"THE… th Fighter Group wants a comedian and some dancers," Michael said to Captain Mincey, his superior officer, sitting at the desk in the room that was lined with pictures of all the famous people who had passed through London for the USO. "And they don't want any more drunks. Johnny Sutter was posted up there last month, and he insulted a pilot in the ready room and was knocked out twice."
"Send them Flanner," Mincey said, weakly. Mincey had asthma and he drank too much, and the combination of Scotch and the climate of London always left him a little forlorn in the morning.
"Flanner has dysentery and he refuses to leave the Dorchester."
Mincey sighed. "Send them that lady accordionist," Mincey said, "what's her name, with the blue hair."
"They want a comedian."
"Tell them we only have accordionists." Mincey sniffed, pushing a tube full of medicine up his nose.
"Yes, Sir," said Michael. "Miss Roberta Finch cannot continue up into Scotland. She had a nervous breakdown in Salisbury. She keeps taking her clothes off in the enlisted men's mess and tries to commit suicide."
"Send that crooner to Scotland," Mincey sighed, "and make out a full report on Finch and send it back to Headquarters in New York, so we'll be covered."
"The MacLean troupe is in Liverpool Harbour," Michael said, "but their ship is quarantined. A seaman came down with meningitis and they can't come ashore for ten days."
"I can't bear it," said Captain Mincey.
"There is a confidential report," Michael said, "from the… nd Heavy Bombardment Group. Larry Crosett's band played there last Saturday and got into a poker game Sunday night. They took eleven thousand dollars from the Group and Colonel Coker says he has evidence they used marked cards. He wants the money back or he is going to prefer charges."
Mincey sighed weakly, poking the glass tube into his other nostril. He had run a night club in Cincinnati before the war and he often wished he was back in Ohio among the comedians and speciality dancers. "Tell Colonel Coker I am investigating the entire matter," he said.
"A Chaplain at the Troop Carrier Command," Michael said, "objects to the profanity used in our production of 'Folly of Youth'. He says the leading man says damn seven times and the ingenue calls one of the characters a son of a bitch in the second act."
Mincey shook his head. "I told that ham to cut out all profanity in this theatre of operations," Mincey said. "And he swore he would. Actors!" He moaned. "Tell the Chaplain I absolutely agree and the offending individuals will be disciplined."
"That's all for now, Captain," Michael said.
Mincey sighed and put his medicine in his pocket. Michael started out of the room.
"Wait a minute, Whitacre," Mincey said.
Michael turned round. Mincey regarded him sourly, his asthma-oppressed eyes and nose red and watery. "For Christ's sake, Whitacre," Mincey said, "you look awful."
Michael looked down without surprise at his rumpled, overlarge tunic and his baggy trousers. "Yes, Captain," Michael said.
"I don't give a damn for myself," Mincey said. "For all I care you could come in here in blackface and a grass skirt. But when officers come in from other outfits, they get a bad impression."
"Yes, Sir," said Michael.
"An outfit like this," Mincey said, "has to look more military than the paratroopers. We have to shine. We have to glisten. You look like a KP in the Bulgarian Army."
"Yes, Sir," said Michael.
"Can't you get yourself another tunic?"
"I've asked for one for two months, now," Michael said.
"The Supply Sergeant won't talk to me any more."
"At least," Mincey said, "polish your buttons. That's not much to ask, is it?"
"No, Sir," said Michael.
"How do we know," Mincey said, "General Lee won't show up here some day?"
"Yes, Sir," said Michael.
"Also," Mincey said, "you always have too many papers on your desk. It gives a bad impression. Put them in the drawers. Only have one paper on your desk at any one time."
"Yes, Sir."
"One more thing," Mincey said damply. "I wonder if you have some cash on you. I got caught with the bill at Les Ambassadeurs last night, and I don't collect my per them till Monday."
"Will a pound do?"
"That all you got?"
"Yes, Sir," said Michael.
"O.K." Mincey took the pound. "Thanks. I'm glad you're with us, Whitacre. This office was a mess before you came. If you'd only look more like a soldier."
"Yes, Sir," said Michael.
"Send in Sergeant Moscowitz," Mincey said. "That son of a bitch is loaded with dough."
"Yes, Sir," said Michael. He went into the other office and sent Sergeant Moscowitz in to see the Captain.
That was how the days passed in London, in the winter of 1944.
"O, my offence is rank," the King said, when Polonius had gone, "it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, A brother's murder!"
In the little shadow boxes on each side of the stage, put there for that purpose, the sign "Air Raid Alert" was flashed, and a moment later came the sound of sirens, and immediately after, in the distance, towards the coast, the rumble of gunfire.
"Pray can I not," the King went on, "Though inclination be as sharp as will: My strongest guilt defeats my strong intent…"
The sound of gunfire came rapidly nearer as the planes swept across the suburbs. Michael looked around him. It was an opening night, and a fashionable one, with a new Hamlet, and the audience was decked out in its wartime best. There were many elderly ladies who looked as though they had seen every opening of Hamlet since Sir Henry Irving. In the rich glow from the stage there was an answering glow from the audience of piled white hair and black net. The old ladies, and everyone else, sat quiet and motionless as the King strode, torn and troubled, back and forth across the dark room at Elsinore.
"Forgive me my foul murder?" the King was saying loudly.
"That cannot be since I am still possess'd Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen."
It was the King's big scene and he obviously had worked very hard on it. He had the stage all to himself and a long, eloquent soliloquy to get his teeth into. He was doing very well, too, disturbed, intelligent, cursed, with Hamlet in the wings making up his mind whether to stab him or not.
The sound of guns marched across London towards the theatre, and there was the uneven roar of the German engines approaching over the gilt dome. Louder and louder spoke the King, speaking across the three hundred years of English rhetoric, challenging the bombs, the engines, the guns. No one in the audience moved. They listened, as intent and curious as though they had been sitting at the Globe on the afternoon of the first performance of Mr Shakespeare's new tragedy.
"In the corrupted currents of this world," the King shouted, "Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law: but 'tis not so above; There is no shuffling…"
A battery of guns opened up just behind the back wall of the theatre, and there was a double explosion of bombs not far off. The theatre shivered gently "… there the action lies in his true nature," said the King loudly, not forgetting any of his business, moving his hands with tragic grace, speaking slowly, trying to space his words between the staccato explosions of the guns.
"… and we ourselves compell'd," the King said, in a momentary lull while the men outside were reloading, "Even to the teeth and forehead…" Then rocket guns opened up outside in their horrible, whistling speech that always sounded like approaching bombs, and the King paced silently back and forth, waiting till the next lull. The howling and thunder diminished for a moment to a savage grumbling. "What then?" the King said hastily, "what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?"
Then he was overwhelmed once more and the theatre shook and trembled in the whirling chorus of the guns.
Poor man, Michael thought, remembering all the opening nights he had ever been through, poor man, his big moment, after all these years. How he must hate the Germans!
"… O wretched state!" swam dimly out of the trembling and crashing. "O bosom black as death!"
The planes stuttered on overhead. The battery behind the theatre sent a last revengeful salvo curling into the noisy sky. The rumble of guns was taken up, further away, by the batteries in north London. Against their diminishing background, like military drums being played at a general's funeral in another street, the King went on, slow, composed, royal as only an actor can be royal, "O limed soul, that struggling to be free Art more engaged! Help, angels!" he said in the blessed quiet, "make assay; Bow, stubborn knees; and heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe.
All may be well."
He knelt at the altar and Hamlet appeared, graceful and dark in his long black tights. Michael looked around him. Every face was calmly and interestedly watching the stage; the old ladies and the uniforms did not stir.
I love you, Michael wanted to say, I love you all. You are the best and strongest and most foolish people on earth and I will gladly lay down my life for you.
He felt the tears, complex and dubious, sliding down his cheeks as he turned to watch Hamlet, torn by doubt, put up his sword rather than take his uncle at his prayers.
Far off a single gun spoke into the subsiding sky. Probably, thought Michael, it is one of the women's batteries, coming, like women, a little late for the raid, but showing their intentions are of the best.
London was burning in a bright circle of fires when Michael left the theatre and started walking towards the Park. The sky flickered and here and there an orange glow was reflected off the clouds. Hamlet was dead now. "Now cracks a noble heart," Horatio had said. "Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!" Horatio had also said his final words on carnal, bloody and unnatural acts: of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, while the last Germans were crashing over Dover, and the last Englishmen were burning in their homes as the curtain slowly dropped and the ushers ran up the aisles with flowers for Ophelia and the rest of the cast.
In Piccadilly, the tarts strolled by in battalions, flashing electric torches on passing faces, giggling harshly, calling, "Hey, Yank, two pounds, Yank."
Michael walked slowly through the shuffling crowds of whores and MPs and soldiers, thinking of Hamlet saying of Fortinbras and his men, "Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death and danger dare, Even for an eggshell."
What mouths we make at the invisible event, Michael thought, grinning to himself, staring through the darkness at the soldiers bargaining with the women, what regretful, doubtful mouths! We expose all that is mortal and unsure, and for more than an eggshell, but how differently from Fortinbras and his twenty thousand offstage men at arms! Ah, probably Shakespeare was laying it on. Probably no army, not even that of good old Fortinbras, returned from the Polack wars, ever was quite as dashing and wholehearted as the dramatist made out. It supplied a good speech and conveniently fitted Hamlet's delicate situation, and Shakespeare had put it in, although he must have known he was lying. We never hear what a Private First Class in Fortinbras's infantry thought about his tender and delicate prince, and the divine ambition that puff'd him. That would make an interesting scene, too… Twenty thousand men, that for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, was it? There were graves waiting not so far off for more than twenty thousand of the men around him, Michael thought, and maybe for himself too, but perhaps in the three hundred years the fantasy and the trick had lost some of their power. And yet we go, we go. Not in the blank-verse, noble certainty so admired by the man in the black tights, but we go. In a kind of limping, painful prose, in legal language too dense for ordinary use or understanding, a judgment against us, more likely than not, by a civil court that is not quite our enemy and not quite our friend, a writ handed down by a nearly honest judge, backed by the decision of a jury of not-quite-our peers, sitting on a case that is not exactly within their jurisdiction. "Go," they say, "go die a little. We have our reasons." And not quite trusting them and not quite doubting them, we go. "Go," they say, "go die a little. Things will not be better when you finish, but perhaps they will not be much worse."
Michael walked slowly along by the Park, thinking of the swans, settling down now on the Serpentine, and the orators who would be out again on Sunday, and the gun crews brewing tea and relaxing now that the planes had fled England. He remembered what an Irish captain on leave in London, from a Dover battery which had knocked down forty planes, had said of the London anti-aircraft outfits. "They never hit anybody," he said in a contemptuous soft burr. "It's a wonder London isn't completely destroyed. They're so busy planting rhododendrons around the emplacements and shining the barrels so they'll look pretty when Miss Churchill happens to pass by, that it's b… all gunnery."
The moon was coming up now, over the old trees and the scarred buildings, and there was a tinkle of glass where some soldiers and their girls were walking over a window that had been blown out in the raid.
"B… all gunnery," Michael said softly to himself, turning into the Dorchester, past the doorman with the decorations from the last war on his uniform. "B… all gunnery," Michael repeated, delighted with the phrase.
There was dance-music swinging into the lobby, and the old ladies and their nephews solemnly drinking tea, and pretty girls floating through on the way to the American bar on the arms of American officers, and Michael had the feeling, looking at the scene, that he had read all about this before, about the last war, that the characters, the setting, the action, were exactly the same, the costumes so little different that the eye hardly noticed it. By a trick of time, he thought, we become the heroes in our youthful romances, but always too late to appear romantic in them.
He walked upstairs to the large room where the party was still in progress and where Louise had said she'd be waiting for him.
"Look," said a tall, dark-haired girl near the door, "a Private." She turned to a Colonel next to her. "I told you there was one in London." She turned back to Michael. "Will you come to dinner next Tuesday night?" she asked. "We'll lionize you. Backbone of the Army."
Michael grinned at her. The Colonel next to her did not seem pleased with Michael. "Come, my dear." He took the girl firmly by the arm. "I'll give you a lemon if you come," the girl said over her shoulder, receding in silk undulations with the Colonel.
"A real whole lemon."
Michael looked around the room. Six Generals, he noticed, and felt very uncomfortable. He had never met a General before. He looked uneasily down at his ill-fitting tunic and the not-quite-polished buttons. He would not have been surprised if one of the Generals had come over to him and taken his name, rank and serial number for not having his buttons polished properly.
He did not see Louise for the moment, and he felt shy at going up to the bar, among the important-looking strangers at the other end of the room, and asking for a drink. When he had passed his sixteenth birthday he had felt that he was finished with being shy for the rest of his life. After that he had felt at home everywhere, had spoken his mind freely, felt that he was acceptable enough, if no more, to get by in any company. But ever since he had joined the Army, a latter-day shyness, more powerful and paralysing than anything he had known as a boy, had developed within him, shyness with officers, with men who had been in action, among women with whom otherwise he would have felt perfectly at ease.
He stood hesitantly a little to one side of the door, staring at the Generals. He did not like their faces. They looked too much like the faces of businessmen, small-town merchants, factory owners, growing a little fat and over-comfortable, with an eye out for a new sales campaign. The German Generals have better faces, he thought. Not better, abstractedly, he thought, but better for Generals. Harder, crueller, more determined. A General should have one of two faces, he thought. Either he should look like a heavyweight prizefighter, staring out coldly with dumb animal courage at the world, through battered, quick slits of eyes, or he should look like a haunted man out of a novel by Dostoevsky, malevolent, almost mad, with a face marked by evil raptures and visions of death. Our Generals, he thought, look as though they might sell you a building lot or a vacuum cleaner, they never look as though they could lead you up to the walls of a fortress. Fortinbras, Fortinbras, did you never migrate from Europe?
"What're you thinking about?" Louise asked.
She was standing at his side. "The faces of our Generals," he said. "I don't like them."
"The trouble with you is," Louise said, "you have the enlisted man's psychology."
"How right you are." He stared at Louise. She was wearing a grey plaid suit with a black blouse. Her red hair, bright and severe above the small, elegant body, shone among the uniforms. He never could decide whether he loved Louise or was annoyed with her. She had a husband somewhere in the Pacific of whom she rarely spoke, and she did some sort of semi-secret job for the OWI and she seemed to know every bigwig in the British Isles. She had a deft, tricky way with men, and was always being invited to week-ends at famous country houses where garrulous military men of high rank seemed to spill a great many dangerous secrets to her. Michael was sure, for example, that she knew when D-Day was going to come, and which targets in Germany were to be bombed for the next month, and when Roosevelt would meet Stalin and Churchill again. She was well over thirty, although she looked younger, and before the war had lived modestly in St Louis, where her husband had taught at a college. After the war, Michael was certain, she would run for the Senate or be appointed Ambassadress to somewhere, and when he thought of it, he pitied the husband, mired on Bougainville or New Caledonia, dreaming of going back to his modest home and quiet wife in St Louis.
"Why," Michael asked, smiling soberly at her, conscious that two or three high-ranking officers were watching him stonily as he talked to Louise, "why do you bother with me?"
"I want to keep in touch with the spirit of the troops," Louise said. "The Common Soldier and How He Grew. I may write an article for the Ladies' Home Journal on the subject."
"Who's paying for this party?" Michael asked.
"The OWI," Louise said, holding his arm possessively.
"Better relations with the Armed Forces and our noble Allies, the British."
"That's where my taxes go," Michael said. "Scotch for the Generals."
"The poor dears," Louise said. "Don't begrudge it to them. Their soft days are almost over."
"Let's get out of here," Michael said. "I can't breathe."
"Don't you want a drink?"
"No. What would the OWI say?"
"One thing I can't stand about enlisted men," Louise said, "is their air of injured moral superiority."
"Let's get out of here." Michael saw a British Colonel with grey hair bearing down on them, and tried to get Louise started towards the door, but it was too late.
"Louise," said the Colonel, "we're going to the Club for dinner, and I thought if you weren't busy…"
"Sorry," Louise said, holding lightly on to Michael's arm.
"My date arrived. Colonel Treaner, PFC Whitacre."
"How do you do, Sir," said Michael, standing almost unconsciously at attention, as he shook hands.
The Colonel, he noticed, was a handsome, slender man with cold, pale eyes, with the red tabs of the General Staff on his lapel. The Colonel did not smile at Michael.
"Are you sure," he said rudely, "that you're going to be busy, Louise?"
He was staring at her, standing close to her, his face curiously pale, as he rocked a little on his heels. Then Michael remembered the name. He had heard a long time ago that there was something on between Louise and him, and Mincey, in the office, had once warned Michael to be more discreet when Mincey had seen Louise and Michael together at a bar. The Colonel was not in command of troops now, but was on one of the Supreme Headquarters Planning Boards, and, according to Mincey, was a powerful man in Allied politics.
"I told you, Charles," Louise said, "that I'm busy."
"Of course," the Colonel said, in a clipped, somewhat drunken way. He wheeled, and went off towards the bar.
"There goes Private Whitacre," Michael said softly, "on landing barge Number One."
"Don't be silly," Louise snapped.
"Joke."
"It's a silly joke."
"Righto. Silly joke. Give me my purple heart now." He grinned at Louise to show her he wasn't taking it too seriously.
"Now," he said, "now that you have blasted my career in the Army of the United States, may we go?"
"Don't you want to meet some Generals?"
"Some other time," said Michael. "Maybe around 1960. Go and get your coat."
"O.K.," said Louise. "Don't go away. I couldn't bear it if you went away." Michael looked speculatively at her. She was standing close to him, oblivious of all the other men in the room, her head tilted a little to one side, looking up at him very seriously. She means it, Michael thought, she actually means it. He felt disturbed, tender and wary at the same time. What does she want? The question skimmed the edges of his mind, as he looked down at the bright, cleverly arranged hair, at the steady, revealing eyes. What does she want? Whatever it is, he thought rebelliously, I don't want it.
"Why don't you marry me?" she said.
Michael blinked and looked around him at the glitter of stars and the dull glint of braid. What a place, he thought, what a place for a question like that!
"Why don't you marry me?" she asked again, quietly.
"Please," he said, "go and get your coat." Suddenly he disliked her very much and felt sorry for the schoolteacher husband in the Marine uniform far away in the jungle. He must be a nice, simple, sorrowful man, Michael thought, who probably would die in this war out of simple bad luck.
"Don't think," Louise said, "that I'm drunk. I knew I was going to ask you that from the minute you walked in here tonight. I watched you for five minutes before you saw me. I knew that's what I wanted."
"I'll put a request through channels," Michael said as lightly as possible, "for permission from my Commanding Officer…"
"Don't joke, damn you," Louise said. She turned sharply and went to get her coat.
He watched her as she walked across the room. Colonel Treanor stopped her and Michael saw him arguing swiftly and secretly with Louise and holding her arm. She pulled away and went on to the cloak-room. She walked lightly, Michael noticed, with a prim, stiff grace, her pretty legs and small feet very definite and womanly in their movements. Michael felt baffled and wished he had the courage to go to the bar for a drink. It had all been so light and comradely, offhand and without responsibility, just the thing for a time like this, this time of waiting, this time before the real war, this time of being ludicrous and ashamed in Mincey's ridiculous office. It had been offhand and flattering, in exactly the proper proportions, and Louise had cleverly erected a thin shield of something that was less than and better than love to protect him from the comic, unending abuse of the Army. And now, it was probably over. Women, Michael thought resentfully, can never learn the art of being transients. They are all permanent settlers at heart, making homes with dull, instinctive persistence in floods and wars, on the edges of invasions, at the moment of the crumbling of states. No, he thought, I will not have it. For my own protection I am going to get through this time alone…
The hell with it, he thought, Generals or no Generals. He strode, upright and swift, through the room to the bar.
"Whisky and soda, please," he said to the bartender, and drank the first gulp down in a long, grateful draught. A British RASC Colonel was talking to an RAF Wing Commander at Michael's elbow. They paid no attention to him. The Colonel was a little drunk. "Herbert, old man," the Colonel was saying, "I was in Africa and I can speak with authority. The Americans are fine at one thing. Superb. I will not deny it. They are superb at supply. Lorries, oil dumps, traffic control, superb. But, let us face it, Herbert, they cannot fight. If Montgomery were realistic he would say to them, 'Chaps, we will hand over all our lorries to you, and you hand over all your tanks and guns to us. You will haul and carry, chaps, because you're absolutely first-rate at it, and we will jolly well do the fighting, and we'll be home by Christmas.'"
The Wing Commander nodded solemnly and both the officers of the King ordered two more whiskies. The OWI, Michael thought grimly, staring at the Colonel's pink scalp shining through the thin white hair on the back of the head, the OWI is certainly throwing away the taxpayer's money on these particular allies.
Then he saw Louise coming out into the room in a loose grey coat. He put down his drink and hurried over to her. Her face wasn't serious any more, but curled into its usual slightly questioning smile, as though she didn't believe one half of what the world told her. At some moment in the cloak-room, Michael thought, as he took her arm, she had looked into the mirror and told herself, I am not going to show anything any more tonight, and switched on her old face, as smoothly and perfectly as she was now pulling on her gloves.
"Oh, my," Michael said, grinning, piloting her to the door.
"Oh, my, what danger I am in."
Louise glanced at him, then half-understood. She smiled reflectively. "Don't think you're not," she said.
"Lord, no," said Michael. They laughed together and walked out through the lobby of the Dorchester, through the old ladies drinking tea with their nephews, through the young Air Force Captains with the pretty girls, through the terrible, anchored English jazz, that suffered so badly because there were no Negroes in England to breathe life into it and tell the saxophonists and drummers, "Oh, Mistuh, are you off! Mistuh, lissen here, this is the way it goes, just turn it loose, Mistuh, turn that poor jailbird horn loose out of yo' hands…" Michael and Louise walked jauntily, arm in arm, back once more, and perhaps only for a moment, on the brittle happy perimeter of love. Outside, across the Park, in the fresh cold evening air, the dying fires the Germans had left behind them sent a holiday glow into the sky.
They paced slowly towards Piccadilly.
"I decided something tonight," Louise said.
"What?" Michael asked.
"I have to get you commissioned. At least a Lieutenant. It's silly for you to remain an enlisted man all your life. I'm going to talk to some of my friends."
Michael laughed. "Save your breath," he said.
"Wouldn't you like to be an officer?"
"Maybe. I haven't thought about it. Even so – save your breath."
"Why?"
"They can't do it."
"They can do anything," Louise said. "And if I ask them…"
"Nothing doing. It will go back to Washington, and it will be turned down."
"Why?"
"Because there's a man in Washington who says I'm a Communist."
"Nonsense."
"It's nonsense," Michael said, "but there it is."
"Are you a Communist?"
"About like Roosevelt," said Michael. "They'd keep him from being commissioned, too."
"Did you try?"
"Yes."
"Oh, God," Louise said, "what a silly world."
"It's not very important," said Michael. "We'll win the war anyway."
"Weren't you furious," Louise asked, "when you found out?"
"A little maybe," said Michael. "More sad than furious."
"Didn't you feel like chucking the whole thing?"
"For an hour or two, maybe," said Michael. "Then I thought, what a childish attitude."
"You're too damned reasonable."
"Maybe. Not really, though, not so terribly reasonable," said Michael. "I'm not really much of a soldier, anyway. The Army isn't missing much. When I went into the Army, I made up my mind that I was putting myself at the Army's disposal. I believe in the war. That doesn't mean I believe in the Army. I don't believe in any army. You don't expect justice out of an army, if you're a sensible, grown-up human being, you only expect victory. And if it comes to that, our Army is probably the most just one that ever existed. I believe the Army will take care of me to the best of its abilities, that it will keep me from being killed, if it can possibly manage it, and that it will finally win as cheaply as human foresight and skill can arrange. Sufficient unto the day is the victory thereof."
"That's a cynical attitude," Louise said. "The OWI wouldn't like that."
"Maybe," said Michael. "I expected the Army to be corrupt, inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and it turned out to be all those things, just like all armies, only much less so than I thought before I got into it. It is much less corrupt, for example, than the German Army. Good for us. The victory we win will not be as good as it might be, if it were a different kind of army, but it will be the best kind of victory we can expect in this day and age, and I'm thankful for it."
"What are you going to do?" Louise demanded. "Stay in that silly office, stroking chorus girls on the behind for the whole war?"
Michael grinned. "People have spent wars in worse ways," he said. But I don't think I'll only do that. Somehow," he said thoughtfully, "somehow the Army will move me somewhere, finally, where I will have to earn my keep, where I will have to kill, where I may be killed."
"How do you feel about it?" Louise demanded.
"Frightened."
"Why're you so sure it will happen?"
"I don't know," he said. "A premonition. A mystic sense that justice must be done by me and to me. Ever since 1936, ever since Spain, I have felt that one day I would be asked to pay. I ducked it year after year, and every day that sense grew stronger; the payment would be demanded of me, without fail."
"Do you think you've paid yet?"
"A little," Michael grinned. "The interest on the debt. The capital remains untouched. Some day they're going to collect the capital from me, and not in the USO office, either." They turned down into St James's Street, with the Palace looming dark and medieval at the other end, and the clock glistening palely, a soft grey blur, among the battlements.
"Maybe," Louise said, smiling, in the darkness, "maybe you're not the officer type after all."
"Maybe I'm not," Michael agreed gravely.
"Still," said Louise, "you could at least be a Sergeant."
Michael laughed. "How the times have slid downhill," he said. "Madame Pompadour in Paris gets a Marshal's baton for her favourite. Louise M'Kimber slips into the King's bed for three stripes for her PFC."
"Don't be ugly," Louise said with dignity. "You're not in Hollwood now."
The Canteen of the Allies, for all its imposing name, was merely three small basement rooms decked with dusty bunting, with a long plank nailed on a couple of barrels that did service for a bar. In it, from time to time, you could get venison chops and Scotch salmon and cold beer from a tin washtub that the proprietress kept full of ice in deference to American tastes. The Frenchmen who came there could usually find a bottle of Algerian wine at legal prices. Almost everyone could get credit if he needed it, and a girl whether he needed it or not. Four or five hard-eyed ladies, nearing middle-age, whose husbands all seemed to be serving in Italy in the Eighth Army, ran the place on a haphazard voluntary basis, and it conveniently and illegally served liquor after the closing hour.
When Michael and Louise entered, someone was playing the piano in the back room. Two English sergeant pilots were singing softly at the bar. An American WAC corporal was being helped, drunk, to the lavatory. An American Lieutenant-Colonel by the name of Pavone, who looked like a middle-aged burlesque comedian and who had been born in Brooklyn and had somehow run a circus in France in the 1930s, and had served in the French cavalry in the beginning of the war, and who continually smoked large expensive cigars, was making what sounded like a speech to four war correspondents at a large table. In a corner, almost unnoticed, a huge dark Frenchman, who, it was reputed, dropped by parachute into France two or three times a month for British Intelligence, was eating martini glasses, something he did when he got drunk and felt moody late at night. In the small kitchen off the back room, a tall, fat American Top Sergeant in the MPs, who had taken the fancy of one of the ladies who ran the place, was frying himself a panful of fish. A two-handed poker game was being played at a small table near the kitchen between a correspondent and a twenty-three-year-old Air Force Major who had that afternoon come back from bombing Kiel, and Michael heard the Major say, "I raise you a hundred and fifty pounds." Michael watched the Major gravely write out an IOU for a hundred and fifty pounds and put it in the middle of the table. "I see you and raise you a hundred and fifty," said his opponent, who wore an American correspondent's uniform, but who sounded like a Hungarian. Then he wrote out an IOU and dropped it on the small flimsy pile in the middle of the table.
"Two whiskies, please," said Michael to the British Lance-Corporal who served behind the bar when he was in London on leave.
"No more whisky, Colonel," said the Lance-Corporal, who had no teeth at all, and whose gums, Michael thought, must be in sad shape from British Army rations. "Sorry."
"Two gins."
The Lance-Corporal, who wore a wide, spotted greyish apron over his battledress, deftly and lovingly poured the two drinks.
From the piano in the other room, quivering male voices sang: My father's a black-market grocer, My mother makes illegal gin, My sister sells sin on the corner, Kee-rist, how the money rolls in!
Michael raised his glass to Louise. "Cheers," he said. They drank.
"Six bob, Colonel," said the Lance-Corporal.
"Put in on the book," said Michael. "I'm busted tonight. I expect a large draft from Australia. I have a kid brother who's a Major there in the Air Force, on flying pay and per them."
The Lance-Corporal laboriously scratched Michael's name down in a gravy-spotted ledger and opened two bottles of warm beer for the sergeant pilots, who, attracted by the melody from the next room, drifted back that way, holding their glasses.
"I wish to address you in the name of General Charles de Gaulle," said the Frenchman, who for the moment had given up chewing on martini glasses. "You will all kindly stand up for General Charles de Gaulle, leader of France and the French Army."
Everyone stood up absently for the General of the French Army.
"My good friends," said the Frenchman loudly and with a thick Russian accent, "I do not believe what the newspapers say. I hate newspapers and I hate all newspaper-men." He glared fiercely at the four correspondents around Colonel Pavone.
"General Charles de Gaulle is a democrat and a man of honour." He sat down and looked moodily at a half-chewed martini glass.
Everyone sat down again. From the back room, the voices of the RAF clattered into the bar. "There's a Lancaster leaving the Ruhr," they sang, "bound for old Blighty's shore, heavily laden with terrified men,… scared and prone on the floor…"
"Gentlemen," said the proprietress. She had been asleep on a chair along the wall, with her glasses hanging from one ear. She opened her eyes, grinned at the company, and said, pointing to the WAC, who was returning from the bathroom, "That woman has stolen my scarf." Then she fell asleep again. In a moment, she was snoring loudly.
"What I like about this place," Michael said, "is the atmosphere of sleepy old England that is so strong here. Cricket," said Michael, "tea being served in the vicar's garden, the music of Delius."
A stout Major-General in Services of Supply, who had just arrived in England that afternoon from Washington, entered the bar. A large young woman with long teeth and a flowing black veil was on his arm. A drunken Captain with a large moustache followed him carefully.
"Ah," the Major-General said, heading straight for Louise, with a wide, warm smile on his face, "my dear Mrs M'Kimber." He kissed Louise. The woman with the long teeth smiled seductively at everyone. She had something wrong with her eyes, and she blinked them, quickly, again and again, all the time. Later on, Michael found out that her name was Kearney and that her husband had been a pilot in the RAF and had been shot down over London in 1941.
"General Rockland," Louise said, "I want you to meet PFC Whitacre. He loves Generals."
The General shook Michael's hand heartily, nearly crushing it, and Michael was sure the General must have played football at West Point at one time. "Glad to meet you, Boy," said the General. "I saw you at the party, sneaking out with this handsome young woman."
"He insists on being a Private," said Louise, smiling. "What can we do about it?"
"I hate professional Privates," said the General, and the Captain behind him nodded gravely.
"So do I," said Michael. "I'd be delighted to be a Lieutenant."
"I hate professional Lieutenants, too," said the General.
"Very well, Sir," said Michael. "If you wish, you can make me a Lieutenant-Colonel."
"Maybe I will," said the General, "maybe I will. Jimmy, take that man's name."
The Captain who had come in with the General fumbled through his pockets and took out a card advertising a private taxi service. "Name, rank and serial number," he said automatically.
Michael gave him his name, rank and serial number and the Captain put the card back carefully in an inside pocket. He was wearing bright red braces, Michael saw, as the tunic flipped back.
The General had Louise over in a corner now, pinned against the wall, his face close to hers. Michael started towards them, but the long-toothed girl stepped into his path, smiling softly and blinking. "My card," she said. She handed Michael a small, stiff white card. Michael stared down at it. Mrs Ottilie Munsell Kearney, he read, Regent…7.
"Ring me up. I'm in every morning until eleven," Mrs Kearney said, smiling without ambiguity at him. Then she wheeled away, her veil blowing, and went from table to table, distributing cards.
Michael got another gin and went over to the table where Colonel Pavone was sitting with the correspondents, two of whom Michael knew.
"… after the war," Pavone was saying, "France is going to go left, and there is nothing we can do about it and nothing England can do about it and nothing Russia can do about it. Sit down, Whitacre, we have whisky."
Michael drained his glass, then sat down and watched one of the correspondents pour him four fingers of Scotch.
"I'm in Civil Affairs," Pavone said, "and I don't know where they're going to send me. But I'll tell you here and now, if they send me to France, it will be a big joke. The French have been governing themselves for a hundred and fifty years, and they'll just laugh at any American who tells them even where to put the plumbing in the city hall."
"I raise you five hundred pounds," said the Hungarian correspondent at the other table.
"I'll see you," said the Air Force Major. They both wrote out IOUs.
"What happened, Whitacre?" Pavone asked. "The General get your girl?"
"Only on a short lease," said Michael, glancing towards the bar, where the General was leaning heavily against Louise and laughing hoarsely.
"The Privilege of Rank," said Pavone.
"The General loves girls," said one of the correspondents. "He was in Cairo for two weeks and he had four Red Cross girls. They gave him the Legion of Merit when he returned to Washington."
"Did you get one of these?" Pavone waved one of Mrs Kearney's cards.
"One of my most treasured souvenirs," said Michael gravely, producing his card.
"That woman," said Pavone, "must have an enormous printing bill."
"Her father," said one of the correspondents, "is in beer. They have plenty of dough."
"I don't want to join the Air Force," sang the RAF in the back room, "I don't want to go to war. I'd rather hang around Piccadilly Underground, Living off the earnings of a high-born – ladeeee…"
The air-raid sirens blew outside.
"Jerry is getting very extravagant," said one of the correspondents. "Two raids in one night."
"I take it as a personal affront," said another of the correspondents. "Just yesterday I wrote an article proving conclusively that the Luftwaffe was through. I added up all the percentages of aircraft production reported destroyed by the Eighth Air Force, the Ninth Air Force, the RAF, and all the fighter planes knocked down in raids, and I found out that the Luftwaffe is operating on minus one hundred and sixty-eight per cent of its strength. Three thousand words."
"Are you frightened by air raids?" A short, fat correspondent by the name of Ahearn asked Michael. He had a very serious round face, mottled heavily with much drinking. "This is not a random question," said Ahearn. "I am collecting data. I am going to write a long piece for Collier's on fear. Fear is the great common denominator of every man in this war, on all sides, and it should be interesting to examine it in its pure state."
"Well," Michael began, "let me see how I…"
"Myself," Ahearn leaned seriously towards Michael, his breath as solid as a brewery wall, "I find that I sweat and see everything much more clearly and in more detail than when I am not afraid. I was on board a naval vessel, even now I cannot reveal its name, off Guadalcanal, and a Japanese plane came in at ten feet off the water, right at the gun station where I was standing. I turned my head away, and I saw the right shoulder of the man next to me, whom I'd known for three weeks and seen before in all stages of undress. I noticed at that moment something I had never noticed before. On his right shoulder he had a padlock tattooed in purple ink, with green vine leaves entwined in the bolt, and over that on a magenta scroll, Amor Omnia Vincit, in Roman script. I remember it with absolute clarity, and if anyone wished I could reproduce it line for line and colour for colour on this table cloth. Now, about you, are things more clear or less clear when you are in danger of your life?"
"Well," said Michael, "the truth is I haven't…"
"I also find difficulty breathing," said Ahearn, staring sternly at Michael. "It is as though I am very high in an aeroplane, speeding through very thin air, without an oxygen mask." He turned suddenly away from Michael. "Pass the whisky, please," he said.
"I am not very interested in the war," Pavone was saying. The guns in the distance coughed the overture to the raid. "I am a civilian, no matter what the uniform says. I am more interested in the peace later."
The planes were overhead by now, and the guns were loud outside the house. The planes seemed to be coming over in ones and twos. Mrs Kearney was handing a card to the MP Top Sergeant who was coming from the kitchen now with his fish.
"Oh, what a beautiful mornin'," sang an American voice near the piano, "Oh, what a beautiful day. I got a beautiful feelin', Everything's goin' my way…"
"America cannot lose a war," said Pavone. "You know it, I know it, by now even the Japs and the Germans know it. I repeat," he said, making his clown's grimace, pulling heavily on his cigar, "I am not interested in the war. I am interested in the peace, because that issue is still in doubt."
Two Polish Captains came in, in their harsh pointed caps, that always reminded Michael of barbed wire and spurs, and went, with set, disapproving faces, over to the bar.
"The world," said Pavone, "will swing to the left. The whole world, except America. The world will swing, not because people read Karl Marx, or because agitators will come out of Russia, but because, after the war is over, that will be the only way they can turn. Everything else will have been tried, everything else will have failed. And I am afraid that America will be isolated, hated, backward, we will all be living there like old maids in a lonely house in the woods, locking the doors, looking under the beds, with a fortune in the mattress, not being able to sleep, because every time the wind blows and a floor creaks, we will think the murderers are breaking in to kill us and take our treasure…"
There was a high whistle outside and above, a roaring, crowding, thundering, clattering scream, that grew out of the blackness like a train wreck in a storm, and hurtled towards them. Everyone hit the floor.
The explosion crashed through every eardrum. The floor heaved. There was the sound of a thousand windowpanes blowing out. The lights flickered, and in the crazy moment before they went out, Michael saw the sleeping proprietress slide sideways out of her chair, her glasses still hanging from one ear. The explosion rumbled on in waves, each one less strong, as buildings collapsed, walls broke, brick tumbled into living-rooms and areas. The piano in the back room hummed as though ten men had struck chords on it all at once.
The lights flickered on. Everyone got to his feet. Somebody lifted the proprietress from the floor and put her back on the chair, still sleeping. She opened her eyes and stared coldly out in front of her. "I think it's despicable," she said, "stealing an old woman's scarf while she sleeps." She closed her eyes again.
The two Polish Captains put on their pointed caps. They looked around them disdainfully, then started out. At the door they stopped. On the wall was a poster of Roosevelt, Churchill, Chiang Kai-shek and Stalin. One of the Poles reached up and tore off the picture of Stalin. Then he ripped the picture in quarters, swiftly, and threw it back into the room, in angular confetti. "Bolshevik pigs!" he shouted.
The Frenchman who ate martini glasses got up from the floor and threw a chair at the Poles. It clattered on the wall next to the pointed caps. The Poles turned and fled.
"Salauds!" shouted the Frenchman, wavering at his table.
"Come back here and I will…"
"Those gentlemen," said the proprietress, keeping her eyes closed, "are to be denied admission to these premises from now on."
Michael looked over to the end of the bar. The Major-General had his arms comfortingly around Louise and was tenderly patting her buttocks. "There, there, little woman," he was saying.
"All right, General." Louise was smiling icily. "The battle is over. Disengage."
The siren went off, indicating, in its long, sustained note, that the raid was over.
Then Michael began to shake. He gripped the bottom of his chair with his hands and he set his teeth, but they clattered in his jaws. He smiled woodenly at Pavone, who was relighting his cigar.
"Whitacre," said Pavone, "what the hell do you do in the Army? Whenever I see you, you're holding up a bar some place."
"I don't do anything much, Colonel," Michael said, then kept quiet, because one more word would have been too much, and his jaw would have worked loose.
"Can you speak French?"
"A little."
"Can you drive a car?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Would you like to work for me?" Pavone asked.
"Yes, Sir," said Michael, because Pavone outranked him.
"We'll see, we'll see," said Pavone. "The man I had working for me is up for court-martial, and I think he's going to be found guilty."
"Yes, Sir."
"Call me up in a couple of weeks," said Pavone. "It may turn out to be interesting."
"Thank you, Sir," said Michael.
"Do you smoke cigars?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Here." Pavone held out three cigars and Michael took them.
"I don't know why I think so, but I think you have an intelligent look in your eye."
"Thanks."
Pavone looked over at General Rockland. "You'd better get back there," Pavone said, "before the General goes off with your girl."
Michael stuffed the cigars into his pocket. He had considerable trouble with the pocket button because his fingers were shaking as though he were plugged into an electric circuit.
"I am still sweating," Ahearn was saying as Michael left the table, "but everything is extraordinarily clear."
Michael stood respectfully but firmly next to General Rockland. He coughed discreetly. "I'm afraid, Sir," he said, "I have to take the lady home. I promised her mother I'd bring her back by midnight."
"Your mother in London?" the General demanded of Louise.
"No," said Louise. "But PFC Whitacre knew her back in St Louis."
The General laughed hoarsely and good-naturedly. "I know when I'm being given the business," he said. "Her mother. That's a new one." He clapped Michael heavily on the back.
"Good luck, Son," he said, "glad to have met you." He peered around the room. "Where's Ottilie?" he demanded. "Is she giving out those damned cards here, too?" He strode off, the Captain with the moustache in his wake, looking for Mrs Kearney, who was locked by now in the bathroom, with one of the sergeant pilots.
Louise smiled at Michael.
"Having a good time?" Michael asked.
"Charming," Louise said. "The General fell right on top of me when the bomb hit. I thought he was going to spend the summer there. Ready to go?"
"Ready," said Michael.
He took her hand and they went out.
Outside there was a sullen smell of smoke in the air, foul and threatening. For a moment, Michael stopped, feeling his jaws and his nerves panicking again, and he nearly turned round and ran back inside. Then he controlled himself, and started down the dark, smoky street with Louise.
From St James's Street came the thin tinkle of glass, and the heavy orange flicker of fire, spitting up through the smoke, and a new sound, thick and gurgling, that he had not heard before. They turned the corner and looked down towards the Palace. The street reflected the quivering orange fire in a million angles of broken glass. Down in front of the Palace, the fire shone back off a small lake of water. The gurgling was being made by ambulances and fire engines pushing through the water in bottom gear. Without saying anything to each other, Michael and Louise walked swiftly, their shoes crackling on the glass, making a sound like people walking through a frozen meadow, towards the spot where the bomb had fallen.
A small car had been hit right in front of the Palace. It was lying against a wall, crushed and compressed, as though it had been put through a giant baling machine. There was no sign of the driver or any of the passengers, unless what an old man on the right-hand side of the street was carefully sweeping into a small pile might be they. A woman's beret, dark blue and gay, rested, almost untouched by the catastrophe, a little to one side of the car.
The houses facing the Palace still stood, although their fronts had slipped down into rubble. There was the familiar and sorrowful picture of rooms, ready for living, with tablecloths laid, and counterpanes turned back, and clocks still ticking the time, laid open to the eye of the night by the knifelike effect of the blast. It is what they are always striving to achieve in the theatre, Michael thought, the removal of the fourth wall and a peep at the life inside.
No sounds came from the broken houses, and somehow Michael felt that very few people had been caught by the bomb. There were many deep air-raid shelters in the neighbourhood, he comforted himself, and probably the inhabitants of the houses had been cautious.
Nobody seemed to be making any effort to rescue anybody who might still be in the blasted buildings. Firemen sloshed methodically through the pond of water, from the gushing, ruptured main. Air Raid Rescue people pushed desultorily and quietly at the more obvious bits of the wreckage. That was all.
Against the wall of the Palace, where the sentry boxes had stood, and the sentries had marched and saluted in their absurd wooden-toy manner whenever they saw an officer half a block away, there was nothing now. The sentries, Michael knew, had not been permitted to leave their posts, and they had merely stood there, in their stiff, pompous, old-fashioned version of soldiers, and had accepted the whistle of the bomb, accepted the explosion, stiffly died as the windows evaporated behind them, and the old clock in the tower above them tore loose from its hinges and hung greyly out from its springs. While he, Michael, a hundred yards away, had been sitting with the whisky in his hand, smiling. And overhead, the desperate boy had crouched in the bucking plane, blinded by the searchlights, with London spinning crazily below him in an erupting glitter of explosions, with the Thames and the Houses of Parliament and Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch swinging murderously around his head, and the flak flicking at the wings. The boy had crouched in the plane, peering shakily down, and had pressed, finally, whatever button the German Air Force pressed to kill Englishmen, and the bomb had come down, on the automobile and the girl with the beret and the houses that had stood there for a hundred years and on the two sentries whose units had been relieved from other duty and honoured with the job of guarding the Palace. And if the boy in the plane above had touched the button a half-second sooner, or a half-second later, if the plane had not at that moment bucked to port in a sudden blast, if the searchlights hadn't blinded the pilot for a second earlier in the evening, if, if, if… then he, Michael, would be lying in his own blood now in the wreck of the Canteen of the Allies, and the sentries would be alive, the girl with the beret alive, the houses standing, the clock running…
It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.
"Come on, darling," Louise said. He could feel that she was shivering, and he was surprised, because she had always been so cool, so contained. "We're not doing any good here. Let's go home."
Silently, they turned and walked away. Behind them, the firemen had managed to reach some valve and the gushing from the broken main diminished, then stopped completely. The water in front of the Palace was calm and black.
Four days after the opening of Hamlet, Michael was called into the orderly room of the Special Services Company to which he was attached for rations and quarters and told that he was ordered to report to the Infantry Replacement Depot at Lichfield. He was given two hours to pack his bags.