Three Soldiers Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 need-n’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 to lie awake and think at night this way, so that he might not lose entirely the thread of his own life, of the life he would take up again some day if he lived through it. He brushed away the thought of death. It was uninteresting. He didn’t care anyway. But some day he would want to play the piano again, to write music. He must not let himself sink too deeply into the helpless mentality of the soldier. He must keep his will power.
    No, but that was not what he had wanted to think about. He was so bored with himself. At any cost he must forget himself. Ever since his first year at college he seemed to have done nothing but think about himself, talk about himself. At least at the bottom, in the utterest degradation of slavery, he could find forgetfulness and start rebuilding the fabric of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship and scorn. Scorn—that was the quality he needed. It was such a raw, fantastic world he had suddenly fallen into. His life before this week seemed a dream read in a novel, a picture he had seen in a shop window—it was so different. Could it have been in the same world at all? He must have died without knowing it and been born again into a new, futile hell.
    When he had been a child he had lived in a dilapidated mansion that stood among old oaks and chestnuts, beside a road where buggies and oxcarts passed rarely to