Soldiers’ Pay by William Faulkner (digital e reader txt) 📕

The rain had ceased for some reason and there came up faintly on the damp air that sound made by battalions and regiments being quiet, an orderly silence louder than a riot. Outside, Madden felt mud, knew darkness and damp, he smelled food and excrement and slumber beneath a sky too remote to distinguish between peace and war.

He thought at times of Captain Green as he crossed France, seeing the intermittent silver smugness of rain spaced forever with poplars like an eternal frieze giving way upon vistas fallow and fecund, roads and canals and villages shining their roofs violently; spires and trees; roads, villages; villages, towns, a city; villages, villages, then cars and troops and cars and troops at junction points. He saw people going about warfare in a businesslike way, he saw French soldiers playing croquet in stained horizon-blue, he saw American soldiers watching them, giving them American cigarettes; he saw American and British troops fighting, saw nobody minding them particularly. Save the M.P.s. A man must be in a funny frame of mind to be an M.P. Or a nigger general. The war zone. Business as usual. The golden age of noncombatants.

He thought at times of Green, wondering where the other was, even after he got to know his new company commander. A man quite different from Green. He had been a college instructor and he could explain to you where Alexander and Napoleon and Grant made their mistakes. He was mild: his voice could scarcely be heard on a parade ground and his men all said, Wait till we get into the lines. We’ll fix the son-of-a-bitch.

Sergeant Madden, however, got along quite well with his officers, particularly with a lieutenant named Powers. And with the men, too. Even after a training period with dummies and a miniature sector he got along with them. They had become accustomed to the sounds of far guns (shooting at other people, however) and the flickering horizon at night; they had been bombed by aeroplanes while lined up for mess at a field kitchen, while the personnel of a concealed French battery watched them without interest from a dugout; they had received much advice from troops that had been in the lines.

At last they were going in themselves after a measureless space of aimless wandering here and there, and the sound of guns though seemingly no nearer was no longer impersonal. They tramped by night, feeling their feet sink, then hearing them suck in mud. Then they felt sloping ground and were in a ditch. It was as if they were burying themselves, descending into their own graves in the bowels of the wet black earth, into a darkness so dense as to constrict breathing, constrict the heart. They stumbled on in the darkness.

Out of the gratis advice they had received, they recalled strongest to drop when a gun went off or when they heard a shell coming; so when a machine gun, far to the right, stuttered, breaking the slow hysteria of decay which buried them, someone dropped, someone stumbled over him, then they all went down as one man. The officer cursed them, noncoms kicked them erect again. Then while they stood huddled in the dark, smelling death, the lieutenant ran back along the line making them a brief bitter speech.

“Who in hell told you to lie down? The only guns within two miles of you are those things in your hands there. Feel this? this thing here”⁠—slapping the rifles⁠—“this is a gun. Sergeants, if another man drops, tramp him right into the mud and leave him.”

They plowed on, panting and cursing in whispers. Suddenly they were among men, and a veteran of four days, sensing that effluvia of men new to battle, said:

“Why, look at the soldiers come to fight in the war.”

“Silence there!” a noncom’s voice, and a sergeant came jumping along saying, Where is your officer? Men going out brushed them, passing on in the pitch wet darkness and a voice whispered wickedly, Look out for gas. The word Gas passed from mouth to mouth and Authority raged them into silence again. But the mischief had been done.

Gas. Bullets and death and damnation. But Gas. It looked like mist, they had been told. First thing you know you are in it. And then⁠—Good night.

Silence broken by muddy movements of unrest and breathing. Eastward the sky paled impalpably, more like a death than a birth of anything; and they peered out in front of them, seeing nothing. There seemed to be no war here at all, though to the right of them a rumorous guttural of guns rose and fell thickly and heavily on the weary dawn. Powers, the officer, had passed from man to man. No one must fire: there was a patrol out there somewhere in the darkness. Dawn grew gray and slow; after a while the earth took a vague form and someone seeing a lesser darkness screamed, “Gas!”

Powers and Madden sprang among them as they fought blindly, fumbling and tearing at their gas masks, trampling each other, but they were powerless. The lieutenant laid about him with his fists, trying to make himself heard, and the man who had given the alarm whirled suddenly on the fire-step, his head and shoulders sharp against the sorrowful dawn.

“You got us killed,” he shrieked, shooting the officer in the face at point-blank range.

Sergeant Madden thought of Green again on a later day as he ran over broken ground at Cantigny saying, Come on, you bastards, do you want to live forever? He forgot Green temporarily as he lay beside a boy who had sold him shoes back home, in a shell-hole too small for them, feeling his exposed leg whipped by a gale as a tufted branch is whipped by a storm. After a while night came and the gale passed away and the man beside him