Three Soldiers | Page 6

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:
"Four o'clock."
"We won't finish today then?"
The man shook his head and wrinkled his face into a strange spasm as
he spat.
"Been here long?"
"Not so long."
"How long?"
"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 both climbed their ladders again in silence.
"How's it you're in Casuals?" asked Andrews again.
"Ain't got no lungs."
"Why don't they discharge you?"
"Reckon they're going to, soon."
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