The frail form in khaki shirt and whitish drawers was held up for a moment between the two men. Then it fell a limp heap on the floor.
“Say, Sarge, he's fainted.”
“The hell he has.... Say, Morrison, ask one of the orderlies to come up from the Infirmary.”
“He ain't fainted.... The kid's dead,” said the other man.
“Give me a hand.”
The sergeant helped lift the body on the bed again. “Well, I'll be goddamned,” said the sergeant.
The eyes had opened. They covered the head with a blanket.
PART THREE: MACHINES
The fields and the misty blue-green woods slipped by slowly as the box car rumbled and jolted over the rails, now stopping for hours on sidings amid meadows, where it was quiet and where above the babel of voices of the regiment you could hear the skylarks, now clattering fast over bridges and along the banks of jade-green rivers where the slim poplars were just coming into leaf and where now and then a fish jumped. The men crowded in the door, grimy and tired, leaning on each other's shoulders and watching the plowed lands slip by and the meadows where the golden-green grass was dappled with buttercups, and the villages of huddled red roofs lost among pale budding trees and masses of peach blossom. Through the smells of steam and coal smoke and of unwashed bodies in uniforms came smells of moist fields and of manure from fresh-sowed patches and of cows and pasture lands just coming into flower.