Three Soldiers (Dover Thrift Editions)
John Dos Passos
Language: English
Pages: 358
ISBN: 1537744003
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This grimly realistic depiction of army life follows a trio of idealists as they contend with the regimentation, violence, and boredom of military service. Incited past the point of endurance, the soldiers respond with rancor and murderous rage. This powerful exploration of warfare's dehumanizing effects remains chillingly contemporary.
Andrews. “It’s always carnival at seven on the Grands Boulevards.” They started climbing the steep streets to Montmartre. At a corner they passed a hard-faced girl with rouge-smeared lips and over-powdered cheeks, laughing on the arm of an American soldier, who had a sallow face and dull-green eyes that glittered in the slanting light of a street-lamp. “Hello, Stein,” said Andrews. “Who’s that?” “A fellow from our division, got here with me this morning.” “He’s got curious lips for a Jew,”
talk about himself. At least at the bottom, in the utterest degradation of slavery, he could find forgetfulness and start rebuilding the fabric of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship and scorn. Scorn—that was the quality he needed. It was such a raw, fantastic world he had suddenly fallen into. His life before this week seemed a dream read in a novel, a picture he had seen in a shop window—it was so different. Could it have been in the same world at all? He must
choked their nostrils. “What are they taking us down here for?” “Damned if I know.” They were filing down ladders into the terrifying pit which the hold of the ship seemed to them. Every man had a blue card in his hand with a number on it. In a dim place like an empty warehouse they stopped. The sergeant shouted out: “I guess this is our diggings. We’ll have to make the best of it.” Then he disappeared. Fuselli looked about him. He was sitting in one of the lowest of three tiers of bunks
that looked blue when he had just shaved. At last the tenseness of his mind slackened; he thought of women for a moment, of a fair-haired girl he’d seen from the train, and then suddenly crushing sleepiness closed down on him and everything went softly warmly black, as he drifted off to sleep with no sense but the coldness of one side and the warmth of his bunkie’s body on the other. In the middle of the night he awoke and crawled out of the tent. Andrews followed him. Their teeth chattered a
there was a faint greasiness of food cooking. At the other side of the wide field long lines of men shuffled slowly into the narrow wooden shanty that was the mess hall. Chins down, chests out, legs twitching and tired from the afternoon’s drilling, the company stood at attention. Each man stared straight in front of him, some vacantly with resignation, some trying to amuse themselves by noting minutely every object in their field of vision,—the cinder piles, the long shadows of the barracks and