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Updated: May 9, 2025
Andrews and Chrisfield tiptoed into the dark corridor, where they stood a long time, waiting, breathing the foul air that stung their nostrils with the stench of plaster-damp and rotting wine. At last the Chink came back with three bottles of wine. "Well, you're right," he said to Andrews. "They are putting up barricades on the Avenue Magenta." On the stairs they met a girl sweeping.
Chrisfield belched and nodded his head vaguely. He remembered Andrews's white fury after the men had been dismissed, how he had sat down on the end of a log by the field kitchen, staring at the patch of earth he beat into mud with the toe of his boot.
The company melted suddenly into a group of men unbuttoning their shirts and tunics in front of the little board shanty where they were quartered, which had been put up by the French at the time of the Marne, years before, so a man had told Andy. "What are you dreamin' about, Indiana?" said Judkins, punching Chrisfield jovially in the ribs.
At the hole in the hedge Chrisfield stumbled and nearly pulled them both down. They laughed, and still laughing staggered into the dark kitchen, where they found the red-faced woman with her baby sitting beside the fire with no other light than the flicker of the rare flames that shot up from a little mass of wood embers. The baby started crying shrilly when the two soldiers stamped in.
The clearing was empty, except for the two Americans and the German with the hole in his back. In the distance they heard a sound of artillery and nearer the "put, put, put" of isolated machine guns. The leaves of the trees about them, all shades of brown and crimson and yellow, danced in the sunlight. "Say, that damn money ain't no good, is it?" asked Chrisfield. "German money?
"Lawsie, Ah juss woke up, Andy. Come along in back." Andrews followed him through a small room with tables and benches, down a corridor where the reek of ammonia bit into his eyes, and up a staircase littered with dirt and garbage. Chrisfield opened a door directly on the stairs, and they stumbled into a large room with a window that gave on the court.
Chrisfield doubled his fists and gave him a smashing blow in the jaw that Judkins warded of just in time. Judkins's face flamed red. He swung with a long bent arm. "What the hell d'you think this is?" shouted somebody. "What's he want to hit me for?" spluttered Judkins, breathless. Men had edged in between them. "Lemme git at him." "Shut up, you fool," said Andy, drawing Chrisfield away.
Swallows had made their nests in the peak of the roof, and their droppings made white dobs and blotches on the floorboards in the alley between the bunks, where a few patches of yellow grass had not yet been completely crushed away by footsteps. Now that the shack was empty, Chrisfield could hear plainly the peep-peep of the little swallows in their mud nests.
Anderson was standing up, swaying backwards and forwards. The explosion made the woods quake. A thick rain of yellow leaves came down. Anderson was flat on the ground. He was so flat he seemed to have sunk into the ground. Chrisfield pressed the spring of the other grenade and threw it with his eyes closed. It burst among the thick new-fallen leaves. A few drops of rain were falling.
He started walking faster than ever. All at once they saw sunlight ahead of them and olive-drab uniforms. Machine guns started firing all around them in a sudden gust. Chrisfield found himself running forward across a field full of stubble and sprouting clover among a group of men he did not know. The whip-like sound of rifles had chimed in with the stuttering of the machine guns.
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