VII

Always More Brass Where He Came From

Tuesday was a very busy day what with checking orders and getting out mimeographed itineraries and briefing the VIPs on conditions in the forward areas. It was necessary to tell them that they would have comfortable, warm quarters, good food and occasional other forms of sustenance, but still, life would not be quite as soft as in Paris and they would have to excuse the army if the trip occasionally assumed a camping-out aspect. For example, each VIP would be issued an emergency ration just in case the system should break down. There was never any serious possibility of this happening, however, because of the interest taken in the trip by the high echelons. In order to make everything absolutely watertight, it was decided on Tuesday morning that Colonel Struthers himself, because of his familiarity with transport, should be put in general charge, but this did not take the personal details off my shoulders. I not only had to run errands for the colonel but I had to continue giving friendly advice about toothbrushes, cameras, shoes and foot powder. By four o’clock that afternoon, however, a short time was allowed me to do my own packing. I was up in my room right in the middle of it when the General knocked on my door.

“Go right ahead,” he said. “Don’t mind me.” And he sat on the edge of the bed while I continued putting things into my kit bag.

“Dottie’s packing up, too,” he said. “She says I make her nervous watching. She told me to run out for half an hour. You don’t mind my waiting here, do you?”

I told him to wait as long as he liked and that there was some rye in the bathroom but that I was short of Scotch.

“Dottie really knows how to pack, doesn’t she?” he said.

Dottie was the only one in that crowd who could put things in her suitcases and know where everything was afterwards. She was one of those people who could move into a strange room for overnight and be all settled in ten minutes.

“Yes, she’s certainly good at it,” I said. “Has she got a headache?”

From the way the General hitched himself back on the bed you could see that he was used to making himself comfortable anywhere.

“Yes, another of those headaches,” he said. “She won’t be able to attend the dinner tonight. She’s been quite a headachey girl lately, hasn’t she?”

“Yes,” I said. “They call it migraine in French.”

The General laughed as though I had said something that only he and I could understand.

“That’s right,” he said. “Sid, did anyone ever tell you you’re a damn nice guy?”

“Not very frequently,” I answered.

“Well, I’m telling you.”

“Well, thanks a lot,” I told him.

“You know, once when I was finishing with Tank School at Benning,” the General said, “I acquired a dog. He was just a mutt, but he kind of attached himself to me. I couldn’t seem to get rid of him, and I remember how he looked when I was packing up to leave. He knew sure as fate we would never see each other again. He couldn’t read but he knew I was ordered to Hawaii. He didn’t know Mrs. Goodwin but he knew Muriel didn’t like dogs. He knew he wouldn’t make the boat, and I was packing. Well, that’s the way I feel this afternoon.”

“There’s some rye in the bathroom, sir,” I said.

“I don’t need any God-damned rye,” the General said. “I don’t believe in drinking when I’m emotional. God damn it, I can’t believe this is over.”

The General stood up, paced across the room and back and sat down again.

“Maybe it’s just as well,” he said, “everything considered. You know how I feel, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’ve got a working idea.”

“You don’t mind my talking to you frankly, do you?” the General said. “My God, I’ve got to talk to somebody.”

“No, of course I don’t mind,” I said.

“Maybe I’m not used to this sort of thing,” the General said. “It doesn’t fall into any regular category with me. It’s separate. It hasn’t got anything to do with anything else, but I’m proud of the whole damn thing. You see what I mean?”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” I said. “It’s a pretty good way to feel.”

The General stood up again.

“Sid,” he said, “I’ve been thinking something over. Dottie and I were talking about it. My aide got killed last month. I consider aides expendable. If I asked for you, would you like the job?”

Dottie always liked to maneuver things, but it was also kind of the General to think of me.

“Yes, sir,” said, “I’d like it, but I don’t think it would look well under the circumstances, do you?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t suppose it would, under the circumstances.”

“Well, thanks just as much,” I said.

Even though I was not sure whether it was Dottie’s or his idea, it was the pleasantest invitation I had received in the course of the war.

“Sid,” he said, “do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Why didn’t you ever marry Dottie?”

“I told you before,” I said, “that I haven’t got what it takes.”

“Well, I’d have done it if I’d been you,” he said.

“Maybe she wouldn’t have married you either,” I said.

As I looked at him standing there in his worn, carefully pressed uniform, with its rows of ribbons and gold service stripes, I thought that he was safe as far as Dottie was concerned. After all, there were a good many major generals—but I had not expected him to follow my thoughts so closely.

“I know what you mean,” he said. “I haven’t got brass enough, have I? Why not let’s go down to Dottie’s room and have a farewell drink?”

“No thanks,” I said, “I’m pretty busy, sir.”

“Well, then I’ll just say good-by,” he said. “You’re a nice guy. Good luck.”

“Good-by and good luck, sir,” I told him.

You were always meeting people and saying good-by and good luck in the ETO. I was reasonably sure that I would never see General Melville A. Goodwin again.

When his hand was on the doorknob, he turned back to me for a moment and he had changed subtly and completely. He looked again like any other general officer, composed, assured and removed from the ordinary strain of human relationships. He had withdrawn to the dignity of his rank, and whether you liked to admit it or not, rank did have a dignity and commanded respect, for it was almost the only reality on which one could depend in an environment of change and uncertainty. Although he smiled agreeably, his whole mood and pattern of behavior had altered in those few seconds. He was like an actor with whom one chatted in the dressing room, who suddenly became the playwright’s character when told that he would go on in another minute.

“So long, young feller,” he said. “I’ll see you in church sometime.”

He did not intend to put me in my place, but I do believe that he felt some need to put himself into his own and that he needed the reassurance of a sense of position. I felt in that last glimpse of him that many of the ordinary ties of human relationship and of friendship were denied him. He could have enemies and faithful subordinates and obsequious bootlickers, but he could have no friends in the conventional sense. He had attained the category of power that made friendship and sympathy a weakness. He was a piece on the chessboard again, remote, insulated and alone.

I saw Dottie for a moment the next morning outside the Ritz just before she took her place in one of the fine new automobiles supplied for the party. It was raining and nothing could be colder than French rain. She was dressed in a Wac uniform, because all the VIPs had been put into some sort of uniform for their forward journey. In addition she was wrapped in a trench coat that was too large for her and which I could guess the General had given her. If so, it was a useful going-away present. She had fixed things so that she could ride with Colonel Struthers at the head of the procession, and the colonel looked delighted. I don’t know how she had arranged this without seeming to push or be arrogant, but Dottie was always expert at getting where she wanted, gently and sweetly, but firmly, and she always managed to look surprised when she got there. Her face was already wet from the driving rain and she must have known that this might happen. She must have deliberately discarded powder and lipstick, depending on the foul weather to give her color.

“Well,” she said when she saw me, “that’s that,” and she wrinkled her nose and shook her head, and with that shake she seemed to have shaken off the Ritz and everything. She was off on a new adventure, riding up front with the colonel, and she had become very military. Dottie was always quick in picking up mannerisms from people around her, and I could see at once that she had learned a lot from General Goodwin. They used to say the way to learn a language was to have a sleeping dictionary, but I did not tell her that. She was looking at the row of automobiles, with an expert and disapproving eye, and then she glanced at her wrist watch. It was a new waterproof timepiece which I had never before seen on Dottie, though I had noticed the General wearing one like it.

“Why can’t we get rolling?” she asked. “Why don’t we put the show on the road?”

These expressions, none of which Dottie had ever employed before, sounded crisp and convincing.

“Why don’t you blow a whistle—” I told her—“two sharp blasts?”

“God damn it,” Dottie said, “why don’t you blow a whistle? That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

Her voice had a new ring of authority, and even the colonel, who stood beside her, appeared to feel its contagion.

“Major,” he said, “get these people into the cars. Let’s get cracking. We’re due to take off at o-eight-hundred. Will you come with me please, Mrs. Peale?”

It was a rough, hard day, even in the new cars. The road had been churned up by truck convoys and the rain came down steadily, so that, in spite of getting cracking, the show stayed on the road two hours longer than scheduled. It was pitch dark and still raining when we arrived at a mediocre northern-France hotel in a provincial town on one of the main supply routes. As usual the red carpet was out for the VIPs.

We were met by officers of the Quartermaster Corps, who had everything taped up and rooms assigned, and there was even a Chemical Warfare general to greet us. The dining room was decorated with streamers—red, white and blue. There were cold-storage turkeys for dinner, and there was a Quartermaster colonel to give a talk with diagrams on the complications of moving supplies forward. I had no chance to talk to Dottie, and there would have been no opportunity later that evening what with the Chemical general and three doctors, if one of the lady novelists had not objected to her accommodations. She said that all of her windows leaked and she was not mollified until I offered to change rooms with her. I had not realized, though the colonel took it up playfully with me in the morning and several times later, that this room adjoined Dottie’s and had a connecting door. As it was, the colonel only took it up playfully, saying I was pretty quick on my feet, what with one thing and another—but at any rate it was something which seemed unnecessary to explain to Helen at Savin Hill. I actually had no idea that Dottie was in the adjoining room until she knocked on the connecting door at eleven o’clock that night. I had hung up some clothes to dry near a radiator that did not work, and I was sitting in a sway-backed chair under a single electric light bulb suspended from the ceiling, reading the essays of Montaigne.

“Sid?” she said. “Sid?”

“Yes,” I answered, “what is it?”

“After all that maneuvering of yours downstairs,” Dottie said, “don’t you think you might at least open this damn door?” The door was not hard to open. In my experience French hotel room doors seldom were, especially in northern provincial towns.

Dottie’s room also was lighted by a single electric bulb. Her Wac uniform was carefully folded on another sway-backed armchair. Her trench coat was suspended on a hanger. She was heating some hot water in a canteen cup over a canned-alcohol burner, and there were two glasses and a bottle of whisky on the table beside it. Dottie was in a belted Jaeger dressing gown and slippers, and her hair was freshly brushed, and her gold-backed brush and tortoise-shell comb and traveling clock were on the bedside table. The alcohol flame gave a warm, pleasant glow, and the whole place smelled of Chanel Five.

“I wasn’t maneuvering downstairs,” I said. “I didn’t know where they’d put you.”

“Well, at least you might pretend you were,” Dottie said. “My God, that colonel was maneuvering.”

“Which colonel?” I asked.

“Any colonel,” Dottie said. “Frankly, I’m getting a little tired of all these men without women. They have such one-track minds. Darling, I never seem to see you on this junket, and I’m awfully tired of coping with the unknown.” She gave her head a quick shake and she sighed. “God, it’s cold in here, and I feel awfully by myself tonight. I don’t seem to know what I’m doing or why I’ve ever done anything or what I’m for. Do you ever feel that way?”

“Yes,” I said, “a lot of people do, particularly around here.”

“Well, you never seem to show it,” Dottie said. “You never seem to struggle or try to get anywhere. You’re so damn self-sufficient. What’s that book in your hand?”

“Montaigne,” I said.

“Jesus,” Dottie said. “Montaigne in the rain. Well, anyway it’s like you. You used to read that to me, remember?”

“Yes,” I said, “I remember.”

“Was that why you were reading it tonight?”

“Why, no,” I said. “I’ve always liked Montaigne.”

“Well, Sid,” she began.

“Yes?” I said.

“I wish you’d put that damn book down, and would you mind kissing me, at least in a friendly way? I wouldn’t feel so much alone.”

I was very glad to kiss her in a friendly way, although it did not seem necessary to tell Helen about this either at Savin Hill.

“Darling,” she said, “I wish we didn’t know so much about each other.”

“I thought you were tired of the unknown,” I said.

“Darling,” she said, “I don’t know what I’m tired of. Let’s have some whisky and hot water. God, it’s cold.”

Then she told me to sit down on the bed or on the chair, but to wait until she had taken the clothes off the chair and hung them up. She said that I was always so untidy she could not see how Helen stood me, but then maybe Helen was untidy herself in a wild, attractive way that absolutely suited her.

“At least we don’t have to worry about what we’re saying when we talk to each other,” she said. “Sid, maybe you were right.”

When I asked what I’d been right about, she took a swallow of her whisky and hot water and sighed again.

“You said he was pretty simple. Maybe you’re right. It was all pretty damn simple,” she said, and she sat on the bed and curled her feet under her. “Henry was simple in a way, but he wasn’t in that way.”

Of course I knew she would talk about Mel Goodwin, and curiously there was nothing indelicate about it, especially in that bare, ugly room with the sound of the trucks outside rolling steadily through the night.

“In what way?” I asked.

“Darling, he knows all the answers in his book of rules,” she said. “He merely has to look in the index. He’s so sure of himself—but maybe his book is wrong. Most of mine has been. It would be awful for him if his book let him down.”

It was not a bad way of describing Mel Goodwin’s certainty.

“He would still be right in there,” I said, “smiting the furrows.”

“Yes,” she said, “and that’s something. Right or wrong he would go right on smiting, wouldn’t he? He was awfully sweet. He couldn’t have been sweeter.”

I winced at that old phrase of hers when she applied it to Mel Goodwin.

“I wonder why it is,” I said, “that you always expect too much of everybody.”

“I know, dear, I know,” she answered, “but it isn’t really expecting. I begin thinking how much I could do for a man if I had the chance. You know that, Sid. It isn’t expecting. It’s only wanting someone to be the way I want him.”

She never had wanted anyone the way he was.

“Did you notice that he was all wound up?” she said. “Maybe you didn’t because I didn’t think so at first. God, darling, he simply couldn’t unwind … and it was always out of the book. Do you know what he kept saying the answer to everything was?”

“Git thar fastest with the mostest men,” I said.

“No, no,” she said, “but of course that came in, too. The answer to everything, he said, is to estimate a situation and then take action. Even if the something you do is wrong, it’s better than doing nothing. Darling, he said it at least five times. I don’t mean that it got on my nerves but I can’t stop thinking of it, because it isn’t so. I’m always doing something, but actually I’m doing nothing. What’s the use in positive action?”

“It’s pretty useful for him,” I said. “Why can’t you accept people for what they are?”

“Because I want them to be better,” she said. “Darling, if I were to put my mind on it, I could do a lot for him. He kept saying he’d like to be a corps commander. Do you think he could ever command a Group?”

That restive energy of Dottie’s was always disconcerting, or at least it had always disconcerted me. In any situation and in any place, however unfamiliar, Dottie was congenitally unable to leave things as they were. Weary though she may have been from coping with the unknown, she was still trying to find the pivots and the balances. She always liked to understand people, as she said. It made no difference that she did not know definitely what a Group meant in tables of organization. She had already acquired a smattering of knowledge from Melville Goodwin, and now she was devising some way to move him upward and onward. She had tried to move me upward once, and even the memory made me uncomfortable.

“Listen, Dot,” I told her, “why don’t you relax and stop trying to be a Joan of Arc?”

“God damn it,” Dottie said, and her voice had a snap which sounded exactly like Mel Goodwin’s, “what’s Joan of Arc got to do with it?”

“Well,” I said, “she tried to win a war.”

“Darling,” Dottie said, and she helped herself to more whisky and water, “I know perfectly well that war is a man’s business. From my experience it’s the most completely, utterly male pursuit I’ve ever seen, and I’m awfully tired of hearing about relaxing. I’m asking you a perfectly simple, intelligent question, and you do have brains if you want to use them. Or perhaps you don’t think I’m intelligent enough for this sort of conversation?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I think so.”

“All right,” Dottie said, “then answer me. Do you or don’t you think Goodwin could command a Group?”

“If you’re talking about an Army Corps, you might ask General Eisenhower,” I told her. “He’d have some idea.”

“That’s a very thoughtful suggestion,” Dottie said, “and I’ll remember to ask him if I see him, but right now he isn’t here.”

“Then why don’t you relax,” I told her, “or else try General Marshall?”

“Darling,” Dottie said, “I don’t believe that Mel is a Marshall man.”

It was always wiser not to underestimate Dottie’s capacities, but I had never realized until then that Melville Goodwin might interest her more than temporarily.

“Now listen, Dot,” I said, “Mel Goodwin has troubles of his own. Don’t give him any more by asking questions about him. Things like that get around.”

“Darling, I can’t help being interested,” Dottie said, “and you don’t mind my talking, do you? I’m just pretending. You know I love moving things around. Now if I had been his wife …”

“But you’re not his wife,” I said. “You can’t be everything.”

“If I had been his wife,” Dottie continued, “I would have seen that we saw a great deal of the Marshalls.”

She sighed and stared ahead of her, lost in her own thoughts. She was Mrs. Melville Goodwin. She was undoubtedly arranging in her imagination a quiet little dinner with the Marshalls, prewar, preferably in Hawaii, and Colonel Marshall, or whatever rank he held in those days, was on her right, and she was telling him how brilliantly Mel had worked out his problem in the war games. She would not be pushing Mel too much. She would know exactly when to stop, but she would make George see Mel’s future as she saw it. She looked as though she were thinking of a Christmas tree as she sat there silently. Mel could have been Bradley or Eisenhower just as well as not, if she had been married to Mel. She did not know much about army wives, but she could have learned, and now she was an army wife. Perhaps it was Washington she was thinking about or the United States Embassy in Berlin before the war, and Mel was the attaché, and they were giving another small dinner. She sighed and looked up at me.

“I wonder what his wife is like,” she said.

“Now, Dot,” I said, “leave the poor guy alone.”

“Darling,” she sighed, “he’s so easy to get on with and he does have a certain kind of ambition. I think he has some very good ideas about fire power. He knows a lot about tanks and new weapons.”

“For God’s sake, Dot,” I said, “leave that poor guy alone.”

The urgency of my tone made her stop. She had laid the General aside for the moment, and now I was the problem.

“I don’t know why it is you’re completely lacking in ambition, darling,” she said. “You’ve been complaining about all this public relations thing you’re doing, and when I try to get you out of it, you refuse. Mel said he asked you to go up there with him. He said he could arrange it.”

I pushed myself up out of the rickety armchair and took a step toward the bed where she was sitting with her feet curled under her.

“Now, Dot,” I said, “I knew perfectly well why he asked me.”

“Darling,” Dottie said, “don’t you like it when I try to do something for you?”

“No,” I said, “it makes me very nervous, Dot.”

“Oh dear,” Dottie said, “I wish you were a little different, just a very little different—and we could have done so much together, Sid.”

“Well, I’m not different,” I said.

“Oh, Sid,” Dottie said, “I don’t know why you’re so impossible. Sid, please don’t look at me in that critical way. Pour yourself another drink. I’m just thinking out loud. You don’t think I’m really serious about Mel Goodwin, do you? I know just as well as you do that he can handle a division, and that’s probably as far as he can go. He can run around end with his damn division, and I’m pretty tired of hearing about running around end. Darling, it was officious of me, interfering, but that’s because I’ve always been in love with you in a certain way. Sid, please don’t be cross. I’ve completely eliminated Mel Goodwin.”

“Well, that’s something,” I told her. “I was getting sorry for that poor guy.”

“Darling,” Dottie said, “I don’t even see why you like him.”

“Leave him alone,” I told her. “Go to work on someone else. Forget about him, Dot.”

“I’m awfully sorry I’ve been so dull, dear,” Dottie said. “I didn’t mean to be boring, just talking about myself. Let’s talk about you and Helen and Camilla.”

It was a ridiculous suggestion, and she must have known it was.

“Sid,” she said, “you’re not angry with me, are you? Or are you just disappointed?”

“Oh, no,” I said, “I’m not disappointed.”

“Oh, hell,” Dottie said, and she stood up. “Here we are and we’re not getting anywhere, and we never could. God, he was awfully dull once the brass wore off. They’re all so damned dull and they have such fixed ideas. Well, you’d better kiss me good night now in a friendly way, and leave the door open. I feel so terribly alone.”

“Well, good night, Dot,” I said.

“Sid,” she asked, “you aren’t jealous about Mel Goodwin, are you?”

“No, not especially,” I said.

“Oh, the hell with it and the hell with him and the hell with you,” Dottie said, “but you might at least kiss me good night again.”

I was very glad to kiss her good night again. It made the evening less boring than many I’d spent in the European Theater of Operations.

Every experience comprises both a loss and gain. This, you may say, is a hysterical discovery of the obvious, but this resounding fact was first brought home to me when I returned from an eight months’ stay in China shortly before the incident at the Marco Polo Bridge which precipitated the Japanese-Chinese War. When I boarded one of the Empress ships bound for Vancouver, and when we began moving in the dark down the Hwang Pu River to the sea, I left many intangibles behind me on the Shanghai Bund, among them a glittering assortment of enthusiasms and illusions. I had gone to China for a news syndicate, imbued with the idea so prevalent among newspapermen that some day I would write fiction and that all I required was experience with exotic backgrounds. I was leaving this idea behind me and carrying away in its place the disturbing discovery that the more I saw of the Orient the less equipped I was to reach conclusions. You could not simply board somewhere. You had to have a permanent stake in a land before you really knew any part of that land’s meaning. An observer could have no stake in anything.

I faced much the same series of reactions when I left the European Theater of Operations a few months after the German collapse, except that these were more acute because, when I left it, the ETO was already ceasing to be an entity. The pressures that had formed it had been removed, so that it was dissipating like bubbles in champagne. To those of us who had joined the army from civil life, its breaking up was not unlike the ending of a generation. We were all returning to the void of peace, and the regulations which had held us together, and even the friendships we had made, were losing most of their validity. Most of us would never meet again after leaving the ETO, and if we did, we would never remember what our relationships had been. We used to say, we uniformed civilians, that we could not wait for the time when we might encounter some of those Regular Army bastards who had arrogated superiority to themselves simply because they were part of the regular service and graduates of West Point. Yet oddly enough, when the occasion arrived, as it did now and then, for you to tell that so-and-so who had pushed you around exactly what you thought of him, you could scarcely remember what it was that had eaten at you so over there in Europe.

I remember, for instance, that there was a Public Relations colonel in SHAEF who impressed me back there as the most arrogant and disagreeable person I had ever known. Though I never cared much for picking quarrels, I frequently used to fall asleep toying with the idea of picking a fight with him as soon as the war was over. Then suddenly in the summer of 1946, I met him at the bar at “21” in New York, and he bought me a drink and called me Sid and asked me if I didn’t wish we were back there again in SHAEF. We certainly did have good times in SHAEF, and I found myself calling him Earl—Earl G. Roberts was his name. He seemed to have forgotten that he had threatened to prefer charges against me the last time we had met in Frankfurt. The cork had been pulled, and the champagne was very flat there in “21.” Instead of feeling resentful, I was sorry for poor old Earl. He had been restored to line duty in the infantry and was on his way to Fort Benning down one rank. He no longer had anyone like me to push around. The ninety-day wonders were gone. I felt sorry for poor old Earl.

The tumult and the shouting was dying, and the captains and the kings, all trained and postured at West Point, were departing to the dull routine that had made them—back to Bragg, back to Benning or the Presidio or Schofield or to any of those other places where they led their insulated lives, watching their rank, living on their base pay, or whatever it was they were always talking about, and being sure to dance with the CO’s wife at the officers’ club on Saturday night. They were gone, and a very good thing it was unless there was World War III, when assuredly they, or others like them, would come popping up again. They had performed a very necessary specialized function, but, thank heaven, the rest of us whom they had tried to mold in their schools and by their lectures did not have to play at being soldiers any more. We did not have to try to strike their attitudes any more, or give them smart salutes right up from the heel. We did not have to remember all those complacent axioms from Army Regulations any more. We did not have to read and digest their windy mimeographed orders or stand at attention on the carpet taking their artistic bawlings out. They could not chew our rear ends off us any longer. We had tried but we could never be like them. You had to be caught young, or you had to be a boy at heart, to acquire the military mind. Heaven knows, most of us had sat up nights trying to acquire it, and heaven knows, in Public Relations we had tried to interpret it. It was curious how fast we were forgetting these people already. The regulars had left their imprint on us, but the main outlines were growing dim.

When Helen said that night at Savin Hill that she could not tell what General Goodwin was like from anything I had told her, I suddenly realized that I no longer knew, myself. You had to see him in a war. He belonged with its sights and smells, with its obsequiousnesses and its brutalities.

“But you say you liked him,” Helen said, “and he asked you to be his aide, didn’t he?”

“You don’t like anybody there,” I told her, “in the way you like people here.”

This was the truth. Liking in the ETO had an expendable sort of quality which you had to experience in order to comprehend.

Helen did not speak for a long while, and finally I thought she had gone to sleep as I lay awake in the dark. My own mind was moving too restlessly for sleep. I was thinking of the General’s plane and of the General sleeping in his reclining seat. Those people were like Napoleon. They could sleep anywhere at any time and wake up in a second.

“Sid,” Helen said, and I realized that I, too, was half asleep, “when he comes here, what are we going to do with him?”

I had no idea what you could do with anyone like Major General Melville Goodwin in a place like Savin Hill, and I really was asleep when Helen spoke again. For a second as I awakened it was a tossup whether I was in the ETO or at Savin Hill.

“Sid, I’ve been thinking,” Helen told me.

“Don’t think,” I told her. “Go to sleep.”

“You know, perhaps you could write something about General Goodwin.”

It was not unusual for Helen to get such an idea. Ever since she had first met me, she frequently suggested subjects on which I might write, and she still retained rather touching illusions as to my latent abilities.

The thought of doing such a thing had never seriously crossed my mind. I never dreamed that night that the preparation of the condensed biography of Melville Goodwin by the employees of a weekly news magazine would cause me to attempt to write about him. It was only later that I saw him as a quasi-Grecian figure moving along lines of almost inevitable tragedy. There was something about his pattern that was classic. In spite of his lexicon of rules, his life was beyond his control like the lives of all the rest of us. He was a part of the tapestry that the Norns were always weaving. He was fallible and infallible, perfect in his own setting and imperfect in any other. As I think of him now, I still like best to remember him when he was there at Savin Hill, bewildered by a problem for which he was not trained. As he told me himself, he never knew what he had got himself in for when he had brushed that Russian tommy gun away from his stomach in Berlin.