Once an Eagle (36 page)

“Won't you sit down, General?”

“Why yes, thank you.” He and Miss Pomeroy chatted a few moments, before she sailed away down the aisle again. It was the first time Damon had seen Caldwell in the presence of women; his manner became even more courtly and gracious.

“Yes, I see what you mean,” he murmured. “Burn my clothes, Doctor—I don't want to go home.” With his good hand he rummaged around in his overcoat pocket, drew out a long cylinder wrapped incongruously in a piece of green toweling and reaching under the head of the bed slipped it into Damon's musette bag. “There. Think we got away with that? It's a very good Scotch.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don't give it a thought. To the victors, you know.” He gazed at Damon for a moment. “Strange, isn't it? Hard to believe it isn't all still grinding on and on, that we've got to go back up there in a day or so …”

“Yes,” Damon said.

“We're not, though. And thank God for that. How are you coming along?”

“The bone's knitting fairly fast. I'll be walking soon. How's the outfit?”

“Griping and groaning. We're billeted along the Rhine. Among a populace both servile and defiant. Curious people, the Germans. I will never understand them. I've said that before, I know.”

“How's the company?”

“In excellent spirits—as why wouldn't they be? Zimmerman is good material, as you said. No Night Clerk, you understand; but he'll do very nicely. Which reminds me: your promotion to major went through just before the curtain came down.”

“Oh,” Damon said. He was astonished at himself; it was so remote from the train of his thoughts these past weeks that he felt nothing at all. He gave himself a little shake and said, “Why, thank you, sir—I'm sorry, I had no idea—”

“Don't thank me. Or anyone else. You would have had the Battalion if the dear old war had gone on a bit and you hadn't had to try to take the Ridge all by yourself.”

“Zim couldn't get them up, General. I didn't think I was going to be able to for a while, there. That shrapnel was the worst I ever saw.”

“Yes. Gouraud has cited the regiment for that engagement. You're to get another French croix, and so are Russo and Zimmerman, a few others. And now the hue and cry is: Home before the snow falls. Jim Harbord won't quite do that, but he'll bust a gut trying …” Watching Hancock joking with Miss Pomeroy at the other end of the ward, he hummed softly:

 

“Say, no more Bois de Boulogne,

I want a girl of my own—

Hey, no more fine or champagne,

Give me the sun and the rain

Of my—home—town …”

 

Damon said: “Are you heading back for the States, sir?”

“Oh, no.” The General shook his head. “No, I'm merely exercising the privileges of my exalted rank. They didn't need me at Division—they don't need
anybody
at Division, or anywhere else, it seems. So I gave myself a seventy-two-hour pass and raced over to Savenay to see Tommy—only to find she's been transferred to Neuilly. Little Minx never even wrote me about it.” He shrugged. “The Spartans were right: only have sons. Put all girl babies to death as rapidly as possible.” He got a package of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket, offered one to Damon, and fumbled one-handed with a box of matches until Damon gave him a light. “Thanks. This is the most maddening affliction: the simplest, most primeval acts become impossible. Have you ever tried buttoning your fly left-handed? It's a great reminder of human frailty.” He watched Breckner hobble slowly down the aisle; when his eyes narrowed they were laced with dozens of fine lines. “Well, they won't all get home by Christmas, but there'll be a mighty exodus for the next three months or so.—What do you think you'll do when they let you out of here, Sam?”

“I don't know. I'm scheduled for a convalescent leave in Cannes … I haven't given it an awful lot of thought, sir.”

“Of course not.”

“I suppose I'll go back home … I have a good chance at a job in the bank in my hometown.”

“I see.” Caldwell's eyes roamed around the room. “I thought perhaps you might consider staying on.”

Damon stared at him, the cigarette halfway to his mouth. “Stay on? In the
Army?
”

“Why, yes. It's a possibility. You could go a long way, Sam. You've made a fine record for yourself, and your majority has come through … Though there are reasons a lot more telling than those.”

The Captain looked away, at Warrenton sleeping softly in his great plaster cuirass and gorget, at Suskin with his long legs rigged to a web of lines and pulleys. “But—that's ridiculous,” he cried softly.

“Is it?”

“I mean, what for? What's the point in it? There can't
be
another war …”

“Perhaps not.”

“There can't be …” Caldwell was watching him, a quizzical gaze brushed with amusement, and it nettled him. “No, this has got to be the last one,” he declared, “and no kidding. For good and forever. The world can't go
through
another one like this.”

The General's face became serious and intent. “No. It can't. That's true.” He said in an even, musing tone: “It will have to go through one of a different kind.”

There was a little silence between them. Across the aisle Herberger and Morse were flipping coins at drinking glasses at the feet of their beds. At the end of each series Herberger would call out to Breckner, who would hobble over and collect the coins with his good arm and hand them back to the players.

Damon raised himself on his elbows and said: “Do you honestly believe that? That there will be another war?”

Caldwell looked at him calmly and nodded. “I'm afraid so.”

“—But that's impossible! After all the slaughter—after all
this
…” He waved his hand down the bleak white corridor, to include the supine figures, the limbs in traction, the amputations and drainage tubes and frames and sandbags, and beyond that the cemeteries, the barracks and dugouts and tents, and beyond them the vast gray wreckage of France. “No!” he said hotly. “After this things will be different. These gay little international disputes will have to be settled by—compromise, adjudication, something … It's got to be!”

“I wish you could be right about that.”

“It's got to be! There's no other answer, no other way.”

The General paused a moment. “It's a time to think that, to believe that with all one's heart; I know …” He leaned forward on the creaking camp stool, holding his wounded hand in the good one. “Sam: do you honestly believe people are going to stop being greedy and resentful and full of pride and prejudice? Do you think they will quit hating and fearing—do you think the lordly heads of government are going to abandon their methods of seizing and holding power, of gaining advantages over their neighbors? Why should they change? What should cause them to abhor the only rules to the game they know? And even if they were to do so, do you believe for one minute their own citizens would let them get away with it?”

He paused, his lips curved in that mournful smile. Damon, lying back again, watched his quick, perceptive eyes and felt the force of that high intelligence, that purposeful equanimity of view that saw so clearly the limits of hope and wisdom; and beyond that the possibility—no, it was more than that, it was a hard obligation—for a man to be all he could be within those implacable limitations … He knew Caldwell was right and for a moment it filled him with the blackest terror. He closed his eyes.

“To think,” he murmured, “to think that a vicious bastard like that Benoît would again have the chance—a chance to … ”

“Yes: he's a butcher and an incompetent, and you are right to hate him. But for all that he was doing the best he could. Same with Foch: blindness, awful failure of imagination … But what about our auto makers back in Detroit, who couldn't be bothered with the war, who couldn't interrupt their profits long enough to produce the tanks we needed so desperately at Soissons, at Malsainterre? What about them? Stupid old Benoît doesn't look so bad alongside that …”

Damon clasped his hands together. Then what's the sense in it? he wanted to shout. What the hell are we all hanging on for? Why face any kind of future at all? But he said nothing. He was bleak with desolation, his mind in a turmoil; he did not know what he thought.

“The thing is, so much of it has been handled incorrectly,” Caldwell went on in his even, thoughtful voice. “General Pershing was talking to several of us the other day. He's a hard man, he's too dogmatic, too arbitrary in some ways, I know. The spit and polish in the billets, this silly Sam Browne belt business. But he has that faculty for cutting through to the essential thing, the kernel … He's convinced it was all handled badly: the surrender. Which ought to come as no surprise, I suppose—the war was abysmally conducted so I guess there's no reason to expect the peace to be very different. Foch should never have negotiated with the civilian leaders at Compiègne; it should have been Ludendorff, Hindenburg, von der Marwitz: the army. The
army
should have surrendered—or else we should have gone on across the Rhine to Berlin and taken those iron hinges off the Brandenburg Gate. As the song says. Maybe that's a little extreme, but in the main he's right. Because the army is saying now they weren't beaten in the field—that the home front, awash with defeatists and Reds, betrayed them.” He paused again, musing. “It gives rise to some hard thoughts. Especially hard to contemplate this winter. General Pershing believes it will have to be done all over again one day.”

Damon was stunned. He looked wildly around the ward, dropped his eyes. All over again. Done all over again …

Caldwell had leaned forward and put his hand on Damon's shoulder. “And if that day comes—and God help us, it will come—the country will have need of people like you, Sam. Immediate and deadly need. Because it'll be the same thing all over again. I saw it in Tampa in '98: three hundred freight cars without a single bill of lading. Winter uniforms—for a jungle war with Spain!—worthless canteens, tons of beef already putrefied. At Siboney they dumped the horses overboard—and expected the terrified creatures to swim three miles to shore. You saw a little of it at Hoboken and St. Nazaire. It seems to be our history: we are indifferent, unprepared—then all of a sudden we're shocked, roaring with righteous wrath, ready to rush off into battle with our pants down …” He paused. “Only the next time will be worse. Planes will fly faster, tanks will travel farther, guns will shoot faster and more accurately than they have this time. The surprise attack on the unready nation will be the hallmark of the next war. And if there aren't men of your caliber ready and able to take charge of things when that day comes, it will go very hard with us. Very hard indeed.”

Caldwell bit his lip and chafed the gauze paw with his fingertips to warm it. “I'm no good at speeches. George Marshall says I'm too verbose, too overintellectual, my expressions aren't forceful enough.” He smiled. “Perhaps I ought to take lessons from Raebyrne.”

Damon looked up eagerly. “How is old Reb?”

“Raising several kinds of hell. Zimmerman made him a sergeant. I think it'll be a disaster, but it's his decision, not mine. Raebyrne's becoming a kind of doughboy legend in a whacky, incorrigible sort of way. I got him and Tsonka DSCs for their work in the Ridge action and pinned them on them both in a full-dress divisional review. Shook hands with Reb and asked him what he was going to do when he got home.” The General grinned ruefully. “I shouldn't have asked him that. He looked me right in the eye and said loudly: ‘Major, first off I'm going to stand this little old rifle under the downspout at the weather corner of the old homestead. And every morning I'm going to step outside and watch the rust close over the bore.' ”

“Old Reb,” Damon murmured.

“Yes. Pungent. My entourage had considerable difficulty maintaining the proper gravity during the rest of the awards and decorations. And of course that isn't all. Reb seems to be imbued with the idea”—Caldwell shot a precautionary eye in the direction of Miss Carmody, who had entered the ward—“that availing himself of prophylaxis is a sign of effeminacy. I believe I've disabused him of it.”

“How'd you do that?”

“Quite simple, really. I borrowed some photos from Hugh Young of syphilis victims in various stages of disintegration, and let him study them for a while. They make the leper colony on Molokai look like an Atlantic City beauty contest. Hugh omits no details. Then I followed that up by telling him that if he got it every child he sired back home in Flat Lick would have two heads and he would have to cut one of them off himself, immediately after parturition. That apparently did it. Another two weeks and I'll have him delivering continence lectures to the regiment. In any event, I'm told the Beloved Tarheel now goes forth well sheathed.” He lowered his voice discreetly, and Damon saw Miss Pomeroy coming toward them, bearing a large platter of fudge.

“General, won't you have some?” she entreated him radiantly. “It's still warm.”

“Gladly, thank you.” He made a courtly little bow and took a piece. “Sweets from the sweet. Couldn't I stay on here until I'm fully recovered?”

“I don't see why not,” said Warrenton, who had awakened, “—maybe the heartless creature will spend more time up here and less with the poor, downtrodden enlisted men.”

“But I'm always available!” Miss Pomeroy protested—and then blushed enchantingly as half the room roared. “Still, it would be delightful to have a general in the ward,” she reflected. “We've never had one.”