Three Soldiers | Page 2

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