Honorable Men (18 page)

“He sounds like a great guy, but then you didn't do so badly yourself,” Lars commented when Chip had finished his tale.

“Oh, I just stood by and did what I was told,” Chip retorted, embarrassed at the idea that he might be seen as seeking credit for himself. “As a matter of fact, I think my duty as skipper was to have stayed on the bridge.”

“Under the circumstances, that might be overlooked.”

“Seriously, Lars, do you think you could put in a word for Hastings? He would give his soul to get back to what he calls the real navy.”

“I'll certainly watch my chance. I happen to know there's a very important person in this building who considers that he got a raw deal on the
Florida.
The subject came up in personnel when we were going over the list of the LST group and flotilla commanders.”

“Oh, Lars, if you only could!”

“I'll do my best. And if he gets a battleship or cruiser assignment in the Pacific, I suppose you'd like to go with him?”

“Would I? I certainly would!”

Lars looked at him curiously. “And now are you ready for my news?”

Chip stared. He had forgotten it! Suddenly he gasped. “Alida? It's come?”

“A fine eight-pound boy. Both doing well. Your ma sent word through the Third Naval District.” As Chip simply gaped, Lars continued, “I'd have told you straight off, but you wouldn't let me.”

“It must be the war. It gets you.” Chip felt again the void that he had sensed on that early morning off the Normandy coast. Why in the name of God did he not feel more?

“Let me ask you something, Chip. You've been on sea duty now for over two years. You've had hardly any leave. I think I could arrange for you to do a spell of shore duty in New York or Washington. Wouldn't you like to catch up with Alida and the new baby?”

Chip twisted his brown cap and then folded it smoothly again on his knee. “I suppose I sound like a monster to you, Lars, but I want to see this thing through first.”

“You don't sound at all like a monster to me. But I fail to see why you must do quite so much more than your share.”

“Maybe you could spare an evening and go out with me and Hastings. I think you might see what I mean. With him, everything seems to make a kind of sense. Even if it's a pretty ghastly sense. All you have to think about is getting the Hun's bloody paws off the Continent. The more krauts we kill, the better.”

“Better? You mean it would be best if we killed them all?”

“I guess the bad ones would be enough. Most of the prisoners I've seen at the beaches are tickled pink to be out of it.”

“And do you and the commander feel the same way about the Japs?”

“What's the difference?”

“So you'd be just as happy on duty in the Pacific?”

“Happy isn't the word. Satisfied, if you like.”

Lars whistled. “Who'd have thought you'd become such a fire-eater, Chip?”

“It isn't that. It's the simplicity of it. Of course, it's probably artificial, but everything's been artificial since we donned the fig leaf. The point is, I don't have to be concerned with Mummie and Daddy and Benedict and God and love, love, love. All I have to do is kill rats. They're out there, in the sky, the sea, the air. And maybe in killing them I can get rid of some of the rottenness in myself.”

“I see,” Lars mused. “It's a kind of exorcism. Of the devil in you. The excuse to kill.”

“Call me a nut and have done with it.”

“Ah, but it's nuts like you who win wars! Time enough to muzzle you when we have an armistice. Yes, I'd like to meet your commander. You wouldn't be free tonight, would you? I can usually get out of here by ten or eleven.”

Somewhat to Chip's surprise, Hastings appeared to like Lars. The latter took them to his club, Roters, which Hastings obviously loved, and where through some dispensation (Lars always obtained one) they were able to sit in the bar until two in the morning.

As Chip drank, deeply for him, he felt a surge of the same euphoric happiness creep through his body as he had felt on the bridge of his ship after the disposal of the bomb. What was it? He looked about the long narrow room, of which they were the only occupants, with its low leather chairs and dark prints of dead statesmen, and saw nothing to elate him. Was it the arrival of the little boy across the Atlantic and the relief that Alida was well? But he had been convinced all along that the child would be a boy and that Alida would bear him easily. That pleasure had been discounted in advance. No, it had more to do with his pleasure in the sudden congeniality between his two friends as they discussed the war in the Pacific.

“Lars here knows the navy as well as a regular,” Hastings observed to Chip.

“I never thought I'd live to hear Gerry Hastings say that of a reserve!”

“Chip thinks I'm prejudiced because of what I've said about amphibious officers. But they're hardly a fair sample of the reserve.”

“Come now, Commander. Surely some of ours have done very well.”

“But look whom they've had to train them!” Hastings exclaimed with a laugh of unabashed conceit as he finished his drink and rose to refill it at the now unattended bar. “You don't have to have been to Annapolis if you've been trained by an Annapolis man.”

“Like me!” Chip agreed, not minding at all that the whiskey made him fatuous.

“Chip seems to think he's learned a lot from you, Commander,” Lars observed. “It makes me wonder if I haven't missed an essential part of my education by being stuck at a desk.”

“Well, London's not so far from the front, and it's going to be right on it when these new flying bombs start your way.” Chip noted that Hastings seemed eager to put Lars at his ease. Was it simple deference to headquarters? Or an immediate awareness of the essential gentleman in Lars?

“What is your opinion of the real lesson of war?” Lars continued. “I mean to basic civilians, like Chip and me.”

“Chip may not be as basic a civilian as you think,” Hastings replied with a wink. “Though I suspect you are, Lars. And in your case, anyway, I mean that as a compliment. But to answer your question in the simplest terms, the real lesson of war, in my opinion, is that we need one every so often to keep us from getting soft and mean.”

“That was Justice Holmes's theory,” Lars commented, turning to Chip. “Do you remember how we all deplored it at Yale? ‘The Soldier's Faith'? The sword-slashed faces of the students at Heidelberg that inspired Holmes with such respect? It was the price, he maintained, of breeding a race fit for leaderÂ
ship.” He swung back now to Hastings with a disarming smile. “Why isn't that Hitlerism, sir?”

“It's part of Hitlerism, I grant,” the latter conceded equably. “But only a part. There's no law that compels me to buy the rest of the bag. Look. I don't care how much you squirm and twist at the idea, the fact remains that every male knows, deep down in his heart, that what I say is true. Oh, of course you do everything you can to avoid so distasteful a conclusion. You point out that it takes as much guts to be truly independent and humane and reasonable as it does to fight a war. And maybe that's so—if a man is truly independent and humane and reasonable. But how many of the breed are? No, you can't get away from it, Lars. There's a horrid basic connection between the male leader and the warrior.”

“What about a female leader?”

“Women are different. They don't have to be able to fight to preserve their character. That's why it's so often said that they're wiser than men. That in a world run by women there wouldn't be any wars. And maybe there wouldn't be. But it would have to be a world inhabited
only
by women. Don't blame me for this. Blame the Creator.”

“Then there must always be wars?”

“It will be a sad thing for our sex when there aren't any. Unless we can invent some sort of substitute. Which we may have to, if wars get much more destructive.”

“And by like token,” Lars pursued, “we should be grateful to the Nazis and Japs?”

“Only in the sense that we're grateful to a vaccine that immunizes us from a dread disease. Gratitude doesn't alter the fact that it's full of foul germs.”

Chip had been listening intently as he drank. In his rising elation, he wondered whether anyone could seriously prefer a twentieth-century glass manufacturer to a medieval knight. History was all at once delightfully simplified.

“Suppose I were to stay in the navy after the war?” he asked suddenly. “Would I get ahead? Or would I always be branded as a reserve?”

“What would become of the sacred family business?” Lars demanded.

“It can look after itself. Anyway, Dad will live forever. No, I might seriously think of it. If Gerry here thinks I'd have a chance.”

Hastings became even more serious; he shook his head. “Don't think of it, Chip. Not that you wouldn't get ahead. You would. We're going to need a huge navy after the war to police the world. England's shot; she won't be able to do it. And we'll have to use our reserves, yes. But that's not the point. The point is that you'd hate the peacetime navy. Red tape, bureaucracy, long duty at dull bases where your wife would have to say pretty-please to some admiral's horsy consort. No, Chip; you were born for the great world. You like the look of the armed forces in wartime, because now we're top dog. But just wait. Chip Benedict, president of Benedict Glass, will be a much hotter shot than Captain Benedict having one too many at the officers' bar in the Brooklyn Navy Yard after a dull day of signing forms.”

“He's right, Chip.”

“Will you form a law firm with me then, Lars?”

“I'll certainly think about it.”

“He was my best friend,” Chip said to Hastings, waving an unsteady arm towards Lars. “My best friend at Yale. But then a man called Bogart came between us. A cheat and a louse. Did you know he was that, Lars?”

Lars rose, smiling. “I didn't know
you
knew it, Chip. I'm glad you found out. I heard he left Virginia Law School. I wondered why. But now, if you both don't mind, I'm afraid I must turn in. I have to be at the office at seven.”

“You think I'm drunk!”

“Well, you ought to be, Daddy.”

And Hastings and Lars solemnly raised their glasses in a final toast to the newborn heir of the Benedicts.

***

In the six months before Chip received the anticipated transfer to the battleship
Maryland
in the Pacific, to which vessel Commander Hastings had preceded him, his LST crossed and recrossed the Channel some dozen times, but nothing of real note occurred. The personnel he transported to France, as the fighting front receded farther and farther from the beach, were increasingly auxiliary: supply corps, engineers, Red Cross and ultimately United Service Organization actors and singers to entertain the troops. Returning were paratroopers, the wounded and ultimately German prisoners. The last of these came aboard in orderly fashion and voiced no objection to the filthy condition of the tank deck into which they would be crowded, two or three thousand at a time, for as much as three days. One group, ordered to disembark at Southampton, actually complained that they needed more time to clean up the ship.

One night, at sea, Chip heard hundreds of voices from the tank deck below raised in a Brahms lullaby.

“It is as if they had left the devil behind them in Germany,” he wrote Hastings. “You will call me a sloshy capitalist, wanting to have my soul and eat it, too, but I impenitently wonder if I didn't send something evil in myself to the bottom with that stretcher that we dropped over the side in Normandy.”

Hastings, characteristically, did not comment on this passage in his answer. But when Chip was standing by his side, an assistant gunnery officer on the deck of the
Maryland,
their ears wadded as the gray leviathan shuddered and rocked with each detonation of her eighteen-inch guns aimed at the visible and defenseless coast of a now almost defeated Japan, he seemed to refer to it.

“There!” he exclaimed after the last roar. “That's for Pearl Harbor! And the next will be for Bataan and the death march! Do you know, Chip, it is almost worth having lived on this dreary globe to see our little yellow brothers get it for what they've done.”

Chip marveled at the gleam in his friend's eyes. Impregnable on a battleship in a sea stripped of the enemy's fleet, he was the same relentless Hastings who had been within a second of being blown to bits by a German obus. But was there any reason that there should
not
be a light in his eye at the destruction of the forces of Satan?

“It won't be long now, Chip.”

“Long before what?”

“Before this is over, and you capitalists can go back to your little games of picking pockets. Do you remember our talk the first night we went out to that bar at Camp Crawford?”

“Oh, yes. And you can go back to your little game of watching the wolves. Well, maybe we're both ready for it.” He raised his binoculars to scan the distant, dull coastline. Then he shrugged. “After all, is this any more a man's job? To me it's like shooting cows.”

C
HIP
, however, was to allow himself one moment of euphoria before the reaction to four years of war fever set in. The terrible two A-bombs had been dropped and the great surrender made, and the long, gray engine of nemesis on which he served was entering the harbor of Sasebo to play its part in the occupation of the enemy. It was a cold autumnal day, slightly, perhaps ominously, overcast, and the dirty dark waters were faintly rippled by the chilly sea breeze. Chip, standing just below the bridge, had a broad view of the silent harbor and the masts, sticking up above the surface like broken or bent bollards, of sunken warships. Ahead of him, and soon all around him, were the anchored vessels of the conquering flotilla. Had Octavius Caesar entering the port of Alexandria, or Scipio Africanus descending upon Carthage, enjoyed a headier sight?