“When you are a general you live in a trailer and your Chief of Staff lives in a trailer, and you have bourbon whisky when other people do not have it. Your G’s live in the C.P. I’d tell you what G’s are, but it would bore you. I’d tell you about G1, G2, G3, G4, G5 and on the other side there is always Kraut-6. But it would bore you. On the other hand, you have a map covered with plastic material, and on this you have three regiments composed of three battalions each. It is all marked in colored pencil.
“You have boundary lines so that when the battalions cross their boundaries they will not then fight each other. Each battalion is composed of five companies. All should be good, but some are good, and some are not so good. Also you have divisional artillery and a battalion of tanks and many spare parts. You live by co-ordinates.”
He paused while the Gran Maestro poured the Roederer Brut ’42.
“From Corps,” he translated, unlovingly, cuerpo d’Armata, “they tell you what you must do, and then you decide how to do it. You dictate the orders or, most often, you give them by telephone. You ream out people you respect, to make them do what you know is fairly impossible, but is ordered. Also, you have to think hard, stay awake late and get up early.”
“And you won’t write about this? Not even to please me?”
“No,” said the Colonel. “Boys who were sensitive and cracked and kept all their valid first impressions of their day of battle, or their three days, or even their four, write books. They are good books but can be dull if you have been there. Then others write to profit quickly from the war they never fought in. The ones who ran back to tell the news. The news is hardly exact. But they ran quickly with it. Professional writers who had jobs that prevented them from fighting wrote of combat that they could not understand, as though they had been there. I do not know what category of sin that comes under.
“Also a nylon-smooth Captain of the Navy who could not command a cat-boat wrote about the intimate side of the truly Big Picture. Everybody will write their book sooner or later. We might even draw a good one. But I don’t write, Daughter.”
He motioned for the Gran Maestro to fill the glasses.
“Gran Maestro,” he said. “Do you like to fight?”
“No.”
“But we fought?”
“Yes. Too much.”
“How is your health?”
“Wonderful except for the ulcers and a small cardiac condition.”
“No,” the Colonel said, and his heart rose and he felt it choke him. “You only told me about the ulcers.”
“Well you know now,” the Gran Maestro said and did not finish the sentence and he smiled his best and clearest smile that came as solid as the sun rises.
“How many times?”
The Gran Maestro held up two fingers as a man might do giving odds where he had credit, and all the betting was on the nod.
“I’m ahead of you,” the Colonel said. “But let’s not be macabre. Ask Donna Renata if she wishes more of this excellent wine.”
“You did not tell me there were more,” the girl said. “You owe it to me to tell me.”
“There has been nothing since we were together last.”
“Do you think it breaks for me? If so, I would come and simply be with you and care for you.”
“It’s just a muscle,” the Colonel said. “Only it is the main muscle. It works as perfectly as a Rolex Oyster Perpetual. The trouble is you cannot send it to the Rolex representative when it goes wrong. When it stops, you just do not know the time. You’re dead.”
“Don’t please talk about it.”
“You asked me,” the Colonel said.
“And that pitted man with the caricature face? He has no such thing?”
“Of course not,” the Colonel told her. “If he is a mediocre writer he will live forever.”
“But you’re not a writer. How do you know this?”
“No,” the Colonel said. “By the grace of God. But I’ve read several books. We have a lot of time to read when we are unmarried. Not as much as the merchant marine maybe. But plenty. I can tell one writer from another and I tell you that a mediocre writer has a long span of life. They ought to all draw longevity pay.”