Once an Eagle

  The shots were brutal in the white stillness. Whack-ack!—like the snapping of a colossal whip, and one of the engineers leaped up in a wild theatrical gesture, arms flung wide, and fell like a dropped sack. At almost the same instant there was the ripping blast from Jackson’s BAR and bits of stone chipped away around one of the holes; then a chorus of gunfire. Pritchard realized he was gripping the rock in front of him with all his strength. He relaxed his hand and turned, encountered the somber, bronze face of Brand, the General’s orderly. He grinned and rocked his head; Brand did not smile back, but he did wink—the slow, droll dropping of one eyelid. Pritchard was a little in awe of Brand. The Indian had been on that 37-millimeter gun with the General on the first day; his forearm had been badly burned and was still wrapped in gauze. Smoke was trailing blue from the barrel of his carbine. Pritchard wished he’d been there, with the gun, that day. But if he had been, he’d probably be dead. Hank Chase was dead …

  “All right, cease firing!” Captain Bowcher shouted, and the shooting stopped. “You haven’t got anything to shoot at, save it …” But his voice was not peremptory; there was a comfort simply in firing your weapon at such a time. To Jackson he said: “Think you got him?”

  “No. But that’s where the son of a bitch was. That hole just to the right of that off-side W, there …”

  “Was is right.”

  “Hell, the Old Man’s wasting his time. What’s he waiting for—an engraved invite?”

  There was a violent commotion behind the weapons carrier now. Two aid men had run over and knelt beside the wounded man.

  “Captain,” Randall said to Bowcher, “I can’t for the life of me see why you don’t use grenades on them. You’ve got plenty of grenades, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, we’ve got grenades.”

  “Then why don’t you use them?”

  Bowcher’s gray eyes moved around to the correspondent. “Because in the first place most of them are too high to reach. And in the second place the tunnels run uphill, and when you lob a grenade in, it just rolls right on out again and blows your balls off. That’s why.”

  “All right, Tom,” Damon called to Fulkes in a steady, flat voice. “Go ahead.”

  “Right.” Fulkes stood up and began giving commands. The working party bent over the drums, removing the plugs, and gas splashed out gurgling, shining like molten silver in the hot, flat light, running down into the fissures at half a dozen places. The men worked with a stealthy haste, in near-silence, like children engaged in some malicious prank, tossing the empties back in the truck bed. The air was raw with gas.

  “All right, move out,” Fulkes cried. The detail scrambled into the vehicle, flinging themselves on the tailgate, as it careened and bumped down the path toward the draw. The silence grew. Fulkes lifted a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, looked around sharply, called, “Fire-in-a-hole!” and let the arm fly off and tossed it. It hung in the air briefly—a fat little green oval—and then fell rolling. There was an explosion and the center of the Salt Mine leaped in tearing orange clouds of flame, followed by a seething low roar as it ignited below ground. The waiting men leaned forward, their faces brightened in the torment of flames, their eyes wide. And then, far below them, deep in the rock, as if coming from another, darker world, rose sounds like girls singing, animals squealing, dogs howling in boundless grief and pain. Pritchard stared at the blackened stone, where smoke now rose in thin swirling columns. Screams. Those were men screaming down there. Hundreds of them, in a muted chorus. He found he was looking at the others near him; he couldn’t help it. Young Bryce was white and pale, his lips trembling; Jackson’s eyes were slitted but his knuckles were white on the grips of the BAR. The screams went on, rising on one another, in thirds, in fifths, in tremulous, fearful octaves—and now they no longer sounded like human beings, not even like animals, but some outlandish acoustical device turned up past all tolerance. Bowcher had his head lowered, Randall was swallowing, his mouth slack; Damon was looking at the cliff face, his face implacable and hard. Only Brand met Pritchard’s eyes—a fierce, passionate gaze that seemed to say, Yes, if it has to be, so be it: I know and you do not.

  Pritchard shut his eyes. We are burning them. We are kneeling here burning to death a hundred, a thousand, God alone knows or ever will know how many human beings. One summer afternoon long ago he had lain in his cot in the little tent he’d pitched in the field behind the house and read a book called At The Earth’s Core, a tale of swamps and eerie lights and molten lava pits where hobgoblin automatons prowled and butchered in the most fiendish ways … But that was fantasy. This was the earth’s core and they were crouched at the edge of it, unable to meet one another’s eyes. Bryce was sick suddenly, bent forward on one knee, gripping his rifle, retching a dark yellow bile that hung in thick chains from his lips and chin. Pritchard felt his own gorge rise, and a hard pressure against his forehead. For a wild, fleeting instant he had the certainty that he could summon up some word, utter some blessed incantation and the barrels would be back in the weapons carrier, the engineers sprawled casually in the shade under the tailgate, Bryce would be explaining to them all, in his crisp Ivy League voice, the nature and properties of calciferous limestone—

  There was a shout, a child’s cry, palpable and near. His head snapped around, he saw a man running out of one of the easternmost caves in the long, curving gallery, moving in faltering, lurching strides. His blouse was on fire, and his hair—he floated, his back arched, shaking his head back and forth as if to throw off this blazing burden; but his haste only fanned the flames more briskly. There was a short, crashing fusillade and the Japanese fell as if thrown and slid forward down the rock face and lay quivering, tiny flames still burning crisply at the back of his skull and his uniform.

  The screams were fainter now, had fallen away to a low moaning, scarcely audible; the very air around them seemed calefactive, teeming with wild, mephitic odors. I don’t want to be here, Pritchard thought; there is no reason why I had to be here. He started to get to his feet. There was a deep boom, and the ground beneath them shook like a heavy branch in a gust of wind; then another, then a whole succession of detonations. Fulkes called something to the General, who was nodding silently. An ammunition dump, that was what it was: the flames had reached explosives and the great caves, their generators blasted to fragments, were pitch-dark now and airless, glowing fitfully in the rocket showers of bullets and mortar shells and grenades. But now there was no living soul to fear them.

  Then the explosions too died away, and the stillness was like a sudden rain. They got to their feet slowly and looked at one another, survivors of some bizarre disaster. Fulkes was bent over, hands on his knees, peering down into one of the crevices, from which smoke was eddying in faint black spirals. It was over. All over, here. Bryce was wiping his mouth with a greasy black sleeve. One hundred, five hundred, a thousand men had died beneath their feet while they watched and listened. At the earth’s core …

  Damon had called to him and Brand, and he hurried over, following the General along the path that led down to the airfield. There was something he wanted to say, something significant and very pressing; but he could not for the life of him think what it was. Before he could speak, the General had turned to him.

  “Harry, contact Colonel Wilcher at the airstrip and tell him the Salt Mine is secured. Then notify Regimental Headquarters.”

  “Yes sir,” he answered.

  “General …” It was the correspondent Randall, his eyes narrowed behind his glasses, his mouth slack with intense distaste. “General Damon …”

  The ADC stopped. “What is it?”

  “What was …” Randall seemed to be out of breath. “Was that—that hideous business back there—was that necessary?”

  “I thought so.”

  “You did,” Randall said in a loud voice. “Well, let me tell you I for one didn’t find it very edifying …”

  Damon turned and faced him heavily. “Randall, the men in this
regiment have been fired on from this CP for days. We have taken over two hundred casualties here in the past twenty-four hours. I have notified General Toyada of my intentions, informing him that his campaign is lost beyond salvage, and offering him every opportunity to surrender by leaflet, radio and public address system, in his own language. We cannot get at them, they will not surrender, they will not come out and engage us in open warfare. We cannot use the airstrip until their base here is destroyed. For reasons you cannot know I have been ordered to render the strip operational by six hundred tomorrow. What do you suggest?”

  Randall waved his hand distractedly. “But that was just—that was just butchery, wanton slaughter …”

  “Was it. Well, now—what was it on D-Day when we were lying there under the ridge and they had hold of the handle?”

  In an angry voice Randall cried: “Well, there must be some way—some better way than this!”

  The General’s eyes rested on the correspondent with bleak contempt. “Well: when you find it you come and let me know and I’ll be more than happy to use it. Until then you leave me to my wanton butcheries and I’ll leave you to yours.”

  He wheeled away, his face black with anger, and Pritchard had to hurry to catch up with him. Behind them two shots rang out as Captain Bowcher continued his duel with the uppermost caves.

  6

  Damon put down the pencil and rubbed his eyes. The rain kept thundering on the tent roof like drumfire, cutting off all other sound. No let up. Rainy season on Lolobiti. An island like a deflated, twisted football a hundred and forty miles beyond the interminable New Guinea coast, first step toward Halmahera and the Philippines. But the G-2 estimates had been wildly wrong again, the Japanese had fought stubbornly and resourcefully. Swanny’s people had run into trouble and bogged down, the timetable had gone all to pieces and old Thiemann, under pressure from MacArthur, had sent the Salamanders up from rest camp on Wokai. For a week they’d made good headway along the coast. Then the rains had started, and that was that. They were already behind in supply. Tetlow was screaming that his guns were down to four hundred rounds. In his mind’s eye Damon could see the trails, already soaked, disintegrating into quagmires, then sluggish streams over which burdened men struggled ankle-deep, knee-deep in gumbo.

  He stared at the olive drab pigeonholes of the field desk in front of him—Westy’s old field desk, then Duke Pulleyne’s, now his by right of succession when Duke had been wounded by mortar fire on the next to last day of the Wokai operation. Interchangeable parts: he, Westy and Pulleyne were all interchangeable parts. If he were hit, he would recommend Ben, who was already on the list for BG, as Divisional Commander. They would come and they would go, each of them, but the Division—that great bristling Salamander, the corpus and weapon of their individual hopes and wills—would go on.

  It would go on, that is, if it were victorious, if it accomplished its mission with dispatch and did not incur the wrath of the emperor …

  He sighed, pumped up the Coleman lantern and went over to the situation map, stared at the knotty configuration of coastline and the strangely artificial bars outlining the amphibious envelopment just beyond Point Komfane, running his finger over the area although he knew every distance, every elevation, every troop disposition by heart. He and Dickinson had spent four days on the operation, laboring with slow care. It was a perfect situation: the beach was good, the coast was flat, the main Japanese supply trail paralleled the beach. Jimmy Hoyt’s battalion was to make the amphibious assault, and when the Japanese diverted forces to contain it Ben’s regiment was to pass through the 484th—now Frenchy Beaupré’s—break through the Japanese MLR and drive northeast toward the coast road and make contact with Hoyt. They had checked and rechecked everything half a hundred times, argued over the timing, deliberately tried to pick flaws in the scheme; everybody had confidence that it would go through.

  And yet, peering at the map in the flat, quaking light under the rain’s thunder he was brushed by a stealthy tremor of disquietude. Maps were cruel. There was no substitute for going up front, for incessant reconnaissance. Staring at the pictures created by grease pencil on acetate overlays made for pessimism. That was part of what had sickened Westy, paralyzed him and pulled him all to pieces. Duke on the contrary had gone to the other extreme—had raced off to the front so often and impulsively his own subordinate commanders hadn’t been able to locate him half the time; his staff work had suffered, he’d lost his grip on the tactical situation, trapped in the web of minutiae and confusion in which battle abounded.

  The only trouble was the higher you got, the less you were able to get up front. You were drawn inexorably away from what was essential—until finally, like MacArthur, you sat in a lofty, immaculate tower three thousand miles from the war and gave yourself up to dreams and schemes, the symbols without the realities that bore them; until at last perhaps you even mistook symbol for flesh and blood …

  He drifted back from the map and sat down at the desk again, holding in his mind the geographical configurations, the order of battle. It had to succeed: it had to. Preparation is the first essential for success, old Vinegar Joe had drummed into their heads back at Benning; therefore prepare, and prepare, and prepare again. But you couldn’t prepare for everything. There was the recon report that didn’t come in because the rubber raft carrying those six men had become wrecked on a coral head; the battalion of Imperial Marines some harassed Japanese commander had bivouacked by pure chance right behind the assault area; the four tanks G-2 knew nothing whatever about and that someone had accidentally sent forward from the airstrip through the kunai grass … What was out there, in that empty triangular area between the sea and the trail and the jungle? Was General Watanabe sitting in his funny little round circus tent of mustard and ocher, studying his map—was he deciding at this malignant midnight hour to move a detachment over to the area north of Point Komfane, just on the chance that the Yanks—? Were they digging in with the patient, dogged industriousness of their race, stringing wire and emplacing guns? Would they be sitting over their sights and mortar tubes, watching placidly for the ghostly white wakes of landing craft?

  Too much imagination was the death of the commander. God knew you had to have some—unless you wanted to be a fatuous dunce like Packy Vinzent, or a cold-blooded, methodical machine like Slingerland. You had to pounce on possibilities, sustain flexibility, dare the unforeseen, conceive of fresh and unorthodox plans, improvise when those plans went awry, bounce back from dismay with confidence. But too much imagination—and even a little too much was worse than much too little—and you became prey to a thousand and one fears that ate at your will like acid. Worst of all. There they were, out there, in their thousands: sleeping fitfully or staring into the teeming dark, or playing cards or writing home, laughing or cursing or held in stony, fearful silence—and what happened to them tomorrow, whether they ate or went hungry, fought or rested, lived or died, was up to you …

  He sighed again and picked up the clipboard. Ray Feltner had come in with a message he’d picked up from coast watchers of a Japanese convoy in the Molucca Sea, approximately thirty miles off Lembeh Point. Where were they headed? Air had nothing on it, nothing at all. Callison had a report of 120 enemy planes on Tajeng Airfield on Salawati, but Haley said he couldn’t do anything about it because it was a purely jurisdictional problem with the Aussies. Jesus. Spheres of Command. How comforting to know that if the Japs took it into their heads to come over some evening early and plaster the daylights out of you, it was all because it was purely jurisdictional.

  The whole business with air was extremely touchy. Prince Hal had come in yesterday snarling with rage, saying he’d made up his mind to establish a bomb support line two thousand yards in advance of all US ground forces, no missions whatever would be accepted inside of that line—and that was final. What this meant of course was no tactical air support at all. After a while Hal had calmed down a little and the story came out: he and Frenchy Beaupré had got
in one unholy row over that last short drop at Suanggi and Frenchy had sent him by special courier a Japanese decoration they’d found on some dead officer. This was dangerous: he’d have to sit on Frenchy and go to work on the fly-boy as soon as possible, stressing how much air support had meant at Wokai, and so on and so forth.

  Oom Paul Thiemann was flying in tomorrow from Wokai to hear all about the amphibious envelopment. He was a big, balding St. Louis German with an excellent tactical sense and he would see it was the way to break it open; but his chief of staff was a pompous little snipe who would poke holes in the plan just for the fun of inserting his own. The other problem was that Thiemann wanted to take Dutch Wilhelm back to Wokai with him as Corps Operations Officer. It was a good thing for Dutch; it would get him out of the line and give him a chance to get over his jaundice and jungle ulcers, and it would mean a star for him. He couldn’t stand in his way, if Dutch wanted to go; but then who would he give the 468th to? He couldn’t give it to Dickinson: Dick was a staff man and always would be. Winslow might work—he’d had a battalion at Wokai—and he was good with troops; but he was impetuous and breezy and Dutch was imperturbable and methodical. There would inevitably be friction—Dutch had run the regiment for so long, and his officers all thought the way he did and distrusted outsiders. And if he did give it to Winslow, what would he do for a G-3? Spellar was out of the question: he’d been under a lot of strain, and he was getting tired and jumpy; if a couple weeks’ leave in Australia didn’t put him back in shape he’d have to send him home.

  The Division hospital had been hit by a solo Betty early that morning and Nate Weintraub wanted it to be either moved or dug in. They’d had a stormy session, everyone was getting ragged. He himself suspected it was an isolated instance—according to one report the bomber had been jettisoning its load under attack from two P-47s from Wokai—but you couldn’t know. Was it by any weird chance connected with the Salawati group? or even that damned convoy? Major Calder and four nurses had been severely wounded and three patients killed and twelve hurt. Old MacChesney had been wild, her hair loose under her cap and a foot-long bomb splinter clutched in one shaking hand. “What I want to know, General Damon, is what you intend to do about this, and right now! It is impossible to function efficiently under these conditions … ” Gazing at her angry, distraught face he had been filled with relief that Joyce was back at the base hospital at Désespoir—then had felt guilty at harboring the thought … The trouble was that if you dug the hospital in it would be under water. Maybe if they went down two feet, and then sandbagged with soil, that would raise the walls to four feet, which ought to protect them from anything but a direct hit, which you couldn’t protect anything from anyway. He’d get the headquarters working parties on that first thing in the morning, all they could spare.