by Earle Looker
“Non?” Gaspard said with sarcasm. “So, you became a commandant by saying things could not be done? Listen to me. Before this affair is known at my headquarters or yours, I shall use my good reputation to get the necessary leave orders for us both. My reputation, I say.” He flipped a couple of his medals with his forefinger. “I must work fast. Already the rumor, the tale of the Oberst, is seeping like gas to the rear. We must get back quickly enough to beat the story to headquarters.” He caught David’s arm, “Allons, depechons nous!”
Donovan was gingerly running down the slick duckboards toward them. Gaspard shrugged, “Do not let this fellow with the face of a horse detain us. You can best make him dumb by telling him had he not been incompetent and asleep I should never have crossed over the parapet.”
David turned away from Gaspard and went to meet his senior captain. Donovan seemed close to the point of wringing his hands. “What shall I do, Major?”
“You’ll probably be called on to report,” David said, “independently of me. Give all the details, Donovan, everything. Be clear I ordered the machineguns ready and put the platoon out between the lines. Cover it all by reporting I took command the moment the Colonel went over the parapet. No, just before.”
Gaspard had joined them, and spat his disgust. Donovan showed expressively his relief and almost immediately a definite solicitude.
“If you really want to help me,” David said, “do this. When the regiment gets on your neck, ask for an officer to come up to investigate. Say you can’t explain except on the ground. Go back to meet him. Stand and talk. Go as far as you like with the truth but delay him as much as you can. String it out as long as possible. Ask him, to protect yourself, to check details with the men of the platoon …”
“Why?” Donovan began.
“Never mind the reason. Well, here it is. I want to gain time to decide what I’m going to do myself.”
“Yes sir. I’ll be glad to.”
David felt a sudden warmth and gratitude toward Donovan.
“Come! Come!” Gaspard cried with urgency.
2
Once more they traversed the communication trench. Where the path was straight and dry, they ran. There was neither breath nor opportunity for talk. But finally when they came out upon the sodden, leaf covered road leading to David’s command post, Gaspard said, “Main plan having been decided … we must … define details.”
“Haven’t decided a damn thing,” David said.
“We are on our way.”
There was Gaspard’s finality again. David fought back the urge to curse him and immediately and uncomfortably felt himself to be under Gaspard’s command. That was Gaspard. While men about him were groping for thought, trying to formulate the question for a decision, Gaspard had already answered it and had started to move. His command went with him as if it were a part of his body. And once action had started, no argument was possible. He became deaf, as he was now to David’s protests.
“Your canteen,” Gaspard said, “your quartermaster stores, are down the hill perhaps half a kilometer from your command post, yes? You will pack musette-bag, proceed to that canteen. I have my sidecar near your post, on the road below. But I do not wait for you. I go at once to my general. I get my orders, arrange with him for yours.”
“But he’s got nothing to do with mine.”
“So? While I sit with him, he talks to your general on the field phone, yes? He arranges your orders, one general to the other. I pass your division headquarters on my way back, pick up your orders, yes? I shall perfect my argument now as I rush to him. You go to that canteen. You enter. There you buy a Silver Eagle – non, you buy two Silver Eagles for the shoulders of a colonel in your army.”
“Hey, wait a minute, Gaspard. I’m not …”
“Alors! You have entered the canteen. You say to the quartermaster: ‘Two Silver Eagles, the insignia of a colonel. Hurry. I have heard a promotion. I cannot tell you the name. My friend does not yet know himself. I wish to take these Eagles to him, to be with him when he receives his orders to promotion. Hurry. Hurry!’ It is an explanation good enough. To touch that quartermaster’s heart. A little gift, a little surprise, yes? While you do this, I manage the affair of the leave orders. Trust me. I shall get them. Now you leave that canteen hurriedly, the moment you have the Eagles in your hand. You go along the road – south. I meet you before you go six-eight hundred meters.”
They had come to the doorway of the hut where Gaspard had demanded the poignards.
“Carry out the details exactly, mon vieux, “Gaspard said, “for all the future depends upon it,” and left at a fast clip.
3
“What th’hell?” David’s fat Sergeant asked again. Perhaps all this time he had not moved away from the door.
“Get Mac,” David ordered.
“Coming, sir, coming,” the voice of the orderly answered within the hut.
“Stand fast,” David said. “Don’t waste time coming to me. Get my musette-bag. Shaving kit’s on the window sill unless you’ve moved it. Pack. Clean shirt if I’ve got one. And don’t forget my hair brush.”
“Pajamas an’ dressin’ gown an’ slippahs?” David heard in a sarcastic undertone within the hut.
“Louse!” David shouted. “Mac, for that crack you’ll put in that clean suit of issue underwear you stole from me the night of the air raid.”
“Thank you, Sir, but you see,” the voice complained with that air of complicated helplessness that was one of their bonds of understanding, “I guess … If you’re in such a … hurry won’t it be quicker if I brough’ ‘em along on me? Now, Sir, I can’t get ‘em off without taking my breeches off. That ain’t so quick, I’ve got to unwind my putts first, and even at that I’ll have to begin by takin’ off me shoes an’ Gawd knows I’ve tied one of them laces, which was broke, so tight I’d have to cut it and then …”
David laughed in spite of his irritation. He had never been sorry he had taken this skinny, rat-faced Mac on as orderly. The fool somehow brightened life. “Why, you damned …” David began but switched to an order: “Pack quickly. Whatever you can lay your hands on of mine without undressing yourself.”
He said to the Sergeant: “Move out the door. I’m coming in. Now grab your notebook. Sit down. I’m dictating a field order. To Captain Cushing …”
The Sergeant coughed apologetically, “Beggin’ your pardon, Major, but the Captain’s been killed.”
He had not forgotten, David reflected, but he had willed Alan Cushing’s death out of his mind. He had learned to do that to keep from turning craven with the thought of casualties. It was a practice more necessary for him than for commanders without strong sympathies for their men. Friends, especially, must thus be forgotten.
The enormity of the habit appalled him now. He felt, in striking his closest friend out of his mind, that he had killed him for a second time. But now the fighting was done, and without impairment of any quality of leadership he could think of Alan as he had last seen him alive. Smiling gravely to his men with that slight twist of the lips as if he saw comment to make but restrained himself. But Alan’s grin and his chuckle could solve more problems than twice Donovan’s discipline.
Alan had been killed. Dead. But death had changed its whole aspect within the last hour. David felt as though he was receiving the shock of Alan’s death, now, for the first time. Alan dead! A red mist obscured his Sergeant from David. Alan gone! David felt his heart drop in sorrow, as sheer down as when he had been wounded himself, though now it beat monotonously on instead of trying to leap from his body. His head felt drained, an emptiness never again to be filled with Alan’s comment upon action as they watched it together, of advice gently given as if it were nothing but humorous imagination of results, of suggestions made with understanding of David’s mood, sometimes tentatively, sometimes with sharp forthrightness like a jerk of the belt strap
from behind. David could almost hear Alan’s voice again, he wished never to forget. Their Virginia-accented tones had often been mistaken one for the other.
Alan gone! Smashed in the head, from behind, in a muddy ditch, by a bullet fired at random. David had been standing close. One blood spot on the braid of his tunic, from Alan’s wound, had seemed to weigh more than his whole arm in its sleeve. It was evidence of his own smallness, David thought, that he felt a kind of exasperation now over Alan’s death that seemed forever to take away whatever credit there may have been for forgetfulness of self when (Was it a month or a year ago?) he had once brought Alan safely over the parapet. To smart now, because death did get him after all.
David remembered Alan had taken a man’s part even before the fighting. He recalled how they had talked, at once, the same language. He and Alan had gone to school and then university together in Charlottesville. Alan had been a newsman in Paris before the war. David had left his own newspaper job at home to volunteer. He wondered why he had often compared himself to Alan. At the beginning, their experience had been much alike, from Alan’s own description.
But they both seemed to have drifted, like so many before them, from reporting on school athletics to the casual offer of the use of a battered typewriter in the office of the local newspaper, to the editorial sufferance shown by a pay envelope whatever the contents, to gopher work for an older reporter, to gradual acceptance as a member of the staff. Alan was a little bit older, David recalled, yet it was doubtless his early decision to make a career of it had helped move him up so fast. David then recalled how when the war had come, his own idea was that his newspaper work seemed only a step toward other greater opportunities.
Yet, Alan had told such stories of the pattern of life in Paris, beautiful as well as ugly, absorbing to David in its old design as well as its new gloss, of news from many angles, of interviews with the great, the near-great, the fakir and the mountebank, and of how little they seemed to differ, that David had half decided, if any such conclusion could be reached during the fighting, to go back to that little paper in Charlottesville, to work his way into the formula, the mechanics, the working technique and then to fight his way up to the larger newspaper, the greater cities – and glory.
David had felt a touch of envy when he had read official correspondence offering Alan what seemed to be a second opportunity for staff safety for the use of his mind in propaganda. David remembered the terse phrasing of Alan’s return endorsement; “Respectfully declined. I thought before enlistment. I hope to do my fighting during it. I hope to think again afterwards.” And a war correspondent visiting David’s lines east of Thiaucourt, had told him how Alan’s flair for clear characterization, together with his ability to blend the news of the moment with relevant events of the past, promised historical studies with a fresh sort of exciting human vitality. There had been moments when David had found himself looking upon Alan as a board carrier would look upon an architect.
Alan – dead! David wondered how he could describe Alan’s death, how he could soften its futility, how he could give the moment some dignity and nobility when, as he knew he must, he faced his girl in Paris, Anne Janney, whose letters to Alan had been found in his kit, letters in which there had been tones so vibrant, even to David, they were as clear and lingering as the notes of a bugle at dusk.
David said sharply to his Sergeant, “You don’t have to remind me Captain Cushing’s been killed. I was thinking of him. It was a slip of the tongue. Now start that order again. To Captain Donovan, and so forth. One: pursuant to paragraph – blank – the order’ll come in my absence – you are assigned temporary command Third Battalion, and so forth. Two: assign temporary command your company to your senior lieutenant. Three: proceed without delay to these headquarters to assume command.”
“Oh m’god!” the Sergeant breathed, obviously thinking of Donovan’s dour strictness.
“I’m leaving at once,” David said. “Look here. I’ll just sign this blank sheet. You type the order over my name.” That was an indication of trust, David knew, which did not escape the Sergeant.
“Where’ll you be, Major, in case?”
“In Paris. Won’t know just where, the street address, until I get there.” The moment he had spoken, David cursed himself. He knew Paris was a word synonymous, in the minds of both Sergeant and orderly, with but two others. He had sounded so completely an intention. In a short time his words, garbled, would be running from one company to the next, with comment: “And him so … quick when a man gets caught with some booze and a woman …” Any explanation now would only point the suspicion. He felt his face flush.
The Sergeant began to laugh. He shook all over with glee. The spindling chair, salvaged from no one knew where, disintegrated beneath his bulk. “Ho! Ho! Haw! Haw!” he cried and went down with splinters of chair about his heaving shoulders. Mac suddenly appeared with crazier laughter and the requested musette bag. David snatched it out of his hand and left them shouting in the hut.
David felt the silver eagles in his pocket, assuring himself he had adequately done Gaspard’s bidding at the canteen. He questioned further the reasons for their purchase. Other details were already of equally little consequence. He ceased to trouble himself as to Gaspard’s confidence in the matter of the leave orders or whether, after all, it might be wiser to report himself under arrest to his regimental commander. It was enough that he was on the road to Paris, marching south, to the best of new ideas.
Yet, presently it seemed necessary to halt to steady himself. He looked down the road with a veteran’s focus, clocking the military features: a little rise at eleven o’clock was about four hundred yards away; the dip behind it looked likely for concealment; a peninsula of light woods at one, six hundred, jutted into a long uncultivated field from twelve to two. He grinned to himself; he would never study a landscape that way again. He looked once more. A vast change seemed to have come about. He saw a mellowness of light and depth to shadow, a vividness even to this November gray and brown that he had never noticed to really enjoy, even long ago among the hills of Albemarle. Far away, screened behind the stand of oak to his right, a sentry sung out a challenge. David was sure of that a few hours ago. Had he been standing in this peaceful place, he would never have heard the voice. He felt all his perceptions sharpen. He felt that very recently they had received a new edge like a tempering.
CHAPTER 5
Train to Gare de l’Est
“Plunge boldly into the thick of life,
and seize it where you will,
it is always interesting.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
La Gare de l’Est, Paris, ca. 1918
David had rested long enough to feel the turning of the earth give him an orientation among these rises and ravines: a mile to his left, parallel to his arm had he held it straight before him, lay the lines; away to his right rose the Fôret de Boult stretching south-easterly, the tip of the Argonne; thus as he faced, the great forest through which he had fought. Yet he was surprised he knew Paris was off to the south-west, perhaps a hundred and fifty miles, with Rheims halfway between and Château Thierry halfway again. Though he saw himself as a dot upon a map, more singular a unit than ever, his shadow on the road seemed darker and longer as if he had gained in stature and substance. All this seemed a part of his new recognition of reality.
Gaspard almost ran David down in a cloud of oily motorcycle smoke and profanity. His own musette-bag was strapped across his shoulder. “Les Aigles?” he cried. “You have the Eagles?”
“Yes, but …”
“And I have the orders!”
“Got them? How?”
“Too long a story now, mon vieux.” Gaspard wagged his beard. “Enough that I have them. I will explain. But later. Not here. Not now. This is a main artillery road to headquarters. We must get away from it as quickly as possible. Standing here, we may be seen.”
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“But with the orders?”
“Orders can be revoked,” Gaspard explained with impatience. “They will be, assuredly, when the report comes in from our trenches. We must get off this road, out of this area. Mount! Mount! Vite!”
“I’m not coming with you,” David said. “Something I should have done …”
“Nothing you could have forgotten could be of the slightest importance!” Gaspard cried furiously.
“I should see that Alan’s grave has a decent marker and have the ground about it cleared of the junk all over it.”
“Imbecile!” Gaspard cried. “He was mon ami also, but that is no reason for delaying us!”
Suddenly David felt a physical sensation as if he had been touched deep within.
Instead of the emptiness he had expected at reflection upon the death of so intimate a friend, David now felt the reverse, as if his mind had been opened and expanded to receive a new part. It was like nothing that had ever happened to him before. It did not even seem farfetched to think of his mind as soil into which a plant had been gently placed, earth that lay disturbed now, but which would eventually nourish new growth. Almost at once, what would be his eventual comments to Anne in Paris were on his mind. Whole phrases of it came to him with a facility he had never known, stood out full formed: ‘There’s a compensation in such a wound as Alan’s. The shock made him feel his hurt to be small. He spoke very faintly of the unexpected lack of pain. He spoke your name, distinctly. Twice. He smiled. He was going then. The best surgeon in the world couldn’t have done anything for him. It was a smile that told a lot … Can I explain to you that there’s an ecstasy in death, which is by no means experienced by everyone? It’s graciously given to only a few. For reasons, well, we can’t know. But I tell you it’s an instant when the soul seems to stand way up on a great height. I’m sure it can look back to happiness in life … and forward to a future … a future that can be so clearly seen that it … warrants assurance, courage, anticipation …’