Once an Eagle

  “—I won’t marry any of you unless I can marry you all,” she cried. This evoked a roar of protest and approbation, and several schemes for a mass wedding were bandied about. Tom Stillman, the ward orderly, would be best man; that lousy YMCA slacker Peckenbough could conduct the service, and Doc Marcus would give the bride away; they would emerge, one by one, under an arch of crossed crutches and Balkan frames; and the bridal bed—the bridal bed would be—

  “Now, that’s enough,” Miss Pomeroy chided them; she blushed more prettily than anything else she did.

  “Get this, Damon,” Warrenton said; he was holding the French paper directly over his head with his good arm. “Oh my God, it’s priceless. Herr Erzberger then replied that they had come to receive the proposals of the Allied Powers toward the conclusion of an Armistice. To which Marshal Foch replied tersely: ‘What proposals, indeed? I have no proposals to make—no proposals whatever.’ A silence ensued, the German delegation appearing confused and rather despondent. Can’t you just see it?”

  “Stupid old fools,” MacCullough muttered.

  “Don’t interrupt him,” Damon said. Secretly he envied Warrenton, whose father had been with the embassy in Paris for years, and who spoke four languages fluently. “Let’s have some more of it, Don.”

  “A silence ensued. Oh yes, I read that. At length Count Oberndorff queried: ‘How do you wish us to express ourselves, Herr Feldmarschall?’ ‘That is for you to decide,’ the Marshal retorted crisply. ‘Do you wish to ask for an Armistice?’ ‘Yes,’ murmured Erzberger. ‘Good. Then if that is so, say so—and formally.’ ‘Yes, Herr Marschall, ’answered Count Oberndorff. ‘That is what we are formally asking.’ ‘Good,’ repeated Foch, and he picked up the document. ‘Then I will read to you those conditions—and only those conditions—upon which it may be obtained.’”

  Herberger let out a whoop. “That’s belting ’em, Ferd!”

  “I’m glad the pompous ass is good for something,” MacCullough growled.

  “Don’t say that—he’s a great man, a great general.” Herberger was indignant. “He’s going to go down in history.”

  “Lucky bloody history.”

  Then, floating across the carefully tended formal gardens from the town of Angers they could hear bells pealing—a silvery, jostling carillon; and what sounded like faraway shouts and cries. Damon, turning his head to the right, encountered Major Borgstad’s pale, gaunt face and mild brown eyes. The Major had a sequestrum and was scheduled for further surgery later in the day.

  “So it’s over,” he observed quietly; his face was bubbling with sweat.

  “It’s over,” Damon answered.

  “What was our furthest line of advance, do you know?”

  “Gièvres, Stenay, a few crossings of the Meuse. Near Sedan.”

  “Still in France.”

  “Still in France.”

  In the town the bells were clashing gaily in three octaves. Hancock was telling the ward, “We’re all wasting our time. Hélène is going to marry only one bird in this whole dreary charnelhouse.” He grinned maliciously; he had been a pilot in the 94th Aero Squadron with Rickenbacker, and was the only officer in the ward who could get away with calling Miss Pomeroy by her first name. “She’s going to marry none other than Lieutenant Percy Arthur Fernishall, and we’d all better face up to it like little men.”

  There were a few feeble cheers, and a murmur of felicitations, which shook Fernishall, a shy, slender boy from Duluth who was completely and hopelessly in love with Miss Pomeroy and couldn’t bear to joke this way about her. He glowered at the flier from under a loose lock of chestnut hair. “You’re just cynical, Hancock,” he declared darkly. “And unfeeling. Nothing is sacred to you …”

  Hancock was incredulous. “Me?—Reverent Rick Hancock, unfeeling? What calumny, Perc my lad.” He laughed, watching the boy’s face. Several nights before he had bribed Stillman into sneaking him an outsize trench coat and contrived to make his way, festooned with bandages and carrying his dakin’s tubes in his hands, out of the hospital and had then talked an old farmer into pushing him in a handcart all the way to La Reine Fière. The ward had been in an uproar when he’d returned hours later, singing lustily, his pockets full of bottles and a webbed sack over his shoulder crammed with presents which he distributed up and down the ward—a soccer ball, a pair of skates, two fat Chinese dolls, a pack of Tarot cards, ivory knitting needles and a little blue porcelain cow for pouring cream. Miss Carmody, the head nurse, and a stern disciplinarian, had ordered him back to bed in a voice for guard mount—whereupon he had kissed her on the cheek while the ward gasped, and bounded back in bed, trench coat and all.

  “Why, everything is sacred to me,” he went on. “I am—for instance, I’m unalterably opposed to the practice of sodomy. You ask Weyermacher if I’m not—”

  “That will do, Lieutenant,” Miss Pomeroy said primly, and the way she looked when she said that was charming, too. “Honestly, you’re the limit.”

  Damon looked out at the sky over the Loire, gray and distant above the naked trees. So it was over—this vast adventure into which he had flung himself with all his youthful ardor and unquenchable pride. There had been whole worlds to conquer—and now he occupied a ward bed and dreamed of a bottle of Bourgeuil, which Tom Stillman might or might not bring him tonight … He had been wrong about the world. He had gone forth believing he was indestructible in the fury, the lordliness of his ambition, and he was not indestructible; he was like all the others. Vulnerable flesh, old mortality.

  The chill trembling began—subtly this time, like a spring wind, and his stomach knotted in a series of spastic clutches. There was the instinctive, inexorable tug to call Miss Carmody and ask her for “some medicine”—which after the manner of hospital form meant a quarter-grain of morphine sulphate—then he beat it back down, and with shaking fingers lighted a cigarette and puffed at it deliberately. He was coming off the drug, and he was coming off it all the way. Others had and he would. Borgstad was watching him, his square flat face drenched in sweat, and he smiled at him over clenched teeth. Down in Angers the bells were still ringing but more faintly now, as though they were tiring of their headlong hilarity.

  The ward was quieter suddenly. Doctor Marcus had entered, was talking to Miss Carmody in a low voice. Behind him Miss Bishop, a heavy girl with powerful arms and a stolid face, was pushing the white-enameled agony wagon, which emitted its falsely festive little tinkle; Damon saw Marcus drawing on a pair of rubber gloves with finicky care, and he felt the old tensing high in his chest.

  “Rather thought we might get away with it today,” Warrenton murmured tonelessly.

  “Yes. I’d hoped so, too.”

  Down the ward Marcus began to work on Grossman, an artillery captain whose feet were a maze of shattered bone; Miss Bishop had just handed the Doctor a shiny, long-necked probe. Damon looked away. It was ward etiquette to busy one’s self when another man’s wound was being dressed.

  He studied the hard dull weight of the November sky. It was over, and out there they were throwing their helmets in the air, firing off celebratory rounds, and crowding into the estaminets, trading their coats and shirts for vin rouge … Were they? How many were left from his old company? Who had survived?

  From the road that ran behind the hospital there came the blare of brass, underlain by the somber thump of drums, as some doughfoot—it would be Captain Kebhart and perhaps an enlisted man or two from across the courtyard—went west. Damon could picture the procession—the big Dodge truck with its broken spring and the three flag-draped coffins easing along behind the band, flanked by a firing squad of surly medical orderlies, their rifles pointing wearily in every direction but the right one, their feet shuffling in rhythm to Chopin’s “Marche Funèbre”; and later the brief, blunt ceremony by the open graves, the chaplain’s voice insubstantial under the lowering November sky, and then the ragged crash of the volleys …

  “Ten—thousand—dollars for the folks—back—h
ome,” Hancock sang sonorously to the band. Damon glared at him, and Weyermacher rose on one elbow and said fiercely:

  “Rick, that’s Kebhart going by. If you don’t shut your stupid face this once I’m going to climb out of this bed and beat your teeth in.”

  There was a little silence and then Hancock said, “Sorry, Bert … I forgot.”

  This was where it ended, then—the bugles, the cheering, the flags and sashes and bright swords: here in long, bleak rooms, in sweating chambers redolent of blood and vomit, of gangrenous flesh and shattered bone; or in the long, bleak battlefield pits. So far from home.

  He went on smoking, his fingers now and then scratching at his chest, his eyes averted from the north end of the ward, where Grossman was groaning thickly under the probe, and thought again of the old platoon, of that slow parade of the dead and disfigured, of whom he was now indissolubly a part: Van Gelder and Starkie and Kraz and little Turner and Johansen and Brewster and all the others; and Dev. Most especially Dev. And all he could think of now was the thin pathos of their going, their piteous mortality. They had come with all their hope and eager bravery and fire, and been cut down, and others had come to take their places and been cut down in turn. They had their moment, their brief, imperiled time of laughter, of fear and wonder and spendthrift valor, a sweet and indispensable nobility—and then they were gone, shoveled under the alien French soil, and there was nothing left of them to keep them alive. Their wives—if they had been lucky enough to have them—would tire of loneliness and celibacy and turn to other men; to their families they would become shadows, frozen in some beloved act, perhaps, some hallowed little moment of childhood or youth, held in a chipped gilt frame; growing fainter with each indifferent year, until finally they were not even shadows …

  But he had known them, and loved them; and he would remember.

  The spastic trembling had passed; he felt better. One bell was still ringing in the town—a deep cathedral boom that seemed to sink into the farthest recesses of his soul … He had done all he could and a little more, and none of it had been any good to anyone. He had driven himself to absurd extremes of savagery and daring, and all it had meant was that the men whose lives and welfare he had worried himself sick over day in and day out had been killed or wounded almost to a man. What kind of man had he become? His sense of moral obligation, of duty and sacrifice, had led him to kill with cold ferocity, to drag his best friend back to death, to draw upon himself the fear and abhorrence of the more sensitive souls under his authority. And now the great butchery was over, the documents had been signed; no one had lost and no one had won, and here he lay with a great hole in his thigh and tried not to think about Ducky Marcus, who had now reached Herberger’s bed and had just taken a small, silvery instrument from Miss Bishop’s fair right hand.

  He saw Caldwell coming down the ward in the falling light, moving with that quick, purposeful stride, and his heart leaped. He raised his hand, Caldwell’s head ticked with a barely perceptible nod; he drew nearer, and now Damon saw on his shoulders the single star.

  “Good evening, sir. Congratulations.”

  Caldwell appeared faintly embarrassed. “Yes. The gratifications of command: before, men only suspected you were a heartless monster; now, you have dispelled all doubt.” He raised his right hand then and Damon saw it was held in an anterior splint.

  “What happened to you, sir?”

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Caldwell peered at it as if it were an article he’d purchased and was disappointed in. “Well, it saves me the trouble of returning salutes. Shell fragment,” he added crisply. “Broke two metacarpals. Two days after you were hit. We carried Mont Noir that afternoon, broke into the clear. I—didn’t tend to it properly; and it became infected. Nuisance really.” He looked back down the ward. “How are they treating you?”

  “Wonderfully, General.” It seemed odd to be calling the Old Man “General.” But there he was, the same old vigorous incisiveness that had always made Sam want to rise to the occasion, stretch his faculties to the limit. “It’s been luxurious. The beds are soft, the nurses are either beautiful or efficient—and sometimes they’re both. We’ve been deluged with fudge and other goodies at odd hours.”

  “Yes, well, tell me about yourself. I mean, how are you—” He broke off as Miss Pomeroy came up to him, smiling her fresh, buoyant, intoxicating smile, and carrying a folding camp stool.

  “Won’t you sit down, General?”

  “Why yes, thank you.” He and Miss Pomeroy chatted a few moments, before she sailed away down the aisle again. It was the first time Damon had seen Caldwell in the presence of women; his manner became even more courtly and gracious.

  “Yes, I see what you mean,” he murmured. “Burn my clothes, Doctor—I don’t want to go home.” With his good hand he rummaged around in his overcoat pocket, drew out a long cylinder wrapped incongruously in a piece of green toweling and reaching under the head of the bed slipped it into Damon’s musette bag. “There. Think we got away with that? It’s a very good Scotch.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Don’t give it a thought. To the victors, you know.” He gazed at Damon for a moment. “Strange, isn’t it? Hard to believe it isn’t all still grinding on and on, that we’ve got to go back up there in a day or so …”

  “Yes,” Damon said.

  “We’re not, though. And thank God for that. How are you coming along?”

  “The bone’s knitting fairly fast. I’ll be walking soon. How’s the outfit?”

  “Griping and groaning. We’re billeted along the Rhine. Among a populace both servile and defiant. Curious people, the Germans. I will never understand them. I’ve said that before, I know.”

  “How’s the company?”

  “In excellent spirits—as why wouldn’t they be? Zimmerman is good material, as you said. No Night Clerk, you understand; but he’ll do very nicely. Which reminds me: your promotion to major went through just before the curtain came down.”

  “Oh,” Damon said. He was astonished at himself; it was so remote from the train of his thoughts these past weeks that he felt nothing at all. He gave himself a little shake and said, “Why, thank you, sir—I’m sorry, I had no idea—”

  “Don’t thank me. Or anyone else. You would have had the Battalion if the dear old war had gone on a bit and you hadn’t had to try to take the Ridge all by yourself.”

  “Zim couldn’t get them up, General. I didn’t think I was going to be able to for a while, there. That shrapnel was the worst I ever saw.”

  “Yes. Gouraud has cited the regiment for that engagement. You’re to get another French croix, and so are Russo and Zimmerman, a few others. And now the hue and cry is: Home before the snow falls. Jim Harbord won’t quite do that, but he’ll bust a gut trying …” Watching Hancock joking with Miss Pomeroy at the other end of the ward, he hummed softly:

  “Say, no more Bois de Boulogne,

  I want a girl of my own—

  Hey, no more fine or champagne,

  Give me the sun and the rain

  Of my—home—town …”

  Damon said: “Are you heading back for the States, sir?”

  “Oh, no.” The General shook his head. “No, I’m merely exercising the privileges of my exalted rank. They didn’t need me at Division—they don’t need anybody at Division, or anywhere else, it seems. So I gave myself a seventy-two-hour pass and raced over to Savenay to see Tommy—only to find she’s been transferred to Neuilly. Little Minx never even wrote me about it.” He shrugged. “The Spartans were right: only have sons. Put all girl babies to death as rapidly as possible.” He got a package of Lucky Strikes out of his pocket, offered one to Damon, and fumbled one-handed with a box of matches until Damon gave him a light. “Thanks. This is the most maddening affliction: the simplest, most primeval acts become impossible. Have you ever tried buttoning your fly left-handed? It’s a great reminder of human frailty.” He watched Breckner hobble slowly down the aisle; when his eyes na
rrowed they were laced with dozens of fine lines. “Well, they won’t all get home by Christmas, but there’ll be a mighty exodus for the next three months or so.—What do you think you’ll do when they let you out of here, Sam?”

  “I don’t know. I’m scheduled for a convalescent leave in Cannes … I haven’t given it an awful lot of thought, sir.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I suppose I’ll go back home … I have a good chance at a job in the bank in my hometown.”

  “I see.” Caldwell’s eyes roamed around the room. “I thought perhaps you might consider staying on.”

  Damon stared at him, the cigarette halfway to his mouth. “Stay on? In the Army?”

  “Why, yes. It’s a possibility. You could go a long way, Sam. You’ve made a fine record for yourself, and your majority has come through … Though there are reasons a lot more telling than those.”

  The Captain looked away, at Warrenton sleeping softly in his great plaster cuirass and gorget, at Suskin with his long legs rigged to a web of lines and pulleys. “But—that’s ridiculous,” he cried softly.

  “Is it?”

  “I mean, what for? What’s the point in it? There can’t be another war …”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “There can’t be …” Caldwell was watching him, a quizzical gaze brushed with amusement, and it nettled him. “No, this has got to be the last one,” he declared, “and no kidding. For good and forever. The world can’t go through another one like this.”

  The General’s face became serious and intent. “No. It can’t. That’s true.” He said in an even, musing tone: “It will have to go through one of a different kind.”

  There was a little silence between them. Across the aisle Herberger and Morse were flipping coins at drinking glasses at the feet of their beds. At the end of each series Herberger would call out to Breckner, who would hobble over and collect the coins with his good arm and hand them back to the players.