Soldiers’ Pay

Lowe, Julian, number ⸻, late a Flying Cadet, Umptieth Squadron, Air Service, known as “One Wing” by the other embryonic aces of his flight, regarded the world with a yellow and disgruntled eye. He suffered the same jaundice that many a more booted one than he did, from Flight Commanders through Generals to the ambrosial single-barred (not to mention that inexplicable beast of the field which the French so beautifully call an aspiring aviator); they had stopped the war on him.

So he sat in a smoldering of disgusted sorrow, not even enjoying his Pullman prerogatives, spinning on his thumb his hat with its accursed white band.

“Had your nose in the wind, hey, buddy?” said Yaphank, going home and smelling to high heaven of bad whisky.

“Ah, go to hell,” he returned sourly and Yaphank doffed his tortured hat.

“Why, sure, General⁠—or should I of said Lootenant? Excuse me, madam. I got gassed doing K.P. and my sight ain’t been the same since. On to Berlin! Yeh, sure, we’re on to Berlin. I’m on to you, Berlin. I got your number. Number no thousand no hundred and naughty naught Private (very private) Joe Gilligan, late for parade, late for fatigue, late for breakfast when breakfast is late. The statue of liberty ain’t never seen me, and if she do, she’ll have to ’bout face.”

And here was Gilligan returned, saying: “Charles, at ease.” I might have known he would have gotten another one, thought Cadet Lowe, looking up. He saw a belt and wings, he rose and met a young face with a dreadful scar across his brow. My God he thought, turning sick. He saluted and the other peered at him with strained distraction. Gilligan, holding his arm, helped him into the seat. The man turned his puzzled gaze to Gilligan and murmured, “Thanks.”

“Lootenant,” said Gilligan, “you see here the pride of the nation. General, ring the bell for ice water. The lootenant here is sick.”

Cadet Lowe pressed the bell, regarding with a rebirth of that old feud between American enlisted men and officers of all nations the man’s insignia and wings and brass, not even wondering what a British officer in his condition could be doing traveling in America. Had I been old enough or lucky enough, this might have been me, he thought jealously.

The porter reappeared.

“No drinking in this car, I told you,” he said. Gilligan produced a bill. “No, sir. Not in this car.” Then he saw the third man. He leaned down to him quickly, then glanced suspiciously from Gilligan to Lowe.

“What you all doing with him?” he asked.

“Oh, he’s just a lost foreigner I found back yonder. Now, Ernest⁠—”

“Lost? He ain’t lost. He’s from Gawgia. I’m looking after him. Cap’m”⁠—to the officer⁠—“is these folks all right?”

Jones, Januarius Jones, born of whom he knew and cared not, becoming Jones alphabetically, January through a conjunction of calendar and biology, Januarius through the perverse conjunction of his own star and the compulsion of food and clothing⁠—Januarius Jones baggy in gray tweed, being lately a fellow of Latin in a small college, leaned upon a gate of iron grillwork breaking a levee of green and embryonically starred honeysuckle, watching April busy in a hyacinth bed. Dew was on the grass and bees broke apple bloom in the morning sun while swallows were like plucked strings against a pale windy sky. A face regarded him across a suspended trowel and the metal clasps of crossed suspenders made a cheerful glittering.

The rector said: “Good morning, young man.” His shining dome was friendly against an ivy-covered wall above which the consummate grace of a spire and a gilded cross seemed to arc across motionless young clouds.

Januarius Jones, caught in the spire’s illusion of slow ruin, murmured: “Watch it fall, sir.” The sun was full on his young round face.

The horticulturist regarded him with benevolent curiosity. “Fall? Ah, you see an aeroplane,” he stated. “My son was in that service during the war.” He became gigantic in black trousers and broken shoes. “A beautiful day for flying,” he said from beneath his cupped hand. “Where do you see it?”

“No, sir,” replied Jones, “no aeroplane, sir. I referred in a fit of unpardonable detachment to your spire.

“Come on,” she repeated, descending the steps.

They left a delirium of sparrows and the sweet smell of fresh grass behind them and were in a graveled path between rose bushes. The path ran on beneath two formal arching oaks; lesser roses rambling upon a wall paralleled them and Gilligan following her long stride trod brittle and careful. Whenever he was among flowers he always felt as if he had entered a room full of women: he was always conscious of his body, of his walk, feeling as though he trod in sand. So he believed that he really did not like flowers.

Mrs. Powers paused at intervals, sniffing, tasting dew upon buds and blooms, then the path passed between violet beds to where against a privet hedge there would soon be lilies. Beside a green iron bench beneath a magnolia she paused again, staring up into the tree. A mocking bird flew out and she said:

“There’s one, Joe. See?”

“One what? Bird nest?”

“No, a bloom. Not quite, but in a week or so. Do you know magnolia blooms?”

“Sure: not good for anything if you pick ’em. Touch it, and it turns brown on you. Fades.”

“That’s true of almost everything, isn’t it?”

“Yeh, but how many folks believe it? Reckon the Loot does?”

“I don’t know.⁠ ⁠… I wonder if he’ll have a chance to touch that one?”

At last they were going in themselves after a measureless space of aimless wandering here and there, and the sound of guns though seemingly no nearer was no longer impersonal. They tramped by night, feeling their feet sink, then hearing them suck in mud. Then they felt sloping ground and were in a ditch. It was as if they were burying themselves, descending into their own graves in the bowels of the wet black earth, into a darkness so dense as to constrict breathing, constrict the heart. They stumbled on in the darkness.

Out of the gratis advice they had received, they recalled strongest to drop when a gun went off or when they heard a shell coming; so when a machine gun, far to the right, stuttered, breaking the slow hysteria of decay which buried them, someone dropped, someone stumbled over him, then they all went down as one man. The officer cursed them, noncoms kicked them erect again. Then while they stood huddled in the dark, smelling death, the lieutenant ran back along the line making them a brief bitter speech.

“Who in hell told you to lie down? The only guns within two miles of you are those things in your hands there. Feel this? this thing here”⁠—slapping the rifles⁠—“this is a gun. Sergeants, if another man drops, tramp him right into the mud and leave him.”