ACROSS the RIVER and INTO the TREES by ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“Thank you,” the Colonel said, “Are you sure you want more of the sad science?”

“Please,” she said. “I love you, you know, and I would like to share it with you.”

“Nobody shares this trade with anybody,” the Colonel told her. “I’m just telling you how it works. I can insert anecdotes to make it interesting, or plausible.”

“Insert some, please.”

“The taking of Paris was nothing,” the Colonel said. “It was only an emotional experience. Not a military operation. We killed a number of typists and the screen the Germans had left, as they always do, to cover their withdrawal. I suppose they figured they were not going to need a hell of a lot of office workers any more and they left them as soldiers.”

“Was it not a great thing?”

“The people of Leclerc, another jerk of the third or fourth water, whose death I celebrated with a magnum of Perrier-Jouet Brut 1942, shot a great number of rounds to make it seem important and because we had given them what they had to shoot with. But it was not im­portant.”

“Did you take part in it?”

“Yes,” the Colonel said. “I think I could safely say, yes.”

“Did you have no great impressions of it? After all, it was Paris and not everyone has taken it.”

“The French, themselves, had taken it four days be­fore. But the grand plan of what we called SHAEF, Supreme, get that word, Headquarters of the Allied Ex­peditionary Forces, which included all the military poli­ticians of the rear, and who wore a badge of shame in the form of a flaming something, while we wore a four-leafed clover as a designation, and for luck, had a master plan for the envelopment of the city. So we could not simply take it.

“Also we had to wait for the possible arrival of General or Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery who was unable to close, even, the gap at Falaise and found the going rather sticky and could not quite get there on time.”

“You must have missed him,” the girl said.

“Oh, we did,” the Colonel said. “No end.”

“But was there nothing noble or truly happy about it?”

“Surely,” the Colonel told her. “We fought from Bas Meudon, and then the Porte de Saint Cloud, through streets I knew and loved and we had no deads and did as little damage as possible. At the Etoile I took Elsa Max­well’s butler prisoner. It was a very complicated opera­tion. He had been denounced as a Japanese sniper. A new thing. Several Parisians were alleged to have been killed by him. So we sent three men to the roof where he had taken refuge and he was an Indo-China boy.”

“I begin to understand a little. But it is disheartening.”

“It is always disheartening as hell. But you are not sup­posed to have a heart in this trade.”

“But do you think it was the same in the time of the Grand Captains?”

“I am quite sure it was worse.”

“But you got your hand honorably?”

“Yes. Very honorably. On a rocky, bare-assed hill.”

“Please let me feel it,” she said.

“Just be careful around the center,” the Colonel said. “It’s split there and it still cracks open.”

“You ought to write,” the girl said. “I mean it truly. So someone would know about such things.”

“No,” the Colonel disagreed, “I have not the talent for it and I know too much. Almost any liar writes more convincingly than a man who was there.”

“But other soldiers wrote.”

“Yes. Maurice de Saxe. Frederick the Great. Mr. T’sun Su.”

“But soldiers of our time.”

“You use the word our with facility. I like it though.”

“But didn’t many modern soldiers write?”

“Many. But did you ever read them?”

“No. I have read mostly the classics and I read the illustrated papers for the scandals. Also, I read your let­ters.”

“Burn them,” the Colonel said. “They are worthless.”

“Please. Don’t be rough.”

“I won’t. What can I tell you that won’t bore you?”

“Tell me about when you were a General.”

“Oh, that,” he said and motioned to the Gran Maestro to bring Champagne. It was Roederer Brut ’42 and he loved it.

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