XXII
General officers were not what you would call public characters in the sense that Hollywood stars, ball players, pugilists, district attorneys, channel swimmers or nominees for the Presidency were—unless there was a war. Then they appeared unheralded out of nowhere, and suddenly parents, sisters, sweethearts and even the GIs themselves wanted to be reassured about them. They wanted to be told that generals had been fun-loving, mischievous boys, who had led a good honest American life, and to know that they loved jokes, children, dogs and football and had a few good healthy hobbies. Granted that they were military geniuses, it was important to know that they had the common touch. In Public Relations you could get their records from the files but these were not enough. You could see your man through the Point and perhaps you could find someone who could tell a funny story about him when he was a plebe. You could trace his career in some subordinate capacity in World War I, but after World War I his trail vanished into such a maze of technical notations that it finally disappeared from view. There were no large-scale maneuvers or big parades under peacetime appropriations to keep the army in the public eye. The army was simply scattered all over its real estate in almost identical barracks.
Melville Goodwin could not list offhand the places he had seen or the sequence of his duties. He had served in Hawaii, the Philippines, China and Panama. He could remember the temples and the blue robes of the Chinese in Tsingtao, but none of this mattered greatly in retrospect. It might be true that if you joined the army you saw something of the world, and you learned, naturally, about sanitation and the care of troops in the tropics and about insect pests and dysentery, but most of the time you were concerned with a way of life. Most of the time you simply saw the army. The army was a closed corporation, and you had to learn its amenities and how to get on with difficult superiors and how not to stick your neck out. The officers corps, Melville Goodwin said, was largely personality, and as time went on you either got the hang of it or you didn’t. He had heard it said by outsiders that army men gossiped like old women when they got together, always telling stories about Mike So-and-so or remembering something about Hank Somebody-else, but this was not all done to pass the time away. At any time there might be new orders and you might be thrown in with Hank and Mike; and then you might be very glad to know what they and their wives were like and whether or not they enjoyed playing Ping-pong and what they thought of a little Saturday’s drinking. Muriel, as time went on, kept notes about army people, and these were very useful, though personally he had never kept a note, finding that he could rely on his memory. You could name almost anyone right now who had served as an officer in the peacetime army, and Melville Goodwin could give you a word sketch of him. No matter how dull the duty was, there was usually someone you could discuss Clausewitz with, or some new idea, confidentially, without sticking your neck out.
Then, too, there was nothing more solid than an army family. The boys had been a heavy expense at times, even with free doctoring, but he would not have missed having them for anything, and neither would Muriel. He could remember Robert in his play pen at Bailey waiting on the square of lawn in front of the veranda. Charley had come along later when they were out in Oregon just before they went to the Canal. He could remember Charley in his pen, too, on another square of lawn in front of another veranda. It was always great to get back to the quarters and see Muriel and the kids, especially after someone had been chewing on you. Also there were horses to ride and the tennis courts and the golf links and the Saturday nights at the club. It was not a bad life, the peacetime army, if you did not stick your neck out. A lot of it ran together now in his memory, but there was one thing you never forgot, and that was your first post. It was the beginning of your life more than any war, and he and Muriel started together at Bailey.
They were just kids and they had hardly been anywhere together and it was Muriel’s idea that they should save on their travel allowance by going West on day coaches. The way you handled the various allowances that came to you over and above your base pay made a lot of difference in your living, and Muriel right from the start had a knack for squeezing out the last penny. In fact he often told Muriel that she knew more about finance than anyone in the Finance Department.
It was late afternoon when they got off the train at Bedeville. They hitched a ride on an army truck to Bailey, Muriel in front with the driver while he sat out in the dust with a quartermaster sergeant who answered his questions about the post. They jolted along the road for about half an hour across miles of uninhabited prairie before they saw the reservation. He had to hand it to Muriel that she was not discouraged by being so many miles from anywhere, but nothing, when he came to think of it, ever discouraged Muriel. At headquarters there was a mixup because they had not heard that he was a married officer, and the news made all the difference. When the colonel saw Muriel, he immediately asked them to supper. By the time they were moved into half a house at the junior end of officers’ row, they were almost part of the family, and Mrs. “Silver” Crosby, the lieutenant colonel’s wife, showed them around herself and called Muriel “my dear” and said they must have a long talk about everything in the morning. Colonel Jones—Jupiter Jones—the post commander, who attended to the housekeeping but who did not conduct the school, was a bachelor just reaching the retirement age and he looked every year of it. Yet when he saw Muriel, he told her that he would have been married long ago if he had ever seen a girl like her.
“Oh, Melville,” Muriel said when they were alone that night, “it’s like a story, isn’t it? And I just love Colonel Jones. He was so happy after dinner.”
Melville, too, had observed that Colonel Jones was happier after dinner than before. He had been suffering from a cough before dinner and had excused himself several times to gargle his throat, and each time he returned, his cough had subsided and he was happier. The truth was that Colonel Jones was something of a problem, and the word was that everyone should cover up for the Old Man. You couldn’t help but love him when he began to talk about Indians and the old army. Kansas was a dry state, and the nation was going dry along with it, but there were still the patent medicines. You should have seen the Old Man’s cases of Old Home Elixir and other bracing medicines.
“Young man,” he told Melville once, “the Civil War would have ended a year earlier if General Grant had known about Old Home.”
He was always fond of Muriel. In fact when Muriel was having Robert, he would sometimes call on her himself with a bottle of Old Home.
Characters like old Jupiter Jones amounted to little in one’s professional career, but you always came upon Joneses here and there, and it was useful to know how to handle them. There was one time, he remembered, when Colonel Jones began firing his automatic from his second-floor window because he believed that Arapaho Indians were skulking about the house. Melville was the one who got there first.
“Sir,” he said, “please give that gun to me quick, there’s an Indian attacking Muriel.”
“Take it, boy,” the colonel said. “I’ll handle the rest of them barehanded.”
Stories like that would last for years. People in the service would hear some story about you even before they knew you, and Melville could tell a lot of good Jupiter Jones stories.
Some of his oldest and dearest friends were among the younger officers who were on the post at Bailey with him. It was his good fortune, too, that he had been able to meet and converse with some of the ablest Infantry officers in the army who came there to the school. He could name them all now if he had to, but then what did names mean? He might, however, mention A. C. Grimshaw, and even civilians ought to remember Grimshaw’s name in World War II. He came to the school for two weeks once to deliver a series of lectures. They called him “Foghorn” Grimshaw because he spoke in a low, deferential voice.
“Of course there may be a possibility that I’m wrong,” he used to say, but by God, Grimshaw was never wrong.
Melville met him first over a chess game at the club, and he took one game off Grimshaw, too, which may have been why Foghorn took a liking to him. It was possibly due to knowing Grimshaw at Bailey as much as to his record in the War College that Melville got a staff job under “Tweaker” Beardsley in the middle thirties. It may have been a word from Grimshaw, too, as much as his record, that finally got Mel Goodwin into tanks and to North Africa.
There had been quite a ripple of excitement when Foghorn Grimshaw had appeared at the school. The word had gone around that both “Black Jack” Pershing and Peyton March had said publicly that Grimshaw had one of the finest tactical and organizational brains in the service. He had been one of the youngest regimental commanders in the AEF, serving with the Ivy Division and then with Corps and finally at GHQ. There was nothing he had not read and nothing he could not do. He could even paint pictures. Put him anywhere, even in a soap factory, and he would have been running it in the end. When Mel Goodwin took a game off him at chess and played another to a draw, he did not realize at all what this might mean to him until he happened to be standing outside his quarters one day after retreat. Melville had just bathed and changed into fresh khaki and had gone out to look over the square of lawn that was drying up, when Major Grimshaw rode by on horseback with an orderly. The school horse he was riding was a scrubby animal named Soby, with a cast-iron mouth and a bad habit of dancing sideways, but even Soby looked stylish with Grimshaw on him.
“Why, hello, Goodwin,” he said. “Is this where you’re living?”
“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
“Have you a chessboard handy?”
Melville was very lucky. He had bought a pegged-in chess set when he was in Cannes and he had it in the house.
“It looks cool on that veranda,” the major said. “How about a game if you’ve the time?”
It would have: been conspicuous and out of line to have invited anyone like Grimshaw to his quarters, but it was different now that the major was inviting himself.
“Take my horse back to the stables please, Murphy,” the major said, “and thank you for a very pleasant ride.”
He never forgot an enlisted man’s name, and when he spoke to enlisted personnel, you were never conscious of rank. Muriel was out on the veranda as soon as they were up the steps, and Melville was proud that she did not look surprised or flustered.
“I’ve just made some lemonade,” she said, and then a while later, after they had finished a game, Muriel asked if Major Grimshaw would not like to stay to supper. They weren’t going to have anything but cold chicken and salad and iced tea, but then perhaps it was too hot to eat much.
Right from the beginning Muriel was pretty good at things like that. He would not have dreamed of asking the major himself, and he nearly dropped through the floor when Muriel spoke of chicken, but Muriel had run out in back and had borrowed it from the Cromleys, and Muriel had also borrowed cigars. She had heard Mrs. Silver Crosby say that Major Grimshaw liked them, and she had run all the way up the row to borrow some from Mrs. Silver Crosby. She had also borrowed after-dinner coffee cups from the Buddingtons and had asked Colonel Jones if she could pick a few of his begonias.
During supper they began talking about the war, and Major Grimshaw apologized once, saying he was afraid the talk might be boring to Muriel, but Muriel said she had to learn about those things, being an officer’s wife, and Melville simply would never tell her about them.
“Melville knocked out two German machine gun nests,” Muriel said. “He threw pineapples into them—isn’t that what you call them, dear?”
“Now, Muriel,” Melville said.
“That’s just like Melville, Major Grimshaw,” Muriel went on. “He never wants to talk about himself. Melly, dear, aren’t you going to smoke your cigar?”
He had only smoked one once, near Hill 302 in the Argonne. Still, he could not very well pretend he did not like cigars when Muriel put him in that position.
“It was north of Château-Thierry, sir,” he said, “near a little town named Cerey, and Muriel shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“I’ve been through Cerey,” the major said.
“Now, Melly,” Muriel said, “don’t change the subject.”
He had to go on and tell about it after that, and as he did, he grew interested in the tactical problem and then the major began talking about tanks.
“I wish we had a sandbox here,” the major said.
“Melly,” Muriel said, “get a baking pan and get some sand from the Crosby baby’s sand pile.”
It turned out to be quite an evening when they mixed a little water in the sand. There were some things that were chores, such as paper work and language and administration, but he always did have an instinctive enthusiasm for terrain. He began to forget who Grimshaw was as they moved from one subject to another, and he began criticizing things more freely than he should have. For instance, he did not believe that horses could go anywhere that motor vehicles couldn’t—if you had the right kind of vehicle. When Major Grimshaw left, it was almost midnight, and Melville did not realize how much he had been sounding off until the major looked at his wrist watch. Then he imagined Foghorn Grimshaw’s telling how he had spent an evening listening to a cocky kid lecturing on logistics and fire power. Muriel was the one who had started him off and after the major had left he told her it was pretty flat-footed. It did no good to have her say that the major enjoyed the evening or he would not have stayed so long.
“You made me sound like a divisional commander,” he said, “right in front of Grimshaw.”
They were standing alone in that tiny living room filled with all the furniture that no one else on the post wanted—because of course they were kids and almost anyone could rank them out of anything.
“But, Melly dear,” Muriel said, there at Bailey at midnight, “you’re going to be a general someday.”
The funny thing about it was that Muriel had hardly seen a general then, except at his graduation from the Point. It was a year later before she met one personally. Old “Blinders” Blake stopped in to inspect the school and there had been a review, of course, and the customary show on the range, and afterwards one of those receptions at the club. Come to think of it, Muriel had been pretty pregnant then. Wives on a post were always nervous about generals, just as though they might exercise seignoral rights, but Blinders Blake had not looked up to this sort of thing. He looked pretty sprung at the knees at that reception. Melville had worn his ribbons because Muriel had sent him home to get them. She was delighted when Blinders Blake had noticed his DSC.
“Where did you get that, son?” he had asked.
“Just outside of Cerey, sir,” he had answered.
“And is this your wife, son?” the General asked. “It’s nice to know we’re going to have another soldier soon.”
Things like that always got around. When “Tinhorn” Harry, who was the doctor then at the post hospital, gave Mel the news, he said that General Blake had called the number right. It was a boy. Muriel had told all the girls about the ribbons and about his trying to skip off to the reception without them. She had been right, Blinders Blake had noticed them, because generals were always checking up on medals, and it made a good story.
In fact General Newhouse, when Mel served down at the Canal Zone, had actually heard the story.
“Where did you get that, son?” he said to Melville. “I’m quoting General Blake.”
It only went to show how word could get around.
It may have been dull in peacetime, but there were a lot of good minds and good men in the service. They were the framework around which the armies of World War II were built. They invented the system of instruction that finally turned out divisions like cars on a production line. All those army schools paid off in the end when everybody, even privates in the rear rank, had to become teachers handling raw material. Yet it took guts to stay with the army in the twenties, when there was no sign of another war. Out in Honolulu perhaps there was a certain reality to the war games, because there was a possibility that the Japs might land there someday. The only trouble was that the navy would handle the Japs. The navy was always throwing its weight around, ready and willing to handle anything, particularly out in Honolulu—but then he was not going to criticize the navy, although he did know some pretty good stories about it.
Sometimes he wished that army wives were not always watching and worrying about their men, but then there was nothing else much for them to worry about. Their futures were inseparable from their men’s futures, and they only had one horse to put their money on. When things went sour, you could not blame a lot of them for wishing they had married someone else. Maybe Muriel wished she had sometimes, but she very seldom showed it. Of course he could feel that she was watching him, but Muriel very seldom pushed him and needled him. She never showed the bitterness or competitive spirit of many other army wives. On the contrary, she was a good sport and she was popular. She was always helpful and sympathetic, and as time went on she was always kind to younger wives. There was never anyone like Muriel for speaking the army language and saying the right thing.
When he got promotions she never looked complacent like some of the other wives and when he got passed over for something good, she did not complain. She backed him up the one time that he disobeyed an order and came close to a court-martial. It happened at the Fort Jellison Demolition School when there had been a problem of blowing up a bridge. A Captain Burdock was the instructor, and Melville had commanded the detail that had placed the explosives. When the thing had not gone off, Burdock had ordered him to remove the charge immediately, and he had refused, because of post regulations, to risk the men. He had ended up under arrest in quarters. He still remembered Muriel’s face when he told her why he had come home early, and he could only tell her that he was right according to the book. The charge should have been left for two hours before it was touched.
“Where’s the book with it in it?” Muriel asked. “I guess I’d better go out and see somebody.”
It was one of the few times they had seriously quarreled. He had told her that this was his problem and not hers—but he never forgot that she was right behind him.
“Well, anyway, you’ve still got me, Mel,” she said.
Actually the charge blew up half an hour later and half an hour after that he was called to the post headquarters office.
“Now wait,” Muriel said. “Before you go, take a shower and put on a clean uniform.”
The captain was in the CO’s office and the door was not even closed, so that everyone heard Captain Burdock get his orders to apologize and everyone heard Burdock do it. Muriel was the one who fixed it up later by asking the Burdocks to come in to supper. It was not his fault or Muriel’s that everyone at Jellison called the captain “Delayed-action” Burdock after that. He was always called “Delayed-action” Burdock, and Muriel still sent a card to them every Christmas.
Melville Goodwin could go on endlessly with his stories once he was in the mood. He seemed to tell them for much the same purpose that a chain smoker smokes cigarettes, for their soothing effect on the nerves rather than for any individual point or moral, and most of them seemed to me to illustrate nothing except a certain mediocrity and a snail-like advance upward on the service list—a list which was governed entirely by seniority until 1935. The General kept saying that he hated nothing more than blowhard officers who pulled wires and who sucked up to their superior officers at headquarters, but you could have a glimpse of Muriel Goodwin through the General’s verbiage, dusting him and brushing him and showing off his right points to the right people by skillful indirection. Yet obviously his own abilities and virtues were the factors in getting him where he was. No woman could push a chump up to two stars.
I remembered what she had once said—that she never worried about Melville when he was with troops, and I could think of her as breathing a sigh of relief and putting her mind on the children and the house when Melville was out somewhere on field maneuvers. Also, I had heard some of his contemporaries vaguely and guardedly imply that the farther he was removed from basic realities, the less effective he became, but he possessed great reserves of clearheadedness, resilience and mental durability. Furthermore, he was fearless, not only intellectually but physically, in an unimaginative, unhysterical and dedicated way. This arose from what I had always thought about him—that he was essentially annoyingly simple.
Melville Goodwin was never happier in his life, he said, than when he was assigned to command a company in the Philippines in Colonel Curly Whittell’s regiment—Curly was subsequently relieved after a visit from the Inspector General’s office and ended his career at a G-2 desk in Washington. Before he was assigned to the Philippines, Melville had been attending a lot of schools. It was good, after all this theorizing, to get down to basic fact, and no matter what anyone said, Infantry was fact. All the special branches and the bright boys in them, the Artillery, the Signal Corps, the Tanks and Aviation, had no other basic purpose than to push ahead the Infantry, and you had better not forget it. He always resented the snooty attitude specialists took about Infantry.
One night at the club at Baguio, when he was up there in the hills for a week’s leave to see Muriel and the boys, he got into quite an argument with his classmate, Phil Mitch—who was commanding a field artillery battery—and some flying officer who had something to do with a pursuit group on Nichols Field. This might not have happened if Muriel had been there, but Muriel had a low fever and had told him to go ahead to the Saturday night dance. Someone in a corner had been singing that one about caissons rolling along, and Phil had asked Melville why he hadn’t chosen a real branch of the service instead of the Infantry. Their voices must have risen because quite a crowd began gathering around them, including some higher officers. Melville said plenty about Infantry and he quoted Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson to prove it, just the way dogmatic ministers quote the Bible. Phil had said he sounded as backward as the late William Jennings Bryan and the monkey trial, and he had told Phil to keep the conversation away from monkeys, that they were talking about Infantry. He must have said more than he intended and perhaps he stuck his neck out because Lieutenant Colonel Dowel—that would be old “Gypsy” Dowel, who was infantry himself, but on a four-year tour as Inspector General—kept handing him drinks and saying he was a fundamentalist himself and thank God there were a few fundamentalists left in the army, and Melville had said thank God there were, sir, that sometimes he thought the army was drifting away from fundamentals; and some of the officers below field rank had said go ahead and give it to him, “Fundamental” Goodwin.
At any rate, he must have stuck his neck out all right because Muriel, who felt well enough by Monday to go out to a ladies’ bridge luncheon, came back and said she had heard that he had been very noisy at the club and that maybe it would be just as well if he did not have such a chip on his shoulder about Infantry. Nevertheless he had been absolutely right, and he told Muriel then that she might as well face it, she had married someone who was going to be in the front lines if there was going to be another war, and never to mind the rank. He overheard her saying the next night that Mel was an eccentric, but as a matter of fact she was as proud as he was of that company. It was like owning something at last to have a company.
An Infantry company, when you came to think of it, was the sharp edge of all war weapons and the individual enlisted man was the the primary unit. You could not be a successful company commander or a successful anything in the field if you could not put yourself in the shoes of the average American soldier. No enlisted man in his right senses ever expected an officer to be his pal, but if you could get the confidence of your people, you could do anything with them. Even the worst of them wanted to be the snappiest soldiers in the best outfit in the service, and they would rupture themselves trying to be if they felt they had a chance.
Company A, when he took it over, was not bad, but its personnel were slowed up and were trying to cut corners. The food and the drill were mediocre and so were the uniforms. The first thing he did when he took command, even before he talked to the officers, was to interview the top sergeant, because the morale of the company and everything else was in the hands of the top kick. The top sergeant of A Company was a sullen-looking man named Politz, who had already served three hitches and who knew all about gold-bricking.
“Now, sergeant,” he said, “I want to be frank with you. I’m ambitious and I want to get ahead, because I have a wife and two kids, and I’m going to make this the best God-damned company in the army. I want you to help me do it.”
He could tell from Politz’s expression that he had seen officers come and go, so he decided he had to make it stick, especially as he was still a first lieutenant, though a company CO.
“You think I’m handing you the old line of goods, don’t you, Politz?” he said. “All right, I’ll have to show you. I’ll back you up if you’ll back me, and if you don’t, I’ll bust you. First off, I want you to be the best-looking top sergeant in the regiment and so you’ve got to do something about your breeches and your blouse. Report here at two this afternoon, and I’ll take you to the post tailor myself.”
He could see that Politz did not like it and neither did the mess sergeant when he got after the cooks, but he really turned that company inside out and in the end it could do close order and extended order like a drill team. They were all a team from top to bottom, including the junior officers, one of whom, “Long John” Gooch, he asked for, later, as his chief of staff in the Silver Leaf.
Day and night he was out there. He would go over every man from head to toe, as though they were kids getting dressed up for a birthday party, and by God you should have seen his men at guard mount. Maybe Politz and some of them thought he would quiet down, but he didn’t. There was always wife trouble and girl trouble and drinking trouble in the company, and he was always ready after retreat to listen to troubles personally. No matter what engagements Muriel had made for him, she had to break them on the nights of the regimental boxing matches, and it was the same with the company ball team. When the men began to spend their own money at the post tailor’s so that they could have their breeches and blouses like Goodwin’s, he knew that everything was in hand, and Muriel got the spirit of it and began doing things about the noncoms’ wives. When the word got around that Goodwin would go right down the line for anyone in A Company, he knew that he was getting where he wanted. He could always figure logistics in terms of live troops. They were never abstract figures but men with a certain limit of endurance. He could reach decisions by looking at the faces of troops. He had learned this from Company A.
He often explained such problems to Muriel when they were together in the evening, and it was amusing to hear Muriel quote him, as she did sometimes at routine official dinners. You certainly learned about social life in the army, starting right as a shavetail, because of all those calls and courtesies and functions. You learned how to enter a room without tipping things over and how to pull out chairs and handle teacups and how to carry on a meaningless, harmless conversation with the lady on your right or left. It might be dull, but by God you learned. If incidentally you learned too much about somebody’s wife flirting with somebody else, you also knew when not to speak about it. Most officers might have started as small-town boys who had never seen a formal dinner table, but you knew your way around by the time you got to field rank, and no one could laugh at the army.
There was nothing that made him more pleased and proud than hearing from other people what a really top-drawer girl Muriel was. Formidable women in the higher echelons who had marched with their husbands from the Point up to the big house on the post and who ought to know, and frightened clumsy little lieutenants’ wives who didn’t know anything, all kept drawing him aside at dances and functions to tell him how much they liked Muriel. She knew all the stories and the jokes and the special type of flattery that made the big brass feel good, and yet she could also turn right around and make all the young kids just entering the service feel right at home. It made him very proud that Muriel had so much faith in him, though when they began to get a little rank and he overheard small snatches of what Muriel was saying about him to the big brass, he would sometimes be impelled to laugh and say that Muriel overestimated the situation; but at the same time, Muriel never went out of her way to tell anyone that he was an unappreciated wonder, as a lot of other wives did while building up their husbands. In fact she would always start by running him down a little. She would say, for instance, that she was afraid sometimes that Melville was turning into a martinet … sometimes she really wished that the boss would put him on the carpet and tell him to relax. She sometimes thought that man of hers, as she occasionally called him, was such a perfectionist that people under him would resent it. Yet back there in the Philippines the men in that company of his had really adored him, though she was sure she did not know why, and when he got orders to return to the States, Sergeant Politz and a little enlisted men’s committee came calling at the house, bringing a silver cigarette box … it almost made her cry.… The box was presented to her, of course, to get around army regulations.… Melville was just as hard on his own two sons as he was on troops. She was sure she didn’t know why his sons were always following him around and always calling for Daddy when they went to bed—except that he could tell them nice stories.
For instance there was the story of Corporal Hoskins and his dog. Melville was surprised when he heard Muriel telling this one to Colonel Frye at a formal dinner, because Muriel always disliked dogs and would not have one of them around the house. Somehow enlisted men always would go for dogs and monkeys and things like that. Every once in a while you’d have to have an open season on pets, or you’d find you’d be running a zoo. That mutt of Corporal Hoskins’s was one of those queer mutts you saw running around the rice paddy villages in the Philippines with sores all over him, but Hoskins had cleaned him up. The mutt’s name was Bolo, and Melville put up with Bolo because Hoskins was a good noncom, until one day at a battalion parade, when the company was passing in review and he had just given the command “Eyes right,” he happened to see Bolo right behind the adjutant keeping time to the music. The battalion commander put him on the carpet afterwards, in a nice way—but on the carpet.
“I love you, Goodwin,” Major Grundy said, “but I don’t love your dog, and the colonel was right there, and the colonel doesn’t love him either.”
“Neither do I, sir,” Melville said. “He isn’t mine. I didn’t know he was there, sir.”
“Well,” the major said, “maybe he thinks the adjutant’s a hydrant.”
“He didn’t commit a nuisance on his post, did he, sir?” Melville asked.
It was all good fun and there was always apt to be kid and dog trouble around a parade when the band began to play, but still, he had taken a bawling out and when he got back to the company office, he put Hoskins and Bolo on the carpet.
“Hoskins,” he said, “by tomorrow morning I want to see that pooch out of here.”
“Sir,” Hoskins said, “if the lieutenant would watch what he can do, the lieutenant might go easy on him.”
“What can he do?” Melville asked.
“He can do it on his hind legs, sir,” Hoskins said.
“Do what on his hind legs?” Melville asked.
“The drill, sir,” Hoskins said.
It was the damnedest thing. That mutt could stand on his hind legs and do a rightabout, left face and right face and walk around the room, forward, to the rear march, and eyes right, all by the numbers. Something had to be done about genius, and eventually he took Bolo and Hoskins up to the major, who took them all to the colonel’s. The colonel was giving a little dinner that night, and after dinner Bolo did his drill. After that Bolo entertained at a lot of parties, but he never did appear again at a formation.
If Muriel’s ideas about him did not always coincide with what Melville knew about himself, they certainly were always favorable, and they always made him happy, and she certainly seemed to know better than he did how to get on the right side of individual superiors. To give just one example, when Lieutenant Colonel Witherell from the general staff came to Hawaii for the winter maneuvers, Muriel found out somehow that Witherell had a special weakness for the Civil War battle of Chancellorsville and that Witherell was particularly fond of everything that had happened on the Orange Plank Road. She had told Melville this several days before Witherell dined with them at Kahala and she had urged him to study up in his Henderson for two evenings on Chancellorsville. Then Muriel had simply said in a most casual way that she did wish that Melville could think of something besides the Civil War. Any time those navy people next door wanted a bridge game—and it was fun to see Melville make money off the navy—why he would always excuse himself and sit under the lamp with one of those Civil War books. That was all that Muriel needed to say. Witherell came around a lot after that. She also told Witherell one of those Philippine Company A stories, the one about his playing parcheesi with Robert after his supper.
“Mummy,” Robert had said, “Daddy doesn’t try when he’s playing parcheesi. He keeps counting out one, two, three, four, five, halt. He’s thinking about A Company.”
He could not remember Robert’s ever having said anything like that, but it made a pretty good story.
Muriel kept after his bridge game, and then she went to work on his golf. That paid off pretty well when they were stationed around Washington, but by then Muriel had found out somehow that fishing and generals seemed to go together. When he finally got his majority, he could play good poker and bridge, not to mention chess. If he was not a good dancer, he was adequate. He could play fair golf and he could cast a fly and he always had been excellent at skeet.
“You really have the makings of a good field officer now,” Muriel told him, “and don’t say I haven’t worked on it.”
Of course this was partially a joke but not altogether. There was a lot to the army in peacetime besides routine duty and professional qualifications, and Muriel had recognized this much more clearly than he ever had. Some officers were good dancers and some were fine piano players and singers, but accomplishments like these, Muriel used to say, weren’t sound, and Muriel may have been right. There was Sewell Beebe, for instance, five years after Melville’s time at the Point. When Melville Goodwin was serving at Schofield on Tweaker Beardsley’s staff, everybody wanted “Soo” around because he could play the ukulele and he had a fine baritone. Yet seriously, Beebe was also a fine officer with brains and ambition. It surprised Melville, when a staff job was open, to find Tweaker Beardsley turning Beebe down. Though Melville hated politics, he had been serving under General Beardsley for about a year when Soo’s name came up, and he felt that he was enough of a member of the family to stick his neck out for a friend.
“Soo’s a good officer, sir,” he said. “He wouldn’t fit so badly in Operations.”
Tweaker Beardsley took a cigar out of his left-hand desk drawer and chewed the end of it for a while.
“Give me a light, will you, Mel?” he said.
Melville was ready, because Muriel had seen to it that he always carried a pocket lighter when he went to work for the Old Man.
“He looks all right on his record,” the Old Man said, “and maybe he is, except that he sings.”
If Melville had wanted to stick his neck out a few inches further, he might have reminded the Old Man that he always sent his aide for Beebe and his uke when there were dinner guests at the big house.
“I don’t mind music personally,” the Old Man said. “Mrs. Beardsley always carries around a lot of red seal records and she chews on me if I break one, but to get back to Beebe, he’s too good a singer. We’ll scratch Beebe and take on ‘Plugger’ Hume. He played right guard, didn’t he, his last two years at the Point?”
“Yes, sir,” Melville answered.
“That’s more like it,” the Old Man said, “and, Mel, just as an older man to a younger one, don’t go sticking your neck out for singing officers. You might be misunderstood.”
“Yes, sir,” Melville said.
The Old Man’s cigar was out, and he asked Melville for another light.
“When you’re choosing personnel,” the Old Man said, “select a good sound poker player or a golfer or someone who likes fishing, and you know where you are, because those types have stability. Put the prima donnas in Intelligence but keep them out of Operations.”
Of course, parenthetically, this prejudice about singing was somewhat personal with old Tweaker Beardsley. For over ten years the Infantry School had a glee club which put on two musical comedies yearly and two concerts also. He once bet Muriel that he could pick at least fifty generals who had sung in glee clubs between the wars, and what about the glee club in the Command and General Staff School? There was even a male quartet in London with a Catholic priest, a Protestant chaplain and a brigadier general in it. Nevertheless, Muriel always stuck to her guns. It might be all right, she had said, that evening when he told her about Soo, if officers sang in groups and choirs. She still did not think it helped if an officer was too funny alone with a ukulele or a piano, and she was very glad that Melville never sang with a uke. She would have been worried.
“But, Melly, dear,” she said, “it might be a nice thing to ask Plugger Hume and Betsy over for Sunday lunch and we’ll ask the Beebes, too, and Soo can bring his uke.”
It was great to hear Soo singing that Sunday under the coconut palms with the trade wind blowing, but Plugger Hume walked right across the lanai and all the way around the living room and back on his hands. He was sound and he made a good assistant in Operations.
Those years had been like the moving belt on a production line, and Melville Goodwin and his contemporaries had taken their places on the belt by the numbers. Some had left to go into business in the twenties. Others had met with death, accident and illness, and one or two had been pulled off by the high command. The rest of the crowd had stayed on the belt until the very end, to be so shined, tightened and tested that they stepped off as logical candidates for a star, and even some of these end products broke down when a more than theoretical strain was placed on them. No matter how effective the simulation, combat was the final test.
Melville Goodwin, as he once said himself, was basically a competent military mechanic. He might not have the global approach of a planner in the Pentagon but he could look at the road and guess what lay around the curves. There was a lot that was wrong with the army. It had its deadwood and its paper-passers, but still it was a pretty good army to have turned out Bradleys and Pattons and MacArthurs just when they were needed. He did not mean to place himself in any of these echelons, because at some point or other every officer’s professional clock struck twelve. Everybody could not be a Napoleon, and an armored division was just about his dish. That was a show he had really learned how to handle—but, without boasting, he could handle a corps or something larger. At any rate he had graduated from the Command and General Staff School at Leavenworth with a recommendation to command a corps in wartime.
Besides the Command and General Staff School, he had attended the Army War College, and he had done his share of staff work in Washington. He had sweated it out for years in the old Munitions Building, and he had not been bad at a desk. He couldn’t be, with his rank, but somehow active service in the field had spoiled his taste for desks and for sitting around conference tables or reclining in map rooms, talking to a lot of Fancy Dans. Of course he had been at a desk in Frankfurt, but frankly, he did not want to be chair-borne again if he could help it. He could take the Pentagon, if he had to, but frankly that building gave him a mild sort of claustrophobia. Sometimes he wished that Muriel would stop thinking about three and four stars. There just weren’t many stars being passed around on platters now, not even in the Air Force. A lot of his colleagues were also shaking around loose like him, looking for stars—who had a lot more jokers up their sleeves and a lot more horseshoes in their pants than he had. Competition was pretty stiff around the Pentagon, but maybe someone would take a look at him in Washington and give him a job of work to do.
Actually he had been over the whole subject with Muriel last night, and he had pointed out one pretty good fact to her. The country had made use of him. He had been the doctor who had been allowed to practice, and just exactly where would they have been if there had not been a war? He was still a major back in 1940 and only a lieutenant colonel at the time of the maneuvers in ’41. That was something for Muriel to think about. She had raised her boys to be soldiers, he had told her, and maybe in a year or two her oldest boy ought to put his sword and gun away so that she could give a little more thought to Robert, and to Charley at the Point.
It was interesting to remember how things started to chirk up in the service when there began to be a little distant gunfire in the world. Henry L. Stimson seemed to want us to do something about Manchuria, though nothing happened. Then, after Hitler’s march to the Rhineland, and the blowoff at the Marco Polo Bridge, and Munich, you began to feel that maybe you hadn’t missed the boat being in the army. Still, after Dunkirk it looked as though the whole show were folding up. It made him very restless and he found himself short of sleep. They were at Benning—he was on the Infantry School staff as Tank Instructor at the time—and there were new ideas every minute, and there was also the tactical aircraft angle.
“Melly,” Muriel asked him, there at Benning, “have you heard from Foghorn Grimshaw lately?”
Of course, as everyone knew, General Grimshaw was in the office of the Chief of Staff in Washington.
“I suppose he’s still living in Georgetown, isn’t he?” Muriel said. “I haven’t written Ellen Grimshaw a letter for a long while, and they sent us a Christmas card. I don’t believe they even know that Robert has entered the Point.”
When he got orders to go to Washington to attend a conference of observers back from Europe, he was sure that Muriel’s letter had nothing to do with it. He was certain that Foghorn Grimshaw would have thought of him anyway, and the General was very glad to see him and asked him to come to Georgetown for the night. The truth was that things were chirking up. The General said he might be wrong, but confidentially he did not see how we could keep out of that show in Europe indefinitely. There were going to be a lot of chances for bright young men. The General was not as young as he had been back in Bailey, and neither was Melville, though he hadn’t a gray hair in his head, but he was still a bright young man to Foghorn Grimshaw, and everybody began to see that this was the sort of war that demanded younger men in the higher ranks, instead of Papa Joffres.