North and South: The North and South Trilogy (8 page)

“If you had been formally accepted as a plebe, sir, I would place you on report, and you would receive a score of demerits. You know, sir, that if you receive two hundred demerits in a year, you are sent down the Canterberry road”—that was the road to the nearest railroad depot and the familiar term for dismissal—“in disgrace. Even superior academics cannot save you. So curb your levity, sir.”

Awash in self-importance, Bent was enjoying himself. “And, more important, give heed to learning this maneuver. You shall practice it, sir—you and your roommate together. Step forward!”

George and Orry stood side by side. Bent strutted in front of them. In his fiercest hoping-for-corporal bellow, he cried, “On one leg, stand! Ready, begin! Front, rear. Front; rear. Front, rear.”

After a minute George felt pain in his right leg. He was damned if he’d let on. One of the regular officers strolled by, giving Bent an approving nod. Bent’s commands grew louder, the cadence faster. Sweat broke out all over George’s face. His leg began to throb, especially the thigh.

Two minutes passed. Two more. His ears rang, his eyes blurred. He figured he might last another ten minutes at most. He was in fine shape physically, but utterly unused to this wrenching exercise.

“Front, rear, front, rear!” Bent’s voice was husky with excitement.

Some others in the squad exchanged nervous looks. The fat cadet’s obsessive enjoyment was all too evident.

Orry fell first, pitching over and catching himself on palms and one knee. Bent stepped to him quickly, seeming to kick up some dust by accident. The dust struck Orry in the face.

Bent was about to order him to stand and resume the exercise when he noticed that the officer was still watching.

“Back to the ranks, sir,” Bent said. He sounded almost regretful. He gave George a scathing look. “You too, sir. Perhaps next time you will not treat a military exercise so frivolously. Perhaps you will not be so pert with a superior.”

George’s right leg ached horribly. But he made it back to the squad, trying to limp as little as possible. Plebes had their generous share of miseries, he thought, but this spiteful hog, sweating his collar black—he was more than a disciplinarian. He was a sadist.

Bent’s sly little eyes sought his again. George returned the look with defiance. He knew he had made an enemy.

The two friends asked questions about Bent. They very quickly got more information than they expected. The Ohioan was a superior student but extremely unpopular. Members of his own class willingly discussed his failings—an unusual, even rare, disloyalty and an indication of Bent’s low status.

During Bent’s plebe year he had been subjected to an unusual amount of hazing. In the opinion of Hancock and others, he had brought it on himself with his pompous pronouncements about war and his frequent boasts about his family’s connections in Washington.

“I would surmise that he’s a boor because he’s fat,” Bee said. “I’ve known a couple of chubby fellows who were picked on when they were small and as a consequence grew up to be mighty rotten adults. On the other hand, that doesn’t explain why Bent’s so bloody-minded. His attitude goes way beyond the proper mental set of a soldier. Goes most all the way to queerness,” the South Carolinian finished with a tap of his forehead.

Another classmate mentioned Bent’s devotion to the Academy’s foremost professor, Dennis Mahan, who taught engineering and the science of war. Mahan believed the next great war, whatever its cause and whoever its participants, would be fought on new strategic principles.

One was celerity. The army that could move fastest would gain the advantage. A transportation revolution was under way in America and the rest of the world. Even in this relatively depressed decade railroads were expanding everywhere. Railroads would make celerity more than a classroom theory; they would make it a reality.

Information was Mahan’s second new principle. Information from other than the traditional earthbound scouts. The professor loved to speculate about the use of balloons for observation, and about experiments now being conducted with coded messages sent long distances along a wire.

A great many cadets absorbed and pondered Mahan’s ideas, George and Orry were told. But few preached them as fanatically as Bent. This was impressed on them when they were unlucky enough to draw Bent as drillmaster a second time. Mahan taught that the great generals, such as Frederick and Napoleon, never fought merely to win a piece of ground but for a far more important objective—to crush utterly all means of enemy resistance. During drill, Bent delivered a queer little lecture in which he referred to this teaching of Mahan’s, then stressed the upperclassman’s duty to promote military discipline by crushing all resistance among the plebes.

A smile wreathed his sweaty face as he held forth. But his dark little eyes were humorless. Jackson was in the squad and that day became Bent’s particular target. Bent reviled the Virginian with the nickname Dunce. He did it not once but half a dozen times.

Back in barracks, Jackson declared that he thought Bent somewhat “tetched.” “And not a Christian. Not a Christian at all,” he added with his usual fervor.

George shrugged. “If someone slapped you with a first name like Elkanah, maybe you’d be crazy too.”

“I don’t know much about the Army,” Orry put in, “but I know Bent isn’t fit to command other men, and he never will be,”

“He’s just the kind that will make it, though,” George said. “Especially if he has those connections he brags about.”

It was traditional for the first classmen to fling their hats in the air at their last parade, then harry them around the Plain by kicking them and stabbing them with their bayonets. That was the entire West Point graduation.

Soon after the ceremony, the first classmen left, having willed or sold their uniforms and blankets to friends remaining behind. Each class then moved up, and the Board of Visitors, convened under the command of General Winfield Scott to examine the prospective graduates, now turned its attention to the prospective plebes.

General Scott was the nation’s foremost soldier, pompous and obese, but a great hero. His nickname, not always uttered affectionately, was Old Fuss and Feathers. He took up residence at the hotel with his daughters and presided at the entrance examinations, although he dozed through most of them. So did a majority of the regular Army officers who sat on the board. The work of the examinations was done by the professors, who could always be identified by what they wore—not regulation uniforms but dark blue coats and trousers with a military look.

The new cadets had been randomly sorted into small groups, or sections; all academic work at the Academy was done in sections. The examinations were patterned after regular classroom sessions. At West Point students did not passively receive lecture material and months later spew it back to the instructor in a test. Every day, according to a fixed schedule, certain members of each section recited. A blackboard was always used for this demonstration, as it was called.

At the examination George and Orry and the others had to step to a board and demonstrate their facility in all the required subjects. George had done no studying. But the examinations still didn’t worry him, and his relaxed manner showed it. He passed with no difficulty.

When Orry’s turn came, he found the examination room hotter than the pit, the officers bored—Scott was snoring—and the demonstration work an excruciating embarrassment. He and Jackson were being tested at the same time. It was a guess as to which one sweated more, squirmed more, or got more chalk on his clothes. Was such torture worth it for a cadet’s princely pay of fourteen dollars a month? Orry had to keep reminding himself that struggling at the board was the price of becoming a soldier.

At that he was lucky. Twenty young men failed and were sent home. The rest received uniforms; after these few weeks that had seemed endless, they were now officially plebes. Just to run a palm over the sleeve of his swallowtail coat of cadet gray was the greatest thrill Orry had ever experienced.

T
HE TWO-MONTH SUMMER
encampment, prescribed by law, began July 1. Except for the new second classmen, who were home on furlough, the entire cadet corps pitched tents on the Plain. Orry was initiated into the mysteries of standing guard and of dealing with upperclassmen who came sneaking around in the dark to see whether they could confuse the new sentinel.

Bent was now a corporal. He placed Orry on report three times for different infractions. Orry thought two of the charges trumped up and one highly exaggerated. George urged him to submit a written excuse for the third offense to Captain Thomas, the commandant of cadets. If the excuse was sufficiently persuasive, the report would be removed. But Orry had heard that Thomas was a stickler for grammar and felicitous phrasing and often kept a cadet in front of him for an hour, while, together, they corrected the written excuse. It sounded too much like blackboard demonstration, so he let all the reports stand and collected the demerits for each.

George seemed to be Bent’s favorite target. Somehow he always managed to wind up in the Ohioan’s detail. When the plebes policed the encampment, Bent hazed George to exhaustion by making him pick up pebbles and straighten blades of grass the corporal claimed were crooked. George wasn’t good at keeping his temper—much to Bent’s delight. He collected demerits—skins, the cadets sometimes called them—at a dizzy rate. He soon had three times the number that Orry did.

Despite the cramped tents, bad food, and incessant ragging by a few of the upperclassmen who criticized everything about the plebes from their salutes to their ancestors, the encampment delighted Orry. He relished the infantry and artillery drills that occupied most of the day. The evening parades, watched by visitors from the hotel, were splendid martial demonstrations that made all the travails worthwhile.

A cadet hop was held each week. To make sure there were enough partners for the ladies who attended, the Academy offered its students the services of a German dancing master. George brushed up on the jig and double shuffle and attended every hop if he wasn’t on duty. Plebes were permitted to mingle with the female guests, but of course had to defer to upperclassmen at all times. In spite of this, George enjoyed himself immensely and on several occasions strolled down Flirtation Walk with a girl—a deliberate defiance of the rules that placed certain sections of the post off limits to members of his class.

One night after a hop, George crawled into the tent with the smell of cigars on him. He found Orry still awake and urged his friend to join him at next week’s dance.

“I’m a terrible dancer.” Orry yawned. “I never have enough nerve to hold a girl firmly. I reckon my trouble is that I think of a woman as an object to be admired from a distance, like a statue.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” George whispered. “Women are meant to be touched and used—like a nice old winter glove. They like it.”

“George, I can’t believe that. Women don’t think the same thoughts as men. They’re delicate creatures. Refined.”

“They only pretend to be delicate and refined because it sometimes suits their purposes. Believe me, Orry, a woman wants exactly what a man wants. She just isn’t allowed to admit it, that’s all. You’d better get over that romantic view of the fair sex. If you don’t, one of these days some woman will break your heart.”

Orry suspected George was right. But he still couldn’t bring himself to attend a hop that summer.

At the end of August the furloughed class returned and the corps of cadets moved back to barracks. On that day upperclassmen took advantage of the plebes as beasts of burden, ordering them to carry their gear. Corporal Bent sought out George, who made four trips with staggering loads in ninety-eight-degree heat. At the start of the fifth trip Bent ordered him to run. George got halfway up the stairs in North Barracks, gasped, and passed out.

He bloodied his forehead as he crashed to the landing below. Bent didn’t apologize or express sympathy. He placed George on report for damaging an upperclassman’s belongings through carelessness. Orry urged that his roommate write an excuse.

George said no. “I’d have to admit I swooned like a girl. I don’t want that on my record. But don’t worry, I’ll get that bastard. If not next week, then next month or next year.”

Orry was starting to feel the same way.

The morning gun, the evening gun, the fifes and the drum soon became familiar sounds, even friendly ones. It was the drum Orry liked best. It not only served as a kind of clock; it reminded him of why he was here. It cheered him up whenever he felt the classroom work was too hard—which was almost every time he went to the board.

Plebes received instruction in mathematics during the morning and in French during the afternoon. For the first week sections were organized on a random basis. Then at week’s end new cadets were ranked. Orry found himself in the mathematics section second from the bottom. In French he was in the lowest section—among the immortals, as the cadets called them.

Orry’s French section recited to Lieutenant Théophile d’Orémieulx, born in France and Gallic from his shrug to his peg-top trousers. He was highly critical of the accents and abilities of his pupils, and his grading showed it.

Class standings were announced once a week at parade. Some cadets rotated in or out of the lowest French section, but Orry remained. This led d’Orémieulx to question him about his background. Orry was prodded to admit that the founder of the Main family had been a Frenchman.

“Then surely your relatives speak the language?”

“No, not anymore, I’m embarrassed to say. My mother can read a little, and my sisters are being tutored in French, but that’s all.”

“God above,” cried the instructor, storming around the room. “How do they expect me to instruct barbarians? I might as well try to teach the M’sieu Attila to paint teacups.”

The conversation only seemed to worsen Orry’s relationship with the instructor. One day in October, after Orry had given an especially halting recitation, d’Orémieulx blew up: