Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  “Look, I’d do what I could—” he began; but her expression was so desolate and bereft he fell silent.

  “This war will never be over,” she said in a dull monotone. “It’s still 1918 really: the same war. It never ended. We only thought it did. It’s the same one, and it’s going to go on for a hundred years. Oh, they’ll change the uniforms and tanks and planes, they’ll talk about different objectives, different war aims but it’ll be the same broken, gasping bodies in the wards, the same forlorn little burial parties nobody knows or cares about. It’ll go on and on because we can’t let it alone. We’ve become more fond of war than of anything else … Look!” she commanded, sweeping the room with her eyes. “Look what it does to us—what a ducky injection in the adrenals, the sex glands! It’s like alcohol or masturbation or drugs. Why should we give it up? It’s so much fun …

  “You know these idiots who are always saying, ‘Gee, if only I had my life to live over’? Well, I’ll join the club. I swear I wouldn’t do a single solitary damn thing I’ve done. Not one. I’d marry a rich sportsman or a big-time publisher or an oil magnate—I’d get myself so wrapped up in money and family and privileges that nothing could reach me with a bangalore torpedo …”

  You’d find that wouldn’t do it, my girl, he almost told her; the world would still get at you. Besides, if you want to dream the great dreams you must be prepared to pay the price. You won’t do it.

  Aloud he said: “Yes, that’d be pleasant.”

  “—What do you want, Court?” The question startled him. She was staring at him frankly now, looking—if it were possible—even lovelier than before. “There you sit: so composed and debonaire. Is life that clear, that meaningful to you? Do you really hold it in your hand so firmly? Don’t you ever wake at night, your palms moist and your heart wrung with terror—?” Her eyes hung on his, almost fearfully. “No, I guess you don’t … I do. Oh God knows, I do.—Court, don’t you ever have a desire to break all the windows, kick over the cart, bust your way out of the whole, silly, sickly pattern of play-the-game and row-the-galley? What’s the use of all the striving and conniving, when it all turns to dust anyway, and we all depart in darkness, as the old Bible says—doesn’t that ever make you want to throw it all over …?”

  It was very, very strange … Gazing into her glistening emerald eyes, held there, entangled, he felt for one slow heartbeat the rush of desire for a life free of sycophancy and manipulation and scheming; free of the worry, the tireless approaches, the disappointments, the strain of bringing timid or stupid or downright hostile people around to seeing things the way you saw them … Then it passed, as lightly as a cloud slipping across the sun, and he smiled and said: “But then who’d do the world’s work, darling girl?”

  She lowered her eyes; he knew she would not say anything more. In another moment he saw Caldwell coming toward them through the cocktail boom and chatter.

  “Tommy, I’m going to have to go back to the office this evening. Gene tells me there are two things that just won’t wait.” Noting her agitation he frowned, glanced at Massengale, patted his daughter’s wrist. “Now, honey,” he said. “You mustn’t get all wrought up over things. It’s natural the boy should want to see some of his own crowd, show off his girl …”

  She nodded rapidly. “It’s all right. I’ll get over it.”

  “Look at Marge—she’s got three boys …”

  “—Yes, and Harry’s a chemistry major, and Benjy’s far too young to go, and Joey’s safely stowed at West Point.”

  “Honey—”

  “Isn’t he? Well, isn’t he?”

  Caldwell regarded her a moment, mournfully. “Now honey, you know that’s not true.”

  She looked down again; she was pulling her gloves all out of shape.

  “I know,” she muttered, “It’s not. I know. That’s a perfectly rotten thing to say.” She looked up at the ceiling. “Margie’s a wonderful gal and I’m a rotten bitch.”

  “You mustn’t get so worked up about things …”

  Listening to them idly, Massengale caught again the dry, distant interior mirth. What a farce it was—what a devastating occasion for comedy! All this apprehension and protectiveness when around them the very chemistry of the nation was being altered, the old counters were losing their currency. The old way was individual—the embattled farmer with his musket, the businessman personally responsible to his associates and clients, a government responsive to the will of the people. But none of that was true anymore. The core now was diffuse, technological, manipulative: now the counters were the tank and the heavy bomber and the radar screen, the corporation and the interlocking directorate; and the host of government agencies proliferating on all sides like some lunatic anagram game—OPD, WPB, OPM, OTD, OPA, OSRD, OWI—were concerned with exhorting or soothing or distracting the citizen, with engineering his responses rather than with handing him anything resembling the truth …

  Here was old Caldwell, ostensibly such a wizard in the matter of training and equipping the new dogface soljer; a tireless, perceptive, reasonably imaginative soul, one of the organizers of victory—and yet he hadn’t the remotest idea about what was happening. The Shifkin girl saw more than he did. The Shifkin girl was right in essence—she didn’t understand it but she felt it in some slow, visceral way. Postwar America would bear no more similarity to prewar America than the Restoration Monarchy bore to Revolutionary France; what would emerge would be a vast, impersonal juggernaut of industrial cartels, a mountainous administrative bureaucracy and a prestigious military junta—and beneath these, far beneath, an emotional and highly subservient citizenry whose attitudes and actions would be created, aroused, manipulated, subverted by the roar of the mass media … it was so clear! Why couldn’t the dunderheads see it? Whoever could see it—whoever rode this wave deftly, keeping just ahead of its boiling crest—would hold the future securely in his fine right hand …

  They were still talking about Donny. That arrogant, ill-mannered boy! It was time to move along. The moment—a kind of moment, with its revelations and overtures—had passed. It was time to move out along the broad, stately avenues, seek the solace of the long, still rooms where the maps and charts and intelligence reports and appreciations and tables of organization and equipment cast their shadows far into the lives of men, transformed them irretrievably …

  He rose and said: “I really have to be going. Thanks so much for including me, General.” They shook hands. “Thomas, it was a distinct pleasure. As always.”

  Her gaze was remote and tired. “Good-bye, Court.”

  As he moved off through the lounge Caldwell was saying, “You’ll have him all to yourself tomorrow morning. Why don’t you go to a movie—there’s a new show at the palace down from the Circle. I ought to be home around eleven or so …”

  4

  “What I like best is lemon meringue pie,” Ben Krisler declared. “No—Washington cream pie. And not because I’m a flag-waving type, because I’m not. With that cool, runny yellow cream and the chocolate drooling down all over it. Christ, what a dessert! Doesn’t it make your bleeding mouth water, Sam?”

  “Oh, you Fitzroy Yanks,” Hallie Burns protested. “All you think about is your tucker.”

  “Not at all.” Ben squinted at her happily. “That’s all I can think about right now. At other times I think of movies, I think of—oh, all kinds of things … for instance—”

  “Never mind, I can guess,” Hallie said. She was a slender, handsome girl with a beautiful clear complexion and saucy violet eyes. “If it isn’t a beano it’s the Sheilas.”

  “I’m rough and tough,” Ben concurred. “I’m a ring-tailed bandicoot.”

  “You’re a devil with horns.”

  “That’s just because you’re seeing him away from home,” Joyce Tanahill told her. “American men are actually the most docile creatures in the world.”

  “There you go.”

  “They are! Anything their wives tell them they do. Their wives run t
hem around with a ring through the nose.”

  “Nurse Tanahill, you’re out of line,” Ben said.

  “Yes sir,” she sang impertinently, and did a rapid two-handed parody of a salute.

  “Not me,” Ben proclaimed sonorously. “I’ve alway been the czar in my domain. What I say goes. Isn’t that right, Sam?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Hear that? Sam never told a fast one in his life. He’s seen me in my best moments and my worst.”

  “Well, all I’ve seen are your worst,” Hallie retorted, and sifted sand through her large, graceful hands.

  Damon smiled, his eyes closed again, letting the voices float around him, footless and playful. Not far away the little waves tumbled toward them lightly, innocently, sho-wa, sho-waaaa, and the sun breathed softly on his lids. In the field behind the strip of beach some of the more energetic members of the Division staff were playing a noisy game of softball, and two other couples were wading in the shallow water near the sand cliffs, hunting for shells. Australia. A green and lovely land. It was pleasant lying here in the sun, torpid as a lizard, sprawled on your back against the warm earth, drawing strength from its vastness. Like—who? The man Hercules defeated by gripping him around the body and lifting him off the ground until his strength had ebbed. What was his name? He couldn’t remember. But it was true: the happiest moments of his life were times like this, lying in green fields, in hammocks, on the banks of rivers—

  “What are those things on your heel?” Hallie Burns was asking Ben. “Those ugly raw red holes, there?”

  “Those?” He bent over to examine them. “Those are chigger bites, ma’am. Or Chegroes, as we call ’em up no’th.” The others laughed and Ben glanced around, pleased. “Oh, I want to tell you, girls, it was rough out there in the swamps. No sauce bigarade, no napery in the messes … why, do you know the floors of the officers’ club weren’t even waxed—!”

  “Oh, you stager …”

  “It’s the truth! Only the brutes survived.” He threw out his jaw, a violent military caricature. “It brings out the roaring beast in a cobber …” Leaning over suddenly he bit Hallie on the thigh.

  “Ben! Stop it,” she cried; she slapped him and rolled away. “You’re half crackers …”

  “You said it, sister.”

  “There are people around,” she protested.

  “Only Sam. Old Sam won’t tell. He’s still out of his head with dengue. Aren’t you, Dad?”

  “Yep.”

  Ben rolled over on his stomach; the leading edges of his shoulders were already pink. “Say how about going to the flicks tonight?”

  “Beaut!” Hallie cried. She opened her violet eyes very wide, the way she did when she wanted to say something she felt was immensely perceptive or startling. “Do you know, somehow or other I just can’t fancy you as a colonel.”

  “Why’s that?”

  She studied him narrowly. “You haven’t enough side. All our colonels are wowsers.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Stuffed shirts,” Joyce said. “Pompous types.”

  “That’s because you’ve only seen me in my off-duty hours,” Ben reminded them. “Relaxed and fancy-free. On duty I’m an unholy terror. Firing Squad Krisler, they call me in the Division. Why, only yesterday I found two men with tarnished shoelace eyelets and had ’em whipped and pickled.”

  “Whipped and pickled!” Hallie cried. “That sounds like a bonzer pudding …”

  “It is, as a matter of fact. We make a kind of jelly out of the corpses later on.”

  “Benjy, stop it!”

  “It’s the dinkum oil.”

  “Listen to him,” Hallie Burns laughed. “Sounds for all the world like a Collins Street Squatter … But all the same, you’re no colonel. I’ll bet you’re a masquerader, like the bloke they caught in Adelaide going around three pips up. Soliciting funds, he was. And then he made the mistake of going out to the track, and some nark did for him …” She sighed and tossed back her rich red hair. “Short life and a merry one.”

  Ben retorted: “If you think I’m a phony, take a look at Sam—who’d ever take him for a cruddy general?”

  “Oh, but Sam’s different,” Joyce Tanahill said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t know …” Her eyes rested on Damon a moment: deep brown eyes, whose irises were as clear as autumn skies back home. Her hair, worn close to her head, was a fine, dull gold. “He makes you want to do something noble.”

  “Oh my God,” Ben scoffed. “Just because he looks like a beat-up imitation of Gary Cooper with a crew cut—”

  “No, it’s not that.” Resting on one arm she looked at Damon again. She was a tall, quiet girl who had her own style of joking; but this time her gaze was acceptant and very grave, and Damon felt a slow, firm pressure under his heart. “He looks like somebody you could tell your troubles to.”

  “Nurse Tanahill, you’re out of line again,” Ben declared.

  “Yes sir!”

  “Would I cure them?” Damon asked her. “All those troubles?”

  She gazed at him a moment longer—then shook her head quickly, and he couldn’t tell whether it was denial or wonder. She looked away, and he studied the fine, high forehead and broad cheeks, the large brown eyes that found the world neither unduly complicated nor unduly harsh; what solace that steady gaze must have been to Millis and Boretz and the other stretcher cases flown in from Kokogela! What a deep, aching reassurance that there was a corner of earth free of muck and desperation and uncaring slaughter, a green little isle of gentleness and calm …

  He rubbed his eyes and stared at the sea. A film of unreality still lay over everything; like the onset of fever, but benign. He could never get over it. There was always something outrageous, almost mad in such a swift violent passage from squalor and death and anguished decision to this equally strange land of beds and sheets and steak-and-eggs and bright, well-appointed rooms and pretty women. He should be used to such transitions, God knew; but he wasn’t, he never would be. Ben was different. What Ben encountered was, and there was no more to be said about it. Battle, beach parties, bars—he moved from one to another with a free, zestful acquiescence. He himself never could accept it so easily—bemused, guilty, for days he would feel he had no right to be whisked up and away and dropped into such casual opulence and frivolity and ease. And this time, intensified by fever and all the furor attendant on the capture of Moapora, it had been worse than ever …

  Lennon’s Hotel was always full: a gaudy, meretricious parade of observers and correspondents and politicos. They wanted to visit Moapora or Buna or the Salamaua front, they wanted to be present at reviews and awards presentations and staff conferences, they all wanted to talk to Sad Sam Damon. They cared nothing about the price exacted—the base hospitals overflowing with fever cases and wounds, nor the pitifully inadequate means bequeathed to the theater; there had been—unexpectedly—a victory, a bright little stop on their pleasurable itineraries, and they flocked around demanding dinners, conferences, interviews. Damon bore with the first half-dozen genially enough; but when he saw they had no desire to air or correct problems, that they were interested not in the truth of a long war against a tough, resourceful enemy but in the illusion of a cheap and easy victory, that they cared nothing about the heroic achievement of some ill-prepared and decimated GIs but instead about himself as a kind of minor celebrity, he made himself as unavailable as possible.

  On his third day in Brisbane MacArthur sent for him. He left an irate Ben in the bar of the hotel and rose in the private elevator to the suite of the Supreme Commander. In the gaily papered little L-shaped foyer he rang, feeling nervous, and cross with himself for feeling nervous.

  MacArthur was waiting for him in his study, standing by one of the windows, reading some reports. He had changed greatly since Damon had last seen him on Luzon; the long, proud face was drawn, the high brow furrowed, the lips that Damon remembered as rather full and mobile were nearly e
ffaced now—in a broad, harsh line that pulled down sharply at one corner. It was an irascible face, a tormented face—

  He saluted and said: “Sir, Colonel Damon, Four seventy-seventh Regiment, reporting as ordered.”

  “Damon.” MacArthur smiled briefly and shook hands; indicated a long leather couch. “Sit down, sit down.”

  Damon seated himself, though the General continued to stand. The quick, birdlike eyes were on him and he gazed back, trying to look interested and respectful and at his ease. He knew about the infinitely graded scale of greetings MacArthur used, which ranged from the carelessly returned salute and curt acknowledgment to a warm handclasp on both shoulders and the ringing exclamation: “Comrade-in-arms!…” Apparently he’d fallen somewhere in between—not a distrusted subordinate, and by no means a “MacArthur man.” It’s because of Dad, he thought; and because I refused Massengale’s offer back at Garfield. That’s part of it …

  “Damon, I’m proud of you,” the General was saying, moving back and forth above him. “You went up there and did your duty. Which is more than most of them did. I wish I’d had a chance to see you on your way out from the States, but there simply wasn’t time for it. One can’t do everything. Damon, you picked that brigade up and made them fight the way I knew they could all along. It was magnificent. It was in the great tradition of American arms.”

  “Sir,” Damon answered, “I will be pleased to inform the men. They did it.”

  MacArthur glanced at him sharply, and began again. “I understand your name is on the next list of general officers. Is that true? Who recommended you? Eichelberger?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” The General turned and stared at the huge map of the western Pacific on the wall, his hand to his chin. “A crucial operation. Crucial. I had to have Moapora. Seems absurd, doesn’t it? All those thousands of miles, all that water …” He turned sharply, his eyes piercing. “You realize that, don’t you?”