Once an Eagle

  “Yes, General,” he answered quietly.

  “I know what you’re thinking. Not much finesse to it, was there? Stupid, head-on slogging. Well, there wasn’t any other way. No landing craft, inadequate air cover, and the Navy …” He chafed the back of his neck; his hair was long, rather shaggy at the neckline. “Well, there won’t be any more Moaporas now. Now I can go back to artful dodging. I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve. Yamashita and his friends are in for some surprises before this year is out.” Abruptly he said: “Tell me about the Fifty-fifth.”

  “Sir, they’re a fine outfit—they’ve found themselves, as you’ve just said. But they’re very weary and worn down. Our medical records indicate a seventy percent latent or active malaria rate. They need a good, long spell of rest and recreation.” He paused. “I estimate a minimum rehabilitation period of four months, possibly six.”

  MacArthur resumed his pacing. “I’m afraid that just isn’t in the cards, Damon. Just not in the cards. Well. I’ve been promised the Forty-first, and the Eighteenth—Swanson’s division. Do you know him?”

  “Yes, General. I served with him at Benning, and at Beyliss.”

  “They say it’s a good division. Superior organization, adequate staff work. Well, we’ll see. God knows I need them badly enough.” Hands sunk deep in his hip pockets, his eyes narrowed, he began pacing again. “Three divisions, two more promised. Perhaps. Five divisions, to retake New Guinea and the Admiralties and the Philippines.” He shook his head. “How do they expect me to operate on that? Five divisions. Now all I need is amphibious elements and air groups and transports and engineer battalions …” His mouth drew down tautly. “They’ve all got them—Nimitz has got them all right, Eisenhower’s got them—they’re stockpiling matériel at Norfolk and Plymouth and Oran and Pearl Harbor and everywhere else. Everywhere but Australia …”

  He swung around, and Damon was astonished at the wrath in the seamed, drawn face. “Do you know what they did send out here? Huntzicker. Yes. The Parson. To read me a sermon on how the main effort is to be against Germany. To tell me that we are a secondary theater of operations. As though I were not already supremely aware of the fact. I had to stand here and listen to that hound-faced moron for twenty minutes! Oh God, for the days in France, Damon—when the country was behind us, when men of competence, men of principle were running things back there … I tell you, this is intolerable. Intolerable! Damon, am I always to be condemned to lead a forlorn hope? a lonely, lost cause?”

  Sam started to say something and checked himself. MacArthur wanted no reply; he kept pacing up and down, up and down, raging softly, bitterly at the incompetents back in Washington, the fools and sycophants and petty, vindictive tyrants who would place personal spite and aggrandizement ahead of the welfare and safety of the greatest nation in the world. Yes, Damon thought, watching the lean, spare body, the proud, handsome profile, the blazing eyes, yes, but when you were Chief of Staff and a lieutenant colonel named George Catlett Marshall modestly requested duty with troops, you sent him to a one-battalion post at poor old Fort Screven to work with the CCC camps, and after that exiled him to Chicago as senior instructor with the Illinois National Guard … And who was then the gentleman?

  MacArthur was pointing a finger at him accusingly. “Damon, we could still lose this war! …”

  “I realize that, sir.”

  “Do you? Thank God you do. It doesn’t seem to have occurred even remotely to anybody else … Listen to them back there—sitting around some conference table mewing at each other and Knudsen asking them, ‘Who wants to make machine guns? Anybody here want to make machine guns?’” He raised one arm threateningly. “They can come down from Timor and Torres Strait and land out there on Moreton Island, but I will never surrender. Never! I will die first. If need be I will seek the end in some final charge …”

  Damon watched him stalk off across the room. There was something wrong here; it was too threatful, too wild, too high-key. The Supreme Commander had wheeled around again. “I know what they’re saying about me back there. Don’t you think I know? Dugout Doug,” he said softly, and his mouth drew down. “Do you think I haven’t heard it whispered, seen it scrawled on fencing?… I came out as the result of an explicit Presidential directive and for no other reason!” His voice rang in the bright, airy room. “I obey orders. Don’t you, Damon?”

  “Yes, General.”

  MacArthur picked up the long-stemmed corn-cob pipe from his desk, fiddled with it, musing—pointed it like a pistol at Damon’s chest. “Caldwell. Your father-in-law. What’s his position on this matter?” Damon hesitated, staring at him. “Go on, speak freely.”

  “I wouldn’t attempt to speak for General Caldwell, sir.”

  MacArthur ducked his head, and began to ream out the bowl of the pipe with quick, harsh little strokes. “How about you, Damon? What’s your attitude?”

  He wouldn’t have believed it; he wouldn’t have believed it if he hadn’t been sitting here on this leather couch, watching the proud, drawn face, the omnivorous eyes. It was wrong to ask a subordinate a question like this—he could only guess at the immense inner torment that had provoked it. He knew what he ought to say, what tradition and deference and diplomacy and his career demanded—and yet he could not say it: he could not get it out.

  “…I believe it’s a matter of individual conscience,” he replied quietly.

  “Do you. What would you have done, Damon?”

  “I don’t know, General. I have never been in that situation.”

  “Of course not. But what do you think you would do?”

  Damon drew a breath. “I believe I would stay with my men, sir.”

  MacArthur swung around with abrupt violence and started pacing again. “Then you’re a damned fool. A double-dyed romantic fool. Like all the rest of them.” Damon made no reply. “There are contingencies considerably more important than the morale of a regiment, or even the fate of an army …” He bit on the pipestem, his jaw outthrust, as sharp as his nose. “Well, I guess that’s all.”

  Damon got to his feet with alacrity and saluted. The General returned it casually. Sam walked across the room. As he reached the door MacArthur called his name.

  He turned. “Yes, General.”

  “Whip them into shape, Damon. Drive them hard. Time is of the essence.”

  “Sir, I’d hoped they could be given a real rest, now that they—”

  “It’s out of the question. The schedule will not permit it.”

  “Very good, sir. If it has to be done.”

  “It does. Believe me, it does.” MacArthur was still standing by the desk, staring at him intensely. “Whip them into shape … you’re a good soldier, aren’t you, Damon?” he added in a strange, admonitory voice.

  He paused, looked back at the Supreme Commander. “I don’t know, General,” he said slowly. “I don’t know whether I am or not.”

  MacArthur smiled then—a bitter, mirthless smile; dismissed him with a gesture. Damon descended to the lobby in a heavy turmoil of relief and resentment, rage and hilarity and gloom. Ben was in the cocktail lounge hunched over an empty glass.

  “How’s the situation?”

  Damon blew out his cheeks. “Fluid. Very fluid.”

  “Not good enough. You’re relieved.”

  “You know, I might be, at that.”

  “What’d you do—rip the scrambled eggs off his cap bill?”

  Damon sank into the opposite chair and sighed. “I just told him he shouldn’t have shagged-ass out of Bataan.”

  “Mother Machree. Now what did you want to do that for? I’m associated with you.” They laughed, and Ben waved for a waitress. “You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “No. No ghost.”

  “What’s in the wind?”

  “Storm signals. Another operation.”

  Ben scrubbed his scalp with his knuckles, his eyes wide. “You’re kidding.”

  “Afraid not.”

  “The outfit? The
Division?”

  “None other.”

  “Jesus. No rest for the wicked.” The two men looked at each other—a long, hard, enigmatic glance. Then Ben said, “Well—let’s live tonight. What’re you drinking? The gin here is—well, it’s escharotic.”

  “Wow. I better have some, then.”

  The bar, called the Victoria, was crowded with the uniforms of several nations. The wainscotting was so dark the room seemed to sink below a horizon line of smoked ebony, and the walls were painted with scenes of desert and jungle where kangaroos, furry koalas, rock wallabies, wombats, bandicoots and platypi peered out, through a labyrinth of leaves and tangled vines, at faces only a little less strange than their own.

  “Dig all those marsupials,” Ben observed. “Rough dodge, you know: teats jammed down in the pouch, no placenta at all.”

  “That’s the woman’s problem.”

  “Well, it’s just as hard on the male. How’d you like to have your scrotum slung up ahead of your hammer?”

  “Damned awkward.”

  “I’ll tell the world.”

  “What happens when you get an erection?”

  “Then you’ve got to do it standing on your head. Or hang by your toes.” Ben leaned forward confidentially. “Tell you the truth, I’m only making an educated guess. I’ll ask the next marsupe I run on to. That’s a promise.”

  Their drinks came and they raised their glasses.

  “To the Salamanders.”

  “Through the fire with clean attire.”

  “Ass—best—us …”

  The world was strange. Up at Huon they were still fighting, slopping through the muck, peering frantically into the bristling, impenetrable viridescence and cursing all jungles forever; and upstairs the Supreme Commander sat alone in his study gazing at maps and charts, reflecting darkly on the incompetent and vindictive souls in Washington and—very probably—on the deplorable lack of loyalty on the part of subordinate commanders; and here and in other bars soldiers and women laughed and argued and drank more than was good for them …

  He sighed. He was going to be a general. If MacArthur didn’t send him home first. So odd. In ’24, in ’31, in ’38 it had seemed impossible, beyond his wildest, most vainglorious dreams. And yet he felt no elation at all. He was happy, yes—to be sitting here with Ben, alive, unmaimed, all his senses alert and quivering and receptive; but above it, hanging over it, was the bitter expanse of the cemetery at Moapora, the long, sepulchral gloom of the hospital tents, the gear rotting in the marshy clearing at Kokogela; the division in rows on rows of pyramidal tents in the hills behind Devon Bay, laboriously filling up with replacements, kids from Brooklyn and Big Spring and Salinas and Fletcher’s Landing, who couldn’t crawl noiselessly for two hundred feet or strip a weapon in the dark … Sitting here, now, in this smoke-burdened, noisy room, listening to Ben telling him a story about Jackson’s extraordinary ruses to bring the company mascot, a dog named Gogarty, ashore at Melbourne he felt the old, long-forgotten urgency gripe at his vitals—this vast, uncaring enterprise in waste and misery and destruction that was even now preparing to pick him up again and fling him into the flame-filled maw … He was here. Here. In this foolish, noisy, lovable Australian bar. His hand—there—was gripping the glass, which was slick and cold; his heart beat thickly, comfortingly, his arms and legs tingled with the gentlest of pleasurable sensations. He was alive, here, his flesh clamoring its silly, sacred immanence, and time was hurrying toward its end …

  Ben had finished the anecdote: the dog—and Jackson, dressed as an Australian dock worker—had been apprehended. Damon became conscious of another voice nearby, a British voice languid with the authorities of two proud and pleasant centuries.

  “Tradespeople, inventors, efficiency experts, expediters—I grant you that. No question. But in battle, confronted by the thousand-and-one strategic and tactical dilemmas—no. They simply haven’t got it, that’s all …”

  He turned. A British colonel with a flat, ruddy face and a low neat dark hairline was leaning forward, talking to another officer and two women, an American Army nurse and a girl in a blue dress who looked startled and upset.

  “Joyce here’s a Yank, you know,” she said in the pretty, faintly Cockney accents of Australia, indicating the nurse.

  “Yes, I know. No offense.” The British colonel’s teeth were a bony white barrier below his mustache. “Matter of racial aptitude, don’t you know. Quality, upbringing. Why dispute it? Eh? Only the truth. Lorries, supply dumps, traffic control, petrol and ammo levels—top-hole. American way. If the PM had any sense at all he’d simply insist on their running up supplies and let us take care of the fighting end of things, don’t you know. Only correct solution…”

  “Listen to that.” Ben was glaring at the Englishman, his eyes snapping. “That character could get to be unpleasant after a while.”

  “Relax, Benbo. He’s loaded.”

  “I don’t care. Drunk or sober he’s unsavory. I didn’t come into this glorified taproom to listen to that.”

  “—After all,” the Australian girl was saying, “the Yanks are here to help defend us—I don’t see why you have to bite the hand that feeds you …”

  “My point exactly. Hewers of wood and drawers of water. But as for the art of war—”

  “But sir,” the nurse protested, “our forces have been fighting up there in Papua and winning a—”

  “Bless-my-soul Papua. Raw-ther! My point exactly. And they have the infernal cheek to offer it as a victory. That farce …”

  “That did it,” Ben said flatly.

  “Look, Ben—” But the Wolverine was already on his feet and moving over to the offending table. Damon rose and followed him, wondering idly what would come of it. A fight, an apology, another round of drinks? Ben was always getting involved in situations like this—on trains, in roadhouses, on ferries: he seemed to require these confrontations, as though to purge the hot, contentious defiance that incessantly flayed him. What the hell, Damon thought; maybe we can both get sent home on the same slow boat to Frisco.

  “Good evening, ladies,” Ben said, and bowed. Their faces turned up to him, vacant with surprise. Ben looked at the British colonel calmly. “You know something, chum? You’re just a trifle obnoxious.”

  The Englishman’s eyes slid up at him. “Not entirely sure that it’s any of your business.”

  “You just made it my business.”

  “Eavesdropping, were you?”

  “As a matter of fact I’ve been trying to ignore you, but I’ve had no luck at it.”

  The other British officer, a major, said: “Ronnie—”

  “No, no.” The colonel waved a hand. “I want to pursue this a bit.”

  Ben said in a flat voice: “I understand you feel the Moapora operation was a farce. Is that correct?”

  “Ah.” The Englishman’s teeth appeared again, huge and bare. “One of the heroes, I presume.”

  Some of the adjacent tables had fallen silent now, and Damon was conscious of the chorus of talk at the bar.

  “That’s right, chum,” Ben answered. “One of the heroes.”

  The Britisher smiled a slow, derisive smile and looked at his companion and then at the girls. Still watching them he said to Ben, “In point of fact I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  Ben reached down and with a quick, fierce grip on the Britisher’s tunic yanked him to his feet; his chair went over backward with a hollow thump. Standing, the Englishman was three inches taller and outweighed Ben by thirty pounds, but the American had acted so swiftly he could only gasp. Still holding him tightly, his face inches away from the other man’s, Ben said in a voice that rang like a bugle in the room: “—And you come to your feet when a fellow officer addresses you! …”

  The other officer had risen now and Damon moved toward him, girding himself for battle. But Ben’s tormentor was still so shaken by this turn of events he could only bluster: “Take your infernal hands off me! How dare you lay
hands on me this way!”

  “I just did, pal.”

  “I am a personal friend of General Blamey and attached to the staff of—”

  “I don’t care if you’re a personal friend of the Emperor Augustus—you can step outside right now, or you can stand here in this room and hear me call you a loud-mouth liar and a son of a bitch and a swine!—”

  “For your information—”

  “Which is it?”

  The room was almost completely still. The Englishman’s eyes flickered nervously about. Ben had released him a few seconds before, and he twisted his neck inside his collar. “Gentlemen and officers,” he breathed, “do not make scenes of this sort …”

  “This one does,” Ben answered lightly; and Damon, watching his eyes, his suddenly relaxed stance, knew that Ben had realized the other man would not fight.

  “Ronnie,” the major said in pleading tones, “wouldn’t it be a whole lot better if—”

  “Be still!” The Englishman turned to Ben again. “We were sitting with these ladies, Colonel, and I’ll thank you to—”

  “Then why don’t we let the ladies choose?” Ben pursued; smiling again he made the same funny little bow. “How about it, girls?” he asked them. “Two Limeys or two Yanks? Roughly equal in rank, in age, in girth—but the heart, ladies: the heart! What do you say?”

  Damon saw the nurse give a soft, radiant little smile, the girl in the blue dress run her tongue along the edge of her teeth in a merry, malicious grin, while the whole room, utterly quiet now, watched and waited. Then all at once the Australian girl, looking at the British colonel from under her brows, still smiling, burst into song, slapping her hand against the table top in rhythm.

  “Fellas of Austryl-yeh,

  Cobbers, chaps, and mites,

  Hear the bloody enemy

  Kickin’ at the gites …”

  The room swelled into singing, raucous and bellicose. The Englishman tried to speak to the girl but she only sang louder, laughing; he turned to Ben, but the singing drowned his words. His companion pulled at his blouse; they glanced at each other and then left quickly through the press, to roars of laughter.