This Scorching Earth (12 page)

The Major was saying: "This morning O'Hara's coming in." (It was definitely the Irish name on the Major's lips—not the softly spoken Japanese "small field" at all.) "I already got him almost talked into it. Hell, you'd think these people'd know a good thing when they see it. But they got no business sense, no get-up-and-go. Cautious. Real cautious. That's what they are. How they ever expect to get ahead in the business way beats me. But maybe you think I don't have a way to light a fire under O'Hara's tail! Just watch him this morning."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"The usual. He's taking dollars for the yen payment, or my name's not Calloway. It's for that opera tonight, you know. You'll deliver. Gonna buy that little girl of yours something nice out of the proceeds?" He smiled broadly.

This was the usual finale to business arrangements between the Major and the Private.

"After all, Richardson, it isn't as though it was just
us
doing things like this. Hell, half the Army's selling cigarettes or sugar or something. That's the way things are. I don't think it's up to us to go around trying to change them, do you?" He smiled again and said: "Besides, some changes are gonna be made in this here little old office before very long, and I think it'd be real nice if you stayed on—and as something a bit more important. Sergeant or something like that."

The Major stepped back to see what effect this had.

Michael looked at the floor. He'd suspected this was coming. Poor Colonel Ashcroft. Only someone like Major Calloway could possibly do something like this. And he was right. He could make a private a sergeant, simply through pull in the proper direction, a little juggling of the Table of Operations, a little interview with the proper colonel, then the proper general. Major Calloway was an operator.

Michael turned to go back to the office, and the Major almost ran the few steps between them: "So—you got it straight about tonight? Got it?"

Michael couldn't decide which aspect of the Major was the worst—the phony commander, leader of men, head of the office; or this ingratiating puppy-like little man, all buddy-buddy with the privates, the good Joe. He simply nodded to show he had in fact "got it."

Instantly the Major became extremely affectionate. He threw his arm around Michael's shoulder, and they walked back into the office. The Major always overdid everything, and now he no more thought of the advisability of a major's throwing his arm over a private's shoulder than he thought of the Articles of War or the meaning of morality. He winked, and for an awful moment Michael thought he was going to nuzzle his cheek. But, instead, he sat down at his desk and became very busy.

Gloria, on the telephone, looked up, amused, mock-despair in her eyes. "... No, sir," she was saying, "you have the wrong number. This is the Liaison Office of Special Services.... Not at all." She hung up with a bang.

"Isn't the telephone wonderful," she said. "You can commit any number of atrocities, like wrong numbers, over it and never get caught. I think I'll call up the Provost Marshal and tell him that the Bank of Japan has just been robbed and a perfectly reliable witness—namely me—saw little Arthur MacArthur MacArthur scooting away with the loot in his kiddy-car. They'd believe it, you know."

The telephone rang again. "... Oh, you wanted Major Calloway.... I see. ... Very sorry," said Gloria, then turned to the Major. "Same party again. Turns out she thought I'd said it was the Imperial Household or some such thing. At any rate, she's waiting."

The Major picked up the telephone. "Hello," he said, and then was silent for a long time. "But you got me all wrong—I never ... Oh, that's just one of those things." Another long pause, and then: "No, of course it's nothing serious, dear.... Well, I can't.... No, I can't explain right now. . . . All right, I'll see you this afternoon. But listen—Hello, hello."

He handed the phone back to Gloria. She gazed at Michael with slightly widened eyes.

The Major looked at both of them and then said: "Must have got cut off."

Gloria put the phone back on the hook; then, with a satisfied grimace in Michael's direction, she began typing again. The hush of industry finally—at ten—settled over the office.

In the next room Colonel Ashcroft was looking out of the window. He heard the click of typewriters, the rustle of papers, and the self-important squeaks of Major Calloway's swivel chair. He looked at his gold watch, then shook his head.

Perhaps he was just old-fashioned, yet it did seem to him that when the working day began at nine the work itself should begin at the same time. The work, after all, was important: that was why they were all here. It was for that reason he'd forbidden coffee-hour in his offices and had thus earned the reputation of being a martinet—a reputation he felt he didn't deserve.

He watched the other officers he knew and saw their refusal to take obligations seriously. They consequently enjoyed the reputation of being what the soldiers called good Joes. The Colonel would never be a good Joe, and he knew it. It was the price that conscience and duty exacted of him. But then this, as the Colonel saw it, was life itself.

Long ago he had learned that if you did not take yourself seriously, no one else was likely to. To be sure, it was not the way to become popular. Becoming popular was easy: all one needed was a fairly destructive sense of humor and a complete lack of dignity. The Colonel had often longed for popularity, but eventually he always believed that it was better to take himself seriously—to refuse to see himself as others saw him, in the perspective which would have revealed to himself his smallness and his misery; to refuse to turn against himself the damaging glance of humor; to refuse to make fun of himself. This would have made him popular, but it would also have deprived him of all dignity in his own eyes. For the Colonel there was no choice at all—popularity was as fragile and ephemeral as most things in life; only human dignity was enduring. Only through dignity were you allowed the privilege of a motive and a goal in life.

The Colonel stroked his silver moustaches. As always, this action calmed him. It had also always calmed his father and his father's father, both of whom had also worn silver moustaches.

On his desk the Colonel always kept his grandfather's letter opener, solid silver and marked "Colonel Randolph Ashcroft," and his father's pen holder, marked "J. D. A." for John Delancy Ashcroft. He had his own date pad, given him by his father, but had never had his own initials engraved upon it. He had not felt they should be. His grandfather had been a great leader in the Civil War—or, rather, the War between the States—and his father had commanded with distinction in the first World War. He himself was in charge of a subsection of entertainment for the troops—Special Services.

Calmed, he took his hand from his moustaches and felt in his pocket. There he carried his father's gold watch. On its chain was the State Seal of Virginia in gold. This too had belonged to his grandfather. The sound of industry in the next room made him feel important, a bit at least. His forces—all the forces he now commanded—did their duty well. Responsibility, industry—this was all that really mattered.

He looked out of the window and saw the street full of Japanese. The Japanese were industrious, and the Colonel liked them for it. The first day he'd come into this little office he'd stood and looked out and seen the blackened ruins stretching away to the horizon. Now, only a few years later, a new city had been built upon the ruins. It was a jerry-built city of frame buildings and colored stucco fronts to be sure, but a city none the less. And Atlanta had been longer reconstructing than Tokyo. He was pleased to see that now some of the earlier buildings had been destroyed to make way for new concrete office buildings. There was one near him. It was up halfway and seemed to be held together entirely by bamboo and straw rope. The workmen in their Army hats and straw sandals swarmed over the structure carrying miscellaneous loads in haphazard ways, adding bit by bit as though they were building a sand castle.

Like ants, Major Calloway had said one morning, looking out this same window. Like everyone else, he had been surprised at their industry. The Colonel knew better. It wasn't ant-like necessity; it was hunger and need. At other times they were bored and listless. The Colonel had seen this state often enough in his own men, brought back from combat during the war. They were too tired to turn the pages of
Life
or to drink Coca-Cola. The Japanese were suffering from the same old-fashioned complaint—shell shock. Realizing this, the Colonel thought even more highly of their industry.

Of course, Major Calloway had been surprised that they would work at all. He'd been expecting snipers, sabotage, the undergound. Like most other Americans, he'd been surprised at the complete lack of resistance and, like most, had been distrustful because of its absence.

Yet, from their point of view they were behaving very sensibly. The Colonel could even reconstruct their attitude. They were only a hundred years old as a Westernized nation and were anxious for respect, anxious not to do anything laughable. Having given up their familiar kimonos, they still felt a bit uneasy in pants and sack coats. Wanting to make certain their pants fit like everyone else's, they had looked about them and had seen not only that the wearers of pants always swaggered a bit, but also that aggression was profitable—Britain in China, America in the Philippines, the grab-bag of Africa. So they tried it, just as they might have tried a washing machine or an automobile, just as they discarded the kimono for plus fours.

Now they had discovered that their studies, though thorough, had been built on false premises. America had been protecting the Philippines; Britain had been engaging in free trade with China. The Japanese had had the right spirit but had used the wrong methods. They had made a mistake. So, with an astonishing amount of good will, they became friendly. On the day after the Emperor's rescript ending the war, any American could have traveled anywhere in the islands with perfect safety. More than that, the children at the roadside would have waved his own flag at him. At the time some of the conquerors said that you'd have thought the Japanese won the war, rather than lost it, the way they carried on.

And, privately, the Colonel wasn't too sure they hadn't. What did one do with a people who, after a fierce and brutal four-year battle, suddenly waved the enemy's flag? Even Hiroshima had not antagonized them. It was just another natural calamity, like an earthquake. They were quite used to accepting the calamities of nature.

They could even accept an army of occupation, accept it with serenity, if not enthusiasm. They did what it told them to and thus transformed the conqueror into an instructor. And all this time they did not seem to resent the presence of the recent enemy, although, to be sure, there were some small antagonisms. The slight anti-American feeling that the Colonel detected from time to time was, he thought, first, a very natural feeling of revolt which, in a healthy nation, would have occurred long before, and second, yet another of Russia's machinations. (The Colonel felt very strongly about Soviet Russia.) All of which did not alter the fact that the Japanese, while not particularly contrite, were now just as anxious to work with the Americans as they had been to fight against them.

He had known their Army well. It was a paper army, a textbook army, and once it lost the advantage, an appallingly bad army. The Colonel, when he had been a major, had seen the Japanese Army coming wave after wave between the palm trees, or skulking about in some antiquated fashion copied from a 19th-century textbook on tactics by Herr Someone-or-other. The line of advancing soldiers would run toward them, shouting banzai's, waving their flags, and all the opposing army had to do was sight and turn on the machine guns, the bazookas, the flame throwers. It was a bit like an old-fashioned shooting gallery, with a choice of weapons. Of course it was frightening also, the way they kept coming, the way the blood kept spilling. And, too, there was something glorious about it, something uselessly gallant in the old Heidelberg tradition—something the Colonel had to respect.

And now, just as this most industrious of peoples had learned tactics and maneuvers by rote, never once believing that a European book could be wrong or that the knowledge in it had to be applied intelligently rather than literally, so they were now learning the principles of democracy by heart, not understanding that democracy was more than a simple method, more than a technique.

Still, what could one expect from this strange country which excelled in techniques and nothing else? The Japanese could not tolerate the amorphous, the ambiguous: they, in fact, lacked the kind of faith, mystical if you liked, that made democracy what it was, that made the ideals of Jefferson—so impractical, so idealistic, so impossible and yet so true—a living reality. Instead they insisted upon definition, upon the hierarchy, upon the letter and not the spirit. Illogical though their Oriental thought-processes often were, still they insisted upon strict logic when it came to anything Western.