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."