Soldiers -- Fiction; War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
When Andrews walked by the M.P. at the Gare-St. Lazare, his hands were
cold with fear. The M.P. did not look at him. He stopped on the crowded
pavement a little way from the station and stared into a mirror in a
shop window. Unshaven, with a check cap on the side of his head and his
corduroy trousers, he looked like a young workman who had been out of
work for a month.
“Gee, clothes do make a difference,” he said to himself. He smiled when
he thought how shocked Walters would be when he turned up in that rig,
and started walking with leisurely stride across Paris, where everything
bustled and jingled with early morning, where from every cafe came a hot
smell of coffee, and fresh bread steamed in the windows of the bakeries.
He still had three francs in his pocket. On a side street the fumes of
coffee roasting attracted him into a small bar. Several men were
arguing boisterously at the end of the bar. One of them turned a ruddy,
tow-whiskered face to Andrews, and said:
“Et toi, tu vas chomer le premier mai?”
“I'm on strike already,” answered Andrews laughing.
The man noticed his accent, looked at him sharply a second, and turned
back to the conversation, lowering his voice as he did so. Andrews drank
down his coffee and left the bar, his heart pounding. He could not help
glancing back over his shoulder now and then to see if he was being
followed. At a corner he stopped with his fists clenched and leaned a
second against a house wall.
“Where's your nerve. Where's your nerve?” He was saying to himself.
He strode off suddenly, full of bitter determination not to turn round
again. He tried to occupy his mind with plans. Let's see, what should he
do? First he'd go to his room and look up old Henslowe and Walters. Then
he would go to see Genevieve. Then he'd work, work, forget everything in
his work, until the army should go back to America and there should be
no more uniforms on the streets. And as for the future, what did he care
about the future?
When he turned the corner into the familiar street where his room was,
a thought came to him. Suppose he should find M.P.'s waiting for him
there? He brushed it aside angrily and strode fast up the sidewalk,
catching up to a soldier who was slouching along in the same direction,
with his hands in his pockets and eyes on the ground. Andrews stopped
suddenly as he was about to pass the soldier and turned. The man looked
up. It was Chrisfield.
Andrews held out his hand.
Chrisfield seized it eagerly and shook it for a long time. “Jesus
Christ! Ah thought you was a Frenchman, Andy.... Ah guess you got yer
dis-charge then. God, Ah'm glad.”
“I'm glad I look like a Frenchman, anyway.... Been on leave long,
Chris?”
Two buttons were off the front of Chrisfield's uniform; there were
streaks of dirt on his face, and his puttees were clothed with mud. He
looked Andrews seriously in the eyes, and shook his head.
“No. Ah done flew the coop, Andy,” he said in a low voice.
“Since when?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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