Once an Eagle

  Lin came up, the snout of the Thompson silhouetted behind his ear, and crouched down beside two of his officers, talking low and rapidly.

  “Ai-la!” one exclaimed. “Erh-pen kwei—t’a ma-ti …” and Damon smiled through his weariness. Men cursed the same way in any language. The Japanese were certainly mother defilers, any way you looked at them …

  The hurried colloquy broke up, the officers rose to their feet, and the dread command came again: “Tsou pa!”

  He couldn’t believe it: they’d been resting three minutes, perhaps four. Trying to hold his voice even, he said, “What is it?”

  Lin stopped in front of him. “Bad news, Ts’an Tsan. Japanese cavalry, coming from Hung-chou. We must really hurry now …”

  Damon watched him posting a light rear guard, and then fell in again. The march ground on, at an even faster pace. He gulped down two aspirins and offered some to the Eskimo, who politely but firmly refused. They crossed another mountain, and another. He lost all track of the sequence of events, of images. Somewhere there was a narrow pass where the wind froze the sweat on his face; somewhere there was an uneven, twisting track above a gorge where a river roared densely and the spray stung his hands and cheeks; somewhere—and the sight of it had shocked him into a little transport of raging effort—a soldier had passed him, his feet making a curiously slapping noise, and looking down he had seen the man was wearing composition sandals.

  He was beyond the sharp edge of anguish now. He had lost all sensation in his legs. They swung on and on, lifted and fell, someone else’s legs entirely, his own ended in a vast area of suffering surrounding his right thigh; his kidneys ached, his head swam with fatigue; he had fallen into a stooped, slouching walk, his hands pressed against his hips and his eyes staring dully at the ground—he dreamed of water, water in rivulets and fountains and green-banked streams and still pools, of sandy beaches where he would lie for hours, sprawled under towering, lazily leaning palms … then he would become aware that he was in danger of straggling again; he would fling such treasonous thoughts out of his mind, concentrating with the fervor of an acolyte on holding this savage, impossible pace through the night cold, climbing, climbing, step on step on step in a hard fury of will …

  There was a ledge that sloped out trickily, a configuration of stone like an abstracted deposition, and they were on the highest ridge of all, the wind on their left cheeks. A thread of moon lay low in the east, and the mountains rose around them—a stately, indigo sea tipped with silver. The top of the world: they were gliding along the very top of the world, far above the sordid pains and foibles of mankind, among these mountains older than time, older than passions or fears, older than the gods … He glanced behind him. Only the Eskimo, who had dropped back—out of courtesy, he knew—and Lin, and two scouts. No one had fallen behind him; no one had straggled. Sixty-eight men had marched 38 miles and fought a battle in 16 hours, and not one had fallen by the wayside. Not one. He thought of the terrible day-and-night march to Soissons in the wind and rain—he had carried someone’s rifle that night, too, hadn’t he? Ferguson’s? No, Clay’s. But men had straggled, they had fallen by the wayside. Not many, but a few. But this was farther, and harder, and performed by men in pitifully inadequate clothing and with empty bellies. Weaving on his feet, half-stupefied with exhaustion, he gazed up at the dancing wilderness of stars, the sickle of moon, seized with an exultation he hadn’t felt in years. How had they done it? How had they done it!—every last man of them … It was fantastic. They were underfed, underclothed, underarmed—but they had something no other troops he’d ever known had, that was for sure. They had it to burn …

  Later, at Tung Yen T’o, beyond weariness and quite sleepless, he was writing furiously in his journal by lamplight when Lin came in. The little man’s eyebrows rose and fell.

  “Still up, Ts’an Tsan?” he said softly. He tossed his head in the direction of the heated k’ang where four men were huddled together, asleep. “Was there no room at the inn?”

  “No, I—” Damon still felt a bit ill at ease with the Commander after the episode at Wu T’ai; he gestured vaguely. “I wanted to get it all down, as fully as I could …”

  Lin stretched his arms. “Ah, the literary life.” He sat down opposite the Captain. “Perhaps you’ll immortalize us in Alexandrines.”

  “You ought to be …” The fervor in his voice surprised him, and he grinned to hide it. “Do you realize what you’ve done, your unit? Do you realize not a man dropped out of the line of march? not one? I’ve just been logging it. Do you realize how fantastically unique that is, after a march like this one?”

  Lin nodded simply. “I have been a soldier ever since my early manhood. But this is a new army. A new world.”

  “How can they do it, Colonel? What has given them such endurance, such—such sheer force …?”

  “Hope.” The guerrilla leader smiled gently. “Hope, and dignity. Hope for a new China, a China free of foreign armies, foreign concessions, free of famine and ignorance and misery; and the dignity of equality.” He looked directly at Damon. “Many have said it—many lands, many leaders. But we live it.” He tossed his head toward the exhausted forms on the k’ang. “That’s what they know—that some must lead and others must follow, but that leadership is an obligation and not a mark of caste. We are the only army where the officers live like the men. Where leadership is based on respect, on proved competence and only that.”

  Slowly Damon nodded, thinking of Jarreyl, and Townsend back at Hardee, and Merrick, and Benoît-Guesclin. Yes, an army without caste or privilege, free of that terrible gulf of hatred, of resentment or contempt—an army without stockades. What an impossible vision …

  “When you ask men to die, to endure great hardship, they have the right to know the purpose that demands that sacrifice,” Lin said softly. “They have the right to be treated like men—with all honor due them—all honor due their inextinguishable souls …” He broke off, his face all at once fearfully stern and forbidding; but his eyes glistened in the smoky orange light from the crude little oil lamp. There was a short silence while the two men looked at each other.

  “—Colonel, I want to apologize,” Damon murmured, “for my—for questioning your orders at Wu T’ai.”

  Lin looked down. “It’s I who should apologize. For my anger.” He sighed and rubbed his nose. “If we had tried to take him with us the Japanese would have caught us at Chunsho Valley. And in any event he would probably have died. He knew.” He peered at his hand, chafing his fingers delicately against his thumb, and now tears hung in his eyes, wetting the long lashes. “A good friend. The best of my officers. A good friend.” He sighed again, and now his face fell into a series of blocklike planes. “Do you know how he came to us?” Damon shook his head. “He lived near Tamingfu, in Hopeh. A simple sheepherder, content to pass his days in peace and poverty. He had even worn the queue. And then the Japanese came. They slaughtered his sheep, they killed his son, they raped his daughter. What he did not see, he heard. For two weeks he walked around like a dead man, without hope or fear. And then one night he came in, to find four Japanese asleep in his house, with no one on guard. He told me: ‘All of a sudden I came awake. I was a man. What was I doing, standing there? I was a man.’ He paused there in the dark, watching the Japanese, listening to his daughter moaning in the next room. Then he went and got the knife he used for butchering sheep, and killed them, one by one. The fourth soldier woke up and fought, but he killed him before he could cry out.

  “Now he had four rifles. He went to his relatives and told them what he had done. Two were afraid, but he convinced the others. They knew what would happen to them all, in time. He armed them with the rifles, and they assaulted the small Japanese garrison in a merchant’s house in the town. He overpowered the sentry with a ruse, and they took the post. Now he had twenty-seven rifles and a pistol. He persuaded neighbors to join his band and left for the hills. In time he had two companies with four automatic weapons. All fro
m standing in the dark with a butcher knife.”

  Damon said: “What happened to the people of the town when the Japanese came back?”

  Lin’s eyes narrowed. “It went very hard with them.”

  “I would think so.”

  “That is guerrilla warfare, Ts’an Tsan.”

  “But the people,” Damon protested, “the women and children, the innocent bystanders—you’re involving them in this war of yours. It’s like putting them in the front line without weapons …”

  “Yes,” Lin nodded, “that’s it, exactly: the front line. But not without weapons.”

  “But what do you call—”

  Lin raised a hand. “Ts’an Tsan, you have seen Hangkow, you have heard about Nanking—do you think those planes make a neat distinction between the soldier and the little child? Japanese artillery has shelled defenseless towns, their soldiery have raped and slaughtered without scruple. I have seen it. No—it is they, in their arrogance and greed who have said, ‘You are all the enemy, a lesser race, to be enslaved.’ And every boy who cuts a Japanese telephone wire in the night, every farmer who comes running to us with information of enemy movements, every woman who hides half a tan of millet in the earth—all of them know this in their innermost hearts. And they will not be despised …

  “No! It is the Japanese who have made this a people’s war. That is the great irony—they planned to bring China to her knees; instead, they have brought her to her feet. She will never be the same again …”

  The lamp sent a long spiral of black smoke toward the ceiling and Lin frowned at it. “It is curious, how the world sees us. The inscrutable Chinese, remote, impassive; a horde of coolies, China’s swarming millions—as though we were a race of lemmings incapable of grief or laughter, without idiosyncracies … The fact is, the Chinese is the most individualistic of people—he cannot help seeing himself as monumentally unique, sacred and inviolate. More so than the American perhaps, Ts’an Tsan. And the Japanese hates this in us—and in you, as well. He will turn and attack you, of course; in his own good time. But for vastly other reasons.”

  Damon said: “Can you hold out until that day comes?”

  “We will hold out until the end of time itself. The Japanese will never conquer us: we will drain them of every soldier, every rifle, every tank and lorry they send here, until they give it up as a bad job and go home … provided you do not give them the victory, Ts’an Tsan.” He smiled at the Observer’s incredulous stare. “Yes. The United States has furnished Tai Nippon with more than half of all war matériel she purchases abroad.”

  “That’s not true!” Damon exclaimed in English. Lin made a soft, importunate gesture. “Where did you hear that?”

  “In one of your own papers, Ts’an Tsan.”

  “Which one? When? I don’t believe it …”

  Almost reluctantly Lin took a worn, bent notebook out of an inner pocket, slipped a grayed, much-folded, sweat-soaked clipping out of the back pages and handed it over. It was a UP dispatch from what looked like The New York Times. There it was, in chapter and verse: it was true. Damon could feel his face burning as he read. When he finished he folded it up and handed it back. He felt a terrible rage compounded of shame and confusion; then it passed, leaving in its wake only a hard implacable stoicism. He rubbed his hands on his trousers.

  “I’m sorry, Colonel Lin,” he said quietly. “I should not have doubted you. I am out of touch with my own country. With events in my own country. It seems.—And I had to come out here to learn this,” he muttered. “All the way out here …”

  “Among the heathen Chinese?” Lin asked, and wiggled his black eyebrows.

  He smiled back. “Among the heathen Chinese …”

  “Well, heaven will not delay a traveler.”

  “Is that an old Chinese proverb?”

  “Oh yes, Ts’an Tsan.”

  “I like old Chinese proverbs. Is there one for every occasion?”

  “Very nearly.” Lin rose with a grunt, stretching his arms and arching his back painfully. “And now I suggest we try to sleep a little. Before another day is upon us.”

  Damon got to his feet; his legs were so stiff and sore he thought for a moment he would fall, and gripped the rough wood table with both hands. “What will you do after the war, Lin?” he asked, to cover his dismay. “Sit in a room overlooking your Yü-tze Valley and write your memoirs? Read The Romance of the Three Kingdoms? Or will you travel?”

  “Oh, I will not survive this war, Ts’an Tsan.”

  Damon stared at him; the little man was smiling—a slow, infinitely sad smile. “All my old comrades are dead except Tsai Huan-tung, and he is faraway now, in Chahar.” He shook his head. “I have been lucky, very lucky, so far. Once in the arm, once in the leg. But the third time will be fatal. After this war … I never think of it. That’s a luxury for others, not for me.” He opened his hands, to include the bare, neat room, the men sleeping in a huddled group behind him. “This is my life, the end of my life. For a new China—where the girl child is not left to die on the manure pile. For a China where the Sons of Han can live as they were meant to live. Like men.”

  Watching that thin, furrowed, indomitable face with its roguish eyebrows, Damon felt a wave of hot sorrow wash through him. Yes, he thought, gripping his hands together, let them win; let them hang on and win through to their victory. Yes, he thought, and by God, land to those who till it—and honor and dignity to those who have suffered so much and so long in its name; and his eyes stung with tears.

  He reached out and gripped Lin Tso-han’s arm. “Tsui ho sheng li,” he said.

  Lin’s eyes glistened again. He nodded. “Yes!” he cried softly. “To—fina’ vic-t’ree … ” It was the only English Damon had heard him speak. And then in French: “You are learning Chinese, Ts’an Tsan. What a curious thing for an American to do.” All at once he grinned. “Ah, if only all Americans were like you, and all Chinese like me, eh? What a glorious world it would be … ” He chuckled, as though it were the funniest thing he’d ever thought of. “And now we must get some sleep, before we both fall down in a stupor.”

  Outside, the first light was breaking over the mountains.

  9

  In the club on Dewey Boulevard the orchestra was playing “Thanks for the Memory.” The rooms were decorated with flags and bits of bunting; there were battle streamers, crossed sabers, and piles of cannonballs made of papiermâché, and couples drifted through the discs of blue and scarlet and amber light in sharp, gaudy patterns. There were infantrymen from the Army of the Continental Congress in blue-and-buff coats and tricorns, there were volunteers from the War of 1812 in gray tunic and busby—an impersonation affected by slight modifications on the West Point uniform; there were doughboys and Confederate cavalrymen—there was even a Fire Zouave of 1861, in red pantaloons and fez, and sporting a scimitar. Several participants were decked out in curious combinations of turn-of-the-century Spanish uniforms, the product of ransacking Manila shops or the homes of Filipino acquaintances. There was an Arab, a Moro, a Prussian Oberst with a monocle and Kaiser Wilhelms—there was even the inevitable wag sweating profusely in a helmet of cardboard and chain-mail skirt made of hemp and painted silver, but Emily Massengale couldn’t tell who he was because everyone was wearing a mask. Colonel Semmes, who had set the theme of the ball—“The Soldier in History”—had insisted that everyone come masked and remain that way until midnight.

  The women had more latitude, though most of them tried to conform to the theme, and there were several Molly Pitchers and Molly Starks in crinolines and bustles and gathered bonnets; but there were also southern belles, buckskin lasses and medieval ladies in horned hats and long velour trains, gathered up now for dancing. A Salvation Army girl in a drab Mother Hubbard smock had a placard around her neck that read “Doughnut & Choc. 75¢.” There was also a camp follower in the full and original sense of the term—Emily Massengale, sitting in the row of chairs near the verandah, suspected it was Kay Harting—f
itted out in a yellow silk dress slit above both knees, ostrich plumes, a giddily plunging bodice and two beauty marks, one above the other.

  “Look at him!” Susan Gantrell, sitting beside her, cried. She was dutifully wearing her mask but nothing could disguise the Georgia accent or the quick, birdlike inclination of her head. “Genghis Khan … This is such fun, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Emily said absently. The mask bothered her if she shifted her gaze quickly so she kept her eyes front and let the dancers slide across her field of vision.

  “Oh look, look at that!”

  “What?”

  “The tall one—the tall one in the gorgeous uniform!…” And there, gliding into Emily’s line of sight, was a man in the dazzling uniform of a Napoleonic marshal, the short sea green tunic with gold epaulets and red facings, tight white breeches, ermine-trimmed hussar’s jacket worn off the shoulder. “Where ever did he get it?”

  That would be telling, Emily thought. Courtney—it was he—was dancing with a stout little woman dressed as a Chinese empress, all brocade. Millicent Lange, that would be, with a costume picked up from the Tientsin tour. Courtney moved out of her vision, moved into it again, circling slowly; he was smiling, his lips curving under the mustache. He’d had the costume made for a ball in Washington when he’d been one of Pershing’s aides, and had insisted on including it in their personal gear wherever they went. Our dreams betray us, she thought somberly, and sipped at her drink; we can offer a mask to the world, but our dreams betray us all the same. She herself was wearing the Phrygian cap and short skirt and boots of a Jacobin woman of the French Revolution, she hadn’t really known why. Now, watching Courtney gracefully swirling and gliding in his gorgeous uniform, she did know. “Liberté, égalité, fraternité,” she murmured, and smiled to herself.

  A giant dressed as a Confederate cavalryman, with slouch hat and a massive black handlebar mustache, came up to them and bowed from the waist. “Ladies, is it your intention to deprive a gentleman of your terpsichorean talents on this memorable evening?”