When he awoke the sky was grey. The train was moving slowly, clattering loudly over switches, through a town of wet slate roofs that rose in fantastic patterns of shadow above the blue mist. Walters was smoking a cigarette.
“God! These French trains are rotten,” he said when he noticed that Andrews was awake. “The most inefficient country I ever was in anyway.”
“Inefficiency be damned,” broke in Andrews, jumping up and stretching himself. He opened the window. “The heating’s too damned efficient… I think we’re near Paris.” The cold air, with a flavor of mist in it, poured into the stuffy compartment. Every breath was joy. Andrews felt a crazy buoyancy bubbling up in him. The rumbling clatter of the train wheels sang in his ears. He threw himself on his back on the dusty blue seat and kicked his heels in the air like a colt.
“Liven up, for God’s sake, man,” he shouted. “We’re getting near Paris.”
“We are lucky bastards,” said Walters, grinning, with the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “I’m going to see if I can find the rest of the gang.”
Andrews, alone in the compartment, found himself singing at the top of his lungs.
As the day brightened the mist lifted off the flat linden-green fields intersected by rows of leafless poplars. Salmon-colored houses with blue roofs wore already a faintly citified air. They passed brick-kilns and clay-quarries, with reddish puddles of water in the bottom of them; crossed a jade-green river where a long file of canal boats with bright paint on their prows moved slowly. The engine whistled shrilly. They clattered through a small freight yard, and rows of suburban houses began to form, at first chaotically in broad patches of garden-land, and then in orderly ranks with streets between and shops at the corners. A dark-grey dripping wall rose up suddenly and blotted out the view. The train slowed down and went through several stations crowded with people on their way to work, — ordinary people in varied clothes with only here and there a blue or khaki uniform. Then there was more dark-grey wall, and the obscurity of wide bridges under which dusty oil lamps burned orange and red, making a gleam on the wet wall above them, and where the wheels clanged loudly. More freight yards and the train pulled slowly past other trains full of faces and silhouettes of people, to stop with a jerk in a station. And Andrews was standing on the grey cement platform, sniffing smells of lumber and merchandise and steam. His ungainly pack and blanket-roll he carried on his shoulder like a cross. He had left his rifle and cartridge belt carefully tucked out of sight under the seat. Walters and five other men straggled along the platform towards him, carrying or dragging their packs.
There was a look of apprehension on Walters’s face.
“Well, what do we do now?” he said.
“Do!” cried Andrews, and he burst out laughing.
Prostrate bodies in olive drab hid the patch of tender green grass by the roadside. The company was resting. Chrisfield sat on a stump morosely whittling at a stick with a pocket knife. Judkins was stretched out beside him.
“What the hell do they make us do this damn hikin’ for, Corp?”
“Guess they’re askeered we’ll forgit how to walk.”
“Well, ain’t it better than loafin’ around yer billets all day, thinkin’ an’ cursin’ an’ wishin’ ye was home?” spoke up the man who sat the other side, pounding down the tobacco in his pipe with a thick forefinger.
“It makes me sick, trampin’ round this way in ranks all day with the goddam frawgs starin’ at us an’… ”
“They’re laughin’ at us, I bet,” broke in another voice.
“We’ll be movin’ soon to the Army o’ Occupation,” said Chrisfield cheerfully. “In Germany it’ll be a regular picnic.”
“An’ d’you know what that means?” burst out Judkins, sitting bolt upright. “D’you know how long the troops is goin’ to stay in Germany? Fifteen years.”
“Gawd, they couldn’t keep us there that long, man.”
“They can do anythin’ they goddam please with us. We’re the guys as is gettin’ the raw end of this deal. It ain’t the same with an’ edicated guy like Andrews or Sergeant Coffin or them. They can suck around after ‘Y’ men, an’ officers an’ get on the inside track, an’ all we can do is stand up an’ salute an’ say ‘Yes, lootenant’ an’ ‘No, lootenant’ an’ let ’em ride us all they goddam please. Ain’t that gospel truth, corporal?”
“Ah guess you’re right, Judkie; we gits the raw end of the stick.”
“That damn yellar dawg Andrews goes to Paris an’ gets schoolin’ free an’ all that.”
“Hell, Andy aren’t yellar, Judkins.”
“Well, why did he go bellyachin’ around all the time like he knew more’n the lootenant did?”
“Ah reckon he did,” said Chrisfield.
“Anyway, you can’t say that those guys who went to Paris did a goddam thing more’n any the rest of us did… Gawd, I ain’t even had a leave yet.”
“Well, it ain’t no use crabbin’.”
“No, onct we git home an’ folks know the way we’ve been treated, there’ll be a great ole investigation. I can tell you that,” said one of the new men.
“It makes you mad, though, to have something like that put over on ye… Think of them guys in Paris, havin’ a hell of a time with wine an’ women, an’ we stay out here an’ clean our guns an’ drill… God, I’d like to get even with some of them guys.”
The whistle blew. The patch of grass became unbroken green again as the men lined up along the side of the road.
“Fall in!” called the Sergeant.
“Atten-shun!”
“Right dress!”
“Front! God, you guys haven’t got no snap in yer… Stick yer belly in, you. You know better than to stand like that.”
“Squads, right! March! Hep, hep, hep!”
The Company tramped off along the muddy road. Their steps were all the same length. Their arms swung in the same rhythm. Their faces were cowed into the same expression, their thoughts were the same. The tramp, tramp of their steps died away along the road.
Birds were singing among the budding trees. The young grass by the roadside kept the marks of the soldiers’ bodies.
Part Five
The World Outside
I
ANDREWS, and six other men from his division, sat at a table outside the café opposite the Gare de l’Est. He leaned back in his chair with a cup of coffee lifted, looking across it at the stone houses with many balconies. Steam, scented of milk and coffee, rose from the cup as he sipped from it. His ears were full of a rumble of traffic and a clacking of heels as people walked briskly by along the damp pavements. For a while he did not hear what the men he was sitting with were saying. They talked and laughed, but he looked beyond their khaki uniforms and their boat-shaped caps unconsciously. He was taken up with the smell of the coffee and of the mist. A little rusty sunshine shone on the table of the café and on the thin varnish of wet mud that covered the asphalt pavement. Looking down the Avenue, away from the station, the houses, dark grey tending to greenish in the shadow and to violet in the sun, faded into a soft haze of distance. Dull gilt lettering glittered along black balconies. In the foreground were men and women walking briskly, their cheeks whipped a little into color by the rawness of the morning. The sky was a faintly roseate grey.