XVIII

Who Pants for Glory Finds but Short Repose

The mass of American manpower that poured into France that summer left much to be desired from the point of view of training. It was basically excellent material but very raw, and admittedly even some of the regular divisions were not yet the smoothly working units that they should have been. One of the most peculiar things in the whole picture was the difficulty experienced by a well-trained officer in ever reaching a position within the range of enemy small-arms fire. This was ironical, but when you came to think of it, natural enough, since there was a demand which simply could not be filled for personnel to instruct green troops. If you exhibited any unusual skills and abilities in those days, someone was apt to grab you. All you had to do was stick your neck out a quarter of an inch and you did not have to fight. Instead you would be teaching others the theory without ever having had the practice. It was marvelous in view of this that the percentage of West Point graduates killed was in the end higher than that of any other group. It spoke volumes for their keenness and anxiety to do what they were trained to do, namely to lead in battle. When Melville Goodwin came to think of it, he was lucky ever to have seen the fighting. A lot of his classmates never even got overseas.

Melville Goodwin was ordered to France in a school detachment of officers from a new division which was still being organized in the States. The officers of the school detachment were to receive various sorts of technical instruction in France, after which they would meet that nebulous division at some debarkation point and assist in its final polishing. This would have been an excellent idea if the demand for manpower had not become pressing after the German breakthrough in the vicinity of Château-Thierry in July. If the Ludendorff concentrations had not been effective, Lieutenant Goodwin might have studied the theories of the machine gun and of trench-mortar fire all summer. He was always grateful that the German general staff had come close to solving the problem of the breakthrough and that something close to open warfare had precipitated a sudden crisis.

However, he had no way of knowing the plans of the German general staff when he received his orders to report at Camp Merritt. He only knew that he was going to France for training after a few days’ leave at home. Most of his able-bodied contemporaries had left Hallowell months before as volunteers or draft troops and the sooner he went, too, the better. People on Prospect Street looked curiously and sometimes bitterly, he thought, at his gold bars, and there seemed to be a feeling that he had become an officer as a result of some sort of pull or juggling. The implication was that here was Melville Goodwin all polished up and an officer and married, too, with a nice soft place for himself when he should have been out in the mud with all the other boys. Muriel was furious when people did not understand that it was more dangerous to be an officer than a private soldier, particularly a West Point officer.

“Well, Melville,” his father said, when Melville had explained to him about the advance school detachment, “I thought you had been working at West Point learning about those same things.”

His mother, however, was glad that the army was taking care of him. She had been terribly worried for fear he might go into the fighting right away, but now she could look over all his equipment, his beautiful puttees, his sleeping bag and all the things in his green foot locker without feeling any more that they meant he was going to be killed. She was glad at last that he had gone to West Point and that the army knew he was valuable. He hoped that she would not say things like that around town, and he asked her not to, but of course she did when she worked at the Red Cross center. The truth was that civilians never could understand about the army.

Muriel wanted to go with him and to stay somewhere in New Jersey outside of Camp Merritt until the detachment finally sailed, but he told her that it was better to say good-by right there in Hallowell. She would be all right because she could go to work again in her father’s office at the hat factory. Yet even Muriel could not wholly understand his point of view.

“I know it’s awful for you, waiting here,” she said, “but I wish you wouldn’t act as though you were so glad to leave me.”

The thing to do in wartime was to get away from home. Women, even Muriel, were only a complication when you were going overseas. It never helped to remember the look on a woman’s face when you were leaving her, even if she were as brave as Muriel. It was demoralizing to see a woman trying to be brave.

“I’d hate to have you stay,” Muriel said, “… but you’ll think of me sometimes, won’t you?”

Women, even the best of them, could not help but be jealous of war. They never did wholly believe it when you said you would always be thinking of them and you never believed it either. He even thought at times that he should not have married Muriel, that it was not fair to her, but thoughts like that were bad for the morale. There was no use describing the details of parting because the thing to do was to get going and get away from home and to try to forget as much of those last moments as you could. He hated to admit when he finally said good-by, that he was glad to go.

When he saw the wooden barracks and the mess halls of the embarkation center at Camp Merritt and turned in his orders, he was happier than he had been for days and days. It was like coming home, to arrive at Merritt. There was a beautiful, restful simplification. An American army post anywhere in the world would be more like home to him in the future than any other place.

“Orderly,” the major on duty said, “take the lieutenant to Quarters C, Square 5.”

All he had to say was Yes, sir, thank you, sir, and then salute and about face, one, two. The President of the United States had reposed special trust and confidence in his patriotism, valor, fidelity and ability, and he was going to the war.

Army life had its dull moments, but no new assignment was ever dull. An assignment to a new command even today was a personal challenge, and a fresh, blank page on your ledger. An embarkation depot always reminded him of that quatrain in the Rubáiyát about the tent where took his one night’s rest, the Sultan to the realms of death addressed. Other guests had come before you and others would follow, and you only waited there in a sort of limbo before you marched aboard the transport.

He had hardly entered the barracks at Merritt and had scarcely started to look over the officers of the school detachment, who were checking their equipment, or sleeping, or reading or playing cards, before he saw Spike Kennedy, his roommate at the Point. He had never been so glad to see anyone as he was to see Spike, and they stood there for a while laughing and pounding each other on the back. Spike had only been there six hours ahead of him, but he already had the swing of everything.

“Say, Mel,” Spike kept saying, “we’ve got to stick together.”

The thing to remember, Spike said, was that they were in a pretty funny crowd. Lieutenant Colonel Redfern, the detachment CO, came from the Point himself and had seen service in the Philippine insurrection and the Boxer Rebellion, but aside from him there were no other regulars in the detachment unless you included a former enlisted man, now a lieutenant. All the rest of these birds who were going over, Spike said, were either from the National Guard or from Plattsburg or somewhere. They had not been for more than six months in the service, but some of them seemed pretty bright. Some of them had been lawyers and things like that, and one of them, an Artillery captain named Tucker, had been a college professor. It was comical seeing all these poor birds trying to be soldiers. Those guys simply did not have a West Point education, and the only thing to do was to help them.

Lieutenant Colonel Redfern exhibited approximately the same attitude when Spike took Melville around to the colonel’s quarters to report. The colonel had a small box of a room to himself at the end of the quarters with a cot, two chairs and a table. He was in his middle forties, lean and stringy, with pale blue eyes and a long, reddish face. It was only when the colonel got quietly drunk by himself on the transport that Melville began to feel that he had failings. He must have been very lonely with that school detachment, or else he would not have expressed himself as frankly as he had.

“Sit down, gentlemen,” the colonel said. “This is a hell of a war. God damn it, I never thought I’d end up taking a zoo across the ocean. My God, there’s even a college professor. Do you play bridge, Goodwin?”

“No, sir,” Melville said.

“That’s right,” the colonel said, “I forgot the attitude toward cards at the Point.”

The colonel stared at the table in front of him.

“We’re getting out of here in forty-eight hours,” he said. “Any questions?”

“No, sir,” Melville answered.

“Well, if you have any,” the colonel said, “don’t bother me with a damn one of them. The main thing is don’t bother me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Melville said.

“You get that, too, do you, Kennedy?”

“Yes, sir,” Spike Kennedy answered.

“Then repeat it.”

“The main thing is not to bother you, sir, about anything.”

“That’s right,” the colonel said. “All the rest will, but you won’t, because you’re from the Point. I don’t understand civilians. Do you understand civilians, Goodwin?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Melville said.

“Don’t say you don’t know,” the colonel told him. “Never try to understand them. Have as little to do with them as is reasonably possible. You’ll only get yourselves confused, fraternizing with those ninety-day wonders. That’s my considered advice.”

“Yes, sir,” Melville said.

“Now one thing more,” Colonel Redfern said. “Our association will be brief, but I might be able to teach you the rudiments of bridge. It calms the mind, it teaches patience and self-control.”

“Yes, sir,” Melville said.

“Well,” the colonel said, “we’ve got to get this organized. That damn professor, Captain Tucker, plays bridge. We can sweat Tucker. Kennedy, give him my compliments and tell him to report in here after supper for bridge with you two young gentlemen. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” they both said, and they stood up.

“Very well,” the colonel said, “that’s all for now.”

Lieutenant Colonel Redfern was quite a card. Heaven only knew what became of him later. He had no future and he never told about his past, but all the way over on the old Kroonland, Colonel Redfern had them playing bridge whenever they were not on submarine lookout. Sometimes even now when Melville played a no-trump hand, he could think of himself in his life jacket aboard the Kroonland and he could see the whole convoy again, spread out like ducks on the gray Atlantic with an old battle cruiser leading them, and he could see the old four-stack destroyers that came to meet them when they reached the danger zone.

“If you had counted your cards,” he could hear the colonel say, “you would have known that there would be an eight against you.”

Yes, Lieutenant Colonel Redfern was quite a card. Melville could remember him more clearly than he could remember the docks at Saint-Nazaire. This was not peculiar, because one day after landing, he was on a train, and three days later he was at the headquarters of a division north of Château-Thierry, and an hour after that, with no food in his stomach, he was on a truck moving to the front as a replacement officer for an Infantry regiment which was to attack at dawn. The Germans were retreating then in the Château-Thierry salient, and there was no time for school detachments.

There had been a momentary view of Brittany, then a six-hour wait in a Paris station and then a trip through villages with all their roofs blown off and unburied corpses in the fields. Then there was a road in the dusk jammed with French cavalry. It was the first and last time he ever saw cavalry in any war. Next there was the sound of shells bursting in a patch of woods, and he was walking through the woods in the dark. Then he was behind the blankets of a dugout in a regimental Post of Command. It was like a bad dream, but it was the army.

“Take this officer up to C Company,” the adjutant was saying.

Then he was outside again with a guide, stumbling through the dark. His locker trunk and bedding roll were nowhere. He did not even have a pack or blanket but he did have a web belt and a forty-five automatic and one of those flat tin hats of World War I. He did not know where he was going and he had not even seen a map. The company command post was in a shell hole in the woods and he was told to stay there until morning, and join his platoon at dawn. Almost without his knowing how he got there, he was in the middle of an artillery duel. The seventy-fives were firing over him and machine guns were chattering out ahead. There was nothing he could fit together, but it was a great experience.

General Melville Goodwin paused and lighted a cigarette, and there was dead silence in the library.

“It was quite a mess at Château-Thierry,” the General said. “Any advance with green troops like that is always that way. Everything in back keeps pushing you. God damn, you’ve got to go.”

Melville Goodwin was out of his chair and on his feet as though everything were pushing him still, and perhaps his memories were. His face was bright and he seemed to enjoy every one of his memories. He reminded me of a football player describing a touchdown.

“That company wasn’t a bad outfit, considering, but maybe I’m sentimental. You always love your first outfit. It always seems to be the way it was originally, even when it gets the hell shot out of it. God damn!” He began to laugh. “We really didn’t know anything. Most of those troops were like kids playing cops and robbers against professionals.”

He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace.

“Well, anyway, we’re up at the front,” he said. “I admit it’s taken a long while to get there. Suppose we all take fifteen minutes out.”

He looked at Phil Bentley and Miss Fineholt, but no one answered.

“Do you remember the song,” he asked, “‘The colonel got the Croix de guerre, and the son of a bitch, he wasn’t there’? Well, this son of a bitch was, but let’s take fifteen minutes out. Come on, Flax.”

Colonel Flax stood up instantly and followed the General out of the library.

“I was there myself, sir,” I heard the colonel saying, “at a place near Le Charme, but it wasn’t charming then.”

Miss Fineholt and Phil Bentley and I still sat silently, considering the life and times and metamorphosis of Melville Goodwin. He had changed himself from a schoolboy at Hallowell into what he was today in the course of a very brief time, without mirrors or deception, but it was hard to follow the process in retrospect. He had not known enough to take off his hat in the elevator, and now there he was, in the shell hole in the woods, with nothing to hold the tale together but a feeble string of anecdotes.

“God,” Phil Bentley said, “what a life!”

“Whose,” I asked, “yours or his?”

“His,” Phil Bentley said. “Anyway, I guess we have something to be thankful for. We never had to go to the Point.” Phil sighed and took off his glasses. “And that Lieutenant Colonel Redfern—my God, he can’t be real.”

I might have explained that any of the rest of us would have seen Colonel Redfern in a different light.

“People like him keep cropping up over there,” I said. “You must have seen a few yourself.”

“I never knew how lucky I was before,” Phil Bentley said. “Oh, God—there’ll be another day of this and he’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

Then I remembered that I had promised Helen to take a walk with Camilla. It was after four, and the machine guns were still chattering in the woods north of Château-Thierry. Everything was still really a mess around Château-Thierry, but some of Company C had been first-team material.…

Until I saw Camilla in jodhpurs and a light-brown pullover sweater, I had not faced the fact that Helen had started her on riding lessons. All Camilla’s class at the Country Day School, Helen had said, were going to a place called the Winding River Riding Academy conducted by an Anglo-Irish gentleman from Galway named Mr. Delaney. Mr. Delaney was also master of an organization known as the Winding River Hunt, which Helen said was popular in the neighborhood, and Helen said that Mr. Delaney was popular, too, and that he was not an ordinary riding teacher. He came from an old Galway hunting family and he was asked everywhere and we should have him over sometime and talk to him about our stables. I had learned lately that a number of people, even in our age group, had taken up riding because of the social contacts the sport afforded. In fact Helen had taken me to a hunt tea recently, where everyone was in riding clothes like Camilla’s, and I had not known what to talk about at the tea, never having ridden myself. It was curious to see my own child looking like a miniature of all those extrovert strangers. It made me realize what a specialized place a child’s world had become since I had grown up—at least out here in Connecticut. It was necessary now for children to become proficient in all sorts of skills. They could not simply bat a ball around or paddle in the creek. They had to learn how to volley and smash in tennis and how to perform the eight-beat crawl in a swimming pool.

Camilla seemed to be growing away from me already and, as often happened these days, we both struggled to find a common subject for conversation.

“Daddy,” Camilla said, “why don’t you carry a cane when you go outdoors?”

“Why should I?” I asked.

“Because other children’s fathers around here always carry walking sticks when they go walking in the country,” Camilla said.

There was a time when you struggled to have your parents appear like other parents, and I was conscious of my own inadequacy, but there was nothing I could do about it.

“Well, I haven’t got a walking stick,” I said.

Camilla took my hand and it always made me happy when she did.

“It’s all right. I only suggested it,” she told me. “You don’t really need it, Daddy.”

She did not sound like a daughter of mine. She spoke with the fine clipped accent of Miss Otts, but then Helen had employed Miss Otts for exactly that purpose. On the other hand, if I had adopted Miss Otts’s manner of speech, I would have been taken off the air, and there would have been no Savin Hill or riding lessons. It occurred to me that I must go back in a little while and look over the script.

“Well,” I said, “what did you do at riding school?”

“We rode around in a circle,” Camilla said. “Mr. Delaney stood in the middle. My horse’s name was Daisy.”

It was exactly what a horse should have been named, and I told her it was a quiet name and I hoped that Daisy was a quiet horse, but I had never ridden around any Mr. Delaney in a ring.

“Daddy,” Camilla said, “we never have time to have a talk. What are we going to talk about?”

I had planned to walk through the garden and then up the hill to a patch of woods and then through the woods and back down to the stables, but I had not thought of any subject of conversation.

“We’ve got to talk about something,” Camilla said. “We can’t just walk.”

“Why can’t we?” I asked. “Everybody talks too much, Camilla.”

“It isn’t any fun just walking,” Camilla said.

As a matter of fact we did not have to work this out immediately because when we walked around the house to the garden, we encountered the General and Colonel Flax, standing together on the path, staring intently at some marks the General was making in the gravel.

“The emplacement was up there,” the General said, “at the edge of the trees, and this area here was open. There was a dead space here where you could crawl on your belly if you wriggled like a snake, and they couldn’t cover the whole sector all at once.”

He looked up from the marks on the path. He had not seen us and I don’t believe that he had heard us, but something must have told him that he and Colonel Flax were no longer alone fighting World War I.

“Well, well,” he said, “and here’s Camilla. Come here and shake hands with the old man. I’ve hardly laid eyes on Camilla. We haven’t had time to get acquainted but we’ll have time someday.”

“Camilla’s pretty busy,” I said. “She runs on a very tight schedule.”

When I saw Camilla looking at the General’s stars and ribbons and timidly holding out her hand, something in her wide-eyed expression reminded me of Rudyard Kipling’s little Una on Pook’s Hill. The outlines of the garden were soft in the late October sunlight, and she might have been meeting Kipling’s Roman centurion or his kind old knight. I wondered whether she knew enough about English history to understand Puck of Pook’s Hill if I should ever have time to read it to her.

“Well, well,” the General said, “so you’ve been out riding, have you?”

“Yes,” Camilla said.

“When you speak to General Goodwin,” I told her, “remember to call him ‘sir.’”

Both the General and Colonel Flax looked self-conscious.

“Don’t you mind your pappy, darling,” the General said. “How’d it be if you call me ‘Uncle Mel’?”

There was no way of telling how it would be, because Camilla stared at him without answering.

“I used to have two little boys once myself,” he said. “They were always full of dirt and devilment. I’ll tell you about them someday, Camilla. They were always riding bareback. They started riding at Benning. Did you ever see the children’s riding class at Benning, Flax?”

“No, sir,” the colonel said.

“The instructor there was a nice old stable sergeant, an old-time cavalryman. They’re as rare as whooping cranes now.”

Colonel Flax looked at his wrist watch.

“I think they may be waiting for us in the library, sir,” he said.

“Oh, all right,” the General said, “all right. Are you coming, Sid?”

It was a question, not an order, but nevertheless I felt apologetic.

“I’ll be back in a little while, sir,” I said, “but you’re right in the groove now and you don’t need me for a while. I’m just going to walk up that hill with Camilla.”

“What hill?” the General said.

“Just up to the woods there,” I told him, and I pointed beyond the garden and General Goodwin examined the hill.

“Well, don’t be too long, Sid,” he said. “I don’t like it in there without you, and you’d better send a patrol out first. There might be a machine gun in those woods.”

Camilla took my hand and we walked across the garden.

“Daddy,” she asked, “who is General Goodwin?”

Probably no one had explained him to her except possibly Miss Otts, whose knowledge of the American army would have been rudimentary. I wondered what the General looked like through Camilla’s eyes and from the point of view of an age in which fact and folklore were always coming into collision. She must have seen him as a new recruit might, but with even greater awe, since all his brass had been designed through the centuries to impress trusting childish minds. This, in the last analysis, was the only reason for uniform and spit and polish. It was difficult to tell in a few words who General Goodwin was. I could not tell Camilla that he was a resultant of a disturbed political order or one of those people you had to maintain as an insurance against dangerous contingencies.

“He’s a man who tells soldiers what to do,” I said. “He has those stars on his shoulders so that anyone can tell that he’s a general. Now Colonel Flax only has eagles because he isn’t a general yet. The more important a general is, the more stars he has and the more of those ribbons over his pocket. Some poor generals only have one star. General Goodwin has two.”

“How many stars can you get to have,” Camilla asked, “if you get to know everything?”

I could see where her mind was moving. They must still have been giving out stars in school as rewards for scholastic attainment.

“They can get up as high as five stars,” I said, “but hardly any of them do, Camilla, and when you get five stars, you can have them in a circle and not in a row.”

“Will he get five stars?” Camilla asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said, “but don’t tell him I said so, Camilla. That might hurt his feelings.”

“Isn’t he bright enough?” Camilla asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s hard to tell.”

I really did not know. I was already beginning to revise my early estimates of him. Automatic fire could not cover every inch of ground because of natural contours. The traverse of a machine gun only had a limited number of degrees, and General Goodwin’s capacity also had its limits. There were blind spots in him, egregious gaps, but then I was becoming conscious of extraordinary areas of acumen.

“Is he anything like Samson?” Camilla asked.

“Who?” I asked.

“You know, like Samson in the Bible.”

“Oh, Samson,” I said. “Samson wasn’t bright at all or he wouldn’t have let Delilah cut his hair off. I don’t think Samson would have been a two-star general.”

Then I began to think that I might be wrong about Samson. High physical courage always had its blind spots, and even if you had five stars, perhaps there was always some Delilah in the background sharpening up the shears.

When I had returned to the library, I could tell from the General’s voice that I had missed something.

“I was waiting until it was firing over there,” the General said. “The damn thing couldn’t be everywhere at once, and I had time to get up on my knees and … Oh, there you are, Sid. Did you have a nice walk with Camilla?”

“You made quite an impression on Camilla,” I said.

“What’s that song?” the General asked. “‘I love the ladies … and the ladies all love me’?”

I was a disturbing influence, and everyone looked impatient.

“How about it?” Phil said. “Did you throw in the grenade?”

“You’re damned well right I did,” the General said, “and it landed on the button, or I wouldn’t be here now.”

I had missed a good deal by taking time out. I had left Lieutenant Melville Goodwin in the shell hole in the woods at the PC of C Company, but I caught up with the story later when I read Miss Fineholt’s notes.