Burning the Days

by James Salter

  I did not exist for Waters, and for Mills, barely. We marched, early one Saturday, down to the river, where the Corps boarded a many-decked white dayliner to sail to New York. At the football game that afternoon, jammed in the halftime crowd, Mills was coming the other way, by chance behind a very beautiful girl, just behind her, with an expression of innocence on his face. As he passed me, he winked.

  His class graduated early, that January of 1943, hastened by the war. There was a tremendous cheer as he walked up to receive his diploma, and for some reason I felt as they did, that he was mine. I thought of him for a long time afterwards, the ease and noble face of the last man in his class.

  ——

  In the safety of that autumn, I foundered. The demerits began again—unpolished shoes, dirty rifle, late for athletics, Blue Book misplaced—there were fifty the first month. One night in the mess hall a spontaneous roar went up when it was announced that at the request of a British field marshal—I think it was Field Marshal Dill—all punishments were revoked. According to custom, a distinguished visitor could do that. The cheers passed over my head, so to speak, but the amnesty did not; I had thirty-five tours erased, seven weeks of walking.

  Still I was swept along as if by a current. I felt lost. There were faces you did not recognize, formations being held no one knew where, the pressure of crammed schedules, the formality of the classrooms, the impersonality of everyone in authority from the distant superintendent to the company tactical officers … it was plain to see why they called it the Factory. It was a male world. In the gym we fought one another, wrestled one another, slammed into one another on darkened fields battling for regimental championships and came raw-knuckled to supper. There were no women except for nurses in the hospital and hardened secretaries, but there was the existence of women always, outside. An upper-classman had his laundry come back with a note pinned to the pajama bottoms, which had gone out with a stiffened area on them. A girl who worked in the laundry had written, The next time you feel like this, call me.

  The hospital was a narrow granite building that stood edge to the road like a town house. There you met other convalescents and formed brief, intense friendships that were overwhelming. I remember a tough, handsome face from the other regiment. We sat in the white-tiled washroom for hours and talked. There is a little tendril now that quivers to make me wonder why he found me so admirable—he was in some sort of nameless trouble—but I was unquestioning, feverish and recovering from the flu. His brothers had been killed in the war, he told me. For a few days he seemed the perfect comrade. Afterwards he disappeared.

  We were inmates. The world was fading. There were cadets who wet the bed and others who wept. There was one who hanged himself. I sometimes thought of boyhood friends with whom I had spent countless hours. I saw that we were separating; I would not find them again.

  In a leather-dark room in the gym we stood with boxing gloves on in facing lines while a bird-legged ex-champion gave instruction. His voice was hoarse and street-accented. It was as if the chalk of the prize ring had given his skin a permanent ashen tone. He moved along the line and stopped in front of me. We had been practicing jabs. “Hit me,” he ordered. I hesitated. “Go ahead,” he commanded. He was standing close.

  I jabbed. He leaned back, fluent and spry. “Again,” he said. I tried harder. “Go on,” he said, “hit me this time.” I stepped forward, missed again, and something solid crashed into the side of my head. I stood with my ear ringing as he explained my error—I had let my right hand slip down as I jabbed. He shuffled like an old pensioner but his fists were like cement.

  In the gloom of the sallyports were lighted boards where grades from classes were posted at the end of the week. Morgan was already failing in mathematics and I was in difficulty in languages. “Don’t worry,” the professor, a major, had said, “it’ll get tougher.” We stayed up after taps studying with a flashlight, exhausted and trying to comprehend italicized phrases in the red algebra book. I was trying to explain them and have Morgan solve problems; he was stubborn, it seemed, in his inability to do it. “Let’s rest for a few minutes.” Kneeling side by side on the cold wooden floor we dozed with only our upper bodies on the bed. Often we studied past midnight in the lavatory.

  ——

  The field marshal’s gift was soon squandered. My name appeared on the gig sheet three or four times a week; I was walking tours and coming back to the room at dusk, dry from the cold and weary, putting my rifle in the rack, taking off my crossbelts and breastplate, and sitting down for a few minutes before washing for supper.

  Punishment had a moral, which was to avoid it, but I could not. There was something alien and rebellious in me. The ease with which others got along was mysterious. I was losing hope.

  In the first captain’s room in the oldest division of barracks there were the names of all those who had once held that honor. I wanted to see it, to linger for a moment and find my bearings, as had happened long ago in the Cadet Store line. Late one Sunday afternoon, telling no one, I went there—nothing forbade it—and stood before the door. I nearly turned away but then, impulsively, knocked.

  The first captain was in his undershirt. He was sitting at his desk writing letters and his roommate was folding laundry. He looked up. “Yes, mister, what is it?” he said.

  Somehow I explained what I had come for. There was a fireplace and on the wall beside it was a long, varnished board with the names. I was told to have a look at it. The list was by year. “Which one is your father?” they asked. I searched for his name and for some reason missed it. My eye went down the column again.

  “Well?”

  It was inexplicable. I couldn’t find it; it wasn’t there. I didn’t know what to say. There had been some mistake, I managed to utter. I felt absolutely empty and ashamed.

  My father, in a letter, was able to explain. His class, in wartime, had graduated early and had come back to West Point after the armistice as student officers. As highest-ranking lieutenant, the result of his academic standing, my father had been student commander. He called this being first captain, and I realized later that I should never have brought it up.

  When he came from Washington to visit we walked on the lawn near the Thayer Hotel in winter sunshine. Bits of the wide river glittered like light. I wanted him to counsel me and, looking moodily at the ground, recited from “Dover Beach.” What was I struggling for and what should I believe? It would be more clear later, he finally said. He had never forsaken West Point. He believed in it and would in fact one day be buried near the old chapel. He was counting on the school to steady me, fix me, as the quivering needle in a compass firms on the pole, a process he did not describe but that in his case had been more or less successful.

  It was a school not of teachers but of lessons, many unspoken, few forgotten, and some I have made an effort to forget. There was the idea that one could be changed, that West Point could make you an aristocrat. In a way it did; it relied on the stoic, outdoor life which is the domain of the aristocrat: sport, hunting, hardship. Ultimately, however, it was a school of less-privileged classes with no true connection to the upper world. You were an aristocrat to sergeants and reserve officers, men who believed in the myth.

  It was a place of bleak emotions, a great orphanage, chill in its appearance, rigid in its demands. There was occasional kindness but little love. The teachers did not love their pupils or the coach the mud-flecked fullback—the word was never spoken, although I often heard its opposite. In its place was comradeship and a standard that seemed as high as anyone could know. It included self-reliance and death if need be. West Point did not make character, it extolled it. It taught one to believe in difficulty, the hard way, and to sleep, as it were, on bare ground. Duty, honor, country. The great virtues were cut into stone above the archways and inscribed in the gold of class rings, not the classic virtues, not virtues at all, in fact, but commands. In life you might know defeat and see things you revered fall into darkness and disgra
ce, but never these.

  Honor was second but in many ways it was the most important. Duty might be shirked, country one took for granted, but honor was indivisible. The word of an officer or cadet could not be doubted. One did not cheat, one never lied. At night a question was asked through the closed door, “All right, sir?” and the answer was the same, “All right.” It meant that whoever was supposed to be in the room was there and no one besides—a single voice answered for all. Absences, attendance, all humdrum was on the same basis and anything written or signed was absolutely true. Even the most minor violation was grave. There was an honor committee; its proceedings were solemn; from its judgment there was no appeal. The committee had no actual disciplinary power. It was so august that anyone convicted—and there were no degrees of guilt, only thumbs up or down—was expected to resign. Almost always they did. Inadvertence could sometimes excuse an honor violation, but not much else. Word traveled swiftly—someone had been brought up on honor. A few days later there was an empty bed.

  ——

  At Christmas that year, apart from the few upperclassmen who for one reason or another had chosen not to take leave, we were alone. Morgan was failing and in the end was turned out. He was by then resigned to it. He had wanted to play football, as he had in the districts of West Texas with their rickety grandstands, but never had the chance; math had barred the way. I knew his plain but honest dreams, his muscular torso, his girlfriend’s temperament and name (it was Nona).

  He did not pass the reentrance exam. He joined the paratroops with the uncertain prestige of having failed at West Point, and eventually earned a battlefield commission. I received occasional letters written in pencil and with words like “bucko” in them. He was wounded in Italy and deserted the hospital to rejoin his unit, which by then was fighting in France. He was in reconnaissance, which took heavy casualties, and one day a letter came—it was the first I ever received from Paris; he was there on leave in the fall of 1944 for four days, he had the most beautiful girl in the entire city, she had a fur coat that cost ten thousand dollars. It was, I think, the last letter. I lost track of him. I was engaged in urgent things myself. The wires went dead.

  In the winter there were parades within the barracks area rather than on the Plain—the band, the slap of hands on rifles, the glint of steel, the first companies sailing past. One of the earliest, in the rain, was for the graduation of the January class. They were walking along the stoops afterwards in the brilliance of their army uniforms, Roberts, Jarrell, Mills, all of them. The wooden packing boxes stenciled with their names and new rank were waiting to be shipped off, the sinks strewn with things they had no use for, that in the space of a single day had lost their value, cadet things they had not given away or sold, textbooks, papers. The next morning they, the boxes, everything was gone. It was like a divorced household; with them somehow went a sense of legitimacy and order. The new first class seemed unfledged—it would always exist in the shadow of the one gone on.

  ——

  One afternoon near the end of winter we ordered class rings. The ring was a potent object, an insignia and reward. Heavy and gold, it was worn on the third finger of the left hand, the wedding finger, with the class crest inwards until graduation. After, it was turned around so the academy crest would be closest to the heart. Engraved within was one’s name and “United States Army.” I had decided I wanted something more, perhaps not the Non serviam of Lucifer, but a coda. Someone, I knew, somewhere would take this ring from my lifeless finger and within find the words which would sanctify me. The line moved steadily forward, the salesman filling out order blanks and explaining the merits of various stones. Could I have something else engraved in my ring, I asked? What did I mean, something else? I wasn’t sure; I hadn’t decided, and I had the feeling I was taking up too much time. Finally he wrote “To follow” in the space for what was to be engraved.

  Unknown to me, all this was overheard. That evening in the mess hall before “Take seats,” a cadet captain was ferreting his way between the tables, here and there whispering a question. I had never seen him before. He was looking for me. I saw him come around the table and the next moment he stood beside me. Was I the one who didn’t want “United States Army” in his ring, he asked in a low voice? I didn’t have a chance to reply before he continued icily, “If you don’t think the U.S. Army is good enough for you, did you ever stop to think that you might not be good enough for the U.S. Army?” On the other side of me another face had appeared. They were converging from far off. “Did you ever make a statement that you would resign just before graduation?” someone said. It was true that I had. “Only facetiously, sir.” I could feel the sweat on my forehead. “Did you ever say you came here only for the education?” “No, sir!”

  Their voices were scornful. They wanted to get a look at me, they said, they wanted to remember my face, “Mister, the Corps will see to it that you earn your ring.” It was useless to try to explain. Who informed them, I never knew. Later I realized it had been a classmate, of course. The worst part was that it all took place in front of my own company. I was confirmed as a rebel, a misfit.

  Incidents form you, events that are unexpected, unseen trials. I defied this school. I took its punishment and its hatred. I dreamed of telling the story, of making that my triumph. There was a legendary book in the library said to have been written by a cadet, to contain damning description, and to have been suppressed, all copies except one destroyed. It was called The Tin Soldier and was not in the card file, nor did anyone I asked admit to having heard of it. It was a kind of literary mirage, though the title seemed real.

  If there was no such book, then I would write it. I thought of its power all that spring during endless hours of walking back and forth on the Area at shoulder arms. Pitiless and spare, it would be published in secret and read by all. Apart from that, I was indifferent and tried to get by doing as little as possible since whatever I did would not be enough.

  At the same time, kindled in me was another urge, the urge to manhood. I did not recognize it as such because I had rejected its form. Try to be one of us, they had said, and I had not been able to. It was this that was haunting me, though I would not admit it. I struggled against everything, it now seems clear, because I wanted to belong.

  Then in sunlight the music floated over us and when it ended—the inachievable last parade as plebes—we turned and in a soaring moment, having forgotten everything, shook hands with the tormentors. They came along the ranks at ease, seeking us out, and with self-loathing I found myself shaking hands with men I had sworn not to.

  So the year ended. I have returned to it many times since. The river is smooth and ice clings to its banks. The trees are bare. Through the open window from the far shore comes the sound of a train, the faint, distinct clicking of wheels on the rail joints, the Albany or Montreal train with its lighted cars and white tablecloths, the blur of luxury from which we are ever barred.

  At night the barracks, seen from the Plain, look like a city. All of us are within, unseen, studying determinants, general orders, law. I had walked the pavement of the interior quadrangles interminably, burning with anger against what I was required to be. In the darkness the uniform flags hung limply. In a few minutes it would be taps, then quickly the next day. Ten minutes to formation. What are we wearing, I ask, where are we going? Bells begin to ring. People are vanishing. The room, the hallways, are empty. Dressing, I run down the stairs.

  II

  That summer, after leave, we went into the field and to a camp by a lake, wooden barracks, firing ranges, and maneuver grounds of all kinds. Yearling summer. In the new and sunny freedom, weedy friendships grew. We fired machine guns and learned to roll cigarettes by hand. In off-hours I lay on my bed, reading. I knew lines of Powys’s Love and Death by heart and reserved them for a slim, witty girl who came up from New York on several weekends. She was the daughter of a famous newspaperman. We danced, swam, and went for walks in permitted areas, where the se
nsuous phrases fell to the ground, useless against her. I was disappointed. The words had been written by someone else but I had assumed them, they were my own. I was posing as part of a doomed generation. They shall not grow old as we who are left grow old … She did not take it seriously. “Kiss the back of your letters, will you?” I asked her. Such things were noticed by the mail orderly.

  There is a final week of maneuvers before we return to the post, of digging until exhausted and then being told abruptly that we are moving to different positions; and deeper, they say, dig deeper. There is the new, energetic company commander with wens on his face who seems to like me and for whom, exhilarated, I would do anything. His affection for me was probably imagined, but mine for him was not. He was someone for whom I had waited impatiently, intelligent, patrician, and governed by a sense of duty—this became a significant word, something valuable, like a dense metal buried in the earth that could guide one’s actions. There were things that must be done; there were faces that would be turned towards yours and rely on you.

  That year we studied Napoleon and obscure campaigns around Lake Garda. There were arrows of red and blue printed on the map but little in the way of thrilling detail, the distant ranks at Eylau, the fires, the snow, the wan-faced emperor wearing sable, the obscure horizon and arms reaching out. We studied movement and numbers. We studied the Civil War and sometimes in the mess hall it was reenacted, as on the birthday of Robert E. Lee, with the plebes of one table singing “Dixie” and others a few feet away “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” louder and louder, veins swelling in their necks and the table commandants urging them on, red with fury. We analyzed the battles of the First World War and what was accurately known of the Second. We studied leadership, in part from German texts, given to us not so much to know the enemy but because of their quality, with nothing in them of politics or race.