Once an Eagle (64 page)

“I'm going to say something
you'll
call highly heretical,” he offered aloud; he touched the tips of his fingers below his chin. “Do you know something? The problem of morale is so much drivel. Oh, you can find isolate instances such as your Xenophon. But I mean really: in an ultimate sense.” Damon smiled slowly and it irritated him. “What's funny about that?”

“I was just remembering the first time we met, Major. In the courtyard near St. Durance. You felt some of the boys were pretty disrespectful—they were trying to get their canteens filled, remember?—and you quoted me that old adage of Napoleon's about morale being to all other factors as four is to one.”

That memory of Damon's: that incredible memory! Had he said that? Yes, he probably had. He didn't remember the incident; what he did remember was the solid, blocklike indomitability of the figure in front of him, the weary, hard defiance; and then he had taken out his notebook and pencil and—

“Did I?” he queried lightly. “Yes, I probably did … Sure, we must all of us pay lip service to it—even the Little Corporal. It has its value in effecting given ends, filtered down through the ranks. But you know as well as I do that it's command that makes the difference. All the fire-eating esprit in the world is useless without a commander's craft and inventiveness. Look at military history: the invincible Macedonian phalanx sends out its massive hammerblow at Pydna, and the three Roman lines bend and bend and bend with the impact, and contain it like a web, and chew it up. Did the Romans have a higher morale? I doubt it. Pakenham's valorous grenadiers march resolutely into the withering fire from behind the cotton bales at New Orleans, the knights at Crécy ride into that gray storm of cloth-yard arrows, and are no more. It's been the same in every age. The irrefutable triumph of strategy, of command disciplines! Look at Hannibal's brilliant victories—he won them with mercenaries: Goths, Asturians, Nubians—elephants, for God's sake. After Cannae every single family in Rome went into mourning.
Every single family!
Did you know that?”

“But Rome won the war,” Damon said quietly.

It was this curious stubbornness that was intriguing. He could run rings around the Nebraskan, marshal a perfect wilderness of facts and deploy them in perfect order, he could push him off balance, run him ragged—but always there was this strange little point of resistance he couldn't quite overpower, like a rock in the middle of a riptide …

Damon's reference to their first meeting had made him think of the war, and he remembered the day he had gone up to the line with General Bannerman and Colonel Mulhouse, the morning of the Malsainterre offensive. A gray, evil morning, but it was dry in the captured German dugout on the crest of the hill. The regimental commander was on one phone, an artillery spotter was on another, and out ahead, in the graybrown murk the crashing patterns of fire and black smoke crept forward and back, forward and back. The noise was terrible, like a sack resting on one's head and shoulders—he had never realized it could be so burdensome; and yet there was at the same time a curious sense of release, almost inebriation … Someone in the dugout was shouting; he put the field glasses to his eyes and there they were, going forward, lumpy and drab in the mud and rain, like men searching for something they do not want to find, their rifles all aslant; stumbling toward that distant tree line on the far slope; and falling now, floating down dreamily or dropping as if tripped, and then groping feebly in the wire and bits of shrubs and shattered trunks of trees. General Bannerman was shouting, everyone around him was shouting and cursing now, Colonel Mulhouse was talking furiously into the phone …

And then, watching another company deploy, and then another, gazing hypnotized through the long slit between the logs, an astonishing thing had happened: those men out there ceased to be men and turned into spots, or rather configurations of spots; without any meaning at all. They rose and fell, slipped and struggled but they, like the bushes and the wraithlike trunks of trees, were nothing more than patterns of light and shadow. And over everything—the lumpy corpses, the mud, the snarled strands of wire—a silence fell, a silence as sheathed and impervious as the first, still snow of winter. He turned and looked at Bannerman, and the General's face had vanished too, into a configuration of pink and silver spots. He shut his eyes; but no one seemed to have noticed. It was the only time in his career he'd ever fouled up an order. The General had shouted something at him—a recommendation, a reminder, something—and he'd got out his notebook and pencil, but he'd written nothing there at all.

He had recoiled from the vision, fixation, visitation, whatever it was—in real terror. That night he'd got deliberately drunk (he did not drink to excess ordinarily, he hated the loss of mental control it brought on) and had fallen fast asleep. The next day had been a busy one, what with the changes in orders and the necessity of committing reserve units to overcome the German resistance, and the insistence of the spots was fainter. Three days later they had worn away almost entirely. And the following week, on the way to Vieux Moulins, watching the artillery and machine-gun companies hurrying forward, he had smiled at the antics of the mules, the waved greetings and curses and shouts, as the mighty procession pushed on, like some vast bristling serpent, all horns and scales, through the ooze: an entire world in motion, bound in one consuming idea. Glancing at General Bannerman's red, flushed face, his snapping blue eyes, Massengale had felt a surge of exultation so great he had trembled inside his trench coat. To set this all in motion—with one word! It was—it was as near to godhood as man would ever reach …

“Samuel,” he said with quick intensity, “we're going to be at war: very soon. Do you realize that?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“A great, swarming, devastating war—desert and jungle and ice cap. And this time we will suffer immense casualties, along with the others.”

“I'm afraid you're right. And it'll be so unnecessary—”

“No war is unnecessary. Wars come because men want them—they satisfy a very deep urge in human nature. They're every bit as inevitable as eating or rutting.”

“A biological necessity of the first importance,” Damon said slowly.

Massengale glanced at him, but the Captain was not smiling. “Yes: that's the way a German would put it, of course …” Twisting in his chair he pointed a finger at the other man. “Samuel,” he demanded, “can you honestly assure me that Brand won't get into trouble over some other hot little skirt? or go off on a bust and tear half of Pasay apart?”

“No. I can't.”

“You see? You can't reform men—you can't save them from what they are. Men—most men—are a passive element. They let themselves be acted upon; they crave it, without it they'd probably go mad. You worry too much about your people, Samuel. You can't do everything—you're merely spreading yourself too thin. And what's the sense in it? War is coming—on seven-league boots now. You know it and I know it. The problem is to be in the most advantageous spot when it comes, the place exerting the greatest possible leverage.”

Damon shifted his feet, frowning; Massengale could sense his disapproval. It was the wrong line to take with a man like this, it would accomplish nothing; he shifted to flattery as a transition.

“You've done a great job with Fox. You're a perfect miracle worker with troops—I wouldn't have believed it possible. Kemperer says you've remade the company.”

“They're good material.”

“Oh, stuff and nonsense.
You
did it, all by yourself. But look, you have talents above and beyond that. You'll never be satisfied with a company, or even a battalion. You're too good for that … Why bury yourself out there in troop-and-stomp?”

Damon said: “I serve where I'm ordered to, I go where I'm sent.”

“Oh, hell, that's no answer.” He felt a surge of exasperation, and let a little of it bleed through in his voice. “If you can serve your country more effectively in a more authoritative, more meaningful position, you have an obligation to do so. You're shirking your responsibilities every bit as much as the officer who turns into a drunk or a wastrel. You're guilty of pride, man.”

“Pride?”

“Yes, of course—what did you think it was? It's your private vice—the egalitarian fallacy.” He snorted crossly. “That damn fool Acton. There's nothing essentially corrupting about power if it's used wisely, for the objective in view.” He raised one hand. “Come on, now—all the libertarian nonsense aside: wouldn't you give your eyeteeth to command a division?”

“Yes,” Damon answered after a moment. “I'd like to lead a division.”

“Well, then. What's that but power—your company multiplied by seventy? Think it over now, give me an answer.”

Damon was sitting hunched forward, his forearms over his knees. “It's true,” he said after a pause. “If that's power, I guess I'd enjoy it, all right.” His eyes came up and met Massengale's. “And I certainly appreciate your offer. I know it's an extraordinary opportunity you're presenting me. But I've got to say—I think I'd better stay with my boys.”

There was a silence. Massengale put a fresh cigarette in the long jade holder and lighted it, listening to a houseboy singing down in the garden behind the house—a high, clear voice in the night air. They were always singing. To his surprise his belly was tense with anger. I was wrong about him, he thought with terse implacability; he has no ambition, no real caliber—he's just another of the Army's perpetual adolescents, bemused by sentiment and dreams …

Well: it was too bad. But that was life. You made your choices and followed them, and they determined your career. Every man had his limitations, reached a certain point he couldn't surmount, and there he stopped; and this was Damon's, obviously. If this incorrigible, self-immolating fool wanted to vegetate grandly in company offices and banana posts for the rest of his days that was his affair. It was disappointing—he'd hoped for more from this man, he'd believed he could shake him out of this futile, destructive pattern—but
people
were disappointing: it was the one rude, unalterable hallmark of the human condition. People let you down, continually and lamentably; and there was nothing to be done about it.

He got up and began to put the chess pieces back in the velvet-lined box, pleased by the cool, silky texture of the ivory, feeling his anger ebb. “Well, we'll talk about it again,” he said. “Let's go in and join our long-suffering spouses, shall we?”

“Certainly, sir. Fine.”

But leading the way into the living room he knew he would never bring it up again. He had already discarded Damon—in the maneuvers and campaigns to come the Nebraskan was not the kind of confederate he wanted: he would never be able to depend on him. He'd look up this young fellow Fowler at Clark Field; feel him out, see what he had to say for himself.

8

The mountains looked
as if they had been flaked from a vast piece of flint: jagged rock outcroppings black in the late winter light. There were no trees. Far below, the valley stretched away in miles on miles of barren earth, a soft dun shadow. Ancient. So ancient and so barren. The wind blew without haste, calmly and surely, as though it knew it would eventually penetrate everything, erode everything and sweep it away—men and habitations and soil, and finally the black flaked flint of the mountains. Until nothing was left. A wind that blew from Siberia, with nothing to stop its bitter progress.

Damon eased himself away from the oblong aperture in the wall and sat down. His feet were numb with cold and his back and thighs quivered from the incessant climbing. A little knot of men were squatted in the corner of the bare, narrow room—it was really a cave with two walls of stone erected on the downhill side—bent over a battered piece of paper laced with rice-grain characters and symbols and soft, meandering lines. Damon smiled wearily, watching them and listening. There was no other sound in the hut. No matter where or at what moment in time you found yourself, at Arbela or Agincourt or Antietam Creek, war always resolved itself into a group of men hunched over a map in a squalid place, talking in low voices. He thought of the farmhouse before Brigny, the desultory shelling and the heat. But these men around him had made a forced march of forty-odd miles through the cruelest country he had ever seen, to reach this mean small room in the bitter cold; they had not had a hot meal in more than twenty-four hours. He was the most warmly clad man in the room, and he was chilled to the bone.

Lin Tso-han was talking, with steady, soft insistence. He had a thin, worn face, a large, mobile mouth and heavy black brows, like Groucho Marx, that moved eerily up and down when he spoke; his eyes were quick and nervous. He was wearing the plain blue uniform of the private soldier, stripped of all insignia of rank. F'eng Po-chou was listening to him, crouched on his big thighs, as squat and imperturbable as a Buddhist figurine. At one point he asked a question. Lin's finger traced a quick, erratic course over the map. F'eng nodded, and the old man with the gnomelike face they called Lao Kou—old dog—muttered something hoarsely; the scar that ran across his nose and cheek looked blue in the cold. Listening hard, his head aching with the effort, Damon began to get it, or thought he did. F'eng's detachment was to simulate an attack in force on Wu T'ai from the east, draw fire, break off and lure the Japanese garrison out of the town up the Yen Teh valley in a long arc. At a certain predetermined moment Lin was to assault the village with the main body from the northwest, wipe out the weakened garrison, cross the Sian Railroad four li below the town, and hike northwest to Tung Yen T'o. Something like that. But the fly in the ointment seemed to be a Japanese column moving toward Wu T'ai from the south …

“K'un nan,” F'eng said tersely, and Damon found himself nodding. It was difficult all right, there was no doubt about that. It sounded fantastic, with one hundred and twenty men and no heavy weapons. But they were certainly acting as if they were going to try it.

Lin became still more persuasive: he did not raise his voice but there was no mistaking the urgent note that had crept into it now. Damon caught the nouns: medical supplies, drugs, ammunition. It was a tremendous opportunity, a rare opportunity, before the enemy column got there and made it all impossible. F'eng said nothing, spat on the hard, gritty clay floor. It was obvious that he was unhappy about his role, and Damon knew exactly what he was worrying about: that moment when he must break contact and start up one of those terrible exposed slopes on the double, with only two automatic weapons—and highly unreliable ones at that—to cover his people. F'eng's glance fell on Damon, who looked away. Nothing ever changed in war. It was always, monotonously, cruelly, the same: one man telling another that a mission was important, that his chances were good, more than good really, they were excellent, and so forth and so on; and the subordinate listening stolidly, realizing that it was going to be done, that perhaps it had to be done, but hoping nevertheless against all faint, fond hope that the whole operation could be postponed, avoided, forgotten. An avalanche, say, or an earthquake or flood or even a tidal wave. But there would be no tidal wave deep in Shansi Province, four hundred miles from the Yellow Sea, on the edge of the roof of the world …

Taking off his boots he massaged his feet, changed his socks from left foot to right, and put his boots on again. Well. Plans and operations. Battle. Nothing ever came for free in this world, nothing; and nobody knew it better than these Chinese guerrillas, squatting in a perfectly hyperborean cave in the Black Tiger Mountains. He had marched with them for twelve days, stopping at the bleak, battered villages, eating millet out of the communal four-foot iron pan, sleeping huddled on the hard clay k'angs where they had to change position every two hours so that the men farthest from the fire wouldn't freeze; he had found out what kind of men they were.

But to have to go into battle, not for the destruction of the enemy's field force or the capture of strong points, but for the seizure of medical supplies …

He chafed his hands briskly; his mind wandered, he no longer caught even individual words in the soft, unhurried musical lilt and dip of Mandarin. Sitting against the wall beside him a young soldier called P'ei Hsien, a thin boy with a smooth round face, was writing in the dirt with a cartridge; his lips moved soundlessly, like a young child's. Damon followed the point of the bullet as it stroked in the characters.
Man. Rice. Earth. Sky. Woman.
And then, falteringly:
Give us back our rivers and our mountains.

Damon swung his head to the right, encountered the gaze of a man with high cheekbones and narrow, liquid eyes; he was heavy for a Chinese, and looked like an Aleut hunter. Damon had forgotten his name. The man grinned and bobbed his head once, and Damon grinned back. The Eskimo was carrying a French Lebel rifle of World War vintage; the stock had split and was fastened tightly with strands of hemp woven with incredible care. The original sling had worn out or been lost and its new owner had substituted a Japanese sling of bright yellow leather. How in God's name had it ended up here, in the possession of a guerrilla way up in Shansi? Had it come from Tonkin? from the French legation at Tientsin? from the Japanese? What a story it could tell …

The Eskimo, following his gaze, patted the long, narrow bolt and grinned again. There was no ammunition Damon could see, nothing on the man's belt or hanging from his shoulders.

“How many?” he asked slowly in Chinese. “How many rounds do you have?”

“Twelve,” the Eskimo said. Proudly he tapped his trouser pocket and Damon heard the soft chink of shells. They were loose in his pocket. He had no clips, then. That meant he had to feed the Lebel like a single shot. Back to Civil War days, to Shiloh. And when those twelve rounds were gone—

F'eng had got to his feet. He had a Japanese wristwatch of which he was very proud; he wore it British style with the face on the underside of his wrist and he extended his forearm now, checking the time with Lin Tso-han. All the arrangements were made, apparently. There were two more exchanges, and then F'eng drew himself up smartly—an incongruous action in the frayed, dirty quilted jacket and visored cap that was like a railroad engineer's—and said: “Tsui ho sheng li.” Damon got that.
For the final victory.
Lin repeated it, but neither man smiled. They shook hands and F'eng went out into the wind; a moment later they heard the sounds of the detachment moving out.

Lin glanced at Damon, and his eyebrows went up and down; then he began talking to Lao Kou and two younger men. Damon forced himself to listen intently, struggling to catch this terribly elusive language where each syllable sounded like five or six others, and the lifts and drops of pitch were still more bewildering. He'd prepared himself as best he could in the short time he'd had, and he'd sought conversation with everyone—merchants, coolies, soldiers; but he could barely make himself understood, and it annoyed him. But this boy P'ei beside him—he was easily twenty-one or -two—was just learning to write his own language; and the Eskimo could neither read nor write. He looked at them both again. The Eskimo offered him half of a hsiao ping; he took the piece of hard, round biscuit and began to gnaw at it methodically. A bullet for a pencil and a beat-up Lebel rifle, he thought; and a piece of Chinese hardtack. Damon, you're a long, long way from home.

It was an odd sensation being a military observer: rather unpleasant. It was like being lifted off the ground, floating and kicking, unable to use your feet—or as though you'd been dropped stark naked into a huge garden party of strangers; very polite, very gracious and well-mannered strangers, it was true, but who were nonetheless quite conscious of your astounding nudity. Now, on the verge of observing his first action against the Japanese he felt ill at ease, extraneous, without the sustaining force of purpose, the fierce absorption of duties and responsibilities. He wasn't cut out for this kind of work. Massengale could do it, he'd be superb at it—this was just his meat, sitting by and watching the events unfold, crisis and countermove, making trenchant observations and witty analogies … Only Massengale wouldn't have taken the detail in the first place.

He'd been astonished when old Metcalfe had called him in and put it up to him. He'd been filled with confusion—but his heart had leaped. China! All the old dreams of his youth reared up like thunder. The farflung adventures amid sandstorms, jade palaces, shrouded figures swaying to great brass gongs—

“Why yes, sir,” he'd said. “I'd like to go very much. Only I don't know if I'm qualified. I don't have any Chinese—I've never drawn Legation duty. And I've never done any intelligence work. Captain MacLure, over in G-3, has a—”

“No,” Colonel Metcalfe said flatly. “I want you.”

“Yes, sir.”

Metcalfe threw himself back in his chair, his hands behind his head. He was a big man with a great broken nose and bristling red hair that rose in two tufts above his ears. “I want a line man.—They say you're tough,” he went on in his dry, sardonic voice. “A boondocker. They say you pace your own marches and walk 'em all into the ground, and next day you're ready for more. Is that true?”

“Well—” Damon paused for only an instant, “—as a matter of fact it is, Colonel.”

“Good. That's what I want. Somebody who can eat it up and then come around for seconds. As far as I'm concerned they can take these fancy-nancy double-domed linguists and file 'em under Extraneous.”

Monk Metcalfe had a reputation for being an eccentric. A Harvard Phi Beta Kappa man, he had made a brilliant record in France on Bullard's staff; then he had amazed and disgusted all the Old Army brass by requesting intelligence work—at a time when that section was looked on as nothing more than a general dumping ground for the incompetent or unstable. But the Monk went into it with a difference. He had covered Abd-el-Krim's war against the French and Spanish in Morocco, he had watched the Greco-Turkish conflict, he'd been in Shanghai when Chiang Kai-shek had crushed the Worker's Army in 1927. He was fluent in eight languages and could get around in eleven more, his essays and analyses in the
Infantry Journal
were the pride and despair of the service, he played the oboe, he knew more about Asia than any three men living, and he was forever in hot water with Washington.

“I want you to go up north,” he said through his teeth, which were fastened on a dead cigar butt. “See what they're doing up there.”

“You mean the Tupei Army, Colonel, the Manchurians …”

“No. Farther than that.”

Damon blinked at him. “You mean—the guerrillas?”

“Yeah.” The Monk's eyes took on a bright, ferocious gleam. “What's wrong with the guerrillas?”

Damon grinned in spite of himself. “Why, nothing that I know of, sir. It's only that I—”

“They're fighting the Nipponese, aren't they?” And before the Captain could reply: “You bet your old Aunt Tillie they are. That's more than the lordly Kuomintang is doing, I'll tell you that much.” He heaved himself up out of his chair and began to stomp up and down behind his desk, his big hands dug deep into his hip pockets. “In face a lion but in heart a deer,” he chanted in rhythm. “In face—a lion—but in heart—a deer … Who said that, Damon?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Good! If you'd told me I'd have thrown you out of here. I'm sick of savants, I'm weary unto
death
of scholiasts who can transpose Chaucer into Urdu but who can't trot down to the latrine without palpitations. Give me an officer who can do anything a PFC can, and do it double. And then do it again. For Christ sake, give me an officer
who thinks like a private soldier!
”

Damon decided the Monk did not want any reply to this, and he was right. “They
say
you've got an open mind,” he went on, and shot the Captain a baleful, suspicious glance. “I won't ask you if you have—any dumb son of a bitch says he's got an open mind. Calvin Coolidge would tell you he had one. So would Savonarola.” He pulled fiercely at one of the tufts of wiry red hair. “But you've been in plenty of trouble—enough to lead me to think you've got one. Would I be right?”

“I've been in plenty of trouble, Colonel.”

Metcalfe laughed, a flat, sneering cackle, and ran a knuckle back and forth under his big nose. “You're on everybody's excremental roster in the Department. I know.” Again he paced back and forth, humming snatches of what sounded to Damon like the
Scheherazade Suite.
“Except the doughfeet,” he murmured after a moment, squinting up at the chipped and flaking ceiling. “Except the poor sons of bitches who fight the dirty old wars …”