Three Soldiers | Page 9

"I lef school when I
was twelve, 'cause it warn't much good, an' dad drank so the folks
needed me to work on the farm."
"What do you grow in your part of the country?"
"Mostly coan. A little wheat an' tobacca. Then we raised a lot o' stock....

But Ah was juss going to tell ye Ah nearly did kill a guy once."
"Tell me about it."
"Ah was drunk at the time. Us boys round Tallyville was a pretty tough
bunch then. We used ter work juss long enough to git some money to
tear things up with. An' then we used to play craps an' drink whiskey.
This happened just at coan-shuckin' time. Hell, Ah don't even know
what it was about, but Ah got to quarrellin' with a feller Ah'd been right
smart friends with. Then he laid off an' hit me in the jaw. Ah don't
know what Ah done next, but before Ah knowed it Ah had a hold of a
shuck-in' knife and was slashin' at him with it. A knife like that's a
turruble thing to stab a man with. It took four of 'em to hold me down
an' git it away from me. They didn't keep me from givin' him a good
cut across the chest, though. Ah was juss crazy drunk at the time. An'
man, if Ah wasn't a mess to go home, with half ma clothes pulled off
and ma shirt torn. Ah juss fell in the ditch an' slep' there till daylight an'
got mud all through ma hair.... Ah don't scarcely tech a drop now,
though."
"So you're in a hurry to get overseas, Chris, like me," said Andrews
after a long pause.
"Ah'll push that guy Anderson into the sea, if we both go over on the
same boat," said Chrisfield laughing; but he added after a pause: "It
would have been hell if Ah'd killed that feller, though. Honest Ah
wouldn't a-wanted to do that."

"That's the job that pays, a violinist," said somebody.
"No, it don't," came a melancholy drawling voice from a lanky man
who sat doubled up with his long face in his hands and his elbows
resting on his knees. "Just brings a living wage...a living wage."
Several men were grouped at the end of the barracks. From them the
long row of cots, with here and there a man asleep or a man hastily
undressing, stretched, lighted by occasional feeble electric-light bulbs,

to the sergeant's little table beside the door.
"You're gettin' a dis-charge, aren't you?" asked a man with a brogue,
and the red face of a jovial gorilla, that signified the bartender.
"Yes, Flannagan, I am," said the lanky man dolefully.
"Ain't he got hard luck?" came a voice from the crowd.
"Yes, I have got hard luck, Buddy," said the lanky man, looking at the
faces about him out of sunken eyes. "I ought to be getting forty dollars
a week and here I am getting seven and in the army besides."
"I meant that you were gettin' out of this goddam army."
"The army, the army, the democratic army," chanted someone under his
breath.
"But, begorry, I want to go overseas and 'ave a look at the 'uns," said
Flannagan, who managed with strange skill to combine a cockney
whine with his Irish brogue.
"Overseas?" took up the lanky man. "If I could have gone an' studied
overseas, I'd be making as much as Kubelik. I had the makings of a
good player in me."
"Why don't you go?" asked Andrews, who stood on the outskirts with
Fuselli and Chris.
"Look at me...t. b.," said the lanky man.
"Well, they can't get me over there soon enough," said Flannagan.
"Must be funny not bein' able to understand what folks say. They say
'we' over there when they mean 'yes,' a guy told me."
"Ye can make signs to them, can't ye?" said Flannagan "an' they can
understand an Irishman anywhere. But ye won't 'ave to talk to the 'uns.
Begorry I'll set up in business when I get there, what d'ye think of

that?"
Everybody laughed.
"How'd that do? I'll start an Irish House in Berlin, I will, and there'll be
O'Casey and O'Ryan and O'Reilly and O'Flarrety, and begod the King
of England himself'll come an' set the goddam Kaiser up to a drink."
"The Kaiser'll be strung up on a telephone pole by that time; ye needn't
worry, Flannagan."
"They ought to torture him to death, like they do niggers when they
lynch 'em down south."
A bugle sounded far away outside on the parade ground. Everyone
slunk away silently to his cot.
John Andrews arranged himself carefully in his blankets, promising
himself a quiet time of thought before going to sleep. He needed