Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  Sam was making love to her; her thoughts tossed themselves upward in dreamy fountains, dissolved in rainbow bands of pure sensation. It was fair enough, she thought falteringly, Sam deserves it if any soldier in the American Army does—and nothing may come of it, anyway, and I don’t care—

  She drew him to her, her blood thick with desire, her fingertips burning; it mingled hotly with the excitement of the dance, her moment, her daring, her folly. For one last moment she looked backward coolly. But I won’t do it again, the thought stirred, and stopped. It will be my one wifely indiscretion: and there it will remain …

  4

  “It was genius,” Ben Krisler said. He scrubbed his cropped black hair with his knuckles feverishly, his eyes snapping. “A moment of pure genius. Wasn’t it, Sam?”

  “What? What was genius?” Marge demanded.

  “You tell it, Sam.”

  Damon smiled at him; it was obvious Ben was dying to tell the story himself. “No, go ahead.”

  “Well, all right.” Ben drained his glass and turned to his wife and Tommy. “Swanson started it all—you know Swanny, he taught half a semester at Alligator Bend Aggies or some place and he’s never got over it—every time he opens his mouth it sounds as if he’s revising a bloody dictionary—”

  “He’s a divine dancer,” Tommy broke in, “—which is a good deal more than you two clodhoppers can say.”

  Ben blinked at her, suddenly crestfallen. “I wouldn’t say we’re all that bad …”

  The girls looked at each other and laughed, and Tommy said, “Of course not, you’re both Vernon Castles on wheels. Carry on gaily.”

  “Well, Swanson gets on his feet and hems and haws around for a quarter of an hour, and then finally he pulls a long face and says, ‘If the Colonel will permit me to say so, it is my contention that the subject is too complex to be covered adequately in the time allotted.’ Or some such dunderfunk. And Colonel Marshall’s eyes got that curious pale gleam in them—you know that look, Sam—and he says: ‘You genuinely feel that, do you, Swanson?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ Swanny says, ‘in point of fact I do.’ ‘Captain,’ old Marshall says in his crisp way, ‘there is no military subject that cannot be covered adequately in five minutes, let alone twenty. It’s simply a matter of compression—and a knowledge of what is important and what is extraneous.’

  “Well, Swanson’s mouth gave that funny smirking twitch, and a couple of muffinheads at the back of the room shifted their feet. And the Colonel, who doesn’t miss one hell of a lot, gets a little twinkle in his eye and says: ‘I see we have some skeptics in our midst. All right. I will now demonstrate that any topic, of no matter what scope, can be successfully outlined in five minutes. Give me a subject, Captain.’ Old Swanny blinks at him. ‘Any subject at all, Colonel?’ ‘Any one at all.’ There is a pause, and then Swanny says, ‘The Civil War,’ and the whole class roars with laughter. ‘Very well,’ says the Old Man with a grin. He nods at Sam and says, ‘Time me, Damon, if you will, please.’ And Sam looks at his watch as if we’re getting ready to jump off at Montfaucon and says: ‘Go.’”

  Ben slapped his hands on his breeches. “And he did it! The whole works—early southern victories, inadequacies of command and discipline in the Army of the Potomac, then Shiloh and the Mississippi strategy of Grant and Sherman, the turning points at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the breakthrough into Georgia and the Carolinas and the threatened encirclement of Lee’s Army of Virginia. I’ve forgotten half of it. And he stops and turns to Sam and says, ‘Time?’ and Sam says: ‘Four minutes, fifty-two seconds, Colonel.’”

  “I think that’s wonderful.” Marge Krisler sighed and wrinkled her nose. She was a plump, pretty blonde from Krisler’s hometown of Menominee, Wisconsin, who had married Ben on his graduation from West Point in the spring of 1918. Essentially a farm girl, simple and good-hearted, she had an almost mystic reverence for things of the mind. “I think it’s marvelous, being able to hold all those facts and—and philosophies in your head like that … ”

  “They call him a stuffed shirt, some of them,” Ben said. “Well, if he is, that’s exactly the kind of stuffed shirt I want to be. And he doesn’t give a damn what anybody happens to think, either.”

  “He gives more of a damn than you do, Benjy,” his wife replied mildly, “or he wouldn’t have got to be colonel.”

  “He’s a great man,” Damon said, and sipped at his drink. “He’s going to rebuild the Army.”

  “If they don’t bury him in Outer Mongolia first,” Tommy observed.

  “Bury him?” Marge looked concerned. “Why should they do that?”

  “Politics, politics, Margie my love. How did you think little soldier boys get to be Chief of Staff? It’s the same old war between Peyton March and Pershing, only we’re getting down to the second generation.” Tommy pressed out her cigarette in a big, ugly, green-glass ashtray. “MacArthur will get it. MacArthur hates him with a passion.”

  “How do you know all that, Tommy?”

  “A big bird told me. There’s a power struggle going on in Washington right this minute. And MacArthur is in on the ground floor with that God damned permanent star of his. Wherever have you been, all these years?”

  “Canal Zone,” Marge answered mournfully, and they all laughed.

  The four of them were sitting in the Krislers’ quarters, which were painfully adjacent to the Damons’—only the thickness of one-inch siding separated their sleeping offspring—after a forbidden meal of scrambled eggs and toast, cooked on a hot plate Tommy kept in a commode under a ragged serape. They had been to the post dance that evening and had observed all the amenities, drunk the innocuous punch and chatted pleasantly with the other officers and their wives. The rank had—mercifully—left early and they had spiked their drinks and danced furiously and long; and now they were back in their own two-family set for what Tommy called The Hour of Truth and No Consequences. The men had shed their blouses and the girls kicked off their heels. Ben had produced a label-less bottle filled with a cloudy fluid that tasted like burned pine needles but which he swore was topflight gin; and they were sipping at it and talking in an affectionate, desultory way of the things they’d wanted to talk about all evening. For Sam it was the nicest moment of the week—he loved these Saturday nights, listening to the lively exchanges between Tommy and Ben, and thinking of nothing in particular.

  “Poppa knew Marshall on Palamangao when they were both shavetails,” Tommy was saying. “I remember he told a wonderful story about him. He was leading a patrol out in the jungle and they were wading across this river. There was a splash near them and someone yelled, ‘Look out for the bandy-flaking crocodiles!’ and the whole bunch panicked and ran right over him and stomped him into the mud. He picked himself up and climbed the bank, called the detail to attention, gave them right-shoulder arms and marched them all right back down into the stream and then back out again. Then he inspected their weapons and carried on. And he never said another word to them about it.”

  “I can just see him,” Ben chortled. “Perfectly impassive, all over gumbo and vines. Command presence.” He grabbed his big nose between thumb and fingers. “That’s an interesting problem. How would you have handled that, Sam?”

  “I’d have been out of that water fifty feet ahead of the nearest trooper. No crocodile is going to nibble my toes.”

  “They say they go for the genitals every time.”

  “Ben!” Marge said.

  “Cold fact. Sort of an antipasto before the main course. Comes from the Sanskrit krakalooloo, meaning: ‘to castrate with one swift bite.’”

  “That’s enough,” Marge threatened him. To Tommy she said, “Honestly, it’s embarrassing—he’s always got his mind on his private parts.”

  “That’s right,” Tommy rejoined, “—and if it’s not on his it’s on yours.”

  “What’s more important?” Ben demanded in the general laughter. “You have five seconds to think up a happier alternative, all of you …”

&nbs
p; “It’s odd, isn’t it?” Marge narrowed her large hazel eyes. “I mean thinking of Colonel Marshall as a young second lieutenant, all covered with mud.”

  “You see?—there’s hope for us yet, gal,” Damon offered. “One of these days Ben and I’ll be leaf colonels running the Infantry School, imparting words of wisdom in all directions.”

  “Fat chance,” Ben said, suddenly gloomy. “Sitting out in a rain forest in Mindoro, more likely.”

  “Oh, no more tropics,” Marge protested, “—can’t we keep out of the jungles for a while? Honestly,” she said to Tommy, “you should have seen the shape our set was in at Gaillard—all tangled in vines and thorns, the porch falling in and lizards running around the walls …”

  “I’ve seen them,” Tommy said with feeling.

  “Jesus, I’ll tell you camp followers what I’m waiting for,” Ben declared, and his homely face contorted in a glare of comic outrage. “It’s for that golden day when Joey grows up and graduates from the Point—and we can both be lieutenants in the same company together! Won’t that scrape at your old heartstrings, though?”

  “Cheer up, son,” Sam told him. “Just think—I may never live long enough to reach the rank I had in the spring of ’19.”

  “You both love it,” Tommy accused them. “You’re both morbid, masochistic romantics and you love every minute of it, or you wouldn’t put up with the whole idiot game … ”

  Ben scratched his scalp furiously. “Maybe she’s right, you know? Why do we put up with it?”

  Damon set down his glass and grinned at Ben, liking him. The first student officer he and Tommy had laid eyes on after reporting in at the Infantry School had been Ben, crouched on his hands and knees in the red dirt and swearing at a yellow wicker baby carriage he was trying to repair. The two men greeted each other with wild enthusiasm. It had seemed like the greatest good fortune; and when they found they’d been assigned to the same set, it struck Damon as the hand of destiny.

  Tommy had ridiculed the notion. “You mean because you had that drink together, the day I bamboozled you all over the place in Cannes? Don’t be silly. The Army’s like Times Square—everybody’s always running into everybody else sooner or later. There’s a diabolical little termite sitting in the AG’s office gleefully moving the pegs around, just to fox credulous souls like you …”

  All the same she’d been pleased, he could tell; she remembered Ben with affection, and she became fond of Marge. It was a happy arrangement: the two men ran together in the early morning to keep in shape, and now and then played a game of chess; the girls went shopping in the Damons’ car or took the children—the Damons now had two, the Krislers four—to the pool. And Damon continued to regard it—surreptitiously—as the hand of destiny.

  Ben was holding the bottle toward him again. “Have another snort and wash all your troubles away.”

  “No more for me.” He shook his head. “I’ve got to get up early tomorrow.”

  “What in hell for? On the seventh day even the Lord collapsed in the sack.”

  “He’s teaching himself German.” Tommy made a face. “Twenty-five words and one irregular verb a day. Zuvereingeschmashen haben worden sein. God, what a language.”

  “You’re learning German?” Ben gaped at them. “In addition to everything else?”

  “Well you see, he wants to be ready for any contingency. For instance, if he’s sent as military attaché to Berlin.”

  Krisler shook his head. “By God, when I break out of this place I’m going where they’ve never heard of the printed word. I’m going to put in for Tahiti, and paddle around with armfuls of dusky maidens. And become the oldest, meanest lieutenant in the dogface Army.” For an instant he glowered at the little room with its meager furnishings—the motheaten sofa whose back was covered with a violent orange rebozo; the scarred oak chairs; the teakwood taboret surmounted by a cloisonné lamp—acquired, both of them, in the Chinese shops of duty-free Panama City—looking wildly incongruous in this rough company. “Consider this domicile. As a marble hall, I mean. As a real, five-alarm, ring-tailed wreck.” The girls both pounced on him for this, and he gave a quick, rueful grin. “I know, honey. Just shooting off my foolish mouth.” Humming, “Oh, we’ll hoist Old Glory to the top of the pole,” he poured himself another drink.

  “You’re going to feel terrible tomorrow,” Marge warned him.

  “Then let’s live tonight. Right? Besides, tomorrow never comes.”

  Ben was delightfully, distressingly mercurial. One moment he would be filled with soaring enthusiasm, the next with dour forebodings and violent imprecations against the powers that be. Actually he had—as Damon quickly saw—a lively imagination and a powerful sense of justice, which he tried to obscure through a harsh, peppery pugnacity. His name was synonymous with defiance. He had got in trouble down at Gaillard with his battalion commander over the inadequate medical facilities for the Puerto Rican enlisted men, and at the officers’ club at Bragg he’d got into a row with a captain over the status of Negroes in the Army, and had asked him outside—an affair climaxed by replies-by-endorsement, office hours, and a demand for an apology Ben had refused to give.

  “You’re a born rebel and a troublemaker,” Marge would tell him with a strange mixture of rebuke and awe. “Whatever they’ve got, you’re against.”

  “Only ninety percent of it, honey,” he’d answer with his crusty grin. “The remaining ten percent I’m a solid conformist.”

  For all that, he was a good soldier. In the tactical problems, where the instructors leaned toward vigorous and unorthodox solutions, he excelled; he was good with troops, and he knew weapons inside and out. His real failing was a deep dislike for bookwork—he had graduated from the Point as the class goat—and Damon had taken him under his wing, tutoring him now and then, calming him, steadying him down.

  “Too much deadwood around,” he was saying now, his heels cocked on the table. “That’s the good thing about Central America, Sam—every couple of years they throw themselves a real, bang-up revolution, and they line up all those superannuated bastards and bump them off and start over again with company grade types like you and me. It’s good for a country to turn everything upside down, smash all the crockery and start fresh: prevents hardening of the brain pan.”

  There was a faint, brief rap at the door. It opened tentatively, and a figure was standing in the shadow. “Anybody home?” a hoarse voice queried. Damon, turning, heard his wife sigh and Ben mutter something. The door swung open farther then and admitted Major Batchelder, their instructor in logistics and supply. He was a pudgy, balding man with a very broad, flabby nose that looked as though it had been made of rubber and painted by some whimsical child.

  “No, we’ve just taken off for the Greek Islands,” Ben’s voice came flatly. “Little pleasure cruise, to get away from all the chicken.”

  For a moment Major Batchelder gazed at them uncertainly, teetering a little—all at once winked, his large mouth hiking up hugely at the corners. “My students,” he declared. “My happy, carefree students. Mind if I come in?”

  “You’re already in, Butch,” Krisler answered. The junior officers had got to their feet, the women were wearing their shoes again. “Well: how are things among the nabobs?”

  “Fluid. In the extreme.” Batchelder produced a silver flask whose bottom half was of leather sewn tightly around the metal, gave it a quick little shake and slipped it back into his hip pocket. “Muriel’s angry at me,” he said truculently, eyeing them.

  “Damned if I can see why,” Ben said.

  “No, it’s worse. She hates me.”

  “They all do, Butch,” Ben answered. He had sat down again and picked up his glass. “That’s the woman’s mission. Our job is to beat up on subordinates and do everything in as stupid a way as possible. And their job is to hate our guts for it.”

  “Ben,” Marge pleaded, “you know you don’t mean that … ”

  “Of course I mean it. Why shouldn’t I?” His ang
er at this capricious intrusion had turned him savage. He couldn’t throw one of his instructors out on his ear—which was what he dearly wanted to do—and so he glared at Damon and his wife. “I’m at my most meaningful early Sunday morning …”

  “Oh, she doesn’t,” Marge said consolingly to Batchelder. “I’m sure she doesn’t hate you, Major.”

  “Call me Clarence.”

  There was a brief silence. “Come in and sit down, sir,” Marge went on. “Would you like a drink? I’m afraid there’s only this funny old bottle of Ben’s—”

  “That’d do very nicely,” the Major said with alacrity. “Fact is, I’m just a trifle low on the oh-be-joyful at present.” Picking up the bottle he poured three fingers of gin into the glass Marge had brought him and drank off half of it. “Now where else could this happen?” he mused genially, wiping at his mustache with a forefinger. “Where else but in this small happy family? This band of brothers … ?”

  “Nowhere else,” Ben answered dryly, leaning forward, his eyes snapping. “A thing like this couldn’t happen anywhere else in the whole wide world. Can you imagine what that means, pal?”

  “Ben,” Damon said quietly, but the Major’s thoughts had wandered back to Muriel, a tall, stern woman who was a Daughter of the American Revolution and owned a silver tea service worth, it was said, two thousand dollars. “… Perhaps if we’d had children,” he murmured.

  “I’m sure they would have taken after you, Clarence,” Tommy offered.

  Batchelder’s face changed: with the lightning perceptiveness of the alcoholic he had caught the note of sarcasm, although Tommy was smiling at him winningly. His eyes dropped, he coughed into his hand. “I know. I lack ambition. Muriel says I don’t see life as the obstacle race it is—she says I try to run around the barriers instead of—putting myself at them properly. Her father was cavalry, you know. If I hadn’t been assigned to that course at Riley I would never have met her at all …” He gazed at the stained fiberboard ceiling with a kind of fearful wonder, as though this thought had never occurred to him before.