Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  “Take this officer up to C Company,” the adjutant was saying.

  Then he was outside again with a guide, stumbling through the dark. His locker trunk and bedding roll were nowhere. He did not even have a pack or blanket but he did have a web belt and a forty-five automatic and one of those flat tin hats of World War I. He did not know where he was going and he had not even seen a map. The company command post was in a shell hole in the woods and he was told to stay there until morning, and join his platoon at dawn. Almost without his knowing how he got there, he was in the middle of an artillery duel. The seventy-fives were firing over him and machine guns were chattering out ahead. There was nothing he could fit together, but it was a great experience.

  General Melville Goodwin paused and lighted a cigarette, and there was dead silence in the library.

  “It was quite a mess at Château-Thierry,” the General said. “Any advance with green troops like that is always that way. Everything in back keeps pushing you. God damn, you’ve got to go.”

  Melville Goodwin was out of his chair and on his feet as though everything were pushing him still, and perhaps his memories were. His face was bright and he seemed to enjoy every one of his memories. He reminded me of a football player describing a touchdown.

  “That company wasn’t a bad outfit, considering, but maybe I’m sentimental. You always love your first outfit. It always seems to be the way it was originally, even when it gets the hell shot out of it. God damn!” He began to laugh. “We really didn’t know anything. Most of those troops were like kids playing cops and robbers against professionals.”

  He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace.

  “Well, anyway, we’re up at the front,” he said. “I admit it’s taken a long while to get there. Suppose we all take fifteen minutes out.”

  He looked at Phil Bentley and Miss Fineholt, but no one answered.

  “Do you remember the song,” he asked, “‘The colonel got the Croix de guerre, and the son of a bitch, he wasn’t there’? Well, this son of a bitch was, but let’s take fifteen minutes out. Come on, Flax.”

  Colonel Flax stood up instantly and followed the General out of the library.

  “I was there myself, sir,” I heard the colonel saying, “at a place near Le Charme, but it wasn’t charming then.”

  Miss Fineholt and Phil Bentley and I still sat silently, considering the life and times and metamorphosis of Melville Goodwin. He had changed himself from a schoolboy at Hallowell into what he was today in the course of a very brief time, without mirrors or deception, but it was hard to follow the process in retrospect. He had not known enough to take off his hat in the elevator, and now there he was, in the shell hole in the woods, with nothing to hold the tale together but a feeble string of anecdotes.

  “God,” Phil Bentley said, “what a life!”

  “Whose,” I asked, “yours or his?”

  “His,” Phil Bentley said. “Anyway, I guess we have something to be thankful for. We never had to go to the Point.” Phil sighed and took off his glasses. “And that Lieutenant Colonel Redfern—my God, he can’t be real.”

  I might have explained that any of the rest of us would have seen Colonel Redfern in a different light.

  “People like him keep cropping up over there,” I said. “You must have seen a few yourself.”

  “I never knew how lucky I was before,” Phil Bentley said. “Oh, God—there’ll be another day of this and he’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  Then I remembered that I had promised Helen to take a walk with Camilla. It was after four, and the machine guns were still chattering in the woods north of Château-Thierry. Everything was still really a mess around Château-Thierry, but some of Company C had been first-team material.…

  Until I saw Camilla in jodhpurs and a light-brown pullover sweater, I had not faced the fact that Helen had started her on riding lessons. All Camilla’s class at the Country Day School, Helen had said, were going to a place called the Winding River Riding Academy conducted by an Anglo-Irish gentleman from Galway named Mr. Delaney. Mr. Delaney was also master of an organization known as the Winding River Hunt, which Helen said was popular in the neighborhood, and Helen said that Mr. Delaney was popular, too, and that he was not an ordinary riding teacher. He came from an old Galway hunting family and he was asked everywhere and we should have him over sometime and talk to him about our stables. I had learned lately that a number of people, even in our age group, had taken up riding because of the social contacts the sport afforded. In fact Helen had taken me to a hunt tea recently, where everyone was in riding clothes like Camilla’s, and I had not known what to talk about at the tea, never having ridden myself. It was curious to see my own child looking like a miniature of all those extrovert strangers. It made me realize what a specialized place a child’s world had become since I had grown up—at least out here in Connecticut. It was necessary now for children to become proficient in all sorts of skills. They could not simply bat a ball around or paddle in the creek. They had to learn how to volley and smash in tennis and how to perform the eight-beat crawl in a swimming pool.

  Camilla seemed to be growing away from me already and, as often happened these days, we both struggled to find a common subject for conversation.

  “Daddy,” Camilla said, “why don’t you carry a cane when you go outdoors?”

  “Why should I?” I asked.

  “Because other children’s fathers around here always carry walking sticks when they go walking in the country,” Camilla said.

  There was a time when you struggled to have your parents appear like other parents, and I was conscious of my own inadequacy, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Well, I haven’t got a walking stick,” I said.

  Camilla took my hand and it always made me happy when she did.

  “It’s all right. I only suggested it,” she told me. “You don’t really need it, Daddy.”

  She did not sound like a daughter of mine. She spoke with the fine clipped accent of Miss Otts, but then Helen had employed Miss Otts for exactly that purpose. On the other hand, if I had adopted Miss Otts’s manner of speech, I would have been taken off the air, and there would have been no Savin Hill or riding lessons. It occurred to me that I must go back in a little while and look over the script.

  “Well,” I said, “what did you do at riding school?”

  “We rode around in a circle,” Camilla said. “Mr. Delaney stood in the middle. My horse’s name was Daisy.”

  It was exactly what a horse should have been named, and I told her it was a quiet name and I hoped that Daisy was a quiet horse, but I had never ridden around any Mr. Delaney in a ring.

  “Daddy,” Camilla said, “we never have time to have a talk. What are we going to talk about?”

  I had planned to walk through the garden and then up the hill to a patch of woods and then through the woods and back down to the stables, but I had not thought of any subject of conversation.

  “We’ve got to talk about something,” Camilla said. “We can’t just walk.”

  “Why can’t we?” I asked. “Everybody talks too much, Camilla.”

  “It isn’t any fun just walking,” Camilla said.

  As a matter of fact we did not have to work this out immediately because when we walked around the house to the garden, we encountered the General and Colonel Flax, standing together on the path, staring intently at some marks the General was making in the gravel.

  “The emplacement was up there,” the General said, “at the edge of the trees, and this area here was open. There was a dead space here where you could crawl on your belly if you wriggled like a snake, and they couldn’t cover the whole sector all at once.”

  He looked up from the marks on the path. He had not seen us and I don’t believe that he had heard us, but something must have told him that he and Colonel Flax were no longer alone fighting World War I.

  “Well, well,” he said, “and here’s Camilla. Come here and
shake hands with the old man. I’ve hardly laid eyes on Camilla. We haven’t had time to get acquainted but we’ll have time someday.”

  “Camilla’s pretty busy,” I said. “She runs on a very tight schedule.”

  When I saw Camilla looking at the General’s stars and ribbons and timidly holding out her hand, something in her wide-eyed expression reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s little Una on Pook’s Hill. The outlines of the garden were soft in the late October sunlight, and she might have been meeting Kipling’s Roman centurion or his kind old knight. I wondered whether she knew enough about English history to understand Puck of Pook’s Hill if I should ever have time to read it to her.

  “Well, well,” the General said, “so you’ve been out riding, have you?”

  “Yes,” Camilla said.

  “When you speak to General Goodwin,” I told her, “remember to call him ‘sir.’”

  Both the General and Colonel Flax looked self-conscious.

  “Don’t you mind your pappy, darling,” the General said. “How’d it be if you call me ‘Uncle Mel’?”

  There was no way of telling how it would be, because Camilla stared at him without answering.

  “I used to have two little boys once myself,” he said. “They were always full of dirt and devilment. I’ll tell you about them someday, Camilla. They were always riding bareback. They started riding at Benning. Did you ever see the children’s riding class at Benning, Flax?”

  “No, sir,” the colonel said.

  “The instructor there was a nice old stable sergeant, an old-time cavalryman. They’re as rare as whooping cranes now.”

  Colonel Flax looked at his wrist watch.

  “I think they may be waiting for us in the library, sir,” he said.

  “Oh, all right,” the General said, “all right. Are you coming, Sid?”

  It was a question, not an order, but nevertheless I felt apologetic.

  “I’ll be back in a little while, sir,” I said, “but you’re right in the groove now and you don’t need me for a while. I’m just going to walk up that hill with Camilla.”

  “What hill?” the General said.

  “Just up to the woods there,” I told him, and I pointed beyond the garden and General Goodwin examined the hill.

  “Well, don’t be too long, Sid,” he said. “I don’t like it in there without you, and you’d better send a patrol out first. There might be a machine gun in those woods.”

  Camilla took my hand and we walked across the garden.

  “Daddy,” she asked, “who is General Goodwin?”

  Probably no one had explained him to her except possibly Miss Otts, whose knowledge of the American army would have been rudimentary. I wondered what the General looked like through Camilla’s eyes and from the point of view of an age in which fact and folklore were always coming into collision. She must have seen him as a new recruit might, but with even greater awe, since all his brass had been designed through the centuries to impress trusting childish minds. This, in the last analysis, was the only reason for uniform and spit and polish. It was difficult to tell in a few words who General Goodwin was. I could not tell Camilla that he was a resultant of a disturbed political order or one of those people you had to maintain as an insurance against dangerous contingencies.

  “He’s a man who tells soldiers what to do,” I said. “He has those stars on his shoulders so that anyone can tell that he’s a general. Now Colonel Flax only has eagles because he isn’t a general yet. The more important a general is, the more stars he has and the more of those ribbons over his pocket. Some poor generals only have one star. General Goodwin has two.”

  “How many stars can you get to have,” Camilla asked, “if you get to know everything?”

  I could see where her mind was moving. They must still have been giving out stars in school as rewards for scholastic attainment.

  “They can get up as high as five stars,” I said, “but hardly any of them do, Camilla, and when you get five stars, you can have them in a circle and not in a row.”

  “Will he get five stars?” Camilla asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, “but don’t tell him I said so, Camilla. That might hurt his feelings.”

  “Isn’t he bright enough?” Camilla asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to tell.”

  I really did not know. I was already beginning to revise my early estimates of him. Automatic fire could not cover every inch of ground because of natural contours. The traverse of a machine gun only had a limited number of degrees, and General Goodwin’s capacity also had its limits. There were blind spots in him, egregious gaps, but then I was becoming conscious of extraordinary areas of acumen.

  “Is he anything like Samson?” Camilla asked.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You know, like Samson in the Bible.”

  “Oh, Samson,” I said. “Samson wasn’t bright at all or he wouldn’t have let Delilah cut his hair off. I don’t think Samson would have been a two-star general.”

  Then I began to think that I might be wrong about Samson. High physical courage always had its blind spots, and even if you had five stars, perhaps there was always some Delilah in the background sharpening up the shears.

  When I had returned to the library, I could tell from the General’s voice that I had missed something.

  “I was waiting until it was firing over there,” the General said. “The damn thing couldn’t be everywhere at once, and I had time to get up on my knees and … Oh, there you are, Sid. Did you have a nice walk with Camilla?”

  “You made quite an impression on Camilla,” I said.

  “What’s that song?” the General asked. “‘I love the ladies … and the ladies all love me’?”

  I was a disturbing influence, and everyone looked impatient.

  “How about it?” Phil said. “Did you throw in the grenade?”

  “You’re damned well right I did,” the General said, “and it landed on the button, or I wouldn’t be here now.”

  I had missed a good deal by taking time out. I had left Lieutenant Melville Goodwin in the shell hole in the woods at the PC of C Company, but I caught up with the story later when I read Miss Fineholt’s notes.

  XIX

  His Neck Was Out a Mile

  Artillery fire, even under optimum conditions, had not developed the precision it attained in World War II and there were no conditions at all in the Château-Thierry salient, optimum or otherwise. It was no joke in those days to be out in front of American artillery. The artillery was firing short that night, though this was no one’s fault particularly, since no one had located the front lines. Even though Melville Goodwin was in a so-called regular division, a lot of company officers had not yet learned how to determine their positions on a French one-to-twenty-thousand map, and there weren’t enough maps anyway. In the pitch dark you could hear the shells crashing among the trees. The company command post was trying to get the regiment whose code name was “Banana One,” but the line was dead. There were no bananas and he was told to stay where he was instead of trying to reach his platoon in the dark.

  In the morning he first saw gray in the sky and then the tree-tops and then figures moving in the woods. The night seemed to rise up slowly like a curtain, on a scene of distorted confusions. No one could adequately describe the disorder of a battlefield with its litter of equipment and the senseless distribution of matériel. The captain of Company C had been killed on the previous afternoon and the commanding officer was a first lieutenant who spoke with a broad “A.” There was not much chance to exchange any ideas with him because this officer ended up a few hours later by being dead himself. Melville Goodwin could only remember that he was not a regular, that his name was Johnson and that he was covered with mud, but even if he was not a regular, he might have been a good officer, because he was as much in touch with all his company as anyone could have been under the circumstances. The orders were to advance at dawn thro
ugh the woods, and Melville Goodwin went forward to take the command of the Second Platoon from a sergeant. It was not the best way to begin with troops, walking in among them out of nowhere. In fact he did not reach his platoon until after the sergeant had blown his whistle and all he could do was to tell the sergeant to go ahead. Fortunately the sergeant was an old army man, thickset, in his late thirties, with a face like a side of beef. His name was Riley and Melville did not need to tell him anything.

  “They’ve pulled out, sir,” the sergeant said. “It’s all clear just ahead.”

  There was nothing arduous in walking with the sergeant beneath the trees because there was not much underbrush to cope with in those French forests. The Frenchmen were always cutting brush for firewood, always saving everything. There was always a lot of griping about the French, and he had to admit they were a funny race—and unsanitary. For instance they all enjoyed collecting large heaps of manure right in their front yards, usually beside the well. It seemed the richer you were in France the bigger your manure heap, and he should know because he kept falling in manure heaps as the outfit fought its way up to the Vesle. Yet at the same time their farms were neater than any around Hallowell.

  The country they advanced over that morning was not cut up by hedges like the land around St. Nazaire. It was hay and grain fields and pastures and orderly patches of woods on top of rolling hills. When the infantry pushed ahead, it was like a pleasant practice maneuver. Though a mist was rising from the valleys, the sun was breaking through the clouds and there were patches of blue sky—and his uniform was drying. The artillery fire was slackening, because the guns were moving forward. Everything was moving forward, and the Germans were pulling out of that salient so hastily that only light forces were engaged.