“You seem to be a man of some education,”
said Captain Dunning.
“Yes, Sir.”
“That’s good, that’s good.
Education’s a great thing, but don’t let
it go to your head. Keep on the way you’re
doing and you’ll be a good soldier.”
With these parting words lingering in his ears, Corporal
Patch saluted, executed a right about face, and left
the tent.
Though the conversation amused Anthony, it did generate
the idea that life would be more amusing as a sergeant
or, should he find a less exacting medical examiner,
as an officer. He was little interested in the
work, which seemed to belie the army’s boasted
gallantry. At the inspections one did not dress
up to look well, one dressed up to keep from looking
badly.
But as winter wore away—the short, snowless
winter marked by damp nights and cool, rainy days—he
marvelled at how quickly the system had grasped him.
He was a soldier—all who were not soldiers
were civilians. The world was divided primarily
into those two classifications.
It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes,
such as the military, divided men into two kinds:
their own kind—and those without.
To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the
Catholic there were Catholics and non-Catholics, to
the negro there were blacks and whites, to the prisoner
there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the
sick man there were the sick and the well....
So, without thinking of it once in his lifetime, he
had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a Gentile,
white, free, and well....
As the American troops were poured into the French
and British trenches he began to find the names of
many Harvard men among the casualties recorded in
the Army and Navy Journal. But for all the sweat
and blood the situation appeared unchanged, and he
saw no prospect of the war’s ending in the perceptible
future. In the old chronicles the right wing
of one army always defeated the left wing of the other,
the left wing being, meanwhile, vanquished by the
enemy’s right. After that the mercenaries
fled. It had been so simple, in those days, almost
as if prearranged....
Gloria wrote that she was reading a great deal.
What a mess they had made of their affairs, she said.
She had so little to do now that she spent her time
imagining how differently things might have turned
out. Her whole environment appeared insecure—and
a few years back she had seemed to hold all the strings
in her own little hand....
In June her letters grew hurried and less frequent.
She suddenly ceased to write about coming South.
March in the country around was rare with jasmine
and jonquils and patches of violets in the warming
grass. Afterward he remembered especially one
afternoon of such a fresh and magic glamour that as
he stood in the rifle-pit marking targets he recited
“Atalanta in Calydon” to an uncomprehending
Pole, his voice mingling with the rip, sing, and splatter
of the bullets overhead.
