Once an Eagle (92 page)

Sam started to say something and checked himself. MacArthur wanted no reply; he kept pacing up and down, up and down, raging softly, bitterly at the incompetents back in Washington, the fools and sycophants and petty, vindictive tyrants who would place personal spite and aggrandizement ahead of the welfare and safety of the greatest nation in the world. Yes, Damon thought, watching the lean, spare body, the proud, handsome profile, the blazing eyes, yes, but when
you
were Chief of Staff and a lieutenant colonel named George Catlett Marshall modestly requested duty with troops, you sent him to a one-battalion post at poor old Fort Screven to work with the CCC camps, and after that exiled him to Chicago as senior instructor with the Illinois National Guard … And who was
then
the gentleman?

MacArthur was pointing a finger at him accusingly. “Damon, we could still lose this war! …”

“I realize that, sir.”

“Do you? Thank God you do. It doesn't seem to have occurred even remotely to anybody else … Listen to them back there—sitting around some conference table mewing at each other and Knudsen asking them, ‘Who wants to make machine guns? Anybody here want to make machine guns?'” He raised one arm threateningly. “They can come down from Timor and Torres Strait and land out there on Moreton Island, but I will never surrender. Never! I will die first. If need be I will seek the end in some final charge …”

Damon watched him stalk off across the room. There was something wrong here; it was too threatful, too wild, too high-key. The Supreme Commander had wheeled around again. “I know what they're saying about me back there. Don't you think I know?
Dugout Doug,
” he said softly, and his mouth drew down. “Do you think I haven't heard it whispered, seen it scrawled on fencing?… I came out as the result of an explicit Presidential directive and for no other reason!” His voice rang in the bright, airy room. “I obey orders. Don't you, Damon?”

“Yes, General.”

MacArthur picked up the long-stemmed corn-cob pipe from his desk, fiddled with it, musing—pointed it like a pistol at Damon's chest. “Caldwell. Your father-in-law. What's his position on this matter?” Damon hesitated, staring at him. “Go on, speak freely.”

“I wouldn't attempt to speak for General Caldwell, sir.”

MacArthur ducked his head, and began to ream out the bowl of the pipe with quick, harsh little strokes. “How about you, Damon? What's your attitude?”

He wouldn't have believed it; he wouldn't have believed it if he hadn't been sitting here on this leather couch, watching the proud, drawn face, the omnivorous eyes. It was wrong to ask a subordinate a question like this—he could only guess at the immense inner torment that had provoked it. He knew what he ought to say, what tradition and deference and diplomacy and his career demanded—and yet he could not say it: he could not get it out.

“…I believe it's a matter of individual conscience,” he replied quietly.

“Do you. What would you have done, Damon?”

“I don't know, General. I have never been in that situation.”

“Of course not. But what do you
think
you would do?”

Damon drew a breath. “I believe I would stay with my men, sir.”

MacArthur swung around with abrupt violence and started pacing again. “Then you're a damned fool. A double-dyed romantic fool. Like all the rest of them.” Damon made no reply. “There are contingencies considerably more important than the morale of a regiment, or even the fate of an army …” He bit on the pipestem, his jaw outthrust, as sharp as his nose. “Well, I guess that's all.”

Damon got to his feet with alacrity and saluted. The General returned it casually. Sam walked across the room. As he reached the door MacArthur called his name.

He turned. “Yes, General.”

“Whip them into shape, Damon. Drive them hard. Time is of the essence.”

“Sir, I'd hoped they could be given a real rest, now that they—”

“It's out of the question. The schedule will not permit it.”

“Very good, sir. If it has to be done.”

“It does. Believe me, it does.” MacArthur was still standing by the desk, staring at him intensely. “Whip them into shape … you're a good soldier, aren't you, Damon?” he added in a strange, admonitory voice.

He paused, looked back at the Supreme Commander. “I don't know, General,” he said slowly. “I don't know whether I am or not.”

MacArthur smiled then—a bitter, mirthless smile; dismissed him with a gesture. Damon descended to the lobby in a heavy turmoil of relief and resentment, rage and hilarity and gloom. Ben was in the cocktail lounge hunched over an empty glass.

“How's the situation?”

Damon blew out his cheeks. “Fluid. Very fluid.”

“Not good enough. You're relieved.”

“You know, I might be, at that.”

“What'd you do—rip the scrambled eggs off his cap bill?”

Damon sank into the opposite chair and sighed. “I just told him he shouldn't have shagged-ass out of Bataan.”

“Mother Machree. Now what did you want to do that for? I'm
associated
with you.” They laughed, and Ben waved for a waitress. “You look as if you've seen a ghost.”

“No. No ghost.”

“What's in the wind?”

“Storm signals. Another operation.”

Ben scrubbed his scalp with his knuckles, his eyes wide. “You're kidding.”

“Afraid not.”

“The outfit? The Division?”

“None other.”

“Jesus. No rest for the wicked.” The two men looked at each other—a long, hard, enigmatic glance. Then Ben said, “Well—let's live tonight. What're you drinking? The gin here is—well, it's escharotic.”

“Wow. I better have some, then.”

The bar, called the Victoria, was crowded with the uniforms of several nations. The wainscotting was so dark the room seemed to sink below a horizon line of smoked ebony, and the walls were painted with scenes of desert and jungle where kangaroos, furry koalas, rock wallabies, wombats, bandicoots and platypi peered out, through a labyrinth of leaves and tangled vines, at faces only a little less strange than their own.

“Dig all those marsupials,” Ben observed. “Rough dodge, you know: teats jammed down in the pouch, no placenta at all.”

“That's the woman's problem.”

“Well, it's just as hard on the male. How'd
you
like to have your scrotum slung up ahead of your hammer?”

“Damned awkward.”

“I'll tell the world.”

“What happens when you get an erection?”

“Then you've got to do it standing on your head. Or hang by your toes.” Ben leaned forward confidentially. “Tell you the truth, I'm only making an educated guess. I'll ask the next marsupe I run on to. That's a promise.”

Their drinks came and they raised their glasses.

“To the Salamanders.”

“Through the fire with clean attire.”

“Ass—best—us …”

The world was strange. Up at Huon they were still fighting, slopping through the muck, peering frantically into the bristling, impenetrable viridescence and cursing all jungles forever; and upstairs the Supreme Commander sat alone in his study gazing at maps and charts, reflecting darkly on the incompetent and vindictive souls in Washington and—very probably—on the deplorable lack of loyalty on the part of subordinate commanders; and here and in other bars soldiers and women laughed and argued and drank more than was good for them …

He sighed. He was going to be a general. If MacArthur didn't send him home first. So odd. In '24, in '31, in '38 it had seemed impossible, beyond his wildest, most vainglorious dreams. And yet he felt no elation at all. He was happy, yes—to be sitting here with Ben, alive, unmaimed, all his senses alert and quivering and receptive; but above it, hanging over it, was the bitter expanse of the cemetery at Moapora, the long, sepulchral gloom of the hospital tents, the gear rotting in the marshy clearing at Kokogela; the division in rows on rows of pyramidal tents in the hills behind Devon Bay, laboriously filling up with replacements, kids from Brooklyn and Big Spring and Salinas and Fletcher's Landing, who couldn't crawl noiselessly for two hundred feet or strip a weapon in the dark … Sitting here, now, in this smoke-burdened, noisy room, listening to Ben telling him a story about Jackson's extraordinary ruses to bring the company mascot, a dog named Gogarty, ashore at Melbourne he felt the old, long-forgotten urgency gripe at his vitals—this vast, uncaring enterprise in waste and misery and destruction that was even now preparing to pick him up again and fling him into the flame-filled maw … He was here. Here. In this foolish, noisy, lovable Australian bar. His hand—there—was gripping the glass, which was slick and cold; his heart beat thickly, comfortingly, his arms and legs tingled with the gentlest of pleasurable sensations. He was alive, here, his flesh clamoring its silly, sacred immanence, and time was hurrying toward its end …

Ben had finished the anecdote: the dog—and Jackson, dressed as an Australian dock worker—had been apprehended. Damon became conscious of another voice nearby, a British voice languid with the authorities of two proud and pleasant centuries.

“Tradespeople, inventors, efficiency experts, expediters—I grant you that. No question. But in battle, confronted by the thousand-and-one strategic and tactical dilemmas—no. They simply haven't got it, that's all …”

He turned. A British colonel with a flat, ruddy face and a low neat dark hairline was leaning forward, talking to another officer and two women, an American Army nurse and a girl in a blue dress who looked startled and upset.

“Joyce here's a Yank, you know,” she said in the pretty, faintly Cockney accents of Australia, indicating the nurse.

“Yes, I know. No offense.” The British colonel's teeth were a bony white barrier below his mustache. “Matter of racial aptitude, don't you know. Quality, upbringing. Why dispute it? Eh? Only the truth. Lorries, supply dumps, traffic control, petrol and ammo levels—top-hole. American way. If the PM had any sense at all he'd simply insist on their running up supplies and let us take care of the fighting end of things, don't you know. Only correct solution…”

“Listen to that.” Ben was glaring at the Englishman, his eyes snapping. “That character could get to be unpleasant after a while.”

“Relax, Benbo. He's loaded.”

“I don't care. Drunk or sober he's unsavory. I didn't come into this glorified taproom to listen to that.”

“—After all,” the Australian girl was saying, “the Yanks are here to help defend us—I don't see why you have to bite the hand that feeds you …”

“My point exactly. Hewers of wood and drawers of water. But as for the art of war—”

“But sir,” the nurse protested, “our forces have been fighting up there in Papua and winning a—”

“Bless-my-soul
Papua.
Raw-ther! My point exactly. And they have the infernal cheek to offer it as a victory.
That
farce …”

“That did it,” Ben said flatly.

“Look, Ben—” But the Wolverine was already on his feet and moving over to the offending table. Damon rose and followed him, wondering idly what would come of it. A fight, an apology, another round of drinks? Ben was always getting involved in situations like this—on trains, in roadhouses, on ferries: he seemed to require these confrontations, as though to purge the hot, contentious defiance that incessantly flayed him. What the hell, Damon thought; maybe we can both get sent home on the same slow boat to Frisco.

“Good evening, ladies,” Ben said, and bowed. Their faces turned up to him, vacant with surprise. Ben looked at the British colonel calmly. “You know something, chum? You're just a trifle obnoxious.”

The Englishman's eyes slid up at him. “Not entirely sure that it's any of your business.”

“You just made it my business.”

“Eavesdropping, were you?”

“As a matter of fact I've been trying to ignore you, but I've had no luck at it.”

The other British officer, a major, said: “Ronnie—”

“No, no.” The colonel waved a hand. “I want to pursue this a bit.”

Ben said in a flat voice: “I understand you feel the Moapora operation was a farce. Is that correct?”

“Ah.” The Englishman's teeth appeared again, huge and bare. “One of the heroes, I presume.”

Some of the adjacent tables had fallen silent now, and Damon was conscious of the chorus of talk at the bar.

“That's right, chum,” Ben answered. “One of the heroes.”

The Britisher smiled a slow, derisive smile and looked at his companion and then at the girls. Still watching them he said to Ben, “In point of fact I don't believe we've been introduced.”

Ben reached down and with a quick, fierce grip on the Britisher's tunic yanked him to his feet; his chair went over backward with a hollow thump. Standing, the Englishman was three inches taller and outweighed Ben by thirty pounds, but the American had acted so swiftly he could only gasp. Still holding him tightly, his face inches away from the other man's, Ben said in a voice that rang like a bugle in the room: “—And you come to your feet when a fellow officer addresses you! …”

The other officer had risen now and Damon moved toward him, girding himself for battle. But Ben's tormentor was still so shaken by this turn of events he could only bluster: “Take your infernal hands off me! How dare you lay hands on me this way!”

“I just did, pal.”

“I am a personal friend of General Blamey and attached to the staff of—”

“I don't care if you're a personal friend of the Emperor Augustus—you can step outside right now, or you can stand here in this room and hear me call you a loud-mouth liar and a son of a bitch and a swine!—”