“And Jack, you know that Frog I was tellin’ you about? When he gave me the coffee he asked me if I was an American. I guess he thought at first that I was an Englishman, and when I told him I wasn’t he looked sort of glad. Then he looked as if he expected me to agree with him and said that the Englishmen were no good.”
“Well, you did, didn’t you? I’d like to take a crack at them lime-juicers.”
“What difference does that make? The point is, the French hate the English and the English hate the Americans and the Americans hate the Germans, and where the hell is it all goin’ to end? Gimme another drink.
“I guess that fellow being killed this afternoon got on my nerves,” he finished.
Hicks drank until he was drunk, not sickeningly drunk, but until his brain was numbed.
Pugh sat awake, watching the stars through the trees and listening to one of the new men singing low some Italian love-songs that he had learned in Rome.
The battalion slept until noon. When they awoke, the field kitchens, drawn up not far from them, were concocting the rations into that particular delicacy known to army folk as slum. The men fell in line before the large metal containers, where soiled-looking ragamuffins slopped a pale, watery substance into the dirty mess-kits that were held out by the men as they passed. The bread was white, there was much coffee that was hot. Further than that the desires of the men did not wing.
Late afternoon found the battalion on the road again, bound farther from the front. They knew that they were leaving the front by the receding boom of the artillery.
They were billeted in a small town from which all of the able-bodied inhabitants had flown. Vacant houses were searched out, armsful of straw were taken from the barns and arranged in neat piles on the stone floors of the houses. By sleeping in pairs, they were able to use one blanket to put over the straw, the other blanket to cover their bodies.
There began the regular soldier’s formula of reveille and morning exercises; a scrawny breakfast and a morning of drill; a heavy, lumpy dinner and an afternoon of skirmishing, alternating with lectures on the manœuvres of war; a thin, skimpy supper, leaving the men free in the evening to bribe the townspeople to sell them eggs, salads, rabbit, cognac, and wine.