“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.
PART THREE: MACHINES
––––––––
I
––––––––
THE FIELDS AND THE misty blue-green woods slipped by slowly as the box car rumbled and jolted over the rails, now stopping for hours on sidings amid meadows, where it was quiet and where above the babel of voices of the regiment you could hear the skylarks, now clattering fast over bridges and along the banks of jade-green rivers where the slim poplars were just coming into leaf and where now and then a fish jumped. The men crowded in the door, grimy and tired, leaning on each other's shoulders and watching the plowed lands slip by and the meadows where the golden-green grass was dappled with buttercups, and the villages of huddled red roofs lost among pale budding trees and masses of peach blossom. Through the smells of steam and coal smoke and of unwashed bodies in uniforms came smells of moist fields and of manure from fresh-sowed patches and of cows and pasture lands just coming into flower.
“Must be right smart o'craps in this country.... Ain't like that damn Polignac, Andy?” said Chrisfield.
“Well, they made us drill so hard there wasn't any time for the grass to grow.”
“You're damn right there warn't.”
“Ah'd lak te live in this country a while,” said Chrisfield.
“We might ask 'em to let us off right here.”
“Can't be that the front's like this,” said Judkins, poking his head out between Andrews's and Chrisfield's heads so that the bristles of his unshaven chin rubbed against Chrisfield's cheek. It was a large square head with closely cropped light hair and porcelain-blue eyes under lids that showed white in the red sunburned face, and a square jaw made a little grey by the sprouting beard.
“Say, Andy, how the hell long have we all been in this goddam train?... Ah've done lost track o' the time....”
“What's the matter; are you gettin' old, Chris?” asked Judkins laughing.
Chrisfield had slipped out of the place he held and began poking himself in between Andrews and Judkins.
“We've been on this train four days and five nights, an' we've got half a day's rations left, so we must be getting somewhere,” said Andrews.
“It can't be like this at the front.”
“It must be spring there as well as here,” said Andrews.
It was a day of fluffy mauve-tinted clouds that moved across the sky, sometimes darkening to deep blue where a small rainstorm trailed across the hills, sometimes brightening to moments of clear sunlight that gave blue shadows to the poplars and shone yellow on the smoke of the engine that puffed on painfully at the head of the long train.
“Funny, ain't it? How li'l everythin' is,” said Chrisfield. “Out Indiana way we wouldn't look at a cornfield that size. But it sort o' reminds me the way it used to be out home in the spring o' the year.”
“I'd like to see Indiana in the springtime,” said Andrews.
“Well you'll come out when the war's over and us guys is all home... won't you, Andy?”
“You bet I will.”
They were going into the suburbs of a town. Rows and clusters of little brick and stucco houses were appearing along the roads. It began to rain from