Once an Eagle (32 page)

“No, sir. Maybe it was just—Soissons …”

“Yes. That's possible. Anything could have done it, I suppose. Perhaps he was simply sick of slaughter. God knows I am; God knows when I look at—”

The Colonel checked himself and folded his arms. “War is a—serious—business,” he said with great deliberation. “Yes. Serious. That's why I've relieved Merrick.”

Damon started. “Relieved him, sir? Sent him down?”

“Back to Blois. Do you feel that's too harsh?”

“Why, I don't know …” He looked at Caldwell uncertainly. “I've never liked him myself, I've never approved of certain things he does. But he's good in combat. He's utterly fearless—”

“That's just it.” The Colonel paused, staring again at the mural. “He has no fear. None at all.” He pointed at Sam, nodding. “
I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale.
That's the crux of it. There's something very wrong with Merrick: he's not a
man.
I wasn't aware of it at first; but battle always brings this out. That action at Paulnay Ridge—to expose his people that way, and for nothing! It's perfectly all right with me if he wants to hurry toward his own destruction. Though I shouldn't even say that, he doesn't have that right any more than the rest of us. But he has no right whatsoever to sacrifice good men to this crazy lust or whatever it is. I won't have it.” He scratched his scalp at the hairline. “There are only a few like him, thank God—the Cadmus soldiers—and they're more of a menace than a help: if you can't measure danger, how on earth can you evade it? For the Merricks war is not a serious business …

“Ultima ratio regem,” he murmured, musing; and his handsome face looked all at once unbelievably stern. “Yes. But let's make sure it
is
the last argument. Because once the eminent heads of state in all their infinite wisdom decide that it must be, once the drums begin to beat—there is nothing ahead but fear and waste and misery and desolation. Nothing else. Once the engine has started it must shudder and rumble to the very end of its hellish course, come what may. And you and I and a few million others are the ones who must cling to the machine as it grinds along.”

Abruptly he turned to the map on the long side wall. “This is what we ought to do. Break in this way.” His fingers traced a quick arc on the heavy paper. “Etain—Briey—Thionville, outflank Metz, knife in to Trier. Do you see it? But we won't. We'll be flung at the Meuse—here—in a long, stupid, costly line. The concept of pierce-and-encircle is not in the French lexicon. And these are the descendants of Napoleon! God damn fools,” he muttered.

“Then why are we doing it?” Damon asked quietly. “Why do we agree to this folly?”

Caldwell turned from the map. “Because we have no choice. To falter now is to breed worse evils than we have. We are saddled with leaders whose concept of strategy and tactics has been destroyed by four years of unparalleled numbers, mountainous losses. It is like asking blind men to run an obstacle course. They are no longer capable of
thought …
”

“But General Liggett—”

“Ah, Liggett, Connor, Marshall—of course. But we lack the power to make our desires prevail. They needed us desperately, we came in our tens of thousands and spilled our blood quite generously from Cantigny to Montfaucon. But now times have changed: now they know they will win, and they are prepared to go their own way.”

“Maybe we should have insisted on certain strategic concessions as part of the price of our entry into the war.”

“A trenchant observation.” Caldwell grinned. “Go straight to the head of the class. Well, it was complicated. We only had four divisions of assault caliber as late as last April, and it was touch and go on the Marne—a poor time to make strategic requests, I imagine.” He slapped his thigh once. “But it's not that: we seem to be incapable of insisting, that's the meat of it. We are a race of headlong altruists. We rush to a foreign land in a deluge of embattled sympathy, we give away clothing, cigarettes, our rations. We even on occasion”—and his eyes sparkled—“repair the battered living quarters of certain comely French civilians. We do everything in our power to proclaim our good intentions, our nobility of purpose, our loftiness of soul … and all because we think we're too good for the rest of the world.”

“Is that the reason?”

“Yes, more or less. We can't be bothered with the sordid details, the actualities of human motivation. We stubbornly, sublimely refuse to see man as he is, Sam—we're so damned certain about how he
ought
to be.
We
know how he ought to be—he ought to be American …” There was a sullen mutter of guns off toward Brieulles, and the Colonel paused, his nose up, as though trying to scent their scope and direction; he shook his head. “No, that hasn't got it. We know what man is, all right, but we insist on overlaying that knowledge with a mass of sticky sentimentality … We know how man treats man. You've only to read the reports of hard-bitten post commanders on the frontier, complaining of the vicious debauchery of entire Indian tribes by Astor's people, the cycles of boom and panic engineered by ruthless stock operators that impoverished hundreds of thousands; the way children were treated in scores of New England mills. Yes, and a fairly general attitude toward the black-skinned man in this great democracy of ours …”

A great rumble surged toward them, broke into the rhythmic grinding roar of trucks passing, shifting gears, straining in the mud; the room shook.

“The Blue Ridgers,” the Colonel said. “Moving up to have another go at Malsainterre. From the south, this time. —We know,” he went on, his voice pitched flat against the noise of the camions, “we know, but we avert our eyes—it's so much more fun to prate of man as a noble creature, a semidivine being bursting with goodness and mercy and all kinds of generous thoughts. It—takes our minds off ourselves … Well, he
isn't
a noble creature, as well we know by now: he's a remarkably clever animal whose talents have outstripped his powers of reason. And his deepest instincts seem to be greed and vanity and self-interest.”

“But the idea of helping your neighbor,” Damon protested, “of sharing what you have—”

Caldwell nodded. “Yes, the nation was founded on a dream—but look at the reality. The men who fought in the War for Independence were promised the western lands as payment for their service—they certainly didn't get any other remuneration. But when the war was over the vested interests pulled every trick in the book to grab it all for themselves; and it took federal creation of the Northwest Territory to secure the veterans their forty acres …”

Muttering and fuming he peered out of the window, where the procession of trucks and artillery ground their way past, slewing and snorting in the sullen rain. “Look at them,” he murmured. “Going up there again, full of fire and hope and high resolve … Day after tomorrow it's our turn again.

“I can never get over the incongruities,” he observed softly, as though carrying on a private dialogue with some inner antagonist. “The essential absurdity of the soldier's life: look at us, standing here well groomed and housed and fed, all at our ease—while up there a few miles men are living and fighting and hiding and dying like some particularly odious species of ferret. A few miles away … I shouldn't trouble myself over such thoughts; a good soldier wouldn't, I suppose. But I can't help it. I can harden my heart, but I cannot alter it. What an awfully
lonely
calling it is!—you continually find yourself alone with your speculations, your afterthoughts, your fears. I should never have been a soldier; but Father was determined I should go to the Point, and so the Point it was. And here I am, and there they are, out there, in their thousands; and we must get on with the bloody business. Get on with it and get it behind us.”

He sipped at his brandy. Damon found himself studying covertly the slender, delicate face, drawn now and yellowed from illness and strain; the high forehead and fine straight nose, the eyes whose bemused, undeviating gaze seemed to behold the world in all its folly, all its avarice and violence and self-deception, and still go forward resolute and undismayed … Feeling a soft little wave of affection, Damon looked down. Dev had told him he could always pull people with him, that no one could say no to him. Was that true? It was terrible if it was: he didn't want to have that kind of hold over people. But here beside him stood a man who could exercise far more than will—who inspired others by the force of his intellect: by his wit, his compassion, his imagination, by his early and all-embracing wisdom … If I could have a father again, this is the kind of man I'd want, he thought.

The Colonel sighed and dropped his hand from the heavy drapery beside the window. “I suppose I'm becoming a misanthrope,” he said gloomily, staring. “A Diogenes who doesn't even need to take up his lantern and start combing the town. I've always hated the breed: it's easy enough to mock life. Tommy says I'm getting to be a morbid old man—and she's only been reading my letters. She says I don't know what trouble is—she's working in the fracture ward at Savenay and I daresay she's right. It can't be the jolliest kind of duty for a high-strung, willful girl. She's so emotional! I can't imagine where she got it. My parents always had themselves in hand, and the Sawtells were dull as dishwater. Even Cora was sort of subdued; very sweet, very dear, but—well, subdued …” He sighed again, and Damon shifted his feet respectfully. He knew the Colonel had lost his wife some years before, that he had an only child, a daughter named—incongruously—Thomas; that was all he knew.

“God knows, she's had a hard time of it,” Caldwell went on. “Cora's death was a fearful blow to her—she was so little: it must have seemed as though the sky were really falling, like Chicken Little. I know it did for me. And then I didn't know what to do with her. My sister took her for a time, and Cora's sister Marilyn, and she didn't like that much better. And all that time I was trudging around from Schofield to Leavenworth to Tientsin to Monroe … I should have made a home for her: a real, honest-to-goodness home, full of nine-to-five regularity and salary raises and neighborhood children she'd have grown up with, found a boy she could have married … ” Abruptly he snorted. “Forgive me, Sam. It's the kind of afternoon when all your sins come back and perch on your soul like vultures, picking and tearing …” He turned and gave the Captain a swift, quizzical look. “Two hours ago General Liggett asked me if I wanted the post of assistant divisional commander.”

Damon's jaw dropped in spite of himself; the idea that a man who had just been given the post of ADC in one of the three finest divisions in the AEF could be standing there by a window pondering over parenthood and human destiny and the American zeitgeist, filled him with amazement. “Why—congratulations, sir!” he stammered. “You're going to take it, of course …”

The Colonel nodded. “Yes: I'm going to take it. I imagine I'll do as good a job as the next man, maybe a little bit better.”

“And it'll mean a star for you—maybe two of them.”

Caldwell smiled. “Yes. I suppose so. I'll become a crabbed, unapproachable old fool, eating like an epicurean and wrangling with the French brass every afternoon. The prerequisites of power.” Outside, the trucks had ceased, and there came now the ponderous wooden sound of boots on cobblestones, men marching in cadence, and now and then a high, sharp cry of command. The Colonel turned again to the window and watched the infantry moving past: a muffled, shapeless frieze in the rainswept dusk. “Yes. Every old soldier dreams of that day when he will put a star on his shoulder: it would be dishonest not to admit it. And it usually occurs—when it does—as the result of a war. And yet”—and he squared around to Damon suddenly, pointing back down toward the street, his face stamped with a terse, almost wrathful concern—“I swear to you I would give it all over and gladly, without one second's hesitation, if those men out there were heading the other way, toward St. Nazaire and Marseille …”

“I know you would, sir,” Damon said; but the Colonel was staring out into the rain again.

“Deliver us from sentimentality!” he exclaimed softly. “When we win this war—and we're going to win it now, in six weeks or less—do you know what old Foch, that master strategist, has in mind? He plans to use us all as labor battalions, to rebuild the villages in Champagne, Picardy.”

Damon's head went up.
“They wouldn't dare …”

“Don't bet on that. I had it from no one less than General Connor himself. Yes. Coolies. Because things are getting back to normal, you see. It's no longer
Save us! Our backs are to the wall.
The Boche aren't at the Marne anymore.” He set a fist firmly in his cupped hand. “They don't respect us. And they don't respect us because we don't properly value ourselves—and
that
is because we refuse to accept the bloody world as it is …” He walked up to Damon and stood in front of him in an attitude of affectionate menace. “Don't
freeze
on things, Sam. Like those muffinheads over at Bombon. Promise me you won't let your mind atrophy. Self-righteousness. It's the occupational disease of the soldier, and it's the worst sin in all the world. Yes! Because it spawns arrogance, selfishness, indifference. We may not be seeing so much of each other for a time now, what with one thing and another … Don't let the weight of things numb you. Read, think, disagree with everything, if you like—but force your mind outward. Promise me that.”

“Yes, sir, I will.” Damon nodded slowly. “I will, Colonel.”

 

Both buildings—they
had together formed a country inn—had been demolished, but the fountain and well miraculously remained intact. Raebyrne and Tsonka were lowering the bucket while the others crowded around them, their canteens in their hands. The rain had stopped. Clouds kept streaming overhead, shouldering each other powerfully off to the west; rifts appeared here and there—and then, low on the horizon the sun broke through, a whirling red disc like the eye of a madman, and flooded everything in the courtyard with a fierce crimson hue. To Damon, sitting on the stone steps in front of the nonexistent inn, studying the map with Lieutenant Zimmerman, the men looked stained with blood: their faces, their hands and weapons and canteens were bathed in it, indelibly. He watched Genthner recoil a step and heard him mutter: “Jesus …”