Burning the Days

by James Salter

  I remember the sweating, the heat and thirst, the banned bliss of long gulping from the spigot. At parades, three or four a week, above the drone of hazing floated the music of the band. It seemed part of another, far-off world. There was the feeling of being on a hopeless journey, an exile that would last for years. In the distance, women in light frocks strolled with officers, and the fine house of the Superintendent gleamed toylike and white. In the terrific sun someone in the next rank or beside you begins to sway, take an involuntary step, and like a beaten fighter fall forward. Rifles litter the ground. Afterwards a tactical officer walks among them as among bodies on a battlefield, noting down the serial numbers.

  Bang! the door flies open. We leap to our feet. Haughty, sway-backed, wearing white gloves, a cadet sergeant named Melton saunters into the room. He glances at us. “Who are you misters? Sound off!” he commands. He turns to the wall lockers on which we have worked for hours preparing for inspection. Everything has its shelf and place, the folds are clean and sharp, the undershirts like pads of paper, the neat linen cuffs, the black socks.

  “Whose locker is this?” he asks with disdain. Not waiting for an answer, he sweeps the contents of a shelf to the floor. “It’s a mess. Are these supposed to be folded? Do it over again.” Shelf after shelf, one locker after another, everything is tumbled out. “Do it right this time, understand?”

  Implacable hatred floods upwards. “Yes, sir!”

  ——

  One of my first roommates was the son of a congressman. He was twenty. In Chicago, he revealed, he’d been living in an apartment with two prostitutes. As a sort of proof he smoked, walked around in his underwear, and marveled at nothing. We were, for the most part, fingerlings, boys in our teens, and his swagger seemed the mark of an enviable thing with which he was already familiar: dissipation. We ran up and down the stairs together but in formation stood far apart. There I was next to a tall, skinny boy who had a cackling laugh and astonishing irreverence. He was a colonel’s son and had come from Hawaii, crossing the continent in a Pullman and spending the night with a woman in a lower berth as she moaned over and over, “My son, my son.” His name was Horner; in time he introduced me to rum, cards, and as a last flourish, poison ivy.

  The most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same. My father had managed to do it, although, seeing what it was like, I did not understand how. I remembered him only strolling in a princely way; I had never seen him run, I could not imagine him in the exhausting routine of each day.

  But it was also hard to be nothing and no one, to be faceless in ranks and unpraised. In still another line, this one in the Cadet Store, where we were being measured for winter uniforms, one of the tailors, a Mr. Walsh, frail and yellowish-haired, noticed my name and asked if I was the son of the honor man in the class of 1919. It was the first feeling I had of belonging, of having a creditable past.

  What you had been before meant something—athletic ability mattered, of course—but it was not always enough to see you through. The most important quality was more elusive; I suppose it could be called dignity, but it was not really that. It was closer to endurance.

  Downstairs was the former second-string quarterback for Boston College who had a wristwatch he’d gotten for playing in the Sugar Bowl. It had letters instead of numerals circling the dial, S, U, G, A, R, etc., and there were small diamonds between the words, as I recall. Nash had come to play football. The days of players who truly came out of the Corps, mostly with unspectacular results, were ending and the war had made winning a matter of great concern. Nash had an Irish face and an unspoiled nature. He had seen something of the world and his enthusiasm for cadet life was limited. He braced with his neck pulled in reluctantly, like a tortoise. More and more he was above such childishness, and annoyance showed in his face. “Stand up straight, Mr. Nash, pull your shoulders back!”

  One day as he was being tormented, he did the inconceivable: he simply stopped obeying. The effect was galvanic—they swarmed around him, almost dancing with rage. In the noon formation he marched calmly to the mess hall, at ease towards it all, with the detached air of a condemned man. He was beyond punishment. The year-end ceremony which marked the end of plebe status was called recognition. The word passed in unbelieving whispers: Nash has recognized himself.

  That, of course, was impossible—he was found unfit and left soon afterwards. My last memory of him is on the top floor of barracks where our rooms were, on a hellish afternoon. There was a form of punishment for general delinquency; it had a benign name, clothing formation, and was held once or twice a week. The list of those to attend was read aloud at formation: at such and such a time the following named fourth classmen would report to the sinks of the Xth division. Sinks was the name for the basement, the engine room with pipes, lockers, and storage. There, in the nearly windowless dark, with the showers turned full hot to create steam and make it more unbearable, a program of steady exercise went on, interrupted only by an announcement: everyone had exactly five minutes to go back to his room and return in a different uniform. Up the stairs we fled to change frantically and run down to begin again. It was like the recruits being drilled to “change trains” in All Quiet on the Western Front, the so-called lesson one never forgets. The various uniforms were described item by item in the regulations book and in addition to everything, amid the confusion, had to be looked up. “Drill D!” was the desperate cry, racing up the last stairs, thirty seconds gone already.

  In the hallway, seated on a banister in an undershirt, doubly forbidden, was Nash with the Blue Book of regulations in his hand. He was smoking a cigar and calmly reading out the particulars, repeating them on demand while we flung clothes wildly off and on. Good luck, he called, as we ran down the stairs. It was his farewell performance.

  Had Nash repented and borne the consequences, he might that year or the next have trotted onto the field to become famous, but there are men born to be impetuous, to live by a gesture and keep their pride.

  ——

  You were never alone. Above all, it was this that marked the life. As a boy I had had my own room, and though familiar enough with teeming hallways and schoolboy games, these existed only temporarily. Afterwards there was home with its quiet, lights in the evening, the rich smell of dinner.

  There was nothing of that at West Point. We brushed shoulders everywhere, as if it were a troopship, and waited a turn to wash and shave. In the earliest morning, in the great summer kiln of the Hudson Valley, we stood for long periods at strict attention, dangerous upperclassmen drifting behind us sullenly, the whole of the day ahead. Over and over to make the minutes pass I recited lines to myself, sometimes to the bullet-hard beat of drums, The time you won your town the race … Buried and lost, but for the moment by myself, wrapped in words.

  I was an unpromising cadet, not the worst but a laggard. Among the youngest, and more immature than my years, I had neither the wisdom of country boys, who knew beasts and the axioms of hardware stores, nor the real toughness of the city. I had been forced to learn a new vocabulary and new meanings, what was meant by “polished,” for instance, or “neatly folded.” For parade and inspection we wore eighteenth-century accessories, crossed white belts and dummy cartridge box, with breastplate and belt buckle shined to a mirrorlike finish. In the doorway of the room at night, before taps, we sat feverishly polishing them. Pencil erasers and jeweler’s rouge were used to painstakingly rub away small imperfections, and the rest was done with a continually refolded polishing cloth. It took hours. The terrible ring of metal hitting the floor—a breastplate that had slipped from someone’s hand—was a sound like the dropping of an heirloom.

  ——

  At the end of the summer, assignment to regular companies was made. There were sixteen companies, each made up of men who were approximately the same height. Drawn up in a long front before parade, the tallest companies were at each end, grading down to the shortest in the middle. The laws of perspective made the
entire Corps seem of uniform size, and as it passed in review, bayonets at the same angle, legs flashing as one, it looked as if every particle of the whole were well formed and bright. The tall companies were known to be easygoing and unmilitary in barracks, but among the runts it was the opposite. To even pass by their barracks was perilous. This was not only fable but fact.

  The stone barracks were arranged around large quadrangles called Areas. Central Area was the oldest, and on opposite sides of it were South and North Areas, and a small appendix near the gym called New North. They were distinct, like provinces, though you walked through several of them every day. Beyond and unseen were the leafy arrondissements where West Point seemed like a serene river town. In mild September with classes about to begin, it settled into routine. There was autumn sun on the playing fields but the real tone was Wagnerian. We passed by the large houses, all in a long row, of the colonels, heads of academic departments, some of them classmates or friends of my father’s, old brick houses to which I would one day be invited for Sunday lunch.

  My new roommates were from Texas and Michigan, the one wide-jawed and springy-haired, the other handsome and Teutonic. Bob Morgan was the Texan. I am trying to recall if he smoked but it was surely the other roommate who taught me that. Morgan came from a small town, Spur, a dot on the map, and the sun and dust of Texas had paled his eyes.

  We had clean slates. All demerits from the summer had been removed and we were as men paroled. Demerits were a black mark and a kind of indebtedness. The allowance was fifteen a month. Beyond that, there were punishment tours, one hour for each demerit, an inflexible rate of exchange. The hours were spent on the Area, walking back and forth, rifle on shoulder, and with this came a further lesson: at the inspection which took place before the tours began, demerits were frequently given out. For shoes with a scuff mark accidentally made or brass with the least breath of tarnish you could receive more tours than you were there to walk off.

  We had learned the skills of a butler, which were meant to be those of gentry. We wore pajamas and bathrobes, garters for our socks. Fingernails were scrubbed pink and hair cut weekly. We learned to take off a hat without touching the bill, to sleep on trousers carefully folded beneath the mattress to press them, to announce menus, birthdays, and weekend films with their casts. Like butlers we had Sunday off, but only after mandatory chapel.

  There was an exception to this. On Friday evenings in an empty theater, twenty-five or so of us sat on folding chairs in Jewish chapel, including one of the most respected men in my company, a yearling named Sohn. After an hour of services, eternal and unconnected to the harsh life we were leading, we marched back to barracks where everyone was studying or preparing for the next morning’s inspection. I felt uncomfortable about having been gone. Though no one ever said a word, I felt, in a way, untrue. In the end I dropped out and went to chapel with the Corps.

  Of course, you cannot drop out—you may perhaps try—and I became part of neither one group nor the other, but it seemed to me that God was God, as the writings themselves said, and what essentially distinguished me was an ingrained culture, ages deep, which in any case I wanted to put aside.

  Three times a day through three separate doors the entire Corps, like a great religious order, entered the mess hall and stood in whispery silence—there was always muted talk and menace—until the command “Take seats!” With the scrape of chairs the roar of dining began. Meals were a constant terror, and as if to enhance it, near their close the orders of the day were announced, often including grave punishments awarded by the regimental or brigade boards. At the ten-man tables upperclassmen sat at one end, plebes at the other. We ate at attention, eyes fixed on plates, sometimes made part of the conversation like an amusing servant but mostly silent or bawling information. At any moment, after being banged on the table, a cup or glass might come flying. The plebe in charge of pouring looked up quickly, hands ready, crying “Cup, please!” It was a forbidden practice but a favorite. A missed catch was serious, since the result might be broken china and possible demerits for an upperclassman. It was better to be hit in the chest with a cup, or even in the head.

  “Sit up!” was a frequent command. It meant “Stop eating,” the consequence of having failed to know something—passing the wrong dish, or putting cream in someone’s coffee who never took it that way—and might result in no meal at all, though usually at the last permission was given to wolf a few bites. Somewhere, in what was called the Corps Squad area, the athletes, plebes among them, were eating at ease.

  Like a hereditary lord’s, the table commandant’s whim was absolute. Some were kindly figures fond of teasing and schoolboy skits. Others were more serpentlike, and most companies had a table that was Siberia, ruled by a stern disciplinarian, in our case an ugly Greek first classman, dark and humorless. In the table assignments you made your way downward to it and there, among the incorrigibles, even felt a kind of pride.

  It was the year of Stalingrad. One Saturday evening following a football victory when we were eating at ease, a waiter I had come to know, an older man whose feet gave him trouble, showed me a clipping from his wallet. From an English newspaper, fragile and forgotten, it was the notice of his having been awarded, at Passchendaele, the Victoria Cross. Yes, he had gotten it, although more important at the time, he remembered quietly, was what he had gotten with it, a tin of cigarettes. He spoke with a slight accent; he was Belgian. How he had ended up, a civilian with worn heels waiting on tables, I forget. Above our heads, covering an entire wall, was a mural of the great captains of history and beneath, unnoticed, shuffled one of their own.

  ——

  The hour before dawn, everything silent, the air chill with the first bite of fall. The Area empty, the hallways still.

  The room was on the second floor at the head of the stairs, the white name cards on the door. I waited for a moment, listening, and cautiously turned the knob. Within it was dark, the windows barely distinguishable. At right angles, separated by desks, were the beds. Waters, a blue-jawed captain, the battalion commander, slept in one. Mills, a sergeant and squad leader, was in the other. I could not hear them breathing; I could hear nothing, the silence was complete. I was afraid to make a sound.

  “Sir!” I cried and shouting my name, went on, “Reporting as ordered, ten minutes before reveille!” A muffled voice said, “Don’t make so much noise.” It was Mills. His quilt moved higher against the cold and as an afterthought he muttered, “Move your chin in.”

  I stood in the blackness. Nothing, not the tick of a clock or the creaking of a radiator. The minutes had come to a stop. I might stand there forever, invisible and ignored, while they dreamed.

  It was Mills who had ordered me to come, for some misbehavior or other, every morning for a week. He was my squad leader but more than that was famous, known to everyone, as king of the goats.

  The first man in the class was celebrated; the second was not, nor any of the rest. It was only when you got to the end that a name became imperishable again, the last man, the goat, and it was with well-founded pride that a goat regarded himself. Custer had been last in his class, Grant, nearly. The goat was the Achilles of the unstudious. He was champion of the rear. In front of him went all the main body with its outstanding and also mediocre figures; behind him was nothing, oblivion.

  It was a triumph like any other, if you were not meant for the classroom, to end up at the very bottom. Those with worse grades had gone under, those with only slightly better were lost in the crowd. Mills had a bathrobe covered with stars. Each one represented the passing of a turn-out examination, the last, all-or-nothing chance in a failed subject—his robe blazed with them. He had come to this naturally; his father had made a good run at it and been fifth from last in 1915. Mills knew the responsibilities of heritage. He had fended off the attacks of men of lesser distinction who nevertheless wanted to vault to renown. Blond and good-looking, he was easy to admire and far from ungifted. A well-executed retreat was said to b
e among the most difficult of all military operations, at which some commanders were adept. It meant passing close to the abyss, skirting disaster, and surviving by a hair. It was a special realm with its tension and desperate acts, men who would purposely spill ink over their drawing in engineering on the final day when nothing else, no possibility, was left.

  Mills was also a good athlete. He had come from South Carolina and gone to The Citadel for a year. There was a joy of life in him and a kind of tenderness untainted by the merely gentle.

  Nothing more had been said to me. I stood in silence. There was neither present nor future. They were unaware of me but I was somehow important, proof of their power. I began to feel dizzy, as if the floor were tilting, as if I might fall. I had lost track of how long I had been there; time seemed to have stopped when from the distance came a single, clear report: the dawn cannon.

  Immediately, like a demonic machine, the sounds begin. Outside in the void, drums explode. Someone is shouting in the hallway, “Sir, there are five minutes until assembly for reveille! Uniform, dress gray with overcoats! Five minutes, sir!” Music is playing. Feet can be heard overhead and on the stairs. The hives of sleeping men are spilling forth. The drums begin again.

  In the room, not a movement. It is still as a vault. Four minutes until assembly. They have not stirred. The plebes are already standing in place with spaces between them that will be filled by unhurrying upperclassmen. The drums start once more. Three minutes.

  Something is wrong. For some reason they are not going to the formation, but if I am late or, unthinkable, miss it entirely … The clamor continues, bugles, drums, slamming doors. Two minutes now. Should I say something, dare I? At the last moment a bored voice murmurs, “Post, dumbjohn.”

  I hurry down the steps and into the cold. Less than a minute remains. Hastily making square corners I reach my place in ranks just as two figures slip past, overcoats flapping, naked chests beneath: Waters and Mills. Fastening the last buttons, Waters arrives in front of the battalion as the noise dies and final bells ring. He appears instantly resolute and calm, as if he had been waiting patiently all along. In a clear, deep voice he orders, “Report!”