warm bodies full of gestures and attitudes and aspirations into moulds, like the moulds toy soldiers are cast in. The phrase became someone shouting raucously in his ears: “Arbeit und Rhythmus,”—drowning everything else, beating his mind hard again, parching it.
But suddenly he laughed aloud. Why, it was in German. He was being got ready to kill men who said that. If anyone said that, he was going to kill him. They were going to kill everybody who spoke that language, he and all the men whose feet he could hear tramping on the drill field, whose legs were all being made the same length on the drill field.
III
It was Saturday morning. Directed by the corporal, a bandy-legged Italian who even on the army diet managed to keep a faint odour of garlic about him, three soldiers in blue denims were sweeping up the leaves in the street between the rows of barracks.
“You fellers are slow as molasses.... Inspection in twenty-five minutes,” he kept saying.
The soldiers raked on doggedly, paying no attention. “You don't give a damn. If we don't pass inspection, I get hell—not you. Please queeck. Here, you, pick up all those goddam cigarette butts.”
Andrews made a grimace and began collecting the little grey sordid ends of burnt-out cigarettes. As he leant over he found himself looking into the dark-brown eyes of the soldier who was working beside him. The eyes were contracted with anger and there was a flush under the tan of the boyish face.
“Ah didn't git in this here army to be ordered around by a goddam wop,” he muttered.
“Doesn't matter much who you're ordered around by, you're ordered around just the same,” said Andrews. “Where d'ye come from, buddy?”
“Oh, I come from New York. My folks are from Virginia,” said Andrews.
“Indiana's ma state. The tornado country.... Git to work; here's that bastard wop comin' around the buildin'.”
“Don't pick 'em up that-a-way; sweep 'em up,” shouted the corporal.
Andrews and the Indiana boy went round with a broom and
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