by Irwin Shaw
Mincey shook his head. “I told that ham to cut out all profanity in this theatre of operations,” Mincey said. “And he swore he would. Actors!” He moaned. “Tell the Chaplain I absolutely agree and the offending individuals will be disciplined.”
“That’s all for now, Captain,” Michael said.
Mincey sighed and put his medicine in his pocket: Michael started out of the room.
“Wait a minute, Whitacre.” Mincey said.
Michael turned around. Mincey regarded him sourly, his asthma-oppressed eyes and nose red and watery. “For Christ’s sake, Whitacre,” Mincey said, “you look awful.”
Michael looked down without surprise at his rumpled, over-large blouse and his baggy trousers. “Yes, Captain,” Michael said.
“I don’t give a damn for myself,” Mincey said. “For all of me you could come in here in blackface and a grass skirt. But when officers come in from other outfits, they get a bad impression.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Michael.
“An outfit like this,” Mincey said, “has to look more military than the paratroopers. We have to shine. We have to glisten. You look like a KP in the Bulgarian Army.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Michael.
“Can’t you get yourself another blouse?”
“I’ve asked for one for two months, now,” Michael said. “The Supply Sergeant won’t talk to me any more.”
“At least,” Mincey said, “polish your buttons. That’s not much to ask, is it?”
“No, Sir,” said Michael.
“How do we know,” Mincey said, “General Lee won’t show up here some day?”
“Yes, Sir,” said Michael.
“Also,” Mincey said, “you always have too many papers on your desk. It gives a bad impression. Put them in the drawers. Only have one paper on your desk at any one time.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“One more thing,” Mincey said damply. “I wonder if you have some cash on you. I got caught with the check at Les Ambassadeurs last night, and I don’t collect my per diem till Monday.”
“Will a pound do?”
“That all you got?”
“Yes, Sir,” said Michael.
“O.K.” Mincey took the pound. “Thanks. I’m glad you’re with us, Whitacre. This office was a mess before you came. If you’d only look more like a soldier.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Michael.
“Send in Sergeant Moscowitz,” Mincey said. “That son of a bitch is loaded with dough.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Michael. He went into the other office and sent Sergeant Moscowitz in to see the Captain.
That was how the days passed in London, in the winter of 1944.
“Oh, my offense is rank,” the King said, when Polonius had gone, “it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,—
A brother’s murder!”
In the little shadow boxes on each side of the stage, put there for that purpose, the sign “Air Raid Alert” was flashed, and a moment later came the sound of sirens, and immediately after, in the distance, toward the coast, the rumble of gunfire.
“Pray can I not,” the King went on.
Though inclination be as sharp as will
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent …”
The sound of gunfire came rapidly nearer as the planes swept across the suburbs. Michael looked around him. It was an opening night, and a fashionable one, with a new Hamlet, and the audience was decked out in its wartime best. There were many elderly ladies who looked as though they had seen every opening of Hamlet since Sir Henry Irving. In the rich glow from the stage there was an answering glow from the audience of white piled hair and black net. The old ladies, and everyone else, sat quiet and motionless as the King strode, torn and troubled, back and forth across the dark room at Elsinore.
“Forgive me my foul murder?” the King was saying loudly. “That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,—
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.”
It was the King’s big scene and he obviously had worked very hard on it. He had the stage all to himself and a long, eloquent soliloquy to get his teeth into. He was doing very well, too, disturbed, intelligent, cursed, with Hamlet in the wings making up his mind whether to stab him or not.
The sound of guns marched across London toward the theatre, and there was the uneven roar of the German engines approaching over the gilt dome. Louder and louder spoke the King, speaking across the three hundred years of English rhetoric, challenging the bombs, the engines, the guns. No one in the audience moved. They listened, as intent and curious as though they had been sitting at the Globe on the afternoon of the first performance of Mr. Shakespeare’s new tragedy.
“In the corrupted currents of this world,” the King shouted, “offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice;
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law; But ‘tis not so above;
There is no shuffling,—”
A battery of guns opened up just behind the back wall of the theatre, and there was a double explosion of bombs not far off. The theatre shivered gently. “… there the action lies in his true nature,” said the King loudly, not forgetting any of his business, moving his hands with tragic grace just as the director had instructed him, speaking slowly, trying to space his words between the staccato explosions of the guns.
“… and we ourselves,” the King said, in a momentary lull while the men outside were reloading, “Even to the teeth and forehead …” Then rocket guns opened up outside in their horrible, whistling speech that always sounded like approaching bombs, and the King paced silently back and forth, waiting till the next lull. The howling and thunder diminished for a moment to a savage grumbling. “What then?” the King said hastily, “what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?”
Then he was overwhelmed once more and the theatre shook and trembled in the whirling chorus of the guns.
Poor man, Michael thought, remembering all the opening nights he had ever been through, poor man, his big moment, after all these years. How he must hate the Germans!
“… O wretched state!” swam dimly out of the trembling and crashing. “O bosom black as death.”
The planes stuttered on overhead. The battery behind the theatre sent a last revengeful salvo curling into the noisy sky. The rumble of guns was taken up, farther away, by the batteries near Hampstead. Against their diminishing background, like military drums being played at a general’s funeral on another street, the King went on, slow, composed, royal as only an actor can be royal, “O limed soul, that struggling to be free
“Art more engaged! Help, angels!” he said in the blessed quiet, “make assay
Bow, stubborn knees, and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!
All may be well.”
He knelt at the altar and Hamlet appeared, graceful and dark in his long black tights. Michael looked around him. Every face was calmly and interestedly watching the stage; the old ladies and the uniforms did not stir.
I love you, Michael wanted to say, I love you all. You are the best and strongest and most foolish people on earth and I will gladly lay down my life for you.
He felt the tears, complex and dubious, sliding down his cheeks as he turned to watch Hamlet, torn by doubt, put up his sword rather than take his uncle at his prayers.
Far off a single gun spoke into the subsiding sky. Probably, thought Michael, it is one of the women’s batteries, coming, like women, a little late for the raid, but showing their intentions are of the best.
London was burning in a bright circlet of fires when Michael left the theatre and started walking toward the Park. The sky flickered and here and there an orange glow was reflected off the clouds. Hamlet was dead by now. “Now cracks a noble heart,” Horatio had said. “Good night, sweet prince. And flights of ang
els sing thee to thy rest.” Horatio had also said his final words on carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts: of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, while the last Germans were crashing over Dover, and the last Englishmen were burning in their homes as the curtain slowly dropped and the ushers ran up the aisles with flowers for Ophelia and the rest of the cast.
In Piccadilly, the whores strolled by in battalions, flashing electric torches on passing faces, giggling harshly, calling, “Hey, Yank, two pounds, Yank.”
Michael walked slowly through the shuffling crowds of whores and MP’s and soldiers, thinking of Hamlet saying of Fortinbras and his men, “Witness this army, of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event;
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger there,
Even for an egg-shell.”
What mouths we make at the invisible event, Michael thought, grinning to himself, staring through the darkness at the soldiers bargaining with the whores, what regretful, doubtful mouths! We expose all that is mortal and unsure, and for more than an eggshell, but how differently from Fortinbras and his twenty thousand offstage men at arms! Ah, probably Shakespeare was laying it on. Probably no army, not even that of good old Fortinbras, returned from the Polack wars, ever was quite as dashing and wholehearted as the dramatist made out. It supplied a good speech and conveniently fitted Hamlet’s delicate situation, and Shakespeare had put it in, although he must have known he was lying. We never hear what a Private First Class in Fortinbras’ infantry thought about his tender and delicate prince, and the divine ambition that puff’d him. That would make an interesting scene, too.… Twenty thousand men, that for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, was it? There were graves waiting not so far off for more than twenty thousand of the men around him, Michael thought, and maybe for himself, too, but perhaps in the three hundred years the fantasy and the trick had lost some of their power. And yet we go, we go. Not in the blank verse, noble certainty so admired by the man in the black tights, but we go. In a kind of limping, painful prose, in legal language too dense for ordinary use or understanding, a judgment against us, more likely than not, by a civil court that is not quite our enemy and not quite our friend, a writ handed down by a nearly honest judge, backed by the decision of a jury of not-quite-our peers, sitting on a case that is not exactly within their jurisdiction. “Go,” they say, “go die a little. We have our reasons.” And not quite trusting them and not quite doubting them, we go. “Go,” they say, “go die a little. Things will not be better when you finish, but perhaps they will not be much worse.” Where is the Fortinbras, to toss a plume and strike a noble pose, and put the cause into good round language for us? N’existe pas, as the French put it. Out of stock. Out of stock in America, out of stock in England, quiet in France, too cunning in Russia. Fortinbras had vanished from the earth. Churchill made a good try of it, but when you finally sounded him there was a hollow and old-fashioned ring to him like a bugle blowing for a war three years ago. The mouth we make at the invisible event today is twisted into a skeptical grin. This is the war of the sour mouth, Michael thought, and yet there will be enough of us dead in it to please any bloodthirsty paying customer at the Globe in the early 1600s.
Michael walked slowly alongside the Park, thinking of the swans, settling down now on the Serpentine, and the orators who would be out again on Sunday, and the gun crews brewing tea and relaxing now that the planes had fled England. He remembered what an Irish Captain on leave in London, from a Dover battery which had knocked down forty planes, had said of the London anti-aircraft outfits. “They never hit anybody,” he said in a contemptuous soft burr. “It’s a wonder London isn’t completely destroyed. They’re so busy planting rhododendrons around the emplacements and shining the barrels so they’ll look pretty when Miss Churchill happens to pass by, that it’s bugger-all gunnery.”
The moon was coming up now, over the old trees and the scarred buildings, and there was a tinkle of glass where some soldiers and their girls were walking over a window that had been blown out in the raid.
“Bugger-all gunnery,” Michael said softly to himself, turning into the Dorchester, past the huge doorman with the decorations from the last war on his uniform. “Bugger-all gunnery,” Michael repeated, delighted with the phrase.
There was dance music swinging into the lobby, and the old ladies and their nephews solemnly drinking tea, and pretty girls floating through on the way to the American bar on the arms of American Air Forces officers, and Michael had the feeling, looking at the scene, that he had read all about this before, about the last war, that the characters, the setting, the action, were exactly the same, the costumes so little different that the eye hardly noticed it. By a trick of time, he thought, we become the heroes in our youthful romances, but always too late to appear romantic in them.
He walked upstairs to the large room where the party was still in progress and where Louise had said she’d be waiting for him.
“Look,” said a tall, dark-haired girl near the door, “a Private.” She turned to a Colonel next to her. “I told you there was one in London.” She turned back to Michael. “Will you come to dinner next Tuesday night?” she asked. “We’ll lionize you. Backbone of the Army.”
Michael grinned at her. The Colonel next to her did not seem pleased with Michael. “Come, my dear.” He took the girl firmly by the arm. “I’ll give you a lemon if you come,” the girl said over her shoulder, receding in silk undulations with the Colonel. “A real whole lemon.”
Michael looked around the room. Six Generals, he noticed, and felt very uncomfortable. He had never met a General before. He looked uneasily down at his ill-fitting blouse and the not-quite polished buttons. He would not have been surprised if one of the Generals had come over to him and taken his name, rank, and serial number for not having his buttons polished properly.
He did not see Louise for the moment, and he felt shy at going up to the bar, among the important-looking strangers at the other end of the room, and asking for a drink. When he had passed his sixteenth birthday he had felt that he was over being shy for the rest of his life. After that he had felt at home everywhere, had spoken his mind freely, felt that he was acceptable enough, if no more, to get by in any company. But ever since he had joined the Army, a later-day shyness, more powerful and paralyzing than anything he had known as a boy, had developed within him, shyness with officers, with men who had been in combat, among women with whom otherwise he would have felt perfectly at ease.
He stood hesitantly a little to one side of the door, staring at the Generals. He did not like their faces. They looked too much like the faces of businessmen, smalltown merchants, factory owners, growing a little fat and overcomfortable, with an eye out for a new sales campaign. The German Generals have better faces, he thought. Not better, abstractly, he thought, but better for Generals. Harder, crueler, more determined. A General should have one of two faces, he thought. Either he should look like a heavyweight prizefighter, staring out coldly with dumb animal courage at the world, through battered, quick slits of eyes, or he should look like a haunted man out of a novel by Dostoievski, malevolent, almost mad, with a face marked by evil raptures and visions of death. Our Generals, he thought, look as though they might sell you a building lot or a vacuum cleaner, they never look as though they could lead you up to the walls of a fortress. Fortinbras, Fortinbras, did you never migrate from Europe?
“What’re you thinking about?” Louise asked.
He turned. She was standing at his side. “The faces of our Generals,” he said. “I don’t like them.”
“The trouble with you is,” Louise said, “you have the enlisted man’s psychology.”
“How right you are.” He stared at Louise. She was wearing a gray plaid suit with a black blouse. Her red hair, bright and severe over the sm
all, elegant body, shone among the uniforms. He never could decide whether he loved Louise or was annoyed with her. She had a husband some place in the Pacific of whom she rarely spoke, and she did some sort of semi-secret job for the OWI, and she seemed to know every bigwig in the British Isles. She had a deft, tricky way with men, and was always being invited to weekends at famous country houses where garrulous military men of high rank seemed to spill a great many dangerous secrets to her. Michael was sure, for example, that she knew when D Day was going to come, and which targets in Germany were to be bombed for the next month, and when Roosevelt would meet Stalin and Churchill again. She was well over thirty, although she looked younger, and before the war had lived modestly in St. Louis, where her husband had taught at a college. After the war, Michael was certain, she would run for the Senate or be appointed Ambassadress to somewhere, and when he thought of it, he pitied the husband, mired on Bougainville or New Caledonia, dreaming of going back to his modest home and quiet wife in St. Louis.
“Why,” Michael asked, smiling soberly at her, conscious that two or three high-ranking officers were watching him stonily as he talked to Louise, “why do you bother with me?”
“I want to keep in touch with the spirit of the troops,” Louise said. “The Common Soldier and How He Grew. I may write an article for the Ladies’ Home Journal on the subject.”
“Who’s paying for this party?” Michael asked.
“The OWI,” Louise said, holding his arm possessively. “Better relations with the Armed Forces and our noble Allies, the British.”
“That’s where my taxes go,” Michael said. “Scotch for the Generals.”
“The poor dears,” Louise said. “Don’t begrudge it to them. Their soft days are almost over.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Michael said. “I can’t breath.”
“Don’t you want a drink?”
“No. What would the OWI say?”
“One thing I can’t stand about enlisted men,” Louise said, “is their air of injured moral superiority.”