Soldiers -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
The straw under him rustled faintly with every sleepy movement Andrews
made in his blankets. In a minute the bugle was going to blow and he was
going to jump out of his blankets, throw on his clothes and fall into
line for roll call in the black mud of the village street. It couldn't
be that only a month had gone by since he had got back from hospital.
No, he had spent a lifetime in this village being dragged out of his
warm blankets every morning by the bugle, shivering as he stood in line
for roll call, shuffling in a line that moved slowly past the cookshack,
shuffling along in another line to throw what was left of his food into
garbage cans, to wash his mess kit in the greasy water a hundred other
men had washed their mess kits in; lining up to drill, to march on along
muddy roads, splattered by the endless trains of motor trucks; lining up
twice more for mess, and at last being forced by another bugle into his
blankets again to sleep heavily while a smell hung in his nostrils of
sweating woolen clothing and breathed-out air and dusty blankets. In
a minute the bugle was going to blow, to snatch him out of even these
miserable thoughts, and throw him into an automaton under other men's
orders. Childish spiteful desires surged into his mind. If the bugler
would only die. He could picture him, a little man with a broad face and
putty-colored cheeks, a small rusty mustache and bow-legs lying like a
calf on a marble slab in a butcher's shop on top of his blankets. What
nonsense! There were other buglers. He wondered how many buglers there
were in the army. He could picture them all, in dirty little villages,
in stone barracks, in towns, in great camps that served the country
for miles with rows of black warehouses and narrow barrack buildings
standing with their feet a little apart; giving their little brass
bugles a preliminary tap before putting out their cheeks and blowing in
them and stealing a million and a half (or was it two million or three
million) lives, and throwing the warm sentient bodies into coarse
automatons who must be kept busy, lest they grow restive, till killing
time began again.
The bugle blew with the last jaunty notes, a stir went through the barn.
Corporal Chrisfield stood on the ladder that led up from the yard, his
head on a level with the floor shouting:
“Shake it up, fellers! If a guy's late to roll call, it's K. P. for a
week.”
As Andrews, while buttoning his tunic, passed him on the ladder, he
whispered:
“Tell me we're going to see service again, Andy... Army o' Occupation.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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