Across the River and Into the Trees (21 page)

“We were back two thousand yards from where we were to take off from. You know what two thousand yards is, Daughter, in a war when you are attacking?”

“No. How could I?”

“Then the front part of the Valhalla Express dropped coloured smoke and turned and went home. This smoke was dropped accurately, and clearly showed the target which was the Kraut positions. They were good positions and it
might
have been impossible to move him out of them without something mighty and picturesque such as we were experiencing.

“Then, Daughter, the next sections of the Valhalla express dropped everything in the world on the Krauts and where they lived and worked to hold us up. Later it looked as though all of the earth had erupted and the prisoners that we took shook as a man shakes when his malaria hits him. They were very brave boys from the Sixth Parachute Division and they all shook and could not control it though they tried.

“So you can see it was a good bombing. Just the thing we always need in this life. Make them tremble in the fear of justice and of might.

“So then daughter, not to bore you, the wind was from the east and the smoke began to blow back in our direction. The heavies were bombing on the smoke line and the smoke line was now over us. Therefore they bombed us the same as they had bombed the Krauts. First it was the heavies, and no one need ever worry about hell who was there that day. Then, to really make the breakthrough good and to leave as few people as possible on either side, the mediums came over and bombed who was left. Then we made the break-through as soon as the Valhalla Express had gone home, stretching in its beauty and its majesty from that part of France to all over England.”

If a man has a conscience, the Colonel thought, he might think about air-power some time.

“Give me a glass of that Valpolicella,” the Colonel said, and remembered to add, “please.”

“Excuse me,” he said. “Be comfortable, honey dog, please. You asked me to tell you.”

“I’m not your honey dog. That must be someone else.”

“Correct. You’re my last and true and only love. Is that correct? But you asked me to tell you.”

“Please tell me,” the girl said. “I’d like to be your honey dog if I knew how to do it. But I am only a girl from this town that loves you.”

“We’ll operate on that,” the Colonel said. “And I love you. I probably picked up that phrase in the Philippines.”

“Probably,” the girl said. “But I would rather be your straight girl.”

“You are,” the Colonel said. “Complete with handles and with the flag on top.”

“Please don’t be rough,” she said. “Please love me true and tell me as true as you can, without hurting yourself in any way.”

“I’ll tell you true,” he said. “As true as I can tell and let it hurt who it hurts. It is better that you hear it from me, if you have curiosity on this subject, than that you read it in some book with stiff covers.”

“Please don’t be rough. Just tell me true and hold me tight and tell me true until you are purged of it; if that can be.”

“I don’t need to purge,” he said. “Except heavies being used tactically. I have nothing against them if they use them right even if they kill you. But for ground support give me a man like Pete Quesada. There is a man who will boot them in.”

“Please.”

“If you ever want to quit a beat-up character like me that guy could give you ground support.”

“You are not beat-up, whatever that is, and I love you.”

“Please give me two tablets from that bottle and pour the glass of Valpolicella that you neglected to pour, and I will tell you some of the rest of it.”

“You don’t have to. You don’t have to tell me and I know now it is not good for you. Especially not the Valhalla Express day. I am not an inquisitor; or whatever the female of inquisitor is. Let us just lie quietly and look out of the window, and watch and see what happens on our Grand Canal.”

“Maybe we better. Who gives a damn about the war anyway?”

“You and me, maybe,” she said and stroked his head. “Here are the two things from the square bottle. Here is the glass of decanted vino. I’ll send you better from our own estates. Please let us sleep a little while. Please be a good boy and we just lie together and love each other. Please put your hand here.”

“My good or my bad?”

“Your bad,” the girl said. “The one I love and must think about all week. I cannot keep it like you keep the stones.”

“They’re in the safe,” the Colonel said. “In your name,” he added.

“Let’s just sleep and not talk about any material things nor any sorrows.”

“The hell with sorrows,” the Colonel said with his eyes closed and his head resting lightly on the black sweater that was his fatherland. You have to have some damned fatherland, he thought. Here is mine.

“Why aren’t you President?” the girl asked. “You could be an excellent president.”

“Me President? I served in the Montana National Guard when I was sixteen. But I never wore a bow tie in my life and I am not, nor ever have been, an unsuccessful haberdasher. I have none of the qualifications for the Presidency. I couldn’t even head the opposition even though I don’t have to sit on telephone books to have my picture taken. Nor am a no-fight general. Hell, I never even was at SHAEF. I couldn’t even be an elder statesman. I’m not old enough. Now we are governed in some way, by the dregs. We are governed by what you find in the bottom of dead beer glasses that whores have dunked their cigarettes in. The place has not even been swept out yet and they have an amateur pianist beating on the box.”

“I don’t understand it because my American is so incomplete. But it sounds awful. But don’t be angry about it. Let me be angry for you.”

“Do you know what an unsuccessful haberdasher is?”

“No.”

“It is not discreditable. There are many of them in our country. There is at least one in every town. No, Daughter, I am only a fighting soldier and that is the lowest thing on earth. In that you run for Arlington, if they return the body. The family has a choice.”

“Is Arlington nice?”

“I don’t know,” the Colonel said. “I was never buried there.”

“Where would you like to be buried?”

“Up in the hills,” he said, making a quick decision. “On any part of the high ground where we beat them.”

“I suppose you should be buried on the Grappa.”

“On the dead angle of any shell-pocked slope if they would graze cattle over me in the summer time.”

“Do they have cattle there?”

“Sure. They always have cattle where there is good grass in the summer, and the girls of the highest houses, the strong built ones, the houses
and
the girls, that resist the snow in winter, trap foxes in the fall after they bring the cattle down. They feed from pole-stacked hay.”

“And you don’t want Arlington or P
è
re Lachaise or what we have here?”

“Your miserable boneyard.”

“I know it is the most unworthy thing about the town. The city rather. I learned to call cities towns from you. But I will see that you go where you wish to go and I will go with you if you like.”

“I would not like. That is the one thing we do alone. Like going to the bathroom.”

“Please do not be rough.”

“I meant that I would love to have you with me. But it is very egotistical and an ugly process.”

He stopped, and thought truly, but off-key, and said, “No. You get married and have five sons and call them all Richard.”

“The lion-hearted,” the girl said, accepting the situation without even a glance, and playing what there was she held as you put down all the cards, having counted exactly.

“The crap-hearted,” the Colonel said. “The unjust bitter criticizer who speaks badly of everyone.”

“Please don’t be rough in talking,” the girl said. “And remember you speak worst of all about yourself. But hold me as close as we can and let’s think about nothing.”

He held her as close as he could and he tried to think about nothing.

THE Colonel and the girl lay quietly on the bed and the Colonel tried to think of nothing; as he had thought of nothing so many times in so many places. But it was no good now. It would not work any more because it was too late.

They were not Othello and Desdemona, thank God, although it was the same town and the girl was certainly better looking than the Shakespearean character, and the Colonel had fought as many, or more times than the garrulous Moor.

They are excellent soldiers, he thought. The damned Moors. But how many of them have we killed in my time? I think we killed more than a generation if you count the final Moroccan campaign against Abdel Krim. And each one you have to kill separately. Nobody ever killed them in mass, as we killed Krauts before they discovered
Einheit
.

“Daughter,” he said. “Do you want me to really tell you, so you will know, if I am not rough telling it?”

“I would rather have you tell me than anything. Then we can share it.”

“It cuts pretty thin for sharing,” the Colonel said. “It’s all yours, Daughter. And it’s only the high-lights. You wouldn’t understand the campaigns in detail, and few others would. Rommel might. But they always had him under wraps in France and, besides, we had destroyed his communications. The two tactical air-forces had; ours and the RAF. But I wish I could talk over certain things with him. I’d like to talk with him and with Ernst Udet.”

“Just tell me what you wish and take this glass of Valpolicella and stop if it makes you feel badly. Or don’t tell it at all.”

“I was a spare-parts Colonel at the start,” the Colonel explained carefully. “They are hang-around Colonels, which are given to a Division Commander to replace one that he may have killed, or that are relieved. Almost none are killed; but many are relieved. All the good ones are promoted. Fairly fast when the thing starts to move sort of like a forest fire.”

“Go on, please. Should you take your medicine?”

“The hell with my medicine,” the Colonel said. “And the hell with SHAEF.”

“You explained that to me,” the girl said.

“I wish the hell you were a soldier with your straight true brain and your beauty memory.”

“I would wish to be a soldier if I could fight under you.”

“Never fight under me,” the Colonel said. “I’m cagey. But I’m not lucky. Napoleon wanted them lucky and he was right.”

“We’ve had some luck.”

“Yes,” the Colonel said. “Good and bad.”

“But it was all luck.”

“Sure,” the Colonel said. “But you can’t fight on luck. It is just something that you need. The people who fought on luck are all gloriously dead like Napoleon’s horse cavalry.”

“Why do you hate cavalry? Almost all the good boys I know were in the three good regiments of cavalry, or in the navy.”

“I don’t hate anything, Daughter,” the Colonel said, and drank a little of the light, dry, red wine which was as friendly as the house of your brother, if you and your brother are good friends. “I only have a point of view, arrived at after careful consideration, and an estimate of their capabilities.”

“Are they not really good?”

“They are worthless,” the Colonel said. Then, remembering to be kind, added, “In our time.”

“Every day is a disillusion.”

“No. Every day is a new and fine illusion. But you can cut out everything phony about the illusion as though you would cut it with a straight-edge razor.”

“Please never cut me.”

“You’re not cut-able.”

“Would you kiss me and hold me tight, and we both look at the Grand Canal where the light is lovely now, and you tell me more?”

When they were looking out at the Grand Canal where the light was, indeed, lovely, the Colonel went on, “I got a regiment because the Commanding General relieved a boy that I had known since he was eighteen years old. He was not a boy any more, of course. It was too much regiment for him and it was all the regiment I ever could have hoped for in this life until I lost it.” He added, “Under orders, of course.”

“How do you lose a regiment?”

“When you are working around to get up on the high ground and all you would have to do is send in a flag, and they would talk it over and come out if you were right. The professionals are very intelligent and these Krauts were all professionals; not the fanatics. The phone rings and somebody calls from Corps who has his orders from Army or maybe Army Group or maybe even SHAEF, because they read the name of the town in a newspaper, possibly sent in from Spa, by a correspondent, and the order is to take it by assault. It’s important because it got into the newspapers. You have to take it.

“So you leave one company dead along a draw. You lose one company complete and you destroy three others. The tanks get smacked even as fast as they could move and they could move fast both ways.

“They hit them one, two, three, four, five.

“Three men usually get out of the five (that are inside) and they run like broken-field runners that have been shaken loose in a play when you are Minnesota and the others are Beloit, Wisconsin.

“Do I bore you?”

“No. I do not understand the local allusions. But you can explain them when you care to. Please keep on telling me.”

“You get into the town, and some handsome jerk puts an air mission on you. This mission might have been ordered and never cancelled. Let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I’m just telling you about things in a general way. It is better not to be specific and a civilian wouldn’t understand it. Not even you.

“This air mission does not help much, Daughter. Because maybe you cannot stay in the town because you have got too few people in, and by now, you are digging them out of rubble; or leaving them in rubble. There are two schools of thought on that. So they say to take it by assault. They repeat this.

“This has been rigidly confirmed by some politician in uniform who has never killed in his life, except with his mouth over the telephone, or on paper, nor ever has been hit. Figure him as our next President if you want him. Figure him any way you like. But figure him and his people, the whole great business establishment, so far back that the best way to communicate with them rapidly would be by racing carrier pigeons. Except, with the amount of security they maintained for their proper persons, they would probably have their anti-aircraft shoot the pigeons down. If they could hit them.