WHEN CAPTAIN SCHOFIELD, A Signal Corps officer, and Lieutenant Colonel Pierce, just out of AMG school, first met each other, at one of the beverage bars in the Pentagon Building, they were just about to go overseas. Running into each other a few evenings later at the Mayflower Hotel was an occasion, the Lieutenant Colonel insisted, that called for a drink.
“Well, are you all set, Colonel?” Schofield asked.
“As ready as a sixteen-year-old bride,” Pierce said.
That was not the way Pierce normally talked, but ever since he had bought his uniforms he had felt he was on an outing. And now this going overseas any minute. It was the most exciting thing that had happened to him since he had hit one over the fence with three men on, for good old Washington U. of St. Louis, nearly thirty years before. He was a paunchy man with thinning gray hair—the remains of a good-looking fellow, Captain Schofield decided. Pierce ordered two old-fashioneds, one without sugar for himself. The without sugar was a concession to the rigors of Army life. While they were waiting for the drinks, Lieutenant Colonel Pierce revealed that he was an income-tax expert from St. Louis who was going to have something to do with finance in occupied territory. He didn’t tell Captain Schofield where he was going, exactly, and Schofield kept his destination hush-hush too. All they let each other know was that it was a matter of days now—minutes, maybe. And both of them understood, though they didn’t tell each other, exactly, that their departure had something to do with the Main Show, as Pierce had heard it described by his BG in the Pentagon.
“Well, here’s luck to you, sir,” Schofield said when the drinks arrived. They clinked glasses with self-conscious ceremony. “That goes for you too, Captain,” Pierce said. Every morning for twenty-five years he had gone down to the office at nine and come home at five-thirty and he wished his wife Agnes and the folks in St. Louis could see him now. Like in the movies. The last few drinks and jokes with a fellow-officer before going over and getting into it.
Captain Schofield was a quiet, boyish man, a teacher in a boys’ school in Massachusetts. He was reserved and unemotional because his schools had taught him to be reserved and unemotional, but deep down he felt edgy about this overseas business too. That last-supper feeling. That last drink.
That evening at the Mayflower the two men liked each other, or at least they liked the idea of each other. “A damn nice fellow,” each one thought, and “God knows what the poor chap is getting in for.” They drank with the proper note of gay desperation and everything that each of them had to say was of great interest to the other.
“Here’s a toast to the Jap Navy,” Schofield said when the waiter brought the second round of drinks. “Bottoms up!” He had picked that up from a group of women Marines at the table next to him in a restaurant the night before. Pierce repeated it, laughing. Schofield thought it was rather good too. After all, they were both leaving any moment for overseas.
When they met in the Mayflower Lounge a few nights later it was a great joke. “Still here, Captain?” “Why, Colonel, I thought by this time you’d be God knows where!” They both laughed. The realization that this minute they might be having a drink together in a Washington hotel, the next minute be dropped down in the middle of a war, was titillating. They had three or four drinks, toasting each other’s forthcoming adventures again, and the Lieutenant Colonel began to observe the legs of the women coming down the steps.
“How about those over there?” he said. “Those aren’t too bad. Though god dammit, you don’t see legs the way they ought to be any more! These little ones coming up look like they’re set on bean poles. The way I like ’em is when you grab ’em above the knee you know you got something.”
Captain Schofield had never talked about women this way and he didn’t like drunks, but this was all right, this was war, the way he had heard of it, and the Lieutenant Colonel, for all his vulgarity, was certainly a square shooter. They had another drink and when they said good-bye they both felt the seriousness of the gesture.
“Well, old man, lots of luck to you again,” Pierce said.
“Thank you, Colonel. Maybe we’ll run into each other on the other side sometime.”
Lieutenant Colonel Pierce was into his third old-fashioned when Captain Schofield showed up two evenings later. “Hello, Captain,” said Pierce. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” This time, when Schofield’s drink arrived, they didn’t bother with the toasts.
“Well, any news?” Pierce said.
“Something seems to be holding it up on the other end,” Schofield said. “Should be coming through any day, though. How about you, Colonel?”
“Oh, just the usual red tape, I guess. Ironing out wrinkles in AMG policy or something. Might take a few more days.”
The two officers looked at each other suspiciously.
“Maybe they’re saving us for the invasion,” Pierce suggested.
“Or maybe they’re saving the invasion for us,” Schofield said.
Pierce asked Schofield if he were married. Schofield said he was. “I’ve been hitched to the same woman for twenty-three years,” Pierce announced. They didn’t come any finer than Mrs. Pierce, he said. And his son, a shavetail in the Marine Corps, was a regular chip off the old block. One of his daughters was married to an insurance man in Minneapolis who cleared fifteen thousand in ’43. “Not that money means anything, the way this government is going.”
Pierce signaled to the waiter with his empty glass. “I tell you, Captain,” he said, “I’m old enough to be your father, so I know what I’m talking about. No matter how much jack you’ve got in the bank you’re a pauper if you haven’t got the love of your own family.”
He reached into his billfold and pulled out a snapshot of a family group. Mrs. Pierce reminded Schofield of the typical Brookline matron. “Mrs. Pierce is a very handsome woman,” he said, and held the photograph the polite length of time before handing it back.
A Wac lieutenant appeared. She was small and rather plain, with a figure that was tidy if not pin-up. Pierce studied it critically. “I hear these service gals around Washington don’t mind giving it away if you’re going overseas,” he said.
Captain Schofield smiled to show that he was one of the boys, but his mind was far away from Lieutenant Colonel Pierce and his observations on wartime morality. He was thinking about his wife, Mignon, in Greenmeadow, Massachusetts. He was wondering if perhaps he weren’t going to be around long enough to make it worth-while for Mignon to come down and stay with him. Pierce was again talking about legs. A beribboned Free French officer with a slight, erect figure limped stylishly down the steps.
“Sort of gives me a kick to see the Free French here in the Mayflower,” Schofield said.
“I still don’t trust ’em,” Pierce said. “From de Gaulle up or down.”
Schofield said nothing. He was not an argumentative man and things he felt strongly about he preferred not to discuss with Lieutenant Colonel Pierce. The future of the civilized world lies in our trusting those fellows and their trusting us, he thought.
“Now that’s the kind of legs I was talking about,” said Pierce, eyeing a pair that were moving past the table.
After a while, when Lieutenant Colonel Pierce and Captain Schofield kept on meeting at the Mayflower, they stopped joking about still being in Washington. They stopped talking about the war because they weren’t heroes any more. They didn’t talk politics because after all there was no sense getting into an argument. They just sat down with each other because people don’t like to sit down alone these days and there weren’t many other men in Washington they knew to sit down with. Like a couple of fellows who find themselves thrown together in the same foxhole, Schofield thought. The Mayflower Lounge was a Washington foxhole papered with dollar bills, where officers going overseas any minute or any year were sweating out the war.
“I know what let’s do,” Pierce said one evening after a longer silence than usual. “Let’s play a game. I’ll bet I can count six silver leafs entering this place before you count twelve bars. And the loser picks up the check.”
“Fine!” Schofield said. He thought of Mignon, pregnant in Greenmeadow, Massachusetts. He thought of the invasion and when it would open up and how much he wanted to be there in time for it, not because he aspired to heroism but because this was going to be the biggest fire the world had ever seen and men are still small boys chasing after fires. He wondered how much longer he would have to sit around the Mayflower while the orchestra played something called “Mairzy Doats” and Lieutenant Colonel Pierce tossed off old-fashioneds without sugar and commented on the good legs and the bad legs passing back and forth.
A youthful Air Force Captain with a string of ribbons, a young lady and a cane, appeared on the landing. Schofield pulled out a pencil and drew a cross on his paper napkin. “That puts me in the lead,” he said. “One to nothing, Colonel.”
The Colonel was watching the Wac lieutenant he had been eyeing for days. He rose so suddenly that he spilled a little of Schofield’s drink into the captain’s lap.
“The hell with this,” he announced. “I’m gonna go over and see if I can get into that Wac’s drawers.”
For a moment, as the two men looked at each other, one of those private little wars within wars was being waged.
“And the hell with you, Captain, you prim, pious son of a bitch,” Pierce said. Then he straightened his uniform, making sure his home-front ribbons were in place, and walked away.
Schofield checked an impulse to call after him, “I hope I never see you again.” Instead he toyed with his drink and thought of Mignon and the waiting French and the petty careering that would always blemish the nobility of war.
“We’ll win something out of this in spite of you, you silly bastard,” he actually said under his breath. And then, feeling a little better, he ordered another drink and went on waiting.