Soldiers Pay (18 page)

Captain Green, who raised
the company, had got a captain's commission from the governor of the state thereby. But Captain Green was dead. He might have been a good officer, he might have been anything: certainly he remembered his friends. Two subaltern's commissions were given away politically in spite of him, so the best he could do was to make his friend Madden, First Sergeant. Which he did.

And so here was Green in bars and shiny putties, here was Madden trying to acquire the habit of saying Sir to him, here was Tom and Dick and Harry, with whom both Green and Madden had gambled and drunk whisky, trying to learn to remember that there was a difference not only between them and Green and Madden, but that there was also a difference between Madden and Green.

“Oh, well,” they said in American camps, “he's working hard: let him get used to it. It's only on parade, hey, Sergeant?”

“Sure,” Sergeant Madden replied. “The Colonel is giving us hell about our appearance. Can't we do better than this?”

But at Brest:

“What in hell does he think he is? Pershing?” they asked Sergeant Madden.

“Come on, come on, snap into it. If I hear another word from a man he goes before the Captain,” Sergeant Madden had also changed.

In war-time one lives in today. Yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come. Wait till we get into action, they told each other, we'll kill the son-of-a-bitch. “Not Madden?” asked one, horrified. They only looked at him. “For Christ's sake,” remarked one at last.

But Fate, using the War Department as an instrument, circumvented them. When Sergeant Madden reported to his present captain and his old friend he found Green alone.

“Sit down, dammit,” Green told him, “nobody's coming in. I know what you're going to say. I am moving, anyhow: should get my papers tonight. Wait,” as Madden would have interrupted. “If I want to hold my commission I have got to work. These goddam training camps turn out officers trained. But I wasn't. And so I am going to school for a while. Christ. At my age. I wish to God somebody else had gotten up this damn outfit. Do you know where I would like to be now? Out yonder with them, calling somebody else a son-of-a-bitch, as they are calling me no. Do you think I get any fun out of this?”

“Ah, hell, let 'em talk. What do you expect?”

“Nothing. Only I had to promise the mother of every goddam one of them that I'd look out for him and not let him get hurt. And now there's not a bastard one wouldn't shoot me in the back if he got a chance.”

“But what do you expect from them? What do you want? This is no picnic, you know.”

They sat silent across a table from each other. Their faces were ridged and sharp, cavernous in the unshadowed glare of light while they sat thinking of home, of quiet elm-shaded streets along which wagons creaked and crawled through the dusty day and along which girls and boys walked in the evening to and from the picture show or to sip sweet chilled liquids in drug stores; of peace and quiet and all homely things, of a time when there was no war.

They thought of young days not so far behind them, of the faint unease of complete physical satisfaction, of youth and lust like icing on a cake, making the cake sweeter. . . . Outside was Brittany and mud, an equivocal city, temporary and twice foreign, lust in a foreign tongue. Tomorrow we die.

At last Captain Green said diffidently:

“You are all right?”

“Hell, yes. They wanted to reduce me at one time, but I am all right now.”

Green opened his mouth twice, like a fish, and Madden said quickly: “I'll look after them. Don't you worry.”

“Ah, I'm not. Not about those bastards.”

An orderly entered, saluting. Green acknowledged him and the man delivered his message stiffly and withdrew.

“There it is,” said the captain.

“You'll go tomorrow, then?”

“Yes. Yes. I hope so,” he answered, vaguely staring at the sergeant. Madden rose.

“Well, I think I'll run along. I feel tired tonight.”

Green rose also and they stared at each other like strangers across the table.

“You'll come in to see me in the morning?”

“I guess so. Sure, I'll come in.”

Madden wished to withdraw and Green wanted him to, but they stood awkwardly, silent. At last Green said: “I am obliged to you.” Madden's light-caverned eyes held a question. Their shadows were monstrous. “For helping. me get by with that dose. Court-martial, you know. . . .”

“What did you expect of me?” No less, Green acknowledged and Madden continued: “Why don't you let those women alone? They are an rotten with it.”

“Easy to say.” Green laughed mirthlessly. “For you, I mean.”

Madden's hand strayed to the pocket of his blouse, then fell. to, his side again. After a while he repeated: “Well, I'll be going.”

The captain moved around the table; extending his hand. “Well, good-bye.”

Madden did not take it. “Good-bye?”

“I may not see you again,” the other explained lamely.

“Hell. You talk like you were going home. Don't be a fool. Those birds don't mean anything by panning you. It will be the same with anybody.”

Green watched his knuckles whitening on the table. “I didn't mean that. I meant——” He could not say I may be killed. A man simply didn't say a thing like that. “You will get to the front before I do, I expect.”

“Perhaps so. But there is enough for all of us, I reckon.”

The rain had ceased for some reason and there came up faintly on the damp air that sound made by battalions and regiments being quiet, an orderly silence louder than a riot. Outside, Madden felt mud, knew darkness and damp, he smelled food and excrement and slumber beneath a sky too remote to distinguish between peace and war.

II

He thought at times of Captain Green as he crossed France, seeing the intermittent silver smugness of rain spaced forever with poplars like an eternal frieze giving way upon vistas fallow and fecund, roads and canals and villages shining their roofs violently; spires and trees; roads, villages; villages, towns, a city; villages, villages, then cars and troops and cars and troops at junction points. He saw people going about warfare in a businesslike way, he saw French soldiers playing croquet in stained horizon-blue, he saw American soldiers watching them, giving them American cigarettes; he saw American and British troops fighting, saw nobody minding them particularly. Save the M.P.s. A man must be in a funny frame of mind to be an M.P. Or a nigger general. The war zone. Business as usual. The golden age of non-combatants.

He thought at times of Green, wondering where the other was, even after he got to know his new company commander. A man quite different from Green. He had been a college instructor and he could explain to you where Alexander and Napoleon and Grant made their mistakes. He was mild: his voice could scarcely be heard on a parade ground and his men all said, Wait till we get into the lines. We'll fix the son-of-a-bitch.

Sergeant Madden, however, got along quite well with his officers, particularly with a lieutenant named Powers. And with the men, too. Even after a training period with dummies and a miniature sector he got along with them. They had become accustomed to the sounds of far guns (shooting at other people, however) and the flickering horizon at night; they had been bombed by aeroplanes while lined up for mess at a field kitchen, while the personnel of a concealed French battery watched them without interest from a dugut; they had received much advice from troops that had been in the lines

At last they were going in themselves after a measureless space of aimless wandering here and there, and the sound of guns though seemingly no nearer was no longer impersonal. They tramped by night, feeling their feet sink, then hearing them suck in mud. Then they felt sloping ground and were in a ditch. It was as if they were burying themselves, descending into their own graves in the bowels of the wet black earth, into a darkness so dense as to constrict breathing, constrict the heart. They stumbled on in the darkness.

Out of the gratis advice they had received, they recalled strongest to drop when a gun went off or when they heard a shell coming; so when a machine gun, far to the right, stuttered, breaking the slow hysteria of decay which buried them, someone dropped, someone stumbled over him, then they all went down as one man. The officer cursed them, non-coms kicked them erect again. Then while they stood huddled in the dark, smelling death, the lieutenant ran back along the line making them a brief bitter speech.

“Who in hell told you to lie down? The only guns within two miles of you are those things in your hands there. Feel this? this thing here”—slapping the rifles—“this is a gun. Sergeants, if another man drops, tramp him right into the mud and leave him.”

They ploughed on, panting and cursing in whispers. Suddenly they were among men, and a veteran of four days, sensing that effluvia of men new to battle, said:

“Why, look at the soldiers come to fight in the war.”

“Silence there!” a non-com's voice, and a sergeant came jumping along saying, Where is your officer? Men going out brushed them, passing on in the pitch wet darkness, and a voice whispered wickedly, Look out for gas. The word Gas passed from mouth to mouth and Authority raged them into silence again. But the mischief had been done.

Gas. Bullets and death and damnation. But Gas. It looked like mist, they had been told. First thing you know you are in it. And then—Good night.

Silence broken by muddy movements of unrest and breathing. Eastward the sky paled impalpably, more like a death than a birth of anything; and they peered out in front of them, seeing nothing. There seemed to be no war here at all, though to the right of them a rumorous guttural of guns rose and fell thickly and heavily on the weary dawn. Powers, the officer, had passed from man to man. No one must fire: there was a patrol out there somewhere in the darkness. Dawn grew grey and slow; after a while the earth took a vague form and someone seeing a lesser darkness screamed, “Gas!”

Powers and Madden sprang among them as they fought blindly, fumbling and tearing at their gas masks, trampling each other, but they were powerless. The lieutenant laid about him with his fists, trying to make himself heard, and the man who had given the alarm whirled suddenly on the fire-step, his head and shoulders sharp against the sorrowful dawn.

“You got us killed,” he shrieked, shooting the officer in the face at point-blank range.

III

Sergeant Madden thought of Green again on a later day as he ran over broken ground at Cantigny, saying, Come on, you bastards, do you want to live forever? He forgot Green temporarily as he lay beside a boy who had sold him shoes back home, in a shellhole too small for them, feeling his exposed leg whipped by a gale as a tufted branch is whipped by a storm. After a while night came and the gale passed away and the man beside him died.

While in hospital he saw Captain Green's name in a published casualty list. He also discovered in hospital that he had lost his photograph. He asked hospital orderlies and nurses about it, but no one recalled having seen it among his effects. It was just as well, though. She had in the meantime married a lieutenant on the staff of a college R.O.T.C. unit.

IV

Mrs. Burney's black was neat and completely airproof: she did not believe in air save as a necessary adjunct to breathing. Mr. Burney, a morose, silent man, whose occupation was that of languidly sawing boards and then mildly nailing them together again, took all his ideas from his wife, so he believed this, too.

She toiled, neat as a pin, along the street, both fretted with and grateful to the heat because of her rheumatism, making a call. When she thought of her destination, of her changed status in the town, above her dull and quenchless sorrow she knew a faint pride: the stroke of Fate which robbed her likewise made of her an aristocrat. The Mrs. Worthingtons, the Mrs. Saunderses, all spoke to her now as one of them, as if she, too, rode in a car and bought a half-dozen new dresses a year. Her boy had done this for her, his absence accomplishing that which his presence had never done, could never do.

Her black gown drank heat and held it in solution about her, her cotton umbrella became only a delusion. How hot for April, she thought, seeing cars containing pliant women's bodies in cool, thin cloth passing her. Other women walking in delicate, gay shades nodded to her bent small rotundity, greeting her pleasantly. Her flat “common sense” shoes carried her steadily and proudly on.

She turned a corner and the sun through maples was directly in her face. She lowered her umbrella to it, and remarking after a while a broken drain, and feeling an arching thrust of poorly laid concrete, she slanted her umbrella back. Pigeons in the spire were coolly remote from the heat, unemphatic as sleep, and she passed through an iron gate, following a gravelled path. The rambling facade of the rectory dreamed in the afternoon above a lawn broken by geranium beds and a group of chairs beneath a tree. She crossed grass and the rector rose, huge as a rock, black and shapeless, greeting her.

(Oh, the poor man, how bad he looks. And so old, so old we are for this to happen to us. He was not any good, but he was my son. .And now Mrs. Worthington and Mrs. Saunders and Mrs. Wardle speak to me, stop in to chat about this and that while there is my Dewey dead. They hadn't no sons and now his son come back and mine didn't, and how grey his face, poor man.)

She panted with heat, like a dog, feeling pain in her bones, and she hobbled horribly across to the grouped figures. It was because the sun was in her eyes that she couldn't see, sun going down beyond a lattice wall covered with wistaria. Pigeons crooned liquid gutturals from the spire, slanting like smears of paint, and the rector was saying:

“This is Mrs. Powers, Mrs. Burney, a friend of Donald's. Donald, here is Mrs. Burney. You remember Mrs. Burney: she is Dewey's mother, you remember.”