»Do I bore you?»
»What do you think?» the girl asked.
»I bore myself, Daughter.»
»I don’t think you do, Richard, you would not have done something all your life if you were bored by it. Don’t lie to me please, darling, when we have so little time.»
»I won’t.»
»Don’t you see you need to tell me things to purge your bitterness?»
»I know I tell them to you.»
»Don’t you know I want you to die with the grace of a happy death? Oh I’m getting all mixed up. Don’t let me get too mixed up.»
»I won’t, Daughter.»
»Tell me some more please and be just as bitter as you want.»
CHAPTER 31
»LISTEN, Daughter,» the Colonel said. »Now we will cut out all references to glamour and to high brass, even from Kansas, where the brass grows higher than osage-orange trees along your own road. It bears a fruit you can’t eat and it is purely Kansan. Nobody but Kansans ever had anything to do with it; except maybe us who fought. We ate them every day. Osage oranges,» he added. »Only we called them K Rations. They weren’t bad. C Rations were bad. Ten in ones were good.
»So we fought. It is dull but it is informative. This is the way it goes if anyone is ever interested; which I doubt.
»It goes like this: 1300 Red S-3: White jumped off on time. Red said they were waiting to tie in behind White. 1305 (that is one o’clock and five minutes after in the afternoon, if you can remember that, Daughter) Blue S-3, you know what an S-3 is I hope, says, ‘Let us know when you move.’ Red said they were waiting to tie in behind White.
»You can see how easy it is,» the Colonel told the girl. »Everybody ought to do it before breakfast.»
»We cannot all be combat infantrymen,» the girl told him softly. »I respect it more than anything except good, honest fliers. Please talk, I’m taking care of you.»
»Good fliers are very good and should be respected as such,» the Colonel said.
He looked up at the light on the ceiling and he was completely desperate at the remembrance of his loss of his battalions, and of individual people. He could never hope to have such a regiment, ever. He had not built it. He had inherited it. But, for a time, it had been his great joy. Now every second man in it was dead and the others nearly all were wounded. In the belly, the head, the feet or the hands, the neck, the back, the lucky buttocks, the unfortunate chest and the other places. Tree burst wounds hit men where they would never be wounded in open country. And all the wounded were wounded for life.
»It was a good regiment,» he said. »You might even say it was a beautiful regiment until I destroyed it under other people’s orders.»
»But why do you have to obey them when you know better?»
»In our army you obey like a dog,» the Colonel explained. »You always hope you have a good master.»
»What kind of masters do you get?»
»I’ve only had two good ones so far. After I reached a certain level of command, many nice people, but only two good masters.»
»Is that why you are not a General now? I would love it if you were a General.»
»I’d love it too,» the Colonel said. »But maybe not with the same intensity.»
»Would you try to sleep, please, to please me?»
»Yes,» the Colonel said.
»You see, I thought that if you slept you might get rid of them, just being asleep.»
»Yes. Thank you very much,» he said.
There was nothing to it, gentlemen. All a man need ever do is obey.
CHAPTER 32
»YOU slept quite well for a time,» the girl told him, lovingly and gently. »Is there anything you would like me to do?»
»Nothing,» the Colonel said. »Thank you.»
Then he turned bad and he said, »Daughter I could sleep good straight up and down in the electric chair with my pants slit and my hair clipped. I sleep as, and when, I need it.»
»I can never be like that,» the girl said, sleepily. »I sleep when I am sleepy.»
»You’re lovely,» the Colonel told her. »And you sleep better than anyone ever slept.»
»I am not proud of it,» the girl said, very sleepily. »It is just something that I do.»
»Do it, please.»
»No. Tell me very low and soft and put your bad hand in mine.»
»The hell with my bad hand,» the Colonel said. »Since when was it so bad.»
»It’s bad,» the girl said. »Badder, or worse, than you will ever know. Please tell me about combat without being too brutal.»
»An easy assignment,» the Colonel said. »I’ll skip the times. The weather is cloudy and the place is 986342. What’s the situation? We are smoking the enemy with artillery and mortar. S-3 advises that S-6 wants Red to button up by 1700. S-6 wants you to button up and use plenty of artillery. White reports that they are in fair shape. S-6 informs that A company will swing around and tie in with B.
»B Company was stopped first by enemy action and stayed there of their own accord. S-6 isn’t doing so good. This is unofficial. He wants more artillery but there isn’t any more artillery.
»You wanted combat for what? I don’t know really why. Or really know why. Who wants true combat? But here it is, Daughter, on the telephone and later I will put in the sounds and smells and anecdotes about who was killed when and where if you want them.»
»I only want what you will tell me.»
»I’ll tell you how it was,» the Colonel said, »and General Walter Bedell Smith doesn’t know how it was yet. Though, probably, I am wrong, as I have been so many times.»
»I’m glad we don’t have to know him or the nylon-smooth man,» the girl said.
»We won’t have to know them this side of hell,» the Colonel assured her. »And I will have a detail guarding the gates of hell so that no such characters enter.»
»You sound like Dante,» she said sleepily.
»I am Mister Dante,» he said. »For the moment.»
And for a while he was and he drew all the circles. They were as unjust as Dante’s but he drew them.
CHAPTER 33
»I WILL skip the detailed part since you are, justifiably, and should be, sleepy,» the Colonel said. He watched, again, the strange play of the light on the ceiling. Then he looked at the girl, who was more beautiful than any girl that he had ever seen, ever.
He had seen them come and go, and they go faster, when they go, than any other thing that flies. They can go faster from fair beauty to the knocker’s shop than any other animal, he thought. But I believe that this one could hold the pace and stay the course. The dark ones last the best, he thought, and look at the bony structure in that face. This one has a fine blood line too, and she can go forever. Most of our own lovely beauties come from soda counters, and they do not know their grandfather’s last name, unless, maybe, it was Schultz. Or Schlitz, he thought.
This is the wrong attitude to take, he said to himself; since he did not wish to express any of these sentiments to the girl, who would not like them anyway, and was soundly sleepy now the way a cat is when it sleeps within itself.
»Sleep well, my dearest lovely, and I will just tell it for nothing.»
The girl was asleep, still holding his bad hand, that he despised, and he could feel her breathe, as the young breathe when they are easily asleep.
The Colonel told her all about it; but he did not utter it.
So after I had the privilege of hearing General Walter Bedell Smith explain the facility of the attack, we made it. There was the Big Red One, who believed their own publicity. There was the Ninth, which was a better Division than we were. There was us, who had always done it when they asked for you to do it.
We had no time to read comic books, and we had no time for practically nothing, because we always moved before first light. This is difficult and you have to throw away the Big Picture and be a division.
We wore a four-leaf clover, which meant nothing except among ourselves, who all loved it. And every time I ever see it the same thing happens in my inner guts. Some people thought that it was ivy. But it was not. It was a four-leaf clover disguised as ivy.
The orders were that we would attack with the Big Red One, the First Infantry Division of the Army of the United States, and they, and their Calypso singing PRO never let you forget it. He was a nice guy. And it was his job.
But you get fed up with horse-shit unless you like the aroma or the taste. I never liked it. Although I loved to walk through cow-shit when I was a kid and feel it between my toes. But horse-shit bores you. It bores me very rapidly, and I can detect it at over one thousand yards.
So we attacked, the three of us in line, exactly where the Germans wished us to attack. We will not mention General Walter Bedell Smith any further. He is not the villain. He only made the promises and explained how it would go. There are no villains, I presume, in a Democracy. He was only just
