Once an Eagle

  His lungs were burning, his head felt as though it were detached and floating in a foggy painful haze somewhere above his body. The man was strong. Terribly strong. Above him the scaly yellow wall wobbled and wavered, and Raebyrne was saying in a clear, calm voice: “I don’t care if he is a sergeant, that’s a low-down Yankee trick …”

  He had to do something, and quickly. He drove his fists into the man’s sides and it was like hitting a washboard. They swayed back and forth in the mud. He kept fighting for leverage, now gripping, now spreading his feet, wrenching and writhing against the massive arms that doubled and redoubled their viselike power. Everyone was shouting now. He heard Tukela yell, “Now, Steve!” Krazewski brought his head up sharply, and Damon felt his cheek open. Someone said, “Butting—that’s rough enough”—a high, thin voice. The son of a bitch! All right. Anything goes, then. Anything goes. He hooked a leg behind one of Krazewski’s and cocking his elbows drove his fingers into the strong man’s eyes. Krazewski gave a roar of pain and bent away. Damon kicked his heel in behind Krazewski’s leg and wrenched sidewise with all his might. They fell bouncing on the slick ground. He felt Krazewski’s arms let go and rolled away, was up in a flash, saw the Pole scrambling to his feet, his face a comic mask of blood and yellow mud. But he was faster, he knew; he darted in, hit him once, twice, then swung his right like a ball bat. Krazewski, leaning into the blow, went down on his hands and knees, blood spattering on his powerful arms. He was shaking his head, slowly and doggedly, trying to clear it. He was dazed, Damon knew; he was halfway out. He had him.

  “All right,” he gasped through the bedlam of voices. “You—had enough, Krazewski?”

  The Pole looked up at him, swaying like a stunned animal on all fours, slack-jawed; his eyes were filmy. Tukela was shouting, “Get up, Steve!” but Krazewski didn’t hear him.

  “You had enough?” Damon repeated in as calm a tone as he could manage.

  Krazewski, still staring up at him, at last nodded dumbly.

  “All right.” Sam walked up to him and bent over. “Now, if you’re not man enough to carry a Chauchat you come to me and tell me all about it and I’ll give it to somebody else. You got that?”

  Devlin handed him his tunic and he started to put it on, then held it in his hand; he didn’t want to draw it on over all the blood and gumbo that slimed him. His ribs hurt, and his shoulder where he’d fallen on it. His cheek was slit; he could feel it stinging in the sudden cold. The circle had broken back. The rows of faces watched him, curiously silent now; it was as if they were ashamed of their bloodthirsty, feverish hilarity of a few minutes ago. He felt that cold, peculiar scorn the combatant feels for the onlooker. Only Raebyrne was grinning his broad-lipped, infectious Tarheel grin. Near him Krazewski had got heavily to one knee.

  “Let’s go get chow,” Damon said. He’d got his wind back now, and his head had stopped slamming. “Come on, Dev. I want to wash some of this off.”

  He walked off through the raw dusk and the silence followed him, broken by Raebyrne’s drawl: “Want to tell you, boys, we got us a stomp down, fire-eating sergeant. Kind that just loves to sort wildcats before breakfast.” There was laughter then. “He hands me one of them catafalks I’m going to learn to shoot it if all it takes is glass aggies in a hopper …”

  It was no kind of country at all. A few stripped and stunted trees, the shattered stone wall of a farmhouse in the shape of a camel’s hump, and hundreds of crazily canted posts bearing tangles of rusty barbed wire. As far as a man could see, which wasn’t very far at all. Everything lay bleak and cold in the night, and to Raebyrne it was the most stupid and pointless of official whimsies that had plucked them up out of Drouamont and dropped them in this stretch of ancient trenches where, for week after chill, sodden week, nothing happened. There had been the first nights in the line when bushes had stirred and posts had moved forward stealthily, and the night air had quivered with gunshots and alarms, and then with recriminations and stern rebukes from officers and noncoms. There had been that trench raid on the Second Battalion’s sector where two men had been killed; and Johnson of B Company had been wounded when a patrol coming back in had been fired on by one of their own automatic riflemen. But that was all. The bushes and posts had returned to their inanimate status, the days and nights dragged along with work details, and out ahead and on both sides of them the front slept like a great dirty battered beast, exhausted by its blood drenchings of two years gone by; malevolent, half-stunned by cold.

  “Piece of God damn foolishness,” Raebyrne muttered aloud. He was lying in a shell hole about thirty feet in front of the trench, wearing hip boots and overcoat, and after two hours of this he was about as miserable as a man could feel. The hole was more than half full of icy water. By clinging to its leading edge with his elbows and drawing up his feet he could hold himself clear of the water; but as soon as he relaxed his grip his body would slowly work down in the slime and slide into the water again. His legs felt as if they were encased in iron pipes, he had a bad cold, and his head ached savagely.

  “Now I didn’t join up to lie in a mudhole like a worthless boar hog and peer out at a lot of barbed wire all night long,” he went on. “Now damned if I did.” On the early nights his own voice had frightened him, but now it helped pass the time to talk to himself and he did, gazing out at this battered, ghostly land where all those Frogs and Fritzies had shot each other up by the bushel basketful. Veer-dunn, Lieutenant Harris had called the place. Greatest battle ever fought known to man. Well, it didn’t look very much like it now. Now all the fighting was in Flanders, Sergeant Damon had told them the other day. Up north. “Then why in thunder don’t we sashay up there and fight?” Raebyrne had wanted to know. “Because you’ve got to learn how to be killed first,” Damon had answered, “then you can go.” And the platoon had laughed nervously, eyeing one another. Raebyrne snorted. He didn’t hold with that kind of talk, and never would. “Those Heinies had better study up on how to get theirselves killed, it ain’t going to be old Raebyrne. Not one time …”

  Out ahead of him and to the right a rocket rose, a lazy climbing parabola of yellow, and below it a machine gun, like a deadly, persistent knocking; then darkness returned, and the silence. “Plain bedcord fact is, there ain’t one cotton-ass Fritzie over there at all … ”

  His voice sounded puny, ineffectual, lost in this dreary eternity of cold and waiting, and he sighed. “Shoot, I could stand up and sling my old rifle and mosey all the way right into Berlin.” The idea pleased him; he thought of himself creeping through the ghostly, abandoned trenches of the enemy, littered with spiked helmets and Meerschaum pipes and sea-green bottles of beer, on past woods and sleeping fields and moldering castles, across the Rhine and right on into Germany. There wasn’t anybody could move through woods like old Reb. On past the barracks and hotels until he’d crept up on the palace where the Kaiser was sitting with his generals, the whole slew of them, studying up a campaign. He had slipped past a couple of stupid-looking sentries, he was in a hall as big as that train station in New York City, he’d raised his rifle as they turned toward him with the monocles popping out of their old lizard eyes. “Now you all can just sit tight where you are until I figure out how to take care of you, hear?” On the polished desk stood a phone on its cradle, a slender gold-and-silver phone, and he picked it up as casual as could be. “Just put me through to General Pershing … That’s what I said. You want me to spell it out for you?… Why yes you might call it urgent if it takes your fancy …”

  His eyes were closed. He snapped them open and glanced around furtively. “Dark as the inside of a hairy dog,” he murmured. His feet and legs were down in the water again and he drew them out groaning, and wiggled his toes unhappily. There was no feeling at all from his ankles down. “Man can get gan-garee living like this. Spasmosis.” This was no kind of a war, no kind at all. He felt insufferably weary, dizzy with cold; there was a funny floating sensation at the back of his head and his eyes stung and smarted. Yes
terday they’d drawn a wiring party, and the day before that they’d hauled ammunition, and now he’d been hooked for this miserable outpost duty. It was all right for Terry and Brewster and Starkie, those dauncy city folks, but it was no way for a mountain boy to waste his talents. He ought to be storming the enemy lines, picking off Fritzies like acorns on a post, or like his Grandaddy Joe at Chancellorsville, rising up all covered with Yankee blood and waving the Stars and Bars and roaring, “Come on back here—you going to leave a Tarheel to die all by his lonesome?” And the regiment had got hold of theirselves and come on back a-howling and whipped hell out of the Yankees and drove them halfway to Washington before they were through …

  Another rocket rose, farther along, and again the short, hollow rapping of the machine gun. He snorted and cursed. There weren’t any Germans over there. What there was was one stupid old sailor with no knot in his thread, like Noddy Fred Haislip back home, only instead of coming around cleaning out the privies and collecting slops for the tannery down at Boyne’s Lick, this one padded back and forth along the trench all night with a wheelbarrow load of rockets and an oil drum and an old ramrod. Every few hundred yards or so the silly hoosier would stop and set down the barrow and pick a rocket and shoot it off and rap the oil drum a couple of times with the ramrod, and then move along again. Damn fool performance, and just what a German would do. If this was what they called fighting over here, no wonder that shorty-George Napoleon had done so well for himself.

  He sneezed so violently he banged his nose against his knuckles. The fierce itching started again in the center of his chest, right under his gas mask, where he couldn’t get at it, then shifted to his left armpit. “Damn old coots …” Of all the sad excuses for a war this one took the pitcher. That recruiting sergeant down in Boone with his great big smile—the smile of a land-office sharper, but he hadn’t had the sense to see it then. “Well now, I’m looking to you boys for the straight skinnaymarinks: who’s the best shot in the crowd?” Someone—Andy Ensor, probably—had pointed and said, “Orville, here.” “That true, Slim?” “Sure it’s true,” he’d answered, before he’d thought. “Well, Slim, you look like just about what the doctor ordered.” The sergeant had a hand on his shoulder now: a big, friendly hand, not too heavy, not too light. “That’s what we want: men that can hit a flying squirrel in the eye in the dark of night, and fight like a barrel of wildcats into the bargain. Men that aren’t afraid of the devil with horns. What do you say, Slim? Are you game?” And just what the hell could you say to that except “Hell yes”? And there he was, before he knew it, out front with the sergeant’s arm around his shoulders, grinning like a loony at the county fair. And they hadn’t even taken Andy because there was something wrong with his lungs …

  He groaned and wiped his nose on his overcoat sleeve. All that talk about shooting up whole battalions of Fritzies and winning the craw dee jeery, and instead all he’d done was slave like a nigger toting damn fool things from one Godforsaken place to another. And now lying here in a sump hole of icy water gazing out at this pitiful country not fit for raising hogs, with the rest of the outfit snug back in the dugout sleeping away the hours. It was enough to make a man lie right down and cry like a natural child … Self-pity, drowsiness swept over him like golden dust; he dropped his head on his hands. Hadn’t even had a chance at one of those wild Frog women. Black Jack had put them all off limits, MPs standing guard over them as if they were a bunch of society queens—if that wasn’t the most sheerly contrary thing to find yourself in France and discover they’d turned it into a high-button camp meeting. French women knew all kinds of doozy ways of rutting, old Devlin who was half-Frog himself had told him about them one night back at Drouamont. Worth a man’s education laying out with one of them, the extraordinary things they’d do … His thoughts began to swirl in a slow riot of lust, finally fell back in sheer exhaustion to Maybelle on the Darbees’ porch stoop, her eyes like great dark flowers, so close to his. “Orville, you know we’ve got to be continent. In all things.” “What the Sam Hill’s that?” “You know full well, Orville. Not until we’re preachered up, that’s what.” He’d groaned in torment, their bodies straining and heavy in the summer heat, and the katydids in a wild scissors-clamor all around them. “Orville—no!”—and she had wrenched away despite all he could do and fled into the house, left him clutching befuddled at the trothless dark …

  Alvina Maddow did not believe in continence, however. She herself had lain out with Andy Ensor and four of the others, he knew, but that other night it had made no difference to him, no difference at all on a voyage as mighty as that. “Did you like it, Orville?” “Like it,” he’d breathed. “Alvina, it’s the most—it’s beyond—” Words nearly failed him. “It beats flying on a golden rug!” The hay was dusty against his sweaty face and neck; he heard again the sizzle chant of the katydids, the faraway moan of an owl …

  He came awake in a dart of panic. He was pinned, a powerful figure had flung him on his back and pinned him, a hand had him by the throat, he saw the flash of a knife blade. This was not possible, not possible at all. He gave a faint, thin gasp. He wanted to be spared now, at this final instant of his life here on this lovely earth—he could not die, he wanted to surrender, yell whatever it was you yelled and he had forgotten the word. He had forgotten everything. Trench raid was the only clear point in the loom of terror. He was going to die: it wasn’t fair! A long, relentless eternity of an instant whose sheer outrageous impossibility shocked him. The knife swept down, the fist struck him full in the chest, and with the blow air and voice came back to him.

  “Oh—oh—oh!” he cried. And then: “Kafferhaz!” There was no pain. Then in the next instant he saw against the night sky the flat helmet, the crumpled gas mask carrier at the man’s throat—and knew who it was.

  “—Sarge,” he gasped.

  “Kamerad.” Damon’s voice was mocking. “You want to surrender, Raebyrne?” He raised his knife in the air. “That it?”

  “Sarge, you scared me—”

  “Is that right.” Damon lowered the brutal trench knife and Raebyrne felt the other hand leave his throat. “You’re dead,” the Sergeant said. “You know that? Dead and rotten. And they’re free to walk right in there and butcher the lot of us. In our sacks. Doesn’t that make you feel good, Raebyrne? knowing that?” He said softly and savagely: “You no-good son of a bitch.”

  “Sarge …” Damon had released him but he felt a complete inability to move. He was awash with a welter of conflicting emotions: he felt relief, guilt, fear, anger, resentment, he was hysterical with delight. “Sarge, I was cold—”

  “Were you,” Damon said. He could hear the knife going back into its scabbard, the zlllt of steel chafing steel, and shivered uncontrollably. “Of course that’ll make all the difference in the world to them, all you’ve got to do is tell them that you were cold.”

  “Who’s that, Sarge?”

  “The Germans, you ninnyhammered idiot! Who did you think?” The Sergeant cursed under his breath, and Raebyrne heard him spit in disgust. Vaguely he rubbed his cheek: it was like another man’s, some other man’s far away. His chest hurt where Damon’s fist had struck him. He felt nauseated.

  “Now what kind of a trick is that?” he demanded, but his voice had no force. “Kind of way to wake up a fellow … ?”

  Damon jabbed his collarbone with a rigid finger. “You know what you’ve done, don’t you? You’ve fallen asleep on watch, on the line. You know what that means?”

  “Sarge, the hours are too long …”

  “Is that a fact. We’ll have to adjust them for you.”

  “It’s all the water. When my feet get cold—” Raebyrne broke off; he was seized with an almost irrepressible surge of laughter—succeeded in less than a second by abject dread. Asleep on outpost duty. Asleep on—

  “You know what you could get. Don’t you.”

  “I—guess so, Sarge.”

  “You guess so. Jesus, they’re just dying to make a
n example of somebody like you, back there. They’ll burn you at the stake.”

  “Yes, Sarge.” He felt contrite, assailed by vague fears of courts-martial, banks of scowling, implacable faces behind a battery of desks, the sweating gray walls of prisons, even the black stake before the firing squad. But nothing stayed in his head for very long; his thoughts rolled around like marbles loose in a can. The swollen terror of that instant of waking still held him with his teeth chattering, half-dizzy, sick at his stomach.

  “You God damned fool … What am I going to do with you?” Damon struck his thigh, waved one arm—the arm that had held the trench knife—wildly north and east. “They want to kill you, over there! Cut your throat and leave you for the rats. Kill. You. Can’t you get that through your stupid Tarheel head?”

  Raebyrne nodded, miserable. He had gone to sleep on watch. When his buddies depended on him for their safety. Their lives. Even now he could hardly comprehend what had happened. He could go to prison for years. Years and years behind stone walls, in the dark.

  “Sarge,” he mumbled. “It won’t happen again …”

  “No. It won’t. It sure as hell won’t.” There was a thick sucking sound as Damon pulled his boots out of the water. He was staring at no man’s land. His face was visible now; for a fleeting instant the Sergeant’s expression was troubled and uncertain, almost fearful—as though he could see out in that swollen desert of muck and débris something infinitely destructive and menacing to them all. Watching him Raebyrne was filled with a nameless, all-pervasive affection for the Nebraskan—and an urgent concern he could not possibly have explained. Old Sarge, he thought awkwardly.

  But when Damon looked at him again the Sergeant’s face might have been carved from flint. In a very quiet voice he said: “All right. I’m going to give you one more chance, Raebyrne. I’m going to let you off.”