Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  He had run down, in spite of himself; he’d stopped. Devlin’s face looked so white it was almost transparent; the smile had left his lips, he was rocking his head back and forth on his gas mask—a fevered, tremulous motion that seemed obscurely fearsome.

  “I’m telling you, Dev,” he hurried on, “you’re going to have your hands full with this new bunch. There’s a kid from Kenosha named Tuckerbee who won’t wear a helmet, he says the metal causes a short circuit in his—”

  “Forget it, Sam.”

  “What?”

  “Never—kid an Irishman.” He raised one hand, dropped it again. “I’m not going back to the outfit. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Sure you are. Of course you are, I’ve got—”

  “I’ve bought the whole wad. I know.” He looked squarely at Damon. “I’m going to check out, Sam.”

  “The hell you are,” Damon said sharply. “Who gave you that crap?”

  “I know, Sam. You think I don’t know what peritonitis means? Don’t—let’s not horse around, Sam. I … can’t afford it.”

  Damon bit his lip. Anybody would say it was just chance, we were in line of skirmishers, milling around, I’d just grabbed Reb around the middle, I was telling him it was only a question of—

  “Sam …”

  “Yes?”

  “Sam, write to my ma, will you? Tell her I was the one hit the till at Natupski’s. That’s why I joined up when I did. Tell her I told you. But I was drunk, I didn’t know half what I was doing, it was on a dare and I was drunk. Sober I’d have known better; I would. Will you tell her that?”

  “Sure, Dev.” He paused, said in a low voice, “You want me to—to go to Charmevillers?”

  The two men gazed at each other for a long moment. Devlin shook his head once, slowly. “No. No point. It’d only be—hard for her, hard for you. That game’s over. She knew.”

  Damon looked away wildly. His hands were slick with sweat and his mouth was dry. In the ambulatory window above him a frieze of mounted knights charged valorously, their lances quick black splinters in a medley of plangent blues and reds and golds. One figure lay beneath the hooves, however, its body collapsed in ugly postures. Oh, shit, he thought weakly. Oh, shit. In another medallion nearby a boy in a blue tunic sat by a silver stream and stroked a lyre—

  He leaned forward, aware of perspiration crawling down through his scalp. “Dev.” He could not say it. He couldn’t. Then he could. “Dev. I wouldn’t have had this happen for the whole world. Dev … I swear it.”

  The dying man gazed at him unsmiling. “You did what you thought was right, Sam. You’re that kind of guy, you see a thing and that’s the only way it can be, and you drive right on. You pull people with you, Sam. Nobody can say no to you. Because you’re so sure. And so far you’ve always made it work. You did what you felt was right … But you’re wrong, Sam.” And now there were tears in Dev’s eyes, huge glinting drops that hung on his lower lids, then broke over and down each side of his nose. “What good was it? Sure, I went back and did what you wanted.—Am I better off now? Is anybody in this whole sad fucking world going to be one notch better off for my being rolled in a poncho and shoveled under? I think not, Sam. Not any way that I can see … ”

  He raised one hand and wiped his eyes and nose; his eyes looked enormous in the thin waxen cast of his face. “Sam. Remember the march to Montemorelos? the trooper, the wounded trooper we carried over to the wagon?”

  “—Gurney,” Damon said, with a croak.

  “Remember how he kept wanting to tell us something, how he kept trying to say something and then he couldn’t? Remember?… I know what he felt, now—it’s funny: it’s something you hear, something you’ve been told, when this happens—something terribly important about life, all of life and yourself and the future, and it’s all so clear!—but you can’t for the life of you explain it to a God damned living soul …” He smiled then—a faint upward curving of his lips that was more desolate than his brief tears. “You don’t understand either … I know that sounds foolish. I know.”

  “No. It doesn’t … I think you need to get some sleep, Dev.”

  He made a little movement to rise and Devlin reached out and clutched his wrist—a faint, tremulous pressure. It was so faint! “No. That’s just what I don’t want … Oh, this is a bad way to go, Sam. A sorry way. If it’d been like Ferg or Starkie—or even Kraz or Turner. But lying here like this, with the thing breaking you down brick by brick. It’s no way … Sam, remember the ball games at Early?”

  “Dev—”

  “Remember old Parrish, the time he made you and Merrick shake hands, that afternoon we beat them? Pulling away at his waxed mustache. ‘We are a family. A select and honorable family.’ He was a good man. What happened to him?”

  “Lost a leg at Vaux.”

  “Well. He’s out of it … Remember the Paris parade, with the girls all winging roses at us? Remember all the—Sam, don’t leave me here, just a little, you can’t leave me here right now—!”

  Damon eased himself down on the edge of the field cot, which creaked with his weight; he could hardly see. “I won’t leave you,” he murmured. “I won’t leave you, Dev.”

  “Good. Good. I knew you wouldn’t run out on a buddy. Your oldest buddy … Sam, remember Jumbo Kintzelman and the rattler, back at Early?” he begged; his eyes were terrible. “When Colonel Hobart’s wife went after it with a hoe and old Jumbo standing there silly as a crane?”

  “Dev. Try to rest. Try to get some sleep.”

  “No. No … Stay with me, Sam. Stay here with me—ah, please …”

  Damon put his fist against his mouth. “I’ll stay with you, Dev. I swear it. Try and sleep. Try and sleep.”

  The room was spacious and high-ceilinged. Heavy velour draperies of wine red hung at the windows. There was a walnut writing table where the Colonel was seated, and a massive armoire against one wall, and a ponderous couch with lions’ claw feet and lions’ heads on the arms where Damon was. There were chairs and cabinets and hassocks. On the interior wall between the windows was a flamboyant painting in blacks and reds and blues, of a German officer in riotous embrace with a naked woman who wore a devil’s horns and tail and had cloven hoofs, while assorted beasts and angels—were they angels?—looked on with avid interest. Damon found himself staring at it numbly.

  “Yes, quite a riddle, isn’t it?” Colonel Caldwell said. “Queer people, the Boches. I’ve left it on the wall—I keep imagining if I study it carefully enough I’ll learn something profound about the German character. I assume my opposite number commissioned it. Do you suppose I could get Raebyrne to work up something for me?”

  Damon turned to him, startled. “Sir?”

  Caldwell smiled. “Nothing. I’m becoming fatuous as I grow older. Tell me: what’s your strength?”

  “One hundred seventy-two, with the new replacements.”

  “What are they like?”

  “All right, I guess. They’re brighter than the old breed, but they’re softer. Better at close-order drill, worse at skirmishing. Poor marksmen, on the whole.”

  “I hear you’re hiking them pretty hard.”

  “Yes, sir, I am. I believe it’s the best conditioner.”

  “So do I.” The Colonel smiled. “How about your new officers?”

  “Shaw is good. Zimmerman I’m not so sure about: have to see how he works in. Their spirit is excellent.”

  “How’s Wilgus working out as first sergeant?”

  “Very well, sir. He’s just what they need. Solid old-timer with no nonsense about him.”

  “He was in Mexico, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, sir. He was.”

  “Did you know him down there?”

  “What, sir?—yes, I did. Slightly. A great stickler for detail. Not quick, but thorough. There was—it’s a …” He stopped; he had lost the thread of his thought. His mind was empty; he felt suddenly afraid. Colonel Caldwell was looking at him with that alert, on-point expression.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said simply. “I forgot what I was going to say.”

  “What’s the trouble, Sam?”

  “I don’t know, Colonel.” He paused. “Devlin.”

  Caldwell said gently: “Is he dead?”

  “He’s—in a coma. They tell me he won’t last the night.”

  The Colonel sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yes. Peritonitis. Very good friend of mine died of a bullet in the belly at Macloban. Not very joyful. One of these days they’ll find a way to seal up the peritoneum without infection. Of course by then they’ll have invented a projectile that will infect every internal organ on entrance, I suppose.” He got up and going over to a musette bag hanging on an ornate brass hook lifted a bottle out of it, crossed to the armoire and poured some of its contents into two painted stem goblets and brought them over. “Here. Join me in a drink. Not the proper service for it, I dare say. To tell the truth you look as though you could do with one.”

  “Thank you, Colonel. I could. I could do with one.”

  It was Cognac, a very good Cognac: dry and fiery, it flamed its way down his throat and lodged in his belly, cauterizing, burning away thoughts of betrayal and death. Death and betrayal. He sat still on the imposing Empire couch, his head lowered, tears stinging his eyes.

  “Sam, it’s not your fault, you know.”

  He looked up. “I’m afraid this time it is, sir. Quite definitely.”

  Caldwell shook his head. “If he had wanted to stay with her—had really and truly wanted to desert for good—there would have been nothing on this earth that would have pulled him back. Least of all you. No, he wouldn’t have lasted two years at that game, and something inside him knew it. He is too proud. Some of them can. They’re doing it—some of them are hiding in Paris now, there’s a whole bunch in the Montmartre area, the MPs are hunting them down: the rebellious, the craven, the sensitive. The ones that war always destroys, good and bad …” He got up and began to pace slowly back and forth in front of the tall windows, where the rain fell without letup. “Don’t torture yourself. When Grant wanted to bow out after Shiloh, they say Sherman talked him into staying on. Uncle Billy used some very clever arguments, but don’t be fooled: Grant stayed on because he knew in his heart, all the backstairs politicking and preferment and calumny to the contrary, it was the only proper course for him.” He stopped by the obscene picture, his back to Damon. “Devlin is a good soldier. Something shook him at Soissons. Do you know what it was?”

  “No, sir. Maybe it was just—Soissons …”

  “Yes. That’s possible. Anything could have done it, I suppose. Perhaps he was simply sick of slaughter. God knows I am; God knows when I look at—”

  The Colonel checked himself and folded his arms. “War is a—serious—business,” he said with great deliberation. “Yes. Serious. That’s why I’ve relieved Merrick.”

  Damon started. “Relieved him, sir? Sent him down?”

  “Back to Blois. Do you feel that’s too harsh?”

  “Why, I don’t know …” He looked at Caldwell uncertainly. “I’ve never liked him myself, I’ve never approved of certain things he does. But he’s good in combat. He’s utterly fearless—”

  “That’s just it.” The Colonel paused, staring again at the mural. “He has no fear. None at all.” He pointed at Sam, nodding. “I will have no man in my boat who is not afraid of a whale. That’s the crux of it. There’s something very wrong with Merrick: he’s not a man. I wasn’t aware of it at first; but battle always brings this out. That action at Paulnay Ridge—to expose his people that way, and for nothing! It’s perfectly all right with me if he wants to hurry toward his own destruction. Though I shouldn’t even say that, he doesn’t have that right any more than the rest of us. But he has no right whatsoever to sacrifice good men to this crazy lust or whatever it is. I won’t have it.” He scratched his scalp at the hairline. “There are only a few like him, thank God—the Cadmus soldiers—and they’re more of a menace than a help: if you can’t measure danger, how on earth can you evade it? For the Merricks war is not a serious business …

  “Ultima ratio regem,” he murmured, musing; and his handsome face looked all at once unbelievably stern. “Yes. But let’s make sure it is the last argument. Because once the eminent heads of state in all their infinite wisdom decide that it must be, once the drums begin to beat—there is nothing ahead but fear and waste and misery and desolation. Nothing else. Once the engine has started it must shudder and rumble to the very end of its hellish course, come what may. And you and I and a few million others are the ones who must cling to the machine as it grinds along.”

  Abruptly he turned to the map on the long side wall. “This is what we ought to do. Break in this way.” His fingers traced a quick arc on the heavy paper. “Etain—Briey—Thionville, outflank Metz, knife in to Trier. Do you see it? But we won’t. We’ll be flung at the Meuse—here—in a long, stupid, costly line. The concept of pierce-and-encircle is not in the French lexicon. And these are the descendants of Napoleon! God damn fools,” he muttered.

  “Then why are we doing it?” Damon asked quietly. “Why do we agree to this folly?”

  Caldwell turned from the map. “Because we have no choice. To falter now is to breed worse evils than we have. We are saddled with leaders whose concept of strategy and tactics has been destroyed by four years of unparalleled numbers, mountainous losses. It is like asking blind men to run an obstacle course. They are no longer capable of thought … ”

  “But General Liggett—”

  “Ah, Liggett, Connor, Marshall—of course. But we lack the power to make our desires prevail. They needed us desperately, we came in our tens of thousands and spilled our blood quite generously from Cantigny to Montfaucon. But now times have changed: now they know they will win, and they are prepared to go their own way.”

  “Maybe we should have insisted on certain strategic concessions as part of the price of our entry into the war.”

  “A trenchant observation.” Caldwell grinned. “Go straight to the head of the class. Well, it was complicated. We only had four divisions of assault caliber as late as last April, and it was touch and go on the Marne—a poor time to make strategic requests, I imagine.” He slapped his thigh once. “But it’s not that: we seem to be incapable of insisting, that’s the meat of it. We are a race of headlong altruists. We rush to a foreign land in a deluge of embattled sympathy, we give away clothing, cigarettes, our rations. We even on occasion”—and his eyes sparkled—“repair the battered living quarters of certain comely French civilians. We do everything in our power to proclaim our good intentions, our nobility of purpose, our loftiness of soul … and all because we think we’re too good for the rest of the world.”

  “Is that the reason?”

  “Yes, more or less. We can’t be bothered with the sordid details, the actualities of human motivation. We stubbornly, sublimely refuse to see man as he is, Sam—we’re so damned certain about how he ought to be. We know how he ought to be—he ought to be American …” There was a sullen mutter of guns off toward Brieulles, and the Colonel paused, his nose up, as though trying to scent their scope and direction; he shook his head. “No, that hasn’t got it. We know what man is, all right, but we insist on overlaying that knowledge with a mass of sticky sentimentality … We know how man treats man. You’ve only to read the reports of hard-bitten post commanders on the frontier, complaining of the vicious debauchery of entire Indian tribes by Astor’s people, the cycles of boom and panic engineered by ruthless stock operators that impoverished hundreds of thousands; the way children were treated in scores of New England mills. Yes, and a fairly general attitude toward the black-skinned man in this great democracy of ours …”

  A great rumble surged toward them, broke into the rhythmic grinding roar of trucks passing, shifting gears, straining in the mud; the room shook.

  “The Blue Ridgers,” the Colonel said. “Moving up to have another go at Malsainterre. From the south, this time
. —We know,” he went on, his voice pitched flat against the noise of the camions, “we know, but we avert our eyes—it’s so much more fun to prate of man as a noble creature, a semidivine being bursting with goodness and mercy and all kinds of generous thoughts. It—takes our minds off ourselves … Well, he isn’t a noble creature, as well we know by now: he’s a remarkably clever animal whose talents have outstripped his powers of reason. And his deepest instincts seem to be greed and vanity and self-interest.”

  “But the idea of helping your neighbor,” Damon protested, “of sharing what you have—”

  Caldwell nodded. “Yes, the nation was founded on a dream—but look at the reality. The men who fought in the War for Independence were promised the western lands as payment for their service—they certainly didn’t get any other remuneration. But when the war was over the vested interests pulled every trick in the book to grab it all for themselves; and it took federal creation of the Northwest Territory to secure the veterans their forty acres …”

  Muttering and fuming he peered out of the window, where the procession of trucks and artillery ground their way past, slewing and snorting in the sullen rain. “Look at them,” he murmured. “Going up there again, full of fire and hope and high resolve … Day after tomorrow it’s our turn again.

  “I can never get over the incongruities,” he observed softly, as though carrying on a private dialogue with some inner antagonist. “The essential absurdity of the soldier’s life: look at us, standing here well groomed and housed and fed, all at our ease—while up there a few miles men are living and fighting and hiding and dying like some particularly odious species of ferret. A few miles away … I shouldn’t trouble myself over such thoughts; a good soldier wouldn’t, I suppose. But I can’t help it. I can harden my heart, but I cannot alter it. What an awfully lonely calling it is!—you continually find yourself alone with your speculations, your afterthoughts, your fears. I should never have been a soldier; but Father was determined I should go to the Point, and so the Point it was. And here I am, and there they are, out there, in their thousands; and we must get on with the bloody business. Get on with it and get it behind us.”