He did not look at her.
They were parted by hard and bitter strife.
After a moment, when she had gone, Ben said without anger:
“I’ve had nothing out of life.
I’ve been a failure.
I’ve stayed here with them until I’m done for.
My lungs are going: they won’t even take a chance on me for the army.
They won’t even give the Germans a chance to shoot at me.
I’ve never made good at anything.
By God!” he said, in a mounting blaze of passion.
“What’s it all about?
Can you figure it out, ‘Gene?
Is it really so, or is somebody playing a joke on us?
Maybe we’re dreaming all this.
Do you think so?”
“Yes,” said Eugene,
“I do.
But I wish they’d wake us up.”
He was silent, brooding over his thin bare body, bent forward on the bed for a moment.
“Maybe,” he said slowly, “maybe — there’s nothing, nobody to wake.”
“To hell with it all!” said Ben.
“I wish it were over.”
Eugene returned to Pulpit Hill in a fever of war excitement.
The university had been turned into an armed camp.
Young men who were eighteen years old were being admitted into the officers’ training corps.
But he was not yet eighteen.
His birthday was two weeks off.
In vain he implored the tolerance of the examining board.
What did two weeks matter?
Could he get in as soon as his birthday arrived?
They told him he could not.
What, then, could he do?
They told him that he must wait until there was another draft.
How long would that be?
Only two or three months, they assured him.
His wilted hope revived.
He chafed impatiently.
All was not lost.
By Christmas, with fair luck, he might be eligible for service in khaki: by Spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench-lice, mustard gas, spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud and gangrene, might be his.
Over the rim of the earth he heard the glorious stamp of the feet, the fierce sweet song of the horns.
With a tender smile of love for his dear self, he saw himself wearing the eagles of a colonel on his gallant young shoulders.
He saw himself as Ace Gant, the falcon of the skies, with 63 Huns to his credit by his nineteenth year.
He saw himself walking up the Champs–Elysees, with a handsome powdering of gray hair above his temples, a left forearm of the finest cork, and the luscious young widow of a French marshal at his side.
For the first time he saw the romantic charm of mutilation.
The perfect and unblemished heroes of his childhood now seemed cheap to him — fit only to illustrate advertisements for collars and toothpaste.
He longed for that subtle distinction, that air of having lived and suffered that could only be attained by a wooden leg, a rebuilt nose, or the seared scar of a bullet across his temple.
Meanwhile, he fed voraciously, and drank gallons of water in an effort to increase his poundage.
He weighed himself a half-dozen times a day.
He even made some effort at systematic exercise: swinging his arms, bending from his hips, and so on.
And he talked about his problem with the professors.