It was pitch dark in that part of the camp. The electric lights had a sparse reddish glow. Fuselli kept straining his eyes, expecting to see a wharf and the masts of a ship at the end of every alley. The line filed into a dim mess hall, where a thin stew was splashed into the mess kits. Behind the counter of the kitchen the non-coms, the jovial first sergeant, and the businesslike sergeant who looked like a preacher, and the wrinkled-faced corporal who had been on the Red Sox outfield, could be seen eating steak. A faint odor of steak frying went through the mess hall and made the thin chilly stew utterly tasteless in comparison.
Fuselli looked enviously towards the kitchen and thought of the day when he would be a non-com too. “I got to get busy,” he said to himself earnestly. Overseas, under fire, he'd have a chance to show what he was worth; and he pictured himself heroically carrying a wounded captain back to a dressing tent, pursued by fierce-whiskered men with spiked helmets like firemen's helmets.
The strumming of a guitar came strangely down the dark street of the camp.
“Some guy sure can play,” said Bill Grey who, with his hands in his pockets, slouched along beside Fuselli.
They looked in the door of one of the barracks. A lot of soldiers were sitting in a ring round two tall negroes whose black faces and chests glistened like jet in the faint light.
“Come on, Charley, give us another,” said someone.
“Do Ah git it now, or mus' Ah hesit-ate?”
One negro began chanting while the other strummed carelessly on the guitar.
“No, give us the 'Titanic.'”
The guitar strummed in a crooning rag-time for a moment. The negro's voice broke into it suddenly, pitched high.