by James Salter
Eisenhower was a major general when he came to England, almost a lowly rank. He was nearly fifty-two years old, he had never commanded troops, never seen a battle. In a matter of a few months, the invasion put aside for the time being, he found himself, quickly promoted, in a damp tunnel in Gibraltar waiting uneasily while fourteen convoys from both sides of the Atlantic, all bearing forces under his command, converged for simultaneous landings at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers.
The invasion of North Africa had been hastily decided upon and planned, with Eisenhower as the logical commander since it was to appear as an American initiative. Actual military command, however, was in the hands of three experienced deputies, all British, for land, sea, and air.
There were problems with the colonial Vichy French, battles with the French fleet, and the usual early disgraces that go with poor officers and green troops. Americans dropped their weapons, abandoned equipment, and fled at Kasserine Pass. Eisenhower had neither the tactical nor strategic experience required, the chief of the British Imperial Staff, Alan Brooke, decided. He was putty in British hands, said Patton, who was also making his first appearance in the war; “I would rather be commanded by an Arab,” Patton wrote in his diary. “I think less than nothing of Arabs.” A depressed Eisenhower kept repeating, “Anybody who wants the job of Allied commander in chief can have it.” Nevertheless, he took full responsibility for the confusion and first defeats, and by spring, the supply situation better, the bad weather past, his reorganized forces had battled through Tunisia to meet Montgomery coming the other way. In the sudden, final collapse in May 1943, almost 250,000 Germans and Italians, many of them driving their own trucks in search of POW compounds, were taken prisoner. These were veterans, and with them went the Mediterranean.
Sicily was next, a less than brilliant campaign. The plan of invasion was uninspired—the Germans never could comprehend why the Strait of Messina had not been immediately seized to cut them off. The fighting was in the heat of summer, fierce and bloody. Patton, now an army commander, revealed some of his dash here and also his impulsiveness. Bradley, more temperate, would rise above him. Neither of them liked Montgomery: “pompous, abrasive, demanding, and almost insufferably vain,” Bradley described him.
The campaign in Italy was more of the same—bad strategy, landings in the wrong places, lost opportunities. As Mediterranean Theater commander, Eisenhower was far from the center of things. Italy was a mere sideshow compared to the immense scale of the Russian front, where literally hundreds of divisions were engaged, and in the course of a battle the opposing armies might lose a division a day. Though assured there would be a second front in the spring, Stalin shrewdly demanded to know who its commander would be. That he would be American was understood, since the bulk of the forces were to be American. That it would probably be Marshall was also understood. But at the last moment Roosevelt decided otherwise. The principal figures had been in their roles too long to change. A deeply disappointed Marshall had the grace to send to Eisenhower as a memento the handwritten note that named him supreme commander.
Generals who do not fail, succeed. From the middle of the pack, past Clark, who was left mired in Italy, past Bradley, who had gotten a star first but was late getting to Europe, past the brash Patton, through all of it, gathering strength, experience, the feel of battles, learning to predominate in conference, perfecting the structure, prodding, cajoling, slowly becoming unchallengeable, Ike made his way.
When he arrived back in London to take charge of the enormous planning, D-day was set for May 1, 1944, a mere three and a half months away.
The Germans knew it was coming. There were fifty-eight German divisions in France, all that could be taken from the east for what Hitler had told his generals would be the decisive battle of the war. If the Allies were defeated, they would never invade again, he pledged—the losses and the blow to morale would be devastating. The Germans could then transfer their entire strength to the grinding eastern front “to revolutionize the situation there.” The waters off the French coast were dense with steel piles, stakes armed with mines, iron barriers. There were over four million land mines laid along the beaches, wire, concrete gun emplacements. At Dieppe, at Tarawa, these defenses had proved murderous.
To England, convoy after convoy had brought the heaviest of all things: armies, with their vehicles, tanks, mountains of munitions, guns. D-day had finally been set for the fifth of June. On that morning tides, moon, everything would be right. But not, as it turned out, the weather. At the last moment the initial eight-division assault had to be postponed, and the following day, with only an uncertain pause in the winds and storm and the immense force leaning forward, as it were, Ike turned it over in his mind, pondered on destiny, and said at last, “Okay, let ’er rip.”
He stood at an airfield in the darkness saluting each paratroop plane as it took off. In his pocket was a folded message on which he had scribbled a brief statement to be used in the event of disaster: the landings had failed and the troops, having done all that bravery and devotion could do, had been withdrawn. “If there is any blame or fault attached to the attempt, it is mine alone.” These were the words, as historian John Keegan says, of a great soldier and a great man.
In France, dogs were barking in the windy darkness. Beneath the low clouds and the usual steady sound of aircraft crossing, the Germans were asleep, expecting a quiet night, when, at about two in the morning, into the country behind the beaches twenty-four thousand armed men came floating down. It was the airborne overture. The ships came at dawn, appearing out of the mist in numbers so great they could not be counted.
On the American beaches alone there were eight thousand casualties. Utah was not too bad, but Omaha was a bloodbath. The outcome was in doubt there for half the day. By that night, however, 150,000 Allied troops had gotten ashore. “Their road will be long and hard,” Roosevelt broadcast to the nation that night, leading it in prayer. “Give us faith in Thee, faith in our sons, faith in each other . . .”
The campaign that began that day lasted for eleven months and became the greatest Allied victory of the war. Eisenhower held big cards and he played them correctly. His armies and his generals by that time were battle-hardened, but there was also considerable finesse. He deceived the Germans by keeping Patton, whom they feared, in England for a long time in command of a phantom army. When the battle of Normandy was over, Rommel was writing to his wife, “We’re finished . . .”—even if the German High Command did not admit it, even though the life and death struggle went on. The Allies had more materiel, better intelligence, and, above all, command of the air, but the Germans were incomparable soldiers and for them there was no way out. Generals committed suicide and men by the tens of thousands died along the road.
That December saw the last great German offensive of the war. Massed in absolute secrecy, under the cover of bad weather, three German armies fell on the four weak divisions that were stretched out to cover eighty-five miles of front in the Ardennes. It was an attack that Hitler personally had conceived and von Rundstedt commanded. Almost simultaneously the first V-2s began to fall on England.
It was just before Christmas. Ike had only that day received his fifth star and was celebrating by drinking champagne and playing bridge when the word came of what would become the Battle of the Bulge. At first neither he nor Bradley could believe what was happening, but soon the scope of the breakthrough became apparent. “Calamity,” Alan Brooke admitted, “acted on Eisenhower like a restorative and brought out all the greatness in his character.” There were black headlines in the newspapers and grave meetings, but Ike had come of age. He committed his strategic reserves to hold the critical area around Bastogne at all costs, which they did. At the end of a week the weather broke and fighter-bombers swarmed over the front. From this time on, Bradley noted, Montgomery or not, Ike ran the war.
On May 7, 1945, with Eisenhower refusing to see the German emissaries who ha
d come to sign the surrender as he had refused to meet captured generals throughout the war, the road at last came to an end. The thrust into Europe, the crusade, as he called it, was over. There had been 586,628 American casualties during the campaign.
Perhaps he was not a great general. He was not a heroic one. He cannot be imagined crying to his troops, “Forty centuries look down upon you!” or “God for Harry! England and Saint George!” He was a new invention, the military manager, and the army was made over in his image. Those who think of him only as president, an old crock with a putter, fail to see the man as he really was. He was tough, resilient, wise. In a sense, the war used him up. For years he gave it every hour, every thought, every breath. It discovered him, and he is entombed in it, together with our greatest victory. The rest is epilogue.
He died on March 28, 1969, twenty-four years after the surrender. He was in Walter Reed Hospital, an invalid, ruined by heart attacks. His last words were, “I want to go. God take me.”
Esquire
December 1983
Younger Women, Older Men
Raoul and Tommy stop by for a few minutes on the way back from the beach. They come onto the porch with their girlfriends, one of whom looks eighteen. Raoul is close to forty, worn, with gray hair. He hasn’t shaved but somehow seems stylish. It’s probably worry—he owns two restaurants, the pressure is always there. Tommy works in one of them. He’s younger and Raoul is like a father to him.
The girls are wearing sandals with heels and slight bikinis tight as string. The sexual flux on the porch has violently changed, as with a powerful magnet, but they act unconcerned. In-ess, one says her name is, the one who looks eighteen. She had a slight accent, South America, Rome? In any case, to the other women she could be Kali, the goddess of destruction, wearing a garland of skulls. Women fear girls in a way that men do not react to boys. Ines stands there indifferently, nearly naked, her skin smooth and blemish-less. The dog, inquisitively, is sniffing her feet. At last she seems to have found something of interest. “Oh,” she says, reaching down to pat him, “he’s so sweet.”
Raoul slips a shirt on over his pale, skinny chest. He refuses a drink. He says something to Ines, who nods. They’re going to the American Hotel for dinner. One can picture them there, not talking much but on display. The two men are talking. They order a good wine—Raoul knows these things. This is all later, the last light lingering, the pleasant weariness from the sea, the food, the crowd. What happens afterward, one is forced to imagine. Raoul has never married though he has the ease of a married man. Tommy is separated from his wife.
When they have driven off there is a dampened spirit in the house. The women are somehow annoyed; a bruise, a tender spot, has been irritated. Their dignity has been injured in some way, or at least their feeling of confidence. Their husbands’ thoughts have gone to where they should not be . . .
It is true that Héloïse was a mere sixteen when she began her immortal love affair with her smitten tutor, Abelard, who was thirty-nine, and that Ajax and Achilles, as has been pointed out, were both in love with their servant maids, but it is an unfortunate thing, this open attraction to young women, many of whom have barely gotten their teeth and claws and who, insufficiently warned, allow themselves to consort with older men whose interest in them cannot entirely be one of friendship. It is a perversion of the state that nature intended of amity and understanding between men and women, equipping them both as she did with the same heart, blood, and sinew as well as with similar limbs, desires, and powers of thought.
Having established this, let us go further.
There is something deeply moving, something innate and good in the image of a young couple, intelligent, even-tempered, filled with hope and rich expectations. They are the alpha pair, upon which all society is founded. Everything else is inferior to them, every choose-it-yourself paradise, the men who love men, women who love women, the radicals and sexual Bolsheviks raging in the streets.
It is an invincible pair but also highly volatile; youth is volatile. Their desires, which now seem so clearly focused on one another, are in fact teeming and infinite. Life is very long and the struggle fierce. So many things will conspire to pull them apart, so many crises for which there seem to be no rules.
The young shun the old, probably with reason since they are usually nothing more than themselves squeezed of vitality and lacking ideals. Still there are exceptions. There are older people who know things and have done things, and anyway they are not that old. At least they don’t seem to be. There can be a natural and classic conjunction. A. J. Liebling in his beautiful chronicle of Paris, Between Meals, describes a great—though not important—French playwright and friend, Yves Mirande, who as a boy of seventeen fresh from the provinces was taken to bed by older women, in their twenties as it happened—as Madeleine Béjart did with the green Molière—made love to, and taught the rules. “When he was a ripe man,” Liebling wrote of Mirande, “he returned the favor by making love to the young.” In a sense this is like a career in education, studying for a doctorate and then afterward proceeding to instruct so that knowledge passes on more or less undiluted.
It is painful to recall life’s pleasures once thought of as unshakable, such as ocean liners, the tango, and dry martinis, that have now been swept into the rubble, but the intoxicating relationship between experience and inexperience endures. There are few things more gratifying than being in the company of someone younger who admires you for your knowledge and is avid to have it shared. If you are lucky, it is a woman.
Des arrived with his new fiancée. She came in first, hair tousled, wearing a man’s black overcoat and boots. When she took off the coat you saw how good-looking she was. She was from New Orleans and had a wonderful smile. Des and I kept talking nonstop, reminiscing, making jokes. “I see why you guys like each other,” she said.
Later she had her bare feet up on the table, beautiful nude feet, long and white. We were on the second bottle of wine. She hadn’t said very much and then—we must have somehow mentioned it earlier—out of nowhere, “What’s so great about Louise Erdrich?” she wanted to know.
She was just starting to read books. All that was ahead of her, the newness of it, the things you learned you could do, the real dimensions of life. Des was going to lay it all out.
How had he met her, I wondered—that’s always the question.
The attraction to men of young women cannot be marked down solely under the heading of education, of course. Many other things are involved, including the imbalance. Happiness is often at its most intense when it is based on inequality, and one of the imperishable visions of it is of life among a burnished, graceful people not as advanced as we—among them are to be found servants with whom, as with slaves in the Koran, pleasure is permitted for those so disposed, the pleasure that simplifies everything: Tahiti, 1880; Bali, 1910; Mexico, 1930; Bangkok, 1950. . . .
Well, all that is struck down. It is part of the darkness of colonialism and perhaps racism. If you care to include it, there is sexism, too. Men’s dream and ambition is to have women, as a cat’s is to catch birds, but this is something that must be restrained. The slightest understanding of things shows that men will take what they are not prevented from taking, and all the force of society must be set against this impulse.
Not long ago I watched an instance of this—they are, after all, countless. It was at a wedding reception in Paris, in one of those apartments that are obtained only through inheritance: huge windows, silk on the walls, rooms and salons tumbling into one another, women in large hats, champagne. In the crowd the groom’s niece, fifteen years old with a lovely broad face that seemed to hold nothing but purity, was boxed in against the wall by a wild Englishman of forty, heavy, with florid cheeks and curly black hair, who was talking to her passionately and without pause.
“We have to get him away from her,” I heard a woman remark nervously, “he’s mad as a
hatter.”
Mad, perhaps, but a member of the wedding party, and among the wives and divorcees he had found something more thrilling. The stitching had given way under one arm of his coat and he was telling her in inspired language of . . . who knows what? No one had ever paid her this kind of attention before, no adult. If he had just a day and a night, he was thinking feverishly, even only a night. If she drank just one more glass of dizzying champagne. . . .
My God, how awful! one thinks fearfully. But he will be dead in ten years most likely, from drink or a car accident, and everything he knew, the poems of Cavafy, the gossip of famous names, the best years for Pauillac, great music, restaurants in Lucca, all of it gone along with the books, pictures, and expensive suits, gone except for the things she remembers, and that is a lot. She will be only in her mid-twenties then with not a wrinkle or scar, not much taken from her and a great deal given, and perhaps she will come once, years later when she is older and has children, to visit the grave. Perhaps she will still have the note he left, the lines like those last few written by the heartsick narrator of Lolita telling her to be true to her husband, “. . . do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy.”
Alix came in in the evening, tall and smiling though she was tired. She had just finished work—she was housekeeping for the summer for someone who had rented a big place near Chilton. She did everything, took care of the cleaning, cooked—she hadn’t known how to boil an egg but after a month she was doing dinners for twelve with fresh asparagus.