Once an Eagle (88 page)

Only in time of peace were they unworthy.

The bugle's somber notes went on pealing sadly. His eyes kept roaming about—he could not help it—saw off to his right, drawn up on the other side, Colonel Wilhelm, looking unutterably weary and grim; behind him and to his left Frenchy Beaupré standing stiff and defiant, tears streaming slick and bright against his cheeks. Many men were weeping now, their mouths working, throats swelling as they swallowed painfully and squeezed shut their eyes. But his own eyes were dry; the old mordant anger stirred inside him. They were dead. They had been shipped out here to this pestilential mangrove swamp far beyond the confines of the safe, sane world for ends they were not to share, and ordered to seize a patch of that swamp or be killed: and they had been killed. It was stupid, it was vicious, it was monstrous and flint-hearted and disgusting; but there was nothing to be done about it, beyond what they were doing now …

The dirty, bloody hell with it.

It was over. Chaplain Unterecker had descended. There was a short pause and then Sam, whom General Eichelberger had designated Acting Divisional Commander after Westy's hospitalization and departure, climbed up on the oil drums and called: “At ease,” and the ranks relaxed in a faint, sonorous murmur. There was a little commotion and then two officers—it looked like Feltner and Chase—handed up a sheet of plywood which Sam turned face outward, holding it with one hand. And Krisler heard behind him the drone of surprise. Sam stood there silently a moment, as though he didn't know quite what to say.

“This is the first time you have ever been assembled as a division,” he began, the words clipped and clear. “You are the Fifty-fifth Division. And for your shoulder flash I have chosen a salamander. Not because the gecko is our constant little friend here in the tropics where we have been ordered to serve. But because from ancient days the salamander was believed invulnerable to fire. So he is crouching here between two flames, with his right foot stamping on a broken samurai sword. You have come through the fire, and you have had your victory.”

He paused, looking out at them as though he sought to meet the eyes of every man in the massed battalions. His face was drawn, his shirt hung on him in loose, damp folds; the knuckles of the hand holding the plywood piece were bony and white. Old Sad Sam, Krisler thought softly; you crazy, rawhide old son of a bitch. Walked out a malaria attack that would have felled a carabao in its prime—
walked it out!
—hung on and hung on and were there on your feet when the last bunker behind the airstrip went down. We're here, standing right here, what's left of us, because of you and nobody else. And anybody that doesn't know it ought to have his head examined. And you could be down in Brisbane right now, confined to quarters and waiting to stand trial for a general court, just as a starter …

“This division—our division—has no long and illustrious history, glowing with great traditions. Neither do its regiments. No American unit had any history of great traditions in 1775. They were built up over the next hundred and fifty years. This division—the Salamander—has just begun. It is going to make its proud traditions from this day on.”

He looked down; when he raised his head again his face was resolute and grim. “This will be a long and cruel war. We have just set out, all of us, on a very thorny, bloody road—and no men know it better than you soldiers standing here. Some hard things have been said about you—some of you have heard them. What is important—what is memorable—is that you have put behind you the bad days of panic and despair and done what no other soldiers have ever done in the history of the world: in spite of faint support and under the worst conditions imaginable, you have taken a fortified position from the Empire of the Rising Sun. It is an honor to serve with you all.”

There was an instant's dead silence, and then from the adjacent battalions, from behind Krisler, the cheer began—a cry that swept through the grove in a wild treble roar. Krisler about-faced. Jimmy Hoyt was cheering, so were Chip Booth and Mac Klementis and the rest of his officers. He tried to call the regiment to attention and gave it up, watched them all—gaunt and ragged and hollow-eyed, dressed in fatigues or khaki they'd scrounged from God knew where—their barracks bags were still lying somewhere in the muck at Milne Bay—while they waved their rifles and pounded one another on the back and shoulders. There wasn't a man there who didn't weight at least twenty pounds less than when he came to this evil place; there was not a man who hadn't seen sights and done deeds he never wanted to see or do again. Yet there they stood, in all their tatterdemalion nobility: wobbly, raggedy-ass, indomitable. The solemn Johns and the hellions, the comics and the squares. All that were left on their feet over thirty-seven terrible days and nights. No one back home would ever know what this had meant, in blood and agony and terror and iron determination: no one. There had been only the communiqué issued by MacArthur's headquarters eight days ago—“Allied Ground Forces succeeded in capturing Moapora Mission, clearing the Kokogela area of enemy forces”—and that had been all. Nobody would ever know what they had endured.

And now, staring at them hard, laughing, at Bowcher with his Silver Star and Jackson and Rodriguez and De Luca and the others who had gone all that weary way with him, down the river through the flashshot dark—to his great surprise he found himself weeping, wildly and unashamed.

3

The air in
the Statler Bar was vibrant with talk and the rattle of glasses and the easy laughter of women; it quivered with power. Admiral Rolfe Haymes, head of Southern Sea Frontier, and a mixed party of six or seven were chatting quietly at a large table. In one of the far corners Packy Vinzent, his broad, florid face grim, his eyes popping, was giving a group of officers his version of the tank battle at Sidi Bou Noura, and the chicanery and toadying that had led to his relief. Courtney Massengale, moving calmly through the tables, smiled to himself. Tough break for Packy; but that was how the old flag wagged. It was a hard world, the air near the summit was rarefied. The clock was still ticking very fast, as the Chief said; and those who couldn't think on their feet, be right the first time and no second guesses, had to go.

Everyone was here—at this fleeting, fashionable hour between the office pressures and the official Washington evening. Colonel Frénart, head of the Vichy mission, looking gloomy and supercilious, was listening to a woman with a hard, beautiful face and high-piled blond hair. Catching Massengale's eye he nodded with a gloomy smile; Massengale nodded back. Poor old Vichy: caught now between the American eagle and the German condor. Their day was waning. To his right, Kjelsen, the junior senator from Nebraska, was talking earnestly with Jim Wiggen, one of Nelson's bright boys on WPB, and beyond them Van der Sluys, the Air Inspector, and a group of young women were laughing uproariously at a story a colonel in procurement was telling. Power. It rose from the tables, hovered over the little orchestra, the smartly uniformed waitresses, it mingled with the cigarette smoke and perfume and alcohol and rose with a faint, pleasurable giddiness to the brain. The world's farthest reaches reverberated to what was said and done here in Washington in the early spring of 1943. A delectable sensation. Massengale nodded to a man on the Priorities Board he disliked; there was a noisy quartet of Navy fliers, a fat British brigadier all by himself, with an untouched martini sitting before him—and there on his right was Lieutenant General Caldwell, with a little group; a group that held Tommy Damon.

“Massengale …” Caldwell had risen with alacrity, although there was certainly no need for him to do so, and they shook hands. “How are you?”

“Bemused, General. Bemused.”

Caldwell laughed, one arm extended toward the table. “You know everyone here, I daresay. Margie Krisler, Tommy, my grandson Donny—oh, no you don't, do you? This is his fiancée, Marion Shifkin. General Massengale.”

He greeted them in turn. The boy came to his feet. He was in uniform, an enlisted man; sergeant. Curious. He was taller than Massengale remembered him, with a steady, calm manner, Tommy's flashing dark eyes. The girl was small and mouselike, not pretty, with a Slavic jaw and a candid, rather vulnerable glance.

Caldwell was saying, “What are you doing in this den of arrogant iniquity?”

“Just passing through, General. I just got young Tanner off for—well, for foreign parts; and I was playing hooky on my way back to the salt mines.”

“How are Emily and Jinny?” Marge asked.

“In fine fettle. Emily's up in Boston visiting for a week or so. Jinny is undermining the foundations of higher education.”

They laughed, and Caldwell said: “Come sit with us, won't you?”

Tommy was gazing up at him, her face flushed and agitated, her lips parted in a fearful plea. Please go, her eyes said; please. She had never looked as attractive to him as she did at that moment.

“I'd be delighted,” he answered Caldwell. He smiled his most charming smile. “I'm not intruding on a strictly family affair?”

“Goodness, no!” Marge Krisler uttered her full, shivery laugh. She had put on weight in the years since Luzon, but she still had that inviting warmth that certain men found appealing—which was one of the crosses poor old Krisler had to bear. “We're all sitting in the dumps, trying to be cheerful,” she went on. “Cheer us up.”

“Yes, cheer us up, Court,” Tommy said. “Tell us all about Casablanca. How was Casablanca?”

“Oh—exotic, ebullient. The prevailing mood was optimism.”

“Optimism!” the women exclaimed.

He nodded. “The President and the Prime Minister were in the best of spirits. Negotiations and planning went forward in an atmosphere of practical jokes and repartee, and the promise of good things to come.”

“A touch premature, isn't it?” Caldwell said dryly.

“Yes, sir, I imagine so. But the African landings were a great tonic. Everybody felt we'd got momentum, we were going forward now; that kind of thing. The consensus is we've achieved a really excellent working relationship with the British.”

“You mean they're extremely pleased that we're doing what they want us to.”

Massengale laughed. “I suppose that's more or less it. Though they do have some enormously capable staff planners. And of course they've been through the mill.”

“The Chief isn't entirely happy about it, is he?”

“Not altogether, no. He'd have preferred the other thing. Several others, in point of fact.” The entire table was watching him now, a little warily, almost fearfully; it was amusing to toss out oblique references to high policy, conflicts and decisions most of the country knew nothing whatever about. Old Caldwell knew, however; his fine, courtly features were impassive but his eyes held a faint sardonic gleam. They always knew more over there in Ground Forces than you suspected. The Old Army grapevine.

“But the Chief's a great team man,” he concluded. “He gets solidly behind whatever's decided.”

“Oh Court, you're such a diplomat,” Tommy teased him.

“That's true, isn't it? You should have heard me at Aïn Krorfa,” he informed them seriously. “It fell to my lot to present Bus Barron in all his irascible glory to the inhabitants. Bus is from Alabama—southern Alabama at that—and the natives began to express a few reservations: putting their hands on their scimitar hilts, things like that. Well, it was going from bad to worse—you know how tricky these things can be, General—and I had visions of the whole Moroccan venture going up in the fire and sword of a Lucknow. Finally I threw open my hands and cried in my most flawless French: ‘Gentlemen, fear not. I have brought you a blood brother in General Barron. His skin may be white—but his
heart,
gentlemen, is as black as your own! …”'

Caldwell and the women were laughing, the politely dutiful laughter that one employed when rank told some pleasantry, good, bad or indifferent. The Damon boy did not laugh, however; he was watching Massengale with a steady, distinctly non-adulatory gaze. A trifle miffed he said: “Where are you stationed, Donald?”

“Maxwell, sir.”

“And your duty?”

“B-17s, sir. Waist gunner.”

“I see. Leaving to join the Eighth soon?”

The boy's face turned flat and hostile. “I wouldn't know, sir.”

Massengale laughed easily. “Good for you.—He's going to make a commendable soldier,” he said to Caldwell.

“I'm certain of it,” the General replied with some constraint.

Massengale glanced at Tommy; her eyes darted to her son, back to his—all at once she looked down, smoothing her gloves in her lap. She's afraid, he thought; she's nearly out of her mind with fear. Impulsive, devil-may-care Tommy Damon. He remembered when the boy had enlisted; they had met at a War Department reception in the fall—Tommy had accompanied her father, who was talking to someone else—and the eddies and flow of social pressures had beached them alone in a corner.

“How are things?” he'd asked her lightly.

“Things are—terrible,” she'd answered; a fierce exhalation that astonished him. “Things are just as awful as they can be …” It seemed that Donny had left Princeton that afternoon, or the day before—she wasn't too clear about this—and had enlisted in the Air Corps. “After he'd promised me, too,” she cried softly, “—his solemn promise.” Her eyes had glittered as if she had fever, and her lip trembled. He had watched her in a curious little confusion of amusement and pity.

“But—aren't you proud of him?”

“No, I'm not proud of
any
part of this stupid, stupid idiot's delight!” She glanced around the room wildly; he could see that she was on the edge of bursting into tears. His amused curiosity became tinged with caution. For all he knew she might fly into one of her headlong rages, one of “Tommy's tantrums”—this would be an unappreciative setting.

“Perhaps it's not as bad as all that,” he observed.

She stared at him as though he had just called her a coward. “Oh!” she said tensely. “Oh, God. What do you know? What the hell do you know about it, anyway?
Staff,
” she sneered, and he saw that several drinks had preceded the one she held tightly in her hand. “You're all a pack of gold-braided, flunky, play-acting fools …
He
put him up to it—I know it, I know it!”

“Who?” he queried.

“Who do you
think?
He's been after the boy, that's what it is. Some of that lovely, divine
force of personal example …
What in holy hell are you laughing for?” she demanded hotly, though he could swear his expression had not changed. “God, I'd like to have two weeks to run this country. Just two weeks. That's all I'd need. What's the play where the women take over, where they refuse to wangle-dangle until the men stop hacking away at each other—what's the name of it?”

“Lysistrata,”
he murmured.

“Yes, well they went at it all wrong—they should have grabbed the household cash and some clothes and the kids and sailed away to a nice, quiet, palmy isle, and let the poor sods blow each other up until there's not one of them left.”

“Isn't that rather shortsighted?”

“Why? Because it doesn't allow for propagating the precious race, you mean? Don't worry—there'll always be one or two males sitting in the bleachers, egging the other ones on. A few prudent souls dug in down in the good old Munitions Building …”

He smiled—though he knew it was a dangerous thing to do. “You can't have it both ways, sweetie,” he told her evenly. “We're all of us either suicidal maniacs or self-sacrificing heroes.”

“—Don't tell
me
what I can or can't have,” she began in a low, fierce tone—but then, mercifully, her father and a colleague had come up to them; and after a few moments he'd beaten a decorous and grateful retreat …

“How's Samuel?” he asked her now, abruptly; though he knew.

Her eyes became flat and calm again. “Oh, he's fine.”

“They're back in Australia now—he and Ben,” Marge offered. “We think they are, anyway. Rest and Rehabilitation. They both got malaria.”

“I shouldn't wonder. That was a splendid job they did at Moapora. We had a radio not long ago from Sutherland—he calls them the Gold Dust Twins.”

“Sam just got his first star,” Marge ran on happily, “and Ben's a chicken colonel. Isn't that terrific?”

“It certainly is. No two doughfeet deserve it more.” So the Night Clerk had caught him again. The fortunes of war. Except that he was very senior in grade—he was in line for his second star soon.

“Remember, back at Benning,” Marge was saying to Tommy, “when Ben used to rant and roar about him and Joey being lieutenants together in the same company?”

Tommy rolled her eyes. “What would we all have done without World War Two?”

“No, but you know what I mean, honey.”

“I certainly do. There were even times when I thought our grander halves were going to wind up privates in the same squad …”

Massengale joined in the laughter, thinking of the night of the masked ball on Luzon and Ben standing there in that idiotic bummer's rig, with his hands on the edge of the table. Well, he hadn't grabbed the first Clipper back to Alameda; but here he was, moving through the palace, sitting on the right hand of one of the lordly sieges of power—and those two highly emotional gentlemen were out at the hot gates, sword in hand … No gods, no Parcae spilled our fortunes with the dice. We did for ourselves. It was all there for the seeing, that tumultuous evening: Ben's headlong self-immolating defiance, and Jarreyl—
Jarreyl
—with his destructive malice, and Tommy standing by the car, her hair wild in the rain, screaming at him—

He thrust the memory away as though it had never been. “From what I hear,” he said to Caldwell, “they were lucky to bring it off. It sounds as though it was touch-and-go for a while, there.”

The General nodded; his eyes flicked over to the others, who were now engaged in talk. “It was a lot closer than that. Hardly anybody has any idea how bad it was. If it hadn't been for Sam … They should have given him the division,” he added grumpily.

“How is it he didn't get it?”

“MacArthur said he was too young. Apparently you've got to be a Methuselah to get a command out there.” Caldwell smiled a wintry smile. “Over in Africa you're antediluvian if you've completed grammar school. The magic age seems to be fifty-two.”

“Who got it?”

“MacArthur—or somebody in his bull pen—asked for Duke Pulleyne.”

“The cavalryman?”

“None other. Christ, they ought to have had more sense … Curious man, MacArthur. Imaginative, austere, great showman, but—” The General broke off, bit on his pipestem. “Well: we all have our failings. God help the poor devils who have to pick up after me.”

“Oh Poppa, you're just sour because they won't give you a field command,” Tommy chided him. “Break down and admit it …”

Caldwell looked at his daughter placidly. “Joe Stilwell's sixty. Krueger's even older. I guess I'd have held up as well as Muggsy McComb. Or poor old Westy.”