Free Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos Page A

lieutenant, understand?”
    They all walked back to the dingy room where the rest of the company waited huddled in their coats, trying to keep their importance from being too obvious in their step.
    “I’ve really started now,” thought Fuselli to himself. “I’ve really started now.”
     
    The bare freight car clattered and rumbled monotonously over the rails. A bitter cold wind blew up through the cracks in the grimy splintered boards of the floor. The men huddled in the corners of the car, curled up together like puppies in a box. It was pitch black. Fuselli lay half asleep, his head full of curious fragmentary dreams, feeling through his sleep the aching cold and the unending clattering rumble of the wheels and the bodies and arms and legs muffled in coats and blankets pressing against him. He woke up with a start. His teeth were chattering. The clanking rumble of wheels seemed to be in his head. His head was being dragged along, bumping over cold iron rails. Someone lighted a match. The freight car’s black swaying walls, the packs piled in the center, the bodies heaped in the corners where, out of khaki masses here and there gleamed an occasional white face or a pair of eyes—all showed clear for a moment and then vanished again in the utter blackness. Fuselli pillowed his head in the crook of someone’s arm and tried to go to sleep, but the scraping rumble of wheels over rails was too loud; he stayed with open eyes staring into the blackness, trying to draw his body away from the blast of cold air that blew up through a crack in the floor.
    When the first greyness began filtering into the car, they all stood up and stamped and pounded each other and wrestled to get warm.
    When it was nearly light, the train stopped and they opened the sliding doors. They were in a station, a foreign-looking station where the walls were plastered with unfamiliar advertisements. “V-E-RS-A-I-L-L-E-S”; Fuselli spelt out the name.
    “Versales,” said Eisenstein. “That’s where the kings of France used to live.”
    The train started moving again slowly. On the platform stood the top sergeant.
    “How d’ye sleep,” he shouted as the car passed him. “Say, Fuselli, better start some grub going.”
    “All right, Sarge,” said Fuselli.
    The sergeant ran back to the front of the car and climbed on.
    With a delicious feeling of leadership, Fuselli divided up the bread and the cans of bully beef and the cheese. Then he sat on his pack eating dry bread and unsavoury beef, whistling joyfully, while the train rumbled and clattered along through a strange, misty-green countryside,—whistling joyfully because he was going to the front, where there would be glory and excitement, whistling joyfully because he felt he was getting along in the world.
     
    It was noon. A pallid little sun like a toy balloon hung low in the reddish-grey sky. The train had stopped on a siding in the middle of a russet plain. Yellow poplars, faint as mist, rose slender against the sky along a black shining stream that swirled beside the track. In the distance a steeple and a few red roofs were etched faintly in the greyness.
    The men stood about balancing first on one foot and then on the other, stamping to get warm. On the other side of the river an old man with an oxcart had stopped and was looking sadly at the train.
    “Say, where’s the front?” somebody shouted to him.
    Everybody took up the cry: “Say, where’s the front?”
    The old man waved his hand, shook his head and shouted to the oxen. The oxen took up again their quiet processional gait and the old man walked ahead of them, his eyes on the ground.
    “Say, ain’t the frogs dumb?”
    “Say, Dan,” said Bill Grey, strolling away from a group of men he had been talking to. “These guys say we are going to the Third Army.”
    “Say, fellers,” shouted Fuselli. “They say we’re going to the Third Army.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “In the Oregon forest,” ventured