But the clerk had closed the window, leaving Hicks with a handful of French money and the tinned food and four bottles of vin blanc. Hence his disconsolation. The roll of paper felt unnatural, superfluous in his pocket. He was tempted to fling it away. In the morning the platoon would find the canteen and buy the last can, the last bottle.
Restive, he ran his lean fingers through his uncombed hair, wondering vaguely whether it were true that his regiment was soon to depart for the front.
It must be true, he decided. There had been an untoward attitude on the part of his officers since the moment that the departure of the platoon had been made known. Their destination had been scrupulously kept from them. In corroboration, a long-range gun boomed sullenly in the distance.
The noise produced in him a not unpleasant shiver of apprehension. He met it, summoning a quiet smile of scorn. Yes, he would be glad to go to the front, to that vague place from which men returned with their mutilated bodies. Not that he was vengeful. His feeling for the German army was desultory, a blend of kaleidoscopic emotions in which hate never entered. But in conflict, he felt, would arise a reason for his now unbearable existence.
The grinning weakness which men called authority had followed him since the day of his enlistment at the beginning of the war. It had turned thoughts of valor into horrible nightmares, the splendor of achievement into debased bickering. Most of the men, it seemed to him, had not entered the army to further the accomplishment of a common motive; they had enlisted or had been made officers and gentlemen—Congress had generously made itself the cultural father of officers—for the purpose of aiding their personal ambitions.
It had darkened. Hicks gathered up his sorry feast and sauntered off through the shaking, mysterious shadows to his pallet of straw.
Stretched out upon individual beds of straw which had been strewn over the stone floor, the members of the platoon were lying before a huge fireplace that drew badly in the early spring wind. In all of their nine months in France this was the first time that they had thus lain, not knowing what was to come on the following day, nor caring, being only satisfied by the warmth which came from the fireplace, by their sense of feeling intact and comfortable.
In this sense of reconciliation John Pugh, the Mississippi gambler, forgot his everlasting dice-throwing, which every pay-day that the platoon had thus far known had won for him more money than his company commander received from the United States Government.
He sighed, elongating his limbs beneath his blanket. He made an effort to rise, and succeeded in resting the weight of his torso on his arm which he had crooked under him. Cautiously he felt for a cigarette beneath his tunic, which he was using for a pillow. He got the cigarette and a match, then held them in his hand, hesitant.
His eyes, large and dolorous, searched the dimly lighted room, scanning the recumbent figures to discover whether they were asleep. Men were lying, their shoes beside their heads, their army packs, rifles, leaning against the wall and the remainder of their equipment scattered near by. They were silent, motionless.