OCR Text |
Show J1L GO70 -L PRATT W.N.U.RELEASE THE STORY THUS FAR: Forty-fonr-rear-old Wilbert Winkle, who operates an luto repair shop In back of his home, Is lotlfied by his draft board that he Is in l.A. He breaks the bad news to bis dom-neering dom-neering wife, Amy, and tramps off to cork without kissing her loodby. Neigh-ors Neigh-ors call the next night after seeing his picture on the front page of the EvenlDg Itandard, and commiserate with him. rhe night before leaving, Mrs. Winkle lells Wilbert she is worried that he may lake np with other women bnt he tells ler she has nothing to worry about, Mr. Winkle takes the lead In the draft parade and on arriving in camp Is given sis "physical." He is ashamed of bis Iklnny physiqne. CHAPTER VI At the desk tf the Chief Medical Examiner, he was informed, casu-illy, casu-illy, that he had been accepted torn General Military Service. It was a little difficult to realize ,t. He was dazed. He felt that his lyspepsia had been insulted. He (till suffered from chronic indigestion indiges-tion ne matter how lightly it was regarded. All except three of the Springville ontingent were accepted. Freddie ind Jack were among the successful )nes or unsuccessful whichever ay yeu looked at it, a matter depending de-pending on how far your patriotism went After retrieving their clothes and liding their nakedness, they were inarched outside. Lined up In the jpen, they took the oath of enlist- Mr. Winkle saw what his future bedroom was like. ment. Mr. Winkle felt very solemn about swearing to bear true faith and allegiance to this country. In the clothing depot they were turned over to a little Sergeant no larger than Mr. Winkle. He had a wizened face and a great many service serv-ice stripes on his sleeve. In a dry good-humored voice he instructed them to change into something more appropriate to their surroundings and new standing. Sergeant Czeideskrowski took them, with more new soldiers from other contingents, to a receiving barracks bar-racks in the Reception Center. Here they would stay for several days, and here Mr. Winkle saw what his future bedroom was like. He was appalled. Not that the quarters weren't good. Indeed, they were better than those any other Army in the world could boast. Even In his somewhat depressed state Mr. Winkle ate more than he usually did at home, which he knew would not please Amy. He didn't mention anything about this when the Alphabet, In motherlike fashion, saw to it that they filled out postcards post-cards to their families announcing the good news of their being in the Army. Finally, for that day, came instruction in-struction in bed making. After an hour of experimenting, during which most of them believed he could make his bed perfectly In the dark, Serjeant Ser-jeant Czeideskrowski observed that none of them would pass Inspection, but their efforts would do for them to sleep that night. Lying in the darkness, with some of the men talking back and forth In whispers, Mr. Winkle felt unnatural. unnat-ural. He was no longer Wilbert Winkle, captain of his own soul or body. He belonged to an immense, fearseme, mysterious organization called the Army whose purpose was to fight other men to the death. Mr. Winkle fell in line with the tner men on the company street. It was barely light. It was cold. All about were the dim outlines of buildings. A vast rustle of men and their movements and voices spread U directions, ghostly and weird. Shivering, Mr. Winkle wondered this could be only a bad dream. Surely he would soon awaken in his own warm bed with Amy beside Dim, telling him it was time to get UP after a good night's rest instead tho fifteen minutes' nap he felt be had. Instead, he heard Sergeant Czeideskrowski Czeid-eskrowski calling his name in the roll "H-here," Mr. Winkle quavered. "Tindalll" "I guess I'm here," Freddie answered. an-swered. "I'm not sure." "Answer 'here' only," the Alphabet Alpha-bet ordered. "We'll try again. Tin-dall!" Tin-dall!" "Here," Freddie replied. In a low mutter he added, "What's left of me." The Alphabet strode over to stand in front of Freddie. He took out a little black notebook from his pocket, pock-et, wrote in it, and said: "Private Tindall, because it's you, and you ain't had the Articles of War read to you yet, especially Article Ar-ticle Sixty-five providing punishment for insubordination to a noncommissioned noncommis-sioned officer which is me we'll just set a record for the camp. You're getting K P duty on your second day. You will become famous fa-mous for this." Mr. Winkle was almost glad to see how wrong Freddie was in his attitude, and how painful this was going to make it for him. Then he felt guilty at having such an unworthy un-worthy sentiment. "Pettigrew!" Teeth chattered. Between clicks. Jack called that he was present. Mr. Winkle had a sense of floating float-ing through the rest of that day. He remained in a daze from the shock of entering the Army. He supposed it was the same with the ether men, but he didn't notice them very much. At the dispensary Mr. Winkle was inoculated for so many things that he couldn't keep track of them all. The faintness induced by being pricked on one arm was counteracted counter-acted by being pricked on the other arm immediately afterward. He en-, joyed only one of the examinations. That was the Mechanical Aptitude Test. He was happy to wade right through this, answering nearly every ev-ery question with ease and certainty, certain-ty, while others scratched their heads. In the afternoon, when they were given individual interviews, he hoped to learn what might be done with him. The interviewer drew him out about the work he had done in civil life. He showed a mild interest in. Mr. Winkle's history his-tory as an accountant, but mostly he asked Mr. Winkle to talk about himself as a repairer of anything and the fact that he had his own shop. "I think we'll have a place for you," he said, quite as if Mr. Winkle only now had been accepted for the position, and hired. The late afternoon was given to them to do as they pleased within the confines of their barracks. That is, all except Freddie. An emissary emis-sary of Sergeant Czeideskrowski, in the form of a Corporal, arrived to instruct Freddie to get into his fatigue fa-tigue denim and follow him. "We're going bubble dancing," the Corporal said. Freddie, snorting and grumbling, decided to agree. Jack was with two of the younger men, boys like himself. Solemnly they thumbed through their copies of The Soldier's Handbook, reading the instructions about what was, for most of them of their age, their first job. Mr. Winkle looked about for companionship com-panionship of his own. A few men looked as if they might be old enough for him, but he couldn't be sure. One of them passed by his cot, and Mr. Winkle, catching his glance, and for lack of anything else to say on the spur of the moment observed: "Well, here we are." "Hah?" the man asked, staring blankly, Mr. Winkle didn't pursue it, and the man passed en. He realized just what an outsider he was going to be. He wrote a letter let-ter to Amy. He informed her that his bag would arrive home by express ex-press collect; it contained his rubbers, rub-bers, which she had better give to the scrap rubber drive. He instructed instruct-ed her to tell the Pettigrews that Jack was getting along fine right now he was having a roughhouse with another boy. He assured Amy that he was all right. He just felt a little funny in his new life. Sitting there alone on his cot, Mr. Winkle reflected that he felt more than a little funny. There was an additional thing connected con-nected with what was going on, which he couldn't exactly analyze or express. It was connected In some way with the broad, general structure struc-ture of the state of human affairs. It went beyond the possibility that man was a warring animal in spite of all his civilized refinements. Neither Nei-ther was it to be found in the concurrent con-current theory that at certain intervals inter-vals man needed to make war in order or-der to pull himself down to his natural nat-ural level, which he had made the mistake of exceeding. Perhaps, thought Mr. Winkle, what he felt was contained in the fact that man had a will to die as well as a will to live, and that the present war was merely a grand expression of this. The world was bent on a mass suicide-pact, whose impulses would be spent only when millions had done away with themselves by the oblique methods employed. Yet not even in that did he discover dis-cover an explanation of the thing he felt. It was to be found in something some-thing much more simple than any such objective ideas, which were perhaps a little crazy, anyway, or at least too dangerous to entertain. But he was sure there was something some-thing to express the situation in which he found himself, and that he would ultimately run across it. He decided to be on the lookout for it. Private Tindall came in shortly after five, looking hot and not cutting cut-ting a very attractive figure in his soiled dungarees. His thin line of mustache did not seem to fit this garment at all. Several of the men' wanted to know what he had had to do. Freddie glared at them disgustedly. disgusted-ly. "I washed floors," he snarled. "Me!" Jack led the laugh that followed. Freddie strode over to him and without a word, drew back his fist and hit him. . Jack sat down on a cot, not hurt but angry. Mr. Winkle had time to think that it was a good thing he had finished his letter mentioning Jack before the boy rose, again to battle Freddie. Fred-die. From the- doorway the voice of Alphabet was heard: "For fighting you'd be surprised what there is, ) Private TindalL But this time we'll make it just the garbage detail for tomorrow." After the Alphabet had written in his notebook and gone away, Freddie Fred-die promised, "I'm going to kill him. From A to Z." "If I don't get you first," Jack muttered. "You," Freddie demanded, "and what other part of the Army? You and Pop, maybe?" Mr. Winkle reflected that this was not the right outlook at all. It was hardly the true spirit of the reason they were here. Mr. Winkle did not find a friend of his own age until he was shipped on a train to his Replacement Training Center. Camp Squibb was a thousand thou-sand miles away from home. Mr. Winkle understood that this great distance was for the purpose of getting get-ting him away from family ties. He was no happier at this than was Freddie Tindall when it was learned that Sergeant Czeideskrowski Czeideskrow-ski was to accompany and stay with them. It seemed that the Alphabet had been charrjping at the bit for having been put in what he referred re-ferred to as the "desk job" of receiving re-ceiving draftees. He wanted active duty, and now he looked at it as a step toward this when he was assigned as-signed to new training troops. Camp Squibb was a great deal like their first camp, except that it was much larger, stretching for miles across the flat bare land. It was the general belief that no one knew how large it was, nor where it began and ended. It had simply "For fighting you'd be surprised what there is, Private Tindall . . ." continued to be built until there were no boundaries at all. Men, it was said, had become lost in it and not yet found. Another rumor had it that in case of invasion the enemy was to be lured to Camp Squibb where, once caught in this trap, ii would never find its way out. On the first afternoon in their new barracks, Mr. Winkle discovered Mr. Tinker. He was among those making mak-ing up the platoon quartered on the ground floor. Mr. Winkle eyed the thickset man with a scowl on his broad face sitting on the next cot, and saw that here was a man of his own age. They eyed each other. Mr. Winkle Win-kle smiled briefly, and was given a frown. That wasn't encouraging. Nevertheless, Mr. Winkle spoke, introducing in-troducing himself. He gave his age, glanced around, and observed, " guess we're sort of two of a kind here." "Yeah," the other man said in a deep voice. Mr. Winkle offered the information informa-tion that he was a married man His look inquired if the same situation situa-tion held true with his acquaintance. "Naw," the man said. There the matter rested for a moment mo-ment until the man suddenly announced an-nounced his own name, which was Tinker, and his age, forty-two. He said he was a plumber. Mr. Winkle asked him how he fell about being in the Army. (TO BE CONTINUED! |