Once an Eagle (85 page)

“We've found four native canoes, in good condition,” Damon broke in on him. He developed the idea as rapidly and clearly as he could, watching Westerfeldt's face. The General was still staring slackly down the trail. “Their defenses are weaker there, just because the stream
is
so deep. We've scouted it thoroughly. They're not looking for us to hit them there …” He took a breath and said: “We could do it tonight.”

Westy's eyes came back to him in alarm. “A
night
crossing? Sam, that's the toughest operation in the book—”

“I know, but—”

“—you can't ask boys as—as weary as these, to try anything like that …”

—They'd one hell of a lot rather try that than go up against the airstrip bunkers frontally, time after time, Damon almost said—bit it off. “They'll do it,” he said urgently. “If we get across there we can cave in the position—go through to the beach and come in behind the Mission and the strip defenses. We can crack the whole front wide open.”

Westerfeldt was still gazing at the trail; his face looked like old candle wax; all the blood had drained out of it. His cheeks and throat were slick with sweat. He shook his head. “I don't know, Sam. It's risky. Awfully risky. Four native boats—”

“General, I know we can do it. It's the chance of a lifetime.”

Westy closed his eyes, made a brusque little gesture with his hand. “All right, all right, Sam,” he answered testily. “Let me think about it. Let me think about it a bit … ” He turned and called to Dickinson, who was still talking with Hodl: “Dick—contact Bart Koch, will you?—and see what he says about Ostrow's people … Christ, I don't know,” he remarked to no one in particular; he pulled off his helmet and mopped his face. “This miserable, stinking country—”

His voice was drowned out in a series of shrieks; they both turned. Down on the trail a stretcher-borne soldier was screaming terribly—a series of yelping, animal cries, his hands clutching at his head.

“You—you people there!” Westerfeldt shouted. “Can't you give that man something, quiet him down …?”

The medics looked back at them, and one of them cried, “Christ, Mac, I've given him two syrettes already …”

Damon looked down at his feet, listening to the General, who was running on about the report of a counterattack on Frenchy Beaupré's battalion from the Grove, his eyes darting here and there. He wasn't going to agree to it, Sam knew; he would wait and wait until it was too late. He was taking longer and longer to make up his mind—which was now following this slow parade of the sick and mangled streaming toward the long green tents in the grove beyond the clearing. Damon hooked his thumbs in his belt, thinking. He had to convince the General of this, he had to, even if he got sore at him. Another day like today—

“—telling me he wouldn't accept the responsibility!” Westy was saying angrily, wagging his head. “Where does he get off with that—I've known Frenchy since he was a hell-raising shavetail at Bailey. How much does he think a man will take? I'm telling you,
one more word
and he's on his way to Australia …”

A man was walking toward them from the field hospital: a slight figure, bareheaded, stoop-shouldered with weariness, wearing red scarves on his forearms—scarves that turned out to be layers on layers of blood; his khaki shirt, his trousers were spattered and smeared with it. Major Weintraub, his beard blue in the hot light, looking like a brilliant scholar who has just been unfairly graded by a pack of academic incompetents.

“General—”

Westerfeldt faced him. “Yes? What's on your mind, Nate?”

“General, would you come across the road and talk to the badly wounded? Just for a few minutes?”

“What's that?” Westy's eyes darted at the doctor and away again. He looked cornered.

“Just for a moment, sir. It would buck them up. They need it badly, most of them. They're pretty low …”

“I … Well, I—no.” The big man shook his head doggedly. “No.”

Weintraub's eyes flashed at him. “But General, they
need
some—”

“Did you hear me—I told you no!” Westerfeldt shouted. His hands were clenched in tight white balls. In a lower tone he added, “The answer is
no,
Major. I can't spare the time … ” He threw a desperate, fearful gaze at the somber tents, the rain clouds boiling on themselves like a deadly gray broth, the barbaric wall of jungle. “Sam,” he said in a tremulous mixture of mandate and supplication, “go over and see them, will you? Talk to them?”

“All right, General.” He watched Westy walk away unsteadily toward the headquarters tent.

“The bastard,” Weintraub was saying in a cold fury. “The one-way, cold-blooded bastard.”

“He's not cold-blooded,” Damon answered, walking toward the long tents.

“No? What is he, then?”

“He's—he's sick.” But he knew that was not the reason.

Weintraub grinned mirthlessly. “Well, isn't that just too fucking bad,” he said in a savage voice. “How unique. I'll tell you something. I took the temperature of every man in one company two days ago. What was left of them. For my own edification and amusement. Every single man was running a temperature. Every—single—man. You can't expect sick men to fight …”

“We have no choice.”

“Is that right.” Weintraub threw him a look white with hate. “That's easy for you to say. You can smash up the crockery; we have to try to paste it back together again.”

Damon made no answer. It's not my detail, he thought resentfully, it's not up to me, most of the troops don't know me anyway. I don't mean anything to them. Walking in step with Weintraub, now stiff with anger, into the olive gloom of the tent, along the rows of field cots where medical corpsmen bent over bottles of plasma hung from mosquito racks like stained garnet wine bottles. Wine of life. The men, drugged with morphine, stirred like blind puppies or lay as still as death, in a stench of alcohol and ether and blood and vomit and excrement. The return on the investment. Oh Jesus—to have Bert MacConnadin here in this cave of agony, for twenty minutes! for just
five.
Or Ed Downing.
All the merchants and the kings …

“Don't let me keep you, Doctor,” he said quietly. “I know how busy you are.” Weintraub walked quickly off through the ward.

The faces turned to Damon—angry, indifferent, smiling dreamily. A medic was just drawing a mustard-colored pad cover over the head of one patient, exposing the blue tubes of ankles. Three cots down Damon saw a face he recognized.

“Millis,” he said, approaching the painfully thin face with its over-large, suppliant eyes, the bandaged legs. “How you doing, son? Anything I can bring you?”

It was several seconds before he realized Millis couldn't understand anything he had said.

 

In the thick
, velvet darkness the opposite shore looked far away. On the surface of the river there was not a flicker or a ripple; it might have been a void, an impassable gulf that sank to the center of the earth. Lying flat on his belly Damon swung his head to the right, passed his eyes over the dulled mounds of helmets, like clay bowls under the spikes and palps and scrolls of vegetation. The moist, rich earth beneath him seemed to be shifting, tilting him over on his back, the helmets shifted subtly. Dizzy. He was dizzy, and sick, his head felt as if it were about to burst into flame. He had the bug: some bug. Beside him Captain Bowcher brought his arm up in front of his face, as though to read his watch. Damon stared at him dully. In a few minutes some of them would be dead, perhaps all of them. In three hours it would all be over: he himself would be dead or wounded, he would be successful, he would be a failure—incompetent, insubordinate, to be court-martialed, sent home in disgrace. What right did he have to do this?

They'd made elaborate preparations for the crossing that afternoon; and at dusk he had gone back to Brigade, leaving Ben in charge. Westy was sitting on the edge of his cot, a sheaf of reports in one hand. Sweat was pouring into his eyes; he looked ready to collapse.

“Hello, Sam.” His eyes were watery and wide. “How are your boys? Tell me the truth.”

“Why, they're all right, General. They're—”

“I just heard from Dick, he's over at BADGER.” His lower lip trembled and he put his hand to his mouth. “Dutch says his people are incapable of advance …”

Damon took a deep breath. “General, if I could explain this crossing once more. I'm convinced we can bring it off.” He launched into the plan again, going into more detail—broke off when Westerfeldt swayed backward, gripped the mosquito bar to steady himself.

“General—you all right?”

Westerfeldt kneaded his belly slowly with one hand. “I feel pretty rocky. Little fever. I'll be all right in a while. Go ahead.” He peered out under the tent flap, furtively. “I don't know, Sam. I still don't like it.”

“General, it's our only hope.” He leaned forward, gesturing. “If you can just give me enough mortar shells to get us over there, we can swing it.”

“We can't stand any more losses. We just can't stand it, Sam…”

“We've got to try it. We can't go along like this—we have no reserves, the companies are down to sixty and seventy, most of the men are ill. We've got to take a few risks now.”

“I don't know. I don't know …”

Damon rose to his feet. “It'll go—we'll make it go. You've got to let me do this!”

“I—”

All at once Westy broke down, rocking back and forth, his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. “Oh God, I can't look at them. My boys. I can't look at them anymore! Ah God help me, I don't know …”

Damon paused there above him, glanced around wildly. There was no one else in the tent or within earshot. He reached down and gripped the General by the shoulder. “Let me do it, Westy. Now. Give me the word!”

The phone rang. Westy lurched to his feet; his face looked green. “That'll be Dick.” Damon stepped back. The General leaned over his field desk, swaying, hanging on to the side of it with one hand. “I'll contact you later, Sam. Better wait on it. I'll see—I want to talk to Dick …”

He went back to the CP in a tumult of rage and frustration. Ben and Feltner and the others were waiting for him in the dugout. They could tell from his face apparently but still Ben said: “How do we stand?”

“Couldn't talk him into it. He's sick. Afraid to try anything now.”

“How did Koch and Frenchy make out?”

“No dice. Ran out of gas after gains of thirty to forty yards.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Oh Jesus is right.”

“But the stupid bastard—doesn't he see what the score is?” Ben chipped dried mud from the back of his hand with his thumbnail. “Well God damn it, I know what I'd do if I were you …”

“Well, you're not me,” he answered curtly.

“Check.” Ben handed him a K ration container. “Here—have some of this vitamin-packed dinosaur turd. Keep your strength up.”

Feltner was listening to this exchange with distress: clearly one did not address a regimental commander in this manner—nor did a regimental commander reply in this manner, either. Damon winked at him, tore open the end of the flat dun carton and shook out the little olive drab tin. Ben was fingering his own carton reflectively. “How many of these you suppose are kicking around in the supply depots? Probably a hundred million of 'em.”

“Yes, and Tommy's uncle's been making most of them, too.”

“No kidding.”

“Yep. Erie Container. He's making millions at it. Millions.”

“I'm so glad for him.”

“Yeah. He'll be a God damn dollar-a-year man next.” There was a certain grisly satisfaction, crouched here spooning this cold, gelatinous hash in a rotting, sweltering, water-logged dugout on the Papuan coast, thinking of Uncle Edgar sitting in his clean, well-lighted office, joking with Headley (Wells Nickerson had died in '38 of a heart attack), gazing out at the long, windowed façade of the plant, getting on the phone to Somervell, on the phone to Donald Nelson. Back there life was good—full of contracts, and raises, and glowing, limitless horizons …

Sergeant Chambers came in with a patrol and made a report to Ben, and he watched their faces. They were coming all apart. He knew the signs: the dulled, vacant gaze, the memory lapses, the incoherence, the flashes of unfocused rage; the alarming rise in combat fatigue cases, like the blond kid this afternoon. Cowardice, Traprock Merrick had called it. But too much battle made any man a coward, in time: any man alive. Where did you draw the line? Exhaustion, despair, disintegration of resolve—what difference did it make?

The phone rang then and Meigs called: “It's BULL MOOSE, Colonel.”

He sprang to his feet and picked up the receiver with an exasperated little tremor and said, “BOBCAT here.”

“Hello, Sam? Dick. You'd better get over here right away. The General's sick.”

“What's the matter?”

“He's delirious. Nate Weintraub's over here with him now. He's running a fever over a hundred and four, he's completely out of his head. Nate says he's got both malaria
and
dengue.” Dickinson's tart New England voice was hoarse with worry. “I don't like the look of it, Sam. I want to call a meeting—all regimental and battalion commanders and execs. I think we'd better.”

Oh Jesus. Another conference! More walla-walla, and confusion, with fear spreading like an oil slick through the whole command. Ben and Feltner and the others were all watching him—a mute, tense expectation that clutched at his bowels. Dickinson was going on about a mortar attack on Frenchy's lines and he ignored him, gazing back at the faces in the dugout, thinking
delirious, fever of a hundred and four—