Corporal Tannhauser, along with four others, was buried at sunrise.  No band this time; the chaplain was ill, so one of the young captains read the service.  Claude stood by watching until the sailors shot one sack, longer by half a foot than the other four, into a lead-coloured chasm in the sea.  There was not even a splash.  After breakfast one of the Kansas orderlies called him into a little cabin where they had prepared the dead men for burial.  The Army regulations minutely defined what was to be done with a deceased soldier’s effects.  His uniform, shoes, blankets, arms, personal baggage, were all disposed of according to instructions.  But in each case there was a residue; the dead man’s toothbrushes, his razors, and the photographs he carried upon his person.  There they were in five pathetic little heaps; what should be done with them?

Claude took up the photographs that had belonged to his corporal; one was a fat, foolish-looking girl in a white dress that was too tight for her, and a floppy hat, a little flag pinned on her plump bosom.  The other was an old woman, seated, her hands crossed in her lap.  Her thin hair was drawn back tight from a hard, angular face—­unmistakably an Old-World face—­and her eyes squinted at the camera.  She looked honest and stubborn and unconvinced, he thought, as if she did not in the least understand.

“I’ll take these,” he said.  “And the others—­just pitch them over, don’t you think?”

VII

B Company’s first officer, Captain Maxey, was so seasick throughout the voyage that he was of no help to his men in the epidemic.  It must have been a frightful blow to his pride, for nobody was ever more anxious to do an officer’s whole duty.

Claude had known Harris Maxey slightly in Lincoln; had met him at the Erlichs’ and afterward kept up a campus acquaintance with him.  He hadn’t liked Maxey then, and he didn’t like him now, but he thought him a good officer.  Maxey’s family were poor folk from Mississippi, who had settled in Nemaha county, and he was very ambitious, not only to get on in the world, but, as he said, to “be somebody.”  His life at the University was a feverish pursuit of social advantages and useful acquaintances.  His feeling for the “right people” amounted to veneration.  After his graduation, Maxey served on the Mexican Border.  He was a tireless drill master, and threw himself into his duties with all the energy of which his frail physique was capable.  He was slight and fair-skinned; a rigid jaw threw his lower teeth out beyond the upper ones and made his face look stiff.  His whole manner, tense and nervous, was the expression of a passionate desire to excel.