunch of warlords like that.”

“Ah'd lahk te cepture a German officer an' make him shine ma boots an' then shoot him dead,” said Chris to Andrews as they walked down the long row towards their barracks.

“But Ah'd a damn side rather shoot somebody else Ah know,” went on Chris intensely. “Don't stay far from here either. An' Ah'll do it too, if he don't let off pickin' on me.”

“That big squirt Anderson they made a file closer at drill yesterday. He seems to think that just because Ah'm littler than him he can do anything he likes with me.”

Andrews turned sharply and looked in his companion's face; something in the gruffness of the boy's tone startled him. He was not accustomed to this. He had thought of himself as a passionate person, but never in his life had he wanted to kill a man.

“Not now, but he gits the hell started in me, the way he teases me. Ah pulled ma knife on him yisterday. You wasn't there. Didn't ye notice Ah looked sort o' upsot at drill?”

They were leaning against the wall of their barracks, looking up at the brilliant starry night.

“Ah never had much schoolin',” went on Chris. “I lef school when I was twelve, 'cause it warn't much good, an' dad drank so the folks needed me to work on the farm.”

“Mostly coan. A little wheat an' tobacca. Then we raised a lot o' stock.... But Ah was juss going to tell ye Ah nearly did kill a guy once.”

“Ah was drunk at the time. Us boys round Tallyville was a pretty tough bunch then. We used ter work juss long enough to git some money to tear things up with. An' then we used to play craps an' drink whiskey. This happened just at coan-shuckin' time. Hell, Ah don't even know what it was about, but Ah got to quarrellin' with a feller Ah'd been right smart friends with. Then he laid off an' hit me in the jaw. Ah don't know what Ah done next, but before Ah knowed it Ah had a hold of a shuck-in' knife and was slashin' at him with it. A knife like that's a turruble thing to stab a man with. It took four of 'em to hold me down an' git it away from me. They didn't keep me from givin' him a good cut across the chest, though. Ah was juss crazy drunk at the time. An' man, if Ah wasn't a mess to go home, with half ma clothes pulled off and ma shirt torn. Ah juss fell in the ditch an' slep' there till daylight an' got mud all through ma hair.... Ah don't scarcely tech a drop now, though.”

“So you're in a hurry to get overseas, Chris, like me,” said Andrews after a long pause.

“Ah'll push that guy Anderson into the sea, if we both go over on the same boat,” said Chrisfield laughing; but he added after a pause: “It would have been hell if Ah'd killed that feller, though. Honest Ah wouldn't a-wanted to do that.”

“No, it don't,” came a melancholy drawling voice from a lanky man who sat doubled up with his long face in his hands and his elbows resting on his knees. “Just brings a living wage... a living wage.”

Several men were grouped at the end of the barracks. From them the long row of cots, with here and there a man asleep or a man hastily undressing, stretched, lighted by occasional feeble electric-light bulbs, to the sergeant's little table beside the door.

“You're gettin' a dis-charge, aren't you?” asked a man with a brogue, and the red face of a jovial gorilla, that signified the bartender.

“Yes, I have got hard luck, Buddy,” said the lanky man, looking at the faces about him out of sunken eyes. “I ought to be getting forty dollars a week and here I am getting seven and in the army besides.”

“The army, the army, the democratic army,” chanted someone under his breath.

“But, begorry, I want to go overseas and 'ave a look at the 'uns,” said Flannagan, who managed with strange skill to combine a cockney whine with his Irish brogue.

“Overseas?” took up the lanky man. “If I could have gone an' studied overseas, I'd be making as much as Kubelik. I had the makings of a good player in me.”

“Why don't you go?” asked Andrews, who stood on the outskirts with Fuselli and Chris.

“Must be funny not bein' able to understand what folks say. They say 'we' over there when they mean 'yes,' a guy told me.”

“Ye can make signs to them, can't ye?” said Flannagan “an' they can understand an Irishman anywhere. But ye won't 'ave to talk to the 'uns. Begorry I'll set up in business when I get there, what d'ye think of that?”

“How'd that do? I'll start an Irish House in Berlin, I will, and there'll be O'Casey and O'Ryan and O'Reilly and O'Flarrety, and begod the King of England himself'll come an' set the goddam Kaiser up to a drink.”

“The Kaiser'll be strung up on a telephone pole by that time; ye needn't worry, Flannagan.”

“They ought to torture him to death, like they do niggers when they lynch 'em down south.”

A bugle sounded far away outside on the parade ground. Everyone slunk away silently to his cot.

John Andrews arranged himself carefully in his blankets, promising himself a quiet time of thought before going to sleep. He needed to be awake and think at night this way, so that he might not lose entirely the thread of his own life, of the life he would take up again some day if he lived through it. He brushed away the thought of death. It was uninteresting. He didn't care anyway. But some day he would want to play the piano again, to write music. He must not let himself sink too deeply into the helpless mentality of the soldier. He must keep his will power.

No, but that was not what he had wanted to think about. He was so bored with himself. At any cost he must forget himself. Ever since his first year at college he seemed to have done nothing but think about himself, talk about himself. At least at the bottom, in the utterest degradation of slavery, he could find forgetfulness and start rebuilding the fabric of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship and scorn. Scorn—that was the quality he needed. It was such a raw, fantastic world he had suddenly fallen into. His life before this week seemed a dream read in a novel, a picture he had seen in a shop window—it was so different. Could it have been in the same world at all? He must have died without knowing it and been born again into a new, futile hell.

When he had been a child he had lived in a dilapidated mansion that stood among old oaks and chestnuts, beside a road where buggies and oxcarts passed rarely to disturb the sandy ruts that lay in the mottled shade. He had had so many dreams; lying under the crepe-myrtle bush at the end of the overgrown garden he had passed the long Virginia afternoons, thinking, while the dryflies whizzed sleepily in the sunlight, of the world he would live in when he grew up. He had planned so many lives for himself: a general, like Caesar, he was to conquer the world and die murdered in a great marble hall; a wandering minstrel, he would go through all countries singing and have intricate endless adventures; a great musician, he would sit at the piano playing, like Chopin in the engraving, while beautiful women wept and men with long, curly hair hid their faces in their hands. It was only slavery that he had not foreseen. His race had dominated for too many centuries for that. And yet the world was made of various slaveries.

John Andrews lay on his back on his cot while everyone about him slept and snored in the dark barracks. A certain terror held him. In a week the great structure of his romantic world, so full of many colors and harmonies, that had survived school and college and the buffeting of making a living in New York, had fallen in dust about him. He was utterly in the void. “How silly,” he thought; “this is the world as it has appeared to the majority of men, this is just the lower half of the pyramid.”

He thought of his friends, of Fuselli and Chrisfield and that funny little man Eisenstein. They seemed at home in this army life. They did not seem appalled by the loss of their liberty. But they had never lived in the glittering other world. Yet he could not feel the scorn of them he wanted to feel. He thought of them singing under the direction of the “Y” man:

He thought of himself and Chrisfield picking up cigarette butts and the tramp, tramp, tramp of feet on the drill field. Where was the connection? Was this all futile madness? They'd come from such various worlds, all these men sleeping about him, to be united in this. And what did they think of it, all these sleepers? Had they too not had dreams when they were boys? Or had the generations prepared them only for this?

He thought of himself lying under the crepe-myrtle bush through the hot, droning afternoon, watching the pale magenta flowers flutter down into the dry grass, and felt, again, wrapped in his warm blankets among all these sleepers, the straining of limbs burning with desire to rush untrammelled through some new keen air. Suddenly darkness overspread his mind.

THE STARS WERE VERY bright when Fuselli, eyes stinging with sleep, stumbled out of the barracks. They trembled like bits of brilliant jelly in the black velvet of the sky, just as something inside him trembled with excitement.

“Anybody know where the electricity turns on?” asked the sergeant in a good-humored voice. “Here it is.” The light over the door of the barracks snapped on, revealing a rotund cheerful man with a little yellow mustache and an unlit cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth. Grouped about him, in overcoats and caps, the men of the company rested their packs against their knees.

Eyes looked curiously at Fuselli as he lined up with the rest. He had been transferred into the company the night before.

“Attenshun,” shouted the sergeant. Then he wrinkled up his eyes and grinned hard at the slip of paper he had in his hand, while the men of his company watched him affectionately.

Meanwhile outside the other barracks other companies could be heard calling the roll. Somewhere from the end of the street came a cheer.

“Well, I guess I can tell you now, fellers,” said the sergeant with his air of quiet omniscience, when he had called the last name. “We're going overseas.”

“Seem to have a pretty decent top-kicker,” whispered Fuselli to the man next to him.

“You bet yer, kid, he's a peach,” said the other man in a voice full of devotion. “This is some company, I can tell you that.”

“You bet it is,” said the next man along. “The corporal's in the Red Sox outfield.”

The lieutenant appeared suddenly in the area of light in front of the barracks. He was a pink-faced boy. His trench coat, a little too large, was very new and stuck out stiffly from his legs.

“Everything all right, sergeant? Everything all right?” he asked several times, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.

Fuselli's ears pounded with strange excitement. These phrases, “entrainment,” “order of march,” had a businesslike sound. He suddenly started to wonder how it would feel to be under fire. Memories of movies flickered in his mind.

“Gawd, ain't I glad to git out o' this hell-hole,” he said to the man next him.

“The next one may be more of a hell-hole yet, buddy,” said the sergeant striding up and down with his important confident walk.

“He's some sergeant, our sergeant is,” said the man next to Fuselli. “He's got brains in his head, that boy has.”

“All right, break ranks,” said the sergeant, “but if anybody moves away from this barracks, I'll put him in K. P. Till—till he'll be able to peel spuds in his sleep.”

The company laughed again. Fuselli noticed with displeasure that the tall man with the shrill voice whose name had been called first on the roll did not laugh but spat disgustedly out of the corner of his mouth.

It gradually grew grey with dawn. Fuselli's legs were tired from standing so long. Outside all the barracks, as far as he could see up the street, men stood in ragged lines waiting.

The sun rose hot on a cloudless day. A few sparrows twittered about the tin roof of the barracks.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Three Soldiers

PART ONE: MAKING THE MOULD

I

II

III

IV