Burning the Days Read online

  There was one with the title Der Kompaniechef, the company commander. This youthful but experienced figure was nothing less than a living example to each of his men. Alone, half obscured by those he commanded, similar to them but without their faults, self-disciplined, modest, cheerful, he was at the same time both master and servant, each of admirable character. His real authority was not based on shoulder straps or rank but on a model life which granted the right to demand anything from others.

  An officer, wrote Dumas, is like a father with greater responsibilities than an ordinary father. The food his men ate, he ate, and only when the last of them slept, exhausted, did he go to sleep himself. His privilege lay in being given these obligations and a harder duty than any of the rest.

  The company commander was someone whom difficulties could not dishearten, privation could not crush. It was not his strength that was unbreakable but something deeper, his spirit. He must not only have his men obey, they must do it when they are absolutely worn out and quarreling among themselves, when they are at the end of their rope and another senseless order comes down from above.

  He could be severe but only when it was needed and then briefly. It had to be just, it had to wash things clean like a sudden, fierce storm. When he looked over his men he was conscious that a hundred and fifty families had placed a son in his care. Sometimes, unannounced, he went among these sons in the evening to talk or just sit and drink a beer, not in the role of superior but of an older, sympathetic comrade. He went among them as kings once went unknown among their subjects, to hear their real thoughts and to know them. Among his most important traits were decency and compassion. He was not unfeeling, not made of wood. Especially in time of grief, as a death in a soldier’s family at home, he brought this news himself—no one else should be expected to—and granted leave, if possible, even before it was asked for, in his own words expressing sympathy. Ties like this would never be broken.

  This was not the parade-ground captain, the mannequin promoted for a spotless record. It was not someone behind the lines, some careerist with ambitions. It was another breed, someone whose life was joined with that of his men, who had reached the peak of the human condition, admired, feared, and loved, someone hardened and uncomplaining upon whom the entire struggle somehow depended, someone almost fated to fall.

  I knew this hypothetical figure. I had seen him as a schoolboy, latent among the sixth formers, and at times had caught a glimpse of him at West Point. Stroke by stroke, the description of him was like a portrait emerging. I was almost afraid to recognize the face. In it was no self-importance; that had been thrown away, we are beyond that, stripped of it. When I read that among the desired traits of the leader was a sense of humor that marked a balanced and indomitable outlook, when I realized that every quality was one in which I instinctively had faith, I felt an overwhelming happiness, like seeing a card you cannot believe you are lucky enough to have drawn, at this moment, in this game.

  I did not dare to believe it but I imagined, I thought, I somehow dreamed, the face was my own.

  ——

  I began to change, not what I was truly but what I seemed to be. Dissatisfied, eager to become better, I shed as if they were old clothes the laziness and rebellion of the first year and began anew.

  On the back of the door, which an inspecting officer never saw since it was flung open upon his entrance, I taped a declaration of faith, drawn from recollection of an article I had once read, that the officers who poured into the army during the First and Second World Wars brought to it the great gifts of the American people (I wrote unenthusiastically), but that West Point gave it standards of duty and performance that were as precise as the Hoke measurement blocks in a machine-tool factory. Other officers might sometimes lie or cheat a little, but the whole army knew that a West Pointer was as good as his word, without exceptions or reservations. Other officers might sometimes take a reasonable line of retreat, but a West Pointer always tried to do exactly as told, even though he and his command were wiped out. One morning I watched as the tactical officer, at the end of his inspection, apparently having heard of it, pushed the door closed and stood in silence reading what was on the back. He was a cavalry officer, moustache and uniform perfect. His face was expressionless. There was a regulation against anything on the walls or door, but when he was finished he left without saying a word.

  I was undergoing a conversion, from a self divided and consciously inferior, as William James described it, to one that was unified and, to use his word, right. I saw myself as the heir of many strangers, the faces of those who had gone before, my new roommate’s brother, for one, John Eckert, who had graduated two years earlier and was now a medium bomber pilot in England. I had a photograph of him and his wife, which I kept in my desk, the pilot with his rakish hat, the young wife, the clarity of their features, the distinction. Perhaps it was in part because of this snapshot that I thought of becoming a pilot. At least it was one more branch thrown onto the pyre. When he was killed on a mission not long after, I felt a secret thrill and envy. His life, the scraps I knew of it, seemed worthy, complete. He had left something behind, a woman who could never forget him; I had her picture. Death seemed the purest act. Comfortably distant from it I had no fear.

  There were images of the struggle in the air on every side, the fighter pilots back from missions deep into Europe, rendezvous times still written in ink on the backs of their hands, gunners with shawls of bullets over their shoulders, grinning and risky, I saw them, I saw myself, in the rattle and thunder of takeoff, the world of warm cots, cigarettes, stand-downs, everything that had mattered falling away. Then the long hours of nervousness as the formation went farther and farther into enemy skies until suddenly, called out by jittery voices, high above, the first of them appear, floating harmlessly, then turning, falling, firing, plummeting past, untouchable in their speed. The guns are going everywhere; the sky is scrawled with smoke and dark explosions, and then it happens, something great and crucial tearing from the ship, a vast flat of wing, and we begin to roll over, slowly at first and then faster, screaming to one another, going down.

  That was death: to leave behind a photograph, a twenty-year-old wife, the story of how it happened. What more is there to wish than to be remembered? To go on living in the narrative of others? More than anything I felt the desire to be rid of the undistinguished past, to belong to nothing and to no one beyond the war. At the same time I longed for the opposite, country, family, God, perhaps not in that order. In death I would have them or be done with the need; I would be at last the other I yearned to be.

  That person in the army, that wasn’t me, Cheever wrote after the war. In my case, it was. I did not know the army meant bad teeth, drab quarters, men with small minds, and colonels wearing sunglasses. Anyone from the life below can be a soldier. I imagined campaigns like Caesar’s, the sun going down in wooded country, encampments on hilltops, cool dawns. The army was that; it was like a beautifully dressed woman; I saw her smile at me and stood erect.

  The army. They are playing the last songs at the hop, the sentimental favorites. I am dancing with a girl named Pat Potter, blonde and elegant, whom I somehow knew. There are moments when one is part of the real beauty, the pageant. They are playing “Army Blue,” the matrimonial and farewell song. A hundred, two hundred, couples are on the floor. The army. Familiar faces. This immense brotherhood in which they bend you slowly to their ways. This great family in which one is always advancing, even while asleep.

  The stern commandments had become my commandments, the harder thing than triumph, in the poet’s words. Long afterwards, in Georgia, as a captain, I was getting off an airplane behind a lame man. We paused at the bottom of the steps. “Remember me?” he asked. It was then I saw who he was, the son of a friend of my father’s, whom I had recognized as an underclassman. “What happened to you?” I said. “You’re not still in the army?”

  He’d been retired, he said, but it was strange, he often thought abo
ut me.

  “What do you mean?”

  I began to recall it as he told me. He had played football as a plebe although he was small. He was a quarterback. The following fall he had come to me for advice: Should he continue to try and make the team—there was only the slightest chance—or drop it and go out for manager? There was an assistant’s opening; he was from Atlanta, and the manager of “A” Squad was traditionally a Georgian. It was a wonderful spot and he would be in line to inherit it.

  The manager was someone to be envied, I agreed, but not admired. Even if he was only a third-string quarterback, he would be on the team, and his moment might come in the twilight of some epic game. Unsoiled and slender, he might come off the bench to lead them to victory.

  It sounded like advice of mine. He had taken it, and the week afterwards his leg was broken in practice, he said. He was in the hospital for more than a month and fell so far behind in his studies that he never caught up, graduating much farther down in his class than he would have, so though he had wanted the Engineers, he got the Infantry instead. In Korea he was hit by a mortar shell that shattered his legs and was given a medical discharge. His career had ended.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I told him.

  “I owe it all to you,” he said.

  ——

  The truest man I knew was dark, with skin almost sallow, a high forehead, and Asia-black hair, Kelton Farris—Nig, as they called him, or Bud. He was from a town called Conway, not far from Little Rock, and all plebes from Arkansas were expected to know an apocryphal speech made in the legislature when it had been proposed to change the name of the state, or at least its unique pronunciation. “Mr. Speaker, Mr. Speaker, Goddamnit,” it began—I forget its many outrages though I knew them then. “When I was a boy at the age of fourteen, I had a prick the size of a roasting ear and could piss halfway across the Ouachita River. ‘Out of order, out of order!’ You’re Goddamn right it was out of order, if it wasn’t, I could have …,” and so forth. The performers were popular, like mimics or banjo players. Let’s have the Arkansas poop, upperclassmen called, as if summoning a favorite fool. But it was not something as homespun as this that made Farris stand out. It was not something you could memorize.

  Looking back I see that later, as officers, in Salt Lake City, Manila, Hawaii, wherever we went among strangers, he was picked out as the one they wanted to know. He did it by his appearance, which was masculine and which somehow set itself as a standard. As I think of him he has a luster like something made of wood, something durable and burnished. But there was also his behavior; he was completely unselfconscious, like an animal. If I use the word “animal” to describe him it is not only in tribute to his ease but to natural responses which in him were unimpeded. He was without flamboyance or the kind of eagerness that repels. Even now I sometimes enter a room thinking of him doing it, imperturbable, assured, drawing people’s interest, their admiration. Heads might not turn but some equilibrium changed, as in a solution when an electrolyte is added.

  I have tried to know what it was that created this. I can see him stand, walk, smile, but, as with a woman you are afraid of, I do not know what he is going to say, only that it will be something I envy, probably for its candor. You could be with him constantly, even bored with him, and be no closer to discovery. Intimacy did not betray him, no examination could reveal his magic. It was like the glitter on the sea, which, scooped up, vanishes. Something priceless had been given him, the power to attract, to be trusted. You could not imagine him dead—whatever happened, he would get through. That was written on him. It was the promise of nature herself.

  Irresistible to women, of course, and with a normal interest in them. They, on the other hand, were more intent. Though not yet married, and placid in his desire to be, he bore the mark of family: brothers, uncles, in-laws, a world in which family was accepted as everything—women recognized it immediately as the thing in him that was genuine and desirable. Alone with them, I am sure, he behaved naturally, by which I mean without needless constraint. A girl once told him, I knew you were a West Pointer from the way you folded your pants over the back of the chair. I imagine it being afternoon as he did this, with the light slipping through the blinds.

  I remember that a few years later, having come back to Conway for it, he called off his wedding at the last minute. He told his fiancée it was no good, he didn’t really know her, though they’d been thought of as a couple since high school. She protested. She hadn’t changed a bit since then, she said; it had been seven years. Well, if she hadn’t, he said, he knew damn well he had.

  Though we were in the same company it was not until flying school or down in Texas the summer we graduated, with the khaki-colored airplanes baking in the sun like abandoned cars, that we became friends. In Salt Lake City, waiting to be sent overseas, we flew together over the great, desolate lake and snowy ground. Rising from damp beds in Manila at four in the morning with cocks crowing somewhere, we drove through rancid streets to Nichols Field for the early run to Japan, transport pilots, fallen to that in the aftermath of the war, and later we were stationed together in Honolulu, living in old wooden bachelors’ quarters, the sort of building that in the South sits on short stacks of bricks. I had a new yellow convertible that had been shipped over on the Lurline. Farris had a room paneled in cedar which he had found, sawed, and nailed up expertly board by board, but he was a country boy and knew how to do anything. One of his favorite words was “silly.” It could apply to anyone or anything and was deflating. He once handled a surly, troublesome soldier by threatening to write a letter to his mother.

  He, himself, the son of an insurance agent, was a born soldier. He had learned it walking down a muddy road to his house half a mile from where the paving ended, and driving in the summers, seven miles in a horse-drawn wagon with his brothers, to work fifty acres of rough farmland that his father had bought near the river. He was an original, a native, like his father, both of them, a flaring of America. Uncounted days had shaped them, as water does stone. The things they knew they had no doubts about, and they were the important things. There were officers in the First War who strolled out calmly under fire in an advance, walking to death as though it were to lunch or adjutant’s call. It was thrilling to see men with disdain like that. As much as you tried, however, you could not imagine Farris in the role. His strength was in his sanity, his straightforwardness. Beneath the palms one night we walked up the smooth stone steps to a masquerade at the Hickam Club. A girl I was very attracted to at the time came over. She was wearing a torn, low-cut blouse, stiletto heels, and mesh stockings, with a rose in her hair. Behind her, pirates, cowboys, and Cleopatras were passing. Farris greeted her, “Hi, Carol,” and, taking in her outfit, “I thought this was supposed to be a costume party.”

  Then we were separated. I went to Washington and he was sent to Europe. Paris was all that anyone ever said it was, the showgirls don’t believe in wearing clothes, he wrote. I visited Europe for the first time in the winter of 1950 and found him comfortably lodged in rainy Wiesbaden in the best surviving hotel—thick carpets, once-white curtains; it had been requisitioned by the occupation forces. Around it were houses that had been flattened. Cities, like women, are tender to the victors. Wiesbaden was shabby but everyone—chambermaids, drivers, shopkeepers—was deferential and hardworking. They should have been on our side, Farris told me; they had wanted to join us at the end and fight the Russians together, not a bad idea. Did he really mean that? I asked. We’d be doing it eventually, he told me. I wondered, did he have a German girlfriend; there was none in evidence.

  In the old-fashioned plush rooms we drank with women officers and secretaries, and towards the end of the visit I borrowed his car and drove to the south of France, my ignorance such as to make me think it would be summery there. From the empty Hotel Martinez I looked out on gray sea and tried to talk to the barman in French.

  I was going to come over again in July or August; we would go to London or d
own to Greece. The glorious, vacant summers of youth. I never went; more important things came up, I forget of course what they were. I saw him about two years later in South Carolina when I had returned from the Korean War. He was still in Troop Carrier and I may have even worn a ribbon or two, feeling they would be admired. I had the idea I had done something he had not.

  Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it’s the same with people. From those days his seems to be, above all others, the face that remains. He rose to be a brigadier general and died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, soon after he retired. With it, something passed out of the soul of the class for me. Occasionally on the street or in an audience, a crowd, you see a person who has died, the replica—nature has made a second version. I have never seen Farris, however. I had never known anyone like him nor would I again. We old first captains, Pershing is supposed to have said to MacArthur, must never flinch. He never would have flinched, I was sure of that.

  As to what he was made of, what rare element, perhaps in the end I’ll know, perhaps he’ll tell me in the obscurity, the shade where he has gone. We will stroll aimlessly, as by rivers in France beneath the trees with their huge flat leaves, or along the Rhine, freed from desire and time, like patients in some hospital, never to leave; he’ll tell me what he remembers and I will finally understand.

  ——

  Images remain, Army-Navy games in Baltimore and the morning’s staticky excitement, the first snow falling on the Plain, the voices of the choir angelically rising from the dark Area at Christmas. I remember the long walk back from the Thayer, half-run as it drew close to midnight, the walk to classes, to the old cemetery, the stadium, to everywhere. The geography of West Point was the sum of its distances. We could not be married, drink, or have a car, though we were permitted to drive. One of the school idols was said to have smuggled a girl onto the post in the trunk of a car. She spent the night in barracks and even attended reveille the next morning in a raincoat with her long hair concealed. This was daring of the highest sort, far above mere drinking. One of the few acts I admired more took place in the mess hall and involved a classmate named Benson. He was then a yearling. The table commandant, a first classman, was a Southerner and one of the plebes at the table was black—there was barely a handful of blacks in the Corps. The first classman, speaking as if the plebe were not there, was talking about niggers. If he ever heard of anyone, a yearling particularly, being nice to one, he said, he would see that he was run out of school. Without a moment’s hesitation Benson reached across the table to the plebe, “My name’s George,” he said, shaking his hand. I had heard of few things more instantly brave.