Three Soldiers

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Book: Read Three Soldiers for Free Online
Authors: John Dos Passos
Tags: General Fiction
be sayin’ ‘All right, corporal,’ to me soon,” he thought. An idea that he repelled came into his mind. The corporal didn’t look strong. He wouldn’t last long overseas. And he pictured Mabe writing Corporal Dan Fuselli, O.A.R.D.5.
    At the end of the afternoon, the lieutenant appeared suddenly, his face flushed, his trench coat stiffer than ever.
    “All right, sergeant; line up your men,” he said in a breathless voice.
    All down the camp street companies were forming. One by one they marched out in columns of fours and halted with their packs on. The day was getting amber with sunset. Retreat sounded.
    Fuselli’s mind had suddenly become very active. The notes of the bugle and of the band playing “The Star Spangled Banner” sifted into his consciousness through a dream of what it would be like over there. He was in a place like the Exposition ground, full of old men and women in peasant costume, like in the song, “When It’s Apple Blossom Time in Normandy.” Men in spiked helmets who looked like firemen kept charging through, like the Ku-Klux Klan in the movies, jumping from their horses and setting fire to buildings with strange outlandish gestures, spitting babies on their long swords. Those were the Huns. Then there were flags blowing very hard in the wind, and the sound of a band. The Yanks were coming. Everything was lost in a scene from a movie in which khaki-clad regiments marched fast, fast across the scene. The memory of the shouting that always accompanied it drowned out the picture. “The guns must make a racket, though,” he added as an afterthought.
    “Atten-shun!
    “Forwa-ard, march!”
    The long street of the camp was full of the tramping of feet. They were off. As they passed through the gate Fuselli caught a glimpse of Chris standing with his arm about Andrews’s shoulders. They both waved. Fuselli grinned and expanded his chest. They were just rookies still. He was going overseas.
    The weight of the pack tugged at his shoulders and made his feet heavy as if they were charged with lead. The sweat ran down his close-clipped head under the overseas cap and streamed into his eyes and down the sides of his nose. Through the tramp of feet he heard confusedly cheering from the sidewalk. In front of him the backs of heads and the swaying packs got smaller, rank by rank up the street. Above them flags dangled from windows, flags leisurely swaying in the twilight. But the weight of the pack, as the column marched under arc lights glaring through the afterglow, inevitably forced his head to droop forward. The soles of boots and legs wrapped in puttees and the bottom strap of the pack of the man ahead of him were all he could see. The pack seemed heavy enough to push him through the asphalt pavement. And all about him was the faint jingle of equipment and the tramp of feet. Every part of him was full of sweat. He could feel vaguely the steam of sweat that rose from the ranks of struggling bodies about him. But gradually he forgot everything but the pack tugging at his shoulders, weighing down his thighs and ankles and feet, and the monotonous rhythm of his feet striking the pavement and of the other feet, in front of him, behind him, beside him, crunching, crunching.
     
    The train smelt of new uniforms on which the sweat had dried, and of the smoke of cheap cigarettes. Fuselli awoke with a start. He had been asleep with his head on Bill Grey’s shoulder. It was already broad day-light. The train was jolting slowly over cross-tracks in some dismal suburb, full of long soot-smeared warehouses and endless rows of freight cars, beyond which lay brown marshland and slate-grey stretches of water.
    “God! that must be the Atlantic Ocean,” cried Fuselli in excitement.
    “Ain’t yer never seen it before? That’s the Perth River,” said Bill Grey scornfully.
    “No, I come from the Coast.”
    They stuck their heads out of the window side by side so that their cheeks touched.
    “Gee, there’s

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