Once an Eagle

by Anton Myrer

  A few seconds longer they stood in the center of the tent, their eyes locked on each other. Then without preamble Massengale turned away with a brief, airy gesture. “I imagine that is so,” he said. There seemed to be no residual emotion in his voice—no anger or fear or gratification—and this absence seemed more fearsome to Feltner than all the threat and vituperation that had gone before. Massengale peered at the situation map still again—raised the fan and poked at the road junction beyond Fanegayan as though he wanted to punch a hole through overlay and map and drawing board, tent wall and jungle beyond. When he glanced at Damon again, Feltner was amazed to see that he was smiling. “I daresay you’re right about that. Touché … Nevertheless, PYLON goes off as ordered.”

  “All right, General. If that’s how you want it. But if I should be hit in the flank and find myself in trouble I am calling in elements of the Forty-ninth Division, as last agreed.”

  “Oh, let’s not borrow trouble, Samuel …”

  “I merely want that understood, sir.”

  Massengale gazed at him a last long moment, musing, tapping his lower lip with the geisha fan. “All right. But I can tell you right now you won’t need it.” Abruptly he turned. “Come along, Lyal.”

  He left the tent rapidly, followed by Ryetower; and a moment later the jeep motor roared. Feltner thought of a day in fifth grade when the superintendent of schools had come into the class and chosen him to write a motto on the blackboard. He still remembered the silence of the room behind his back, the dry, patronizing voice of the superintendent, the chafe of the chalk as it moved over the worn slate.

  Bring me men to match my mountains.

  Bring me men to match my plains,

  Men with empires in their purpose,

  And new eras in their brains …

  He was surprised to find he was shaking with relief and rage and disgust.

  “The filthy rotten son of a bitch!” he gasped; and at nearly the same instant Brand muttered, “No-good bastard …”

  “That’s enough of that,” the General said. His eyes rested on them all severely, then glinted with angry mirth. “You can think it all you want to. But you can’t say it out loud. I won’t permit it in my command.”

  “That suits me,” Feltner answered.

  Brand was perfectly motionless. Pritchard looked scared and hollow, his eyes darting from one man to another.

  “What’s the matter, Harry,” Damon asked him, “—did you figure you were on your way up to a line company?”

  “No, sir,” the aide said promptly, while Brand and Feltner grinned; then, because he felt himself the junior member of the firm, so to speak, the newcomer who had not carried the tattered standard at the Chief’s side at Wokai and Moapora, he added hotly, “—but I’d made up my mind, if he relieved you I was going to tell him off! …”

  Damon grinned at their laughter. “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t.” The shelling began again, down the line to the left. The Old Man stared out of the tent, his big shoulders sagging in the sweat-soaked green fabric.

  “Jesus, you’d think a man—” He stopped, rubbed the side of his face with his hand, while they watched him in silence. “Well,” he said briskly, “you all heard the gentleman. What is it General Krisler says? Ours but to pine and sigh.”

  “Yeah—ours but to college try,” Brand said. “He’s got a million of them. Ours but to shit and shy …”

  Two more shells landed with a stunning crash at the far edge of the grove.

  “I could see them, General,” the pilot said. He was a slender, handsome boy with long silver-blond hair which he kept sweeping back with a quick, rather graceful movement of his cupped palm. “Just as plain as day. They were waving colored scarfs or—you know, rebozos or something; and pointing. They kept pointing north toward the old Spanish barracks, up the road toward Ritidian …”

  “I see,” Massengale said. “What about troop movements?”

  The boy frowned. He was wearing the inevitable crash bracelet on his right wrist; his sleeves were tightly rolled high above the biceps, and his arms were covered with a soft golden down of hair. “Well, it’s pretty hard to see much down there. Except on the highway. I was down to fifty, sixty feet a lot of the time. I got one glimpse of a small column—”

  “What do you mean, a small column?” The pilot glanced at him in mild alarm, and Massengale realized his voice was sharper than he’d intended it to be. This was silly: it would only rattle the boy. “I mean, what would you estimate it to be, son?” he amended in a persuasive, fatherly tone. “Battalion strength, would you say? or greater?”

  “Oh, no.” The flier slapped his baseball cap against his knee. “Less. A company, maybe two. They were pretty disorganized, you see—all strung out, running around and scattering … It’s awfully tough to get a clear picture through all that spinach.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “But this matter of the Filipinos, General,” Fowler interjected. “It’s my opinion they’re trying to tell us the Japanese are pulling out, starting a general retreat toward the north.”

  “Yes. It’s possible.” Massengale asked the pilot a few more questions, listening to him with a semblance of complete calm. The heat was fierce; Fowler’s face was brick red and streaming sweat from every pore. All the decent dwellings in Dalomo had been shelled to bits before the landing, and Ewing had set up the CP in the ruins of the old Del Monte office near the beach; but it was completely inadequate. Here on the east side of the island below the hills, blocked off from the life-giving trades, it was breathless and stifling. He would have to change his headquarters as soon as practicable, get out of this glaring furnace. His chest burned with prickly heat; he lifted the shirt and undershirt away from his skin with distaste.

  Ryetower and Prengle came in and he nodded to them. After a few moments he got to his feet, and Fowler and the pilot rose. “Well, that’s fine, son,” he said. “I think that’s all, then. I won’t detain you any longer.” He smiled and nodded in the overcourteous formality that he had made a hallmark of his and that had become known as the Massengale Manner. Then he put out his hand and said, “Good boy.”

  “Thank you, sir.” The boy’s awkwardness was touching; he turned to go, turned back. “I just thought you’d want to know about that, sir.”

  “I do. I do indeed. I’m always grateful for any information, no matter how trivial or irrelevant it may seem. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  The pilot left and he went over to the map, which occupied the entire east wall of the room and where every landmark, every activity was recorded. He was conscious of Ryetower and Fowler in the room behind him, watching him with deference, waiting on his formulations, and the thought afforded him, even in the midst of his vast impatience, a certain pleasure. The very contemplation of a map always gave him great comfort. The world was erected on symbols: flags, wedding rings, mourning bands, stars and bars and evening gowns and automobiles. Those rectangles with their intersecting lines—symbolic of the crossed chest straps of the infantry—embodied companies and battalions of men moving through the jungle, pressing against the Japanese defenses guarding the airfield. All the vast complexity of war was represented: the patrols moving silently and then pausing, while the point knelt behind a tree, tapping his rifle stock, the sound like a gourd in the tense, damp stillness; the wire companies stringing communications wire along the trails, the 105 batteries lunging and recoiling in their sweaty, iron pavane around the guns, the engineers perched on their shuddering cats and graders, grinding out roads and clearings for supplies. All of it was here under his eye. At one word from him all these tens of thousands of toiling men would stop, and move again in some other manner …

  God, it was hot. Heat—the very element itself—seemed to emanate from under his flesh, like some noxious and flammable gas. Not a breath of air stirred the huge acacia beyond the window. Sound swelled in the heat—the grating mutter of radio voices, the pulsing thud of the teletype machines in the mes
sage center in the next room, struck him as abnormally loud and oppressive. Perhaps he’d made a mistake—perhaps he should have set up his Corps Headquarters over on the Babuyan side, with Damon. Swanson was malleable enough. All he had was radio contact with the Night Clerk; and he’d had no report from him in nearly two hours now.

  He felt a quick thrust of anger, remembering the quarrel at Damon’s quarters the day before. Unseemly. Unseemly and ineffective. Of course he could command—but that was no satisfaction, or at best a very minor one: the triumph lay in the ability to convince, to bring the doubtful or hostile nature under the sway of his own logic. And with Damon he’d failed, palpably: Damon was like that crab he’d tried to capture on the beach at Newport, when he was a child: no matter how he dodged and feinted, no matter what ruses he employed, there it was, facing him, fighting claws up and flaring—until at last in a flash of frustration and rage he’d picked up a stone and smashed it into a feebly groping blue-and-yellow pulp—

  He inserted a cigarette in the long jade holder and lighted it, keeping his back to the two staff officers, running his eyes absently over hills and streams and trails already familiar past cognition. They were behind schedule. The estimates of enemy strength had been way off base; apparently Ochikubo had concentrated many more of his people in that central area astride the airstrip and the highway junction than anyone had foreseen. If they didn’t get a move on and nail that strip down within two days, Murtaugh would complain to Kincaid that he couldn’t get away, and Kincaid would protest to MacArthur—and a few hours after that MacArthur would be calling him. Luzon was the baby, the cherished operation: whatever interfered with that, drew off power or support from that, would arouse the Supreme Commander’s wrath.

  He went over to his desk and picked up the phone and said: “Get me MANGO.” There was the customary ear-splitting crackle and flurry of voices, and then Riemen came on, and after that Swanson’s measured, rather sepulchral voice.

  “Archibald? Massengale here. How are you progressing?”

  “Quite well, General. Quite well. All things considered. MUSLIN just got in to Hasugbu Village.”

  “What about the ridge?”

  “There’s increasing resistance in the ridge area, General. The Nip is touchy as hell there. Evans has patrols out—”

  “How about the bridge over the Lanoba? Is it still in?”

  “I believe so, sir.”

  “We’ve got to get across there, you know. It’s key. Keep pushing hard. What about Grossing’s battalion—has he taken Hill 307?”

  “I’m expecting it momentarily, sir. He sounded full of confidence this morning. I’ll check on that right away if you’d like.”

  “Good. Keep pushing now, Archibald. Try swinging west of that bend in the Laguac.” He rapidly gave the thrust line co-ordinates—he held them all in his mind with perfect clarity. “That alternate we talked about. Keep maximum pressure on the ridge.”

  “Yes, General, I will. The Jap’s putting up a terrific fight for Noguete, we’ve had very heavy casualties—”

  “I know. Keep thinking aggressively. Time is of the very essence. We must take that airdrome by tomorrow noon.”

  “Yes, sir. We’re giving it everything we have.”

  Massengale replaced the phone in its jacket and leaning back in the swivel chair closed his eyes.

  “Have they taken D Ridge, General?” Ryetower asked.

  He shook his head. “Not as yet. Has there been anything from CUTLASS?”

  “Nothing since that first report at eleven hundred hours, sir.”

  “I see.” He felt suddenly exasperated and depressed. The great map, with its neat, threadlike lines and symbols, mocked him. It was fraudulent, it didn’t tell you what was really happening; and neither did anything else. You could tear around and shake up divisional and regimental commanders, oversee bridging and supply operations, exude confidence or offer reprimand; you could issue orders and even (rarely) knock heads together, or sit here in this hotbox and pick up reports and note the changes—but you couldn’t really know what had happened. You couldn’t be sure. Men lied to you: they told you what they thought was happening, like Ryetower, or—like Swanson—what they felt you wanted to hear. Out of fear or confusion or sycophancy or guilt or ambition they spun their false versions of that one adamantine actuality that was being acted out in the tangle of rain forest and cogon grass and ravine, and you sat and tried to weave this fanciful tangle into a smooth, comprehensible fabric you could work with …

  He got up and began walking back and forth, dwelling on the pilot’s report. What had they been signaling? Reina Blanca. That little jewel of a city on its high green plain, twenty-five miles away, like a barbaric white citadel, an exotic dream of a city. Before the war he had walked its teeming streets, marveling at the ferocious mélange of alien races—Moros and Sulus and Tagalogs and Bajaos and Samals and the proud Spanish faces, the girls with their fluttering ternos, the handsome park with its mosaic fountain and the birds dancing in the flame trees. It had repelled and attracted him, like everything in these impudently sensuous islands—the men with their short, muscular bodies, their laughter and singing, the women whose eyes rolled up at you so dark and mischievous. Children: they were children—willful, wayward, headlong, amusing and appealing as children always were. Once during the Garfield days Asunta had failed to come back to prepare an important dinner until it was nearly too late, and he’d upbraided her. “Oh but sir,” she pleaded, “I was at mass, at Malate Church—a mass in memory of my mother.” “No,” he’d said angrily, and gripped her arm. “I am more important than mass. Do you understand?” “Oh sir—!” What a strange look she’d given him! And then Emily had walked up to him and said: “No. You are not more important, Courtney. You may be one day, but you are not right now.” And she had smiled that simple, constrained Boston smile that had always enraged him, and turned away. To go back to her poppy and mandragora, her drowsy syrups of the world that had been for so many years her solace and escape.

  Now—curiously, for there had been no catalytic episode he’d been able to find—she had changed. Her letters were full and informative, her thoughts ordered and vigorous. She had busied herself with USO work and enlisted men’s clubs; she was—it was utterly amazing!—even speaking at war bond rallies, at which she’d become apparently very adept: he’d heard enthusiastic reports from Uncle Schuyler and officers still with OPD. It was maddening: why couldn’t she have acted this way years ago, when it would have helped him professionally? Well, one ought to be grateful for small favors as well as large ones—she was beyond question a credit to him now, keeping his name before the public eye, balancing the periodic communiqués in which he was now beginning to figure prominently … and yet there was something upsetting about this—as though it was his absence that had freed her from the drug; and—nearly as disconcerting—that she had managed this renascence without his help, almost in defiance of it. She seemed even to have effected a better relationship with Jinny, who was living in New York City with two other girls, and whose letters, infrequent and brief, gave evidence of a mounting wildness and rebellion, a serious loss of control—

  “Lyal,” he said suddenly.

  “Yes, sir?” Ryetower was gazing at him with his chubby, round face and large blue eyes: an infantile expectancy, as though hoping for a bottle. A perfectly prosaic, pedestrian mind, incapable of creative impulsion; but an extraordinary memory, and a workhorse. And utterly loyal, which was the paramount thing.

  “Lyal, what’s the highway to Reina Blanca like?”

  The Chief of Staff pursed his lips. “Excellent, General. Well surfaced, two lanes, good shoulders. The Japs kept it up pretty well. There may be a few bad spots—bomb craters and so on. It’s a first-class road.”

  “Just over sixteen miles, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right, sir. Sixteen-point-two.”

  “And the rest is crushed coral and limestone.”

  “Yes, sir.”
/>   “I wonder … I wonder if a battalion of armor could smash through at Apolete and roll on in and nail the place down.”

  “Reina Blanca itself? Yes sir, I imagine so …” Ryetower’s baby blue eyes were troubled. Massengale knew what he was thinking: that column of armor, sitting there in the town while the Japanese reserve elements around the uncompleted airstrip and south of the city regrouped, and assaulted, and wiped them out. But he said nothing more. With a smile he looked away.

  It would require a quick, violent blow. The Japanese would certainly blow up the town if they were given time: they were not in the habit of declaring cities open for any reason—least of all a city on high ground, flanked by a river, which would afford good defensive possibilities.

  He looked out at the beach, where vehicles beetled over the churned-up ground, and antlike men struggled and gesticulated, their cries as faint as memory. Beyond that frantic activity lay the flat, dark water of the Sulu Sea, where the transports rode at anchor, disgorging supplies.

  A quick, violent blow. To ride into a conquered city—no, more than that, a liberated city; gliding through the golden streets to the Plaza Grande, where the mosaic tiles gleamed and the populace surged and swayed, and screamed their thanks, pelting his command car with orchids and lilies and cadeña de amor in a petaled rain. The magic of it! Gerow and Barton had had all of Paris at their feet, the whole vast City of Light half-mad with rejoicing. Even Eisenhower and that stodgy methodical Bradley had got in on the festivities. Wayne Clark had had his short-lived triumph in the city of the Caesars, and later Florence …

  MacArthur would never take Manila intact: the distances were too great, the approach down the valley from Lingayen Gulf too thorny, the Japanese too vindictive and demented … Which would leave Reina Blanca as the first, most important Philippine city to be freed. And the Islanders would never forget it, either—their gratitude would be boundless. Focus: it would give a focus to the whole campaign, a bejeweled little climax. No Pacific city had yet been taken intact. New Guinea and the Solomons had held nothing but wretched little nipa-hut villages, the Navy had smashed Garapan and Agaña beyond recognition, the Japanese had fired Tacloban. It would make headlines in the stateside papers. Why shouldn’t it?—now that Patton and Hodges were stalled in the Vosges and the Italian Front was dead …?