They had left the station and were rumbling slowly past interminable freight trains. At last the train came to a dead stop.
A whistle sounded.
“Don't nobody get out,” shouted the sergeant from the car ahead.
“Hell! They keep you in this goddam car like you was a convict,” muttered Chrisfield.
“I'd like to get out and walk around Dijon.”
“O boy!”
“I swear I'd make a bee line for a dairy lunch,” said Judkins.
“Hell of a fine dairy lunch you'll find among those goddam frogs. No, vin blank is all you'ld get in that goddam town.”
“Ah'm goin' to sleep,” said Chrisfield. He stretched himself out on the pile of equipment at the end of the car. Andrews sat down near him and stared at his mud-caked boots, running one of his long hands, as brown as Chrisfield's now, through his light short-cut hair.
Chrisfield lay looking at the gaunt outline of Andrews's face against the light through half-closed eyes. And he felt a warm sort of a smile inside him as he said to himself: “He's a damn good kid.” Then he thought of the spring in the hills of southern Indiana and the mocking-bird singing in the moonlight among the flowering locust trees behind the house. He could almost smell the heavy sweetness of the locust blooms, as he used to smell them sitting on the steps after supper, tired from a day's heavy plowing, while the clatter of his mother's housework came from the kitchen. He didn't wish he was back there, but it was pleasant to think of it now and then, and how the yellow farmhouse looked and the red barn where his father never had been able to find time to paint the door, and the tumble-down cowshed where the shingles were always coming off. He wondered dully what it would be like out there at the front. It couldn't be green and pleasant, the way the country was here. Fellows always said it was hell out there. Well, he didn't give a damn. He went to sleep.