Fuselli leaned against the back of the barracks and smoked a cigarette. The air stung his hands as if they had been scraped by a nutmeg-grater. Twenty minutes passed slowly. Despair seized hold of him. He was so far from anyone who cared about him, so lost in the vast machine. He was telling himself that he'd never get on, would never get up where he could show what he was good for. He felt as if he were in a treadmill. Day after day it would be like this,--the same routine, the same helplessness. He looked at his watch. Twenty-five minutes had passed. He picked up his broom and moved round to the lieutenant's room. “Come in,” said the lieutenant carelessly. He was in his shirtsleeves, shaving. A pleasant smell of shaving soap filled the dark clapboard room, which had no furniture but three cots and some officers' trunks. He was a red-faced young man with flabby cheeks and dark straight eyebrows. He had taken command of the company only a day or two before. “Looks like a decent feller,” thought Fuselli. “What's your name?” asked the lieutenant, speaking into the small nickel mirror, while he ran the safety razor obliquely across his throat. He stuttered a little. To Fuselli he seemed to speak like an Englishman. “Fuselli.” “Italian parentage, I presume?” “Yes,” said Fuselli sullenly, dragging one of the cots away from the wall. “Parla Italiano?” “You mean, do I speak Eyetalian? Naw, sir,” said Fuselli emphatically, “I was born in Frisco.” “Indeed? But get me some more water, will you, please?” When Fuselli came back, he stood with his broom between his knees, blowing on his hands that were blue and stiff from carrying the heavy bucket. The lieutenant was dressed and was hooking the top hook of the uniform carefully. The collar made a red mark on his pink throat. “All right; when you're through, report back to the Company.” The lieutenant went out, drawing on a pair of khaki-colored gloves with a satisfied and important gesture. Fuselli walked back slowly to the tents where the Company was quartered, looking about him at the long lines of barracks, gaunt and dripping in the mist, at the big tin sheds of the cook shacks where the cooks and K. P.'s in greasy blue denims were slouching about amid a steam of cooking food. Something of the gesture with which the lieutenant drew on his gloves caught in the mind of Fuselli. He had seen peoople make gestures like that in the movies, stout dignified people in evening suits. The president of the Company that owned the optical goods store, where he had worked, at home in Frisco, had had something of that gesture about him. And he pictured himself drawing on a pair of gloves that way, importantly, finger by finger, with a little wave, of self-satisfaction when the gesture was completed.... He'd have to get that corporalship. “There's a long, long trail a-winding Through no man's land in France.”