After the show, he and Muriel walked down Sixth Avenue and passed an open-air shooting gallery. Some enlisted men behind them were singing a snatch of a popular song, “If you can fight like you can love, good night, Germany!”
“Melly,” Muriel said, “let’s see if you can shoot like you can love.”
As a matter of fact, when he came to think of it he was a better shot than lover, or at least he had had more practice. It was a big elaborate gallery with strings of ducks, revolving pipes and balls bouncing on jets of water. He would not have shot if two Infantry privates had not called out to move back and give the lieutenant a chance. At least he knew what he was doing when the attendant handed him a twenty-two, even if the weapon was chained to the counter. It was a nicely balanced little rifle, warm from a lot of shooting, but very dirty.
“All right,” he told Muriel, “I’ll try the ducks,” and he knocked all the ducks over, snap, snap. Now that he had the feel of the rifle, he went on to the revolving wheels of pipes and cleaned out three wheels of them, but by that time he had shot fifty cents’ worth, which was enough money for that sort of thing.
“Jesus,” the men were saying, “look at that lieutenant. Go ahead and clean it out, Lieutenant.”
He was better at snap shooting later. There was a trick to it like anything else.
“Go on, Melville,” Muriel said, but he told her they were wasting money.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Bud,” the proprietor of the gallery said. “If you knock off the balls from the fountains from left to right, you can have all the shooting for nothing.”
A crowd had gathered behind him. The balls were erratic, but Muriel was there and he decided to shoot fast, even if he missed.
“One,” the men began to chant, “two, three, four; Jesus, look at the lieutenant—five, six, seven, eight,” and then there was a groan.
“Oh, Melly,” Muriel said, “you missed the last one.”
“That’s all right,” one of the infantrymen said, “don’t you mind what she calls you, Melly.”
Melville set his rifle down carefully on the counter. It was his first experience with troops except for the well-trained personnel at the Point. If Muriel had not been there, he would have let the matter drop, but now he had to do something, and this was the part of the story he liked best, because it had a moral. The man was a green soldier on leave, and even then Melville could see that he meant no harm.
“What’s your first name?” he asked. He spoke quietly like his Tac, Captain Folsom, at the Point.
“Charlie,” the soldier said.
“Charlie what?” Melville asked.
“Charlie Thompson.”
“Yes,” Melville said, “but Charlie Thompson what?”
“Charlie Thompson, sir.”
“Atta boy,” the soldiers called, “give it to him, Lieutenant.”
A good officer, he knew, should never get mad at troops. He was glad to remember that he had been adroit enough to smile.
“That’s right,” he said. “You guessed the answer. I’ll give you five dollars if you’ll knock off that last ball, Charlie.”
“Go ahead, Charlie,” the men called, “take his five dollars, Charlie.”
“I couldn’t shoot that good, sir,” the soldier said.
He had been smart enough to know that he was as young as any of those boys and he had made his point, and he had done right, calling the soldier “Charlie.”
“Well,” he said, and he had the sense to smile again, “you’re going where you ought to learn. Remember to squeeze and not to jerk, and hook up your collar and button up your pockets.”
He smiled again at the troops and pulled out the bill that Muriel had left him to pay the gallery.
“If there’s anything left over,” he said, “let some of these soldiers use it. Come on, Muriel.”
The moral of the story was, you had to learn to handle troops right if you were going to the front and didn’t want a shot in the back. Never let them get away with anything, but remember the human equation.…
“Say, Lieutenant, sir,” one of the men said, “what outfit are you with?”
The man, being a sergeant, should have known better. According to military courtesy, he should have phrased his question in the third person, but then he was not in Melville’s outfit.
“I haven’t been assigned to any yet, Sergeant,” Melville said.
“Well, I hope to God you get into ours, sir,” the sergeant said.
“Why, thanks, Sergeant,” Melville said, “and here’s wishing you a lot of luck. Come on, Muriel.”
“Why, Melly,” Muriel said, “you sounded just like an officer.”
It was not an intelligent critique, seeing that Muriel could not really know yet how an officer should sound.
“I mean,” she said, before he could tell her so, “you sounded just like your Tac at West Point, that nice Captain Folsom.”
It was a good idea to have a model when you started in the army, and he had been trying to sound like the captain, though he felt slightly deflated because she had guessed.
“It might be just as well,” he said, “if you didn’t call me Melly.”
“Yes, sir,” Muriel said, “and I’m pleased you’re assigned to my outfit, sir, and take off that hat when we get into that elevator.”
It all made a pretty good story, if you told it among old friends, or even if you had to make yourself agreeable to some gauche young officer and his wife, and there was another moral to that story, and he always liked to end it with that moral. The moral was, don’t let your wife control the situation all the time. Let her handle you but you handle troops, and don’t push troops too hard when they’re on leave, especially in the States.
XVIII
Who Pants for Glory Finds but Short Repose
The mass of American manpower that poured into France that summer left much to be desired from the point of view of training. It was basically excellent material but very raw, and admittedly even some of the regular divisions were not yet the smoothly working units that they should have been. One of the most peculiar things in the whole picture was the difficulty experienced by a well-trained officer in ever reaching a position within the range of enemy small-arms fire. This was ironical, but when you came to think of it, natural enough, since there was a demand which simply could not be filled for personnel to instruct green troops. If you exhibited any unusual skills and abilities in those days, someone was apt to grab you. All you had to do was stick your neck out a quarter of an inch and you did not have to fight. Instead you would be teaching others the theory without ever having had the practice. It was marvelous in view of this that the percentage of West Point graduates killed was in the end higher than that of any other group. It spoke volumes for their keenness and anxiety to do what they were trained to do, namely to lead in battle. When Melville Goodwin came to think of it, he was lucky ever to have seen the fighting. A lot of his classmates never even got overseas.
Melville Goodwin was ordered to France in a school detachment of officers from a new division which was still being organized in the States. The officers of the school detachment were to receive various sorts of technical instruction in France, after which they would meet that nebulous division at some debarkation point and assist in its final polishing. This would have been an excellent idea if the demand for manpower had not become pressing after the German breakthrough in the vicinity of Château-Thierry in July. If the Ludendorff concentrations had not been effective, Lieutenant Goodwin might have studied the theories of the machine gun and of trench-mortar fire all summer. He was always grateful that the German general staff had come close to solving the problem of the breakthrough and that something close to open warfare had precipitated a sudden crisis.
However, he had no way of knowing the plans of the German general staff when he received his orders to report at Camp Merritt. He only knew that he was going to France for training after a few days’ leave at home. Most of
his able-bodied contemporaries had left Hallowell months before as volunteers or draft troops and the sooner he went, too, the better. People on Prospect Street looked curiously and sometimes bitterly, he thought, at his gold bars, and there seemed to be a feeling that he had become an officer as a result of some sort of pull or juggling. The implication was that here was Melville Goodwin all polished up and an officer and married, too, with a nice soft place for himself when he should have been out in the mud with all the other boys. Muriel was furious when people did not understand that it was more dangerous to be an officer than a private soldier, particularly a West Point officer.
“Well, Melville,” his father said, when Melville had explained to him about the advance school detachment, “I thought you had been working at West Point learning about those same things.”
His mother, however, was glad that the army was taking care of him. She had been terribly worried for fear he might go into the fighting right away, but now she could look over all his equipment, his beautiful puttees, his sleeping bag and all the things in his green foot locker without feeling any more that they meant he was going to be killed. She was glad at last that he had gone to West Point and that the army knew he was valuable. He hoped that she would not say things like that around town, and he asked her not to, but of course she did when she worked at the Red Cross center. The truth was that civilians never could understand about the army.
Muriel wanted to go with him and to stay somewhere in New Jersey outside of Camp Merritt until the detachment finally sailed, but he told her that it was better to say good-by right there in Hallowell. She would be all right because she could go to work again in her father’s office at the hat factory. Yet even Muriel could not wholly understand his point of view.
“I know it’s awful for you, waiting here,” she said, “but I wish you wouldn’t act as though you were so glad to leave me.”
The thing to do in wartime was to get away from home. Women, even Muriel, were only a complication when you were going overseas. It never helped to remember the look on a woman’s face when you were leaving her, even if she were as brave as Muriel. It was demoralizing to see a woman trying to be brave.
“I’d hate to have you stay,” Muriel said, “… but you’ll think of me sometimes, won’t you?”
Women, even the best of them, could not help but be jealous of war. They never did wholly believe it when you said you would always be thinking of them and you never believed it either. He even thought at times that he should not have married Muriel, that it was not fair to her, but thoughts like that were bad for the morale. There was no use describing the details of parting because the thing to do was to get going and get away from home and to try to forget as much of those last moments as you could. He hated to admit when he finally said good-by, that he was glad to go.
When he saw the wooden barracks and the mess halls of the embarkation center at Camp Merritt and turned in his orders, he was happier than he had been for days and days. It was like coming home, to arrive at Merritt. There was a beautiful, restful simplification. An American army post anywhere in the world would be more like home to him in the future than any other place.
“Orderly,” the major on duty said, “take the lieutenant to Quarters C, Square 5.”
All he had to say was Yes, sir, thank you, sir, and then salute and about face, one, two. The President of the United States had reposed special trust and confidence in his patriotism, valor, fidelity and ability, and he was going to the war.
Army life had its dull moments, but no new assignment was ever dull. An assignment to a new command even today was a personal challenge, and a fresh, blank page on your ledger. An embarkation depot always reminded him of that quatrain in the Rubáiyát about the tent where took his one night’s rest, the Sultan to the realms of death addressed. Other guests had come before you and others would follow, and you only waited there in a sort of limbo before you marched aboard the transport.
He had hardly entered the barracks at Merritt and had scarcely started to look over the officers of the school detachment, who were checking their equipment, or sleeping, or reading or playing cards, before he saw Spike Kennedy, his roommate at the Point. He had never been so glad to see anyone as he was to see Spike, and they stood there for a while laughing and pounding each other on the back. Spike had only been there six hours ahead of him, but he already had the swing of everything.
“Say, Mel,” Spike kept saying, “we’ve got to stick together.”
The thing to remember, Spike said, was that they were in a pretty funny crowd. Lieutenant Colonel Redfern, the detachment CO, came from the Point himself and had seen service in the Philippine insurrection and the Boxer Rebellion, but aside from him there were no other regulars in the detachment unless you included a former enlisted man, now a lieutenant. All the rest of these birds who were going over, Spike said, were either from the National Guard or from Plattsburg or somewhere. They had not been for more than six months in the service, but some of them seemed pretty bright. Some of them had been lawyers and things like that, and one of them, an Artillery captain named Tucker, had been a college professor. It was comical seeing all these poor birds trying to be soldiers. Those guys simply did not have a West Point education, and the only thing to do was to help them.
Lieutenant Colonel Redfern exhibited approximately the same attitude when Spike took Melville around to the colonel’s quarters to report. The colonel had a small box of a room to himself at the end of the quarters with a cot, two chairs and a table. He was in his middle forties, lean and stringy, with pale blue eyes and a long, reddish face. It was only when the colonel got quietly drunk by himself on the transport that Melville began to feel that he had failings. He must have been very lonely with that school detachment, or else he would not have expressed himself as frankly as he had.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” the colonel said. “This is a hell of a war. God damn it, I never thought I’d end up taking a zoo across the ocean. My God, there’s even a college professor. Do you play bridge, Goodwin?”
“No, sir,” Melville said.
“That’s right,” the colonel said, “I forgot the attitude toward cards at the Point.”
The colonel stared at the table in front of him.
“We’re getting out of here in forty-eight hours,” he said. “Any questions?”
“No, sir,” Melville answered.
“Well, if you have any,” the colonel said, “don’t bother me with a damn one of them. The main thing is don’t bother me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
“You get that, too, do you, Kennedy?”
“Yes, sir,” Spike Kennedy answered.
“Then repeat it.”
“The main thing is not to bother you, sir, about anything.”
“That’s right,” the colonel said. “All the rest will, but you won’t, because you’re from the Point. I don’t understand civilians. Do you understand civilians, Goodwin?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Melville said.
“Don’t say you don’t know,” the colonel told him. “Never try to understand them. Have as little to do with them as is reasonably possible. You’ll only get yourselves confused, fraternizing with those ninety-day wonders. That’s my considered advice.”
“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
“Now one thing more,” Colonel Redfern said. “Our association will be brief, but I might be able to teach you the rudiments of bridge. It calms the mind, it teaches patience and self-control.”
“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
“Well,” the colonel said, “we’ve got to get this organized. That damn professor, Captain Tucker, plays bridge. We can sweat Tucker. Kennedy, give him my compliments and tell him to report in here after supper for bridge with you two young gentlemen. You understand?”
“Yes, sir,” they both said, and they stood up.
“Very well,” the colonel said, “that’s all for now.”
&nb
sp; Lieutenant Colonel Redfern was quite a card. Heaven only knew what became of him later. He had no future and he never told about his past, but all the way over on the old Kroonland, Colonel Redfern had them playing bridge whenever they were not on submarine lookout. Sometimes even now when Melville played a no-trump hand, he could think of himself in his life jacket aboard the Kroonland and he could see the whole convoy again, spread out like ducks on the gray Atlantic with an old battle cruiser leading them, and he could see the old four-stack destroyers that came to meet them when they reached the danger zone.
“If you had counted your cards,” he could hear the colonel say, “you would have known that there would be an eight against you.”
Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Redfern was quite a card. Melville could remember him more clearly than he could remember the docks at Saint-Nazaire. This was not peculiar, because one day after landing, he was on a train, and three days later he was at the headquarters of a division north of Château-Thierry, and an hour after that, with no food in his stomach, he was on a truck moving to the front as a replacement officer for an Infantry regiment which was to attack at dawn. The Germans were retreating then in the Château-Thierry salient, and there was no time for school detachments.
There had been a momentary view of Brittany, then a six-hour wait in a Paris station and then a trip through villages with all their roofs blown off and unburied corpses in the fields. Then there was a road in the dusk jammed with French cavalry. It was the first and last time he ever saw cavalry in any war. Next there was the sound of shells bursting in a patch of woods, and he was walking through the woods in the dark. Then he was behind the blankets of a dugout in a regimental Post of Command. It was like a bad dream, but it was the army.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 30