They stopped and he looked at them both in the face and smiled his old and worn death smile. Then he looked down at their feet, as you always look at the feet of such people, since they wear their shoes too tight, and when you take the shoes off them you see their hammer-toes. The Colonel spat on the pavement and said nothing.
The two of them, they were the first thing he had suspected, looked at him with hatred and with that other thing. Then they were off like marsh-birds, walking with the long strides of herons too, the Colonel thought, and something of the flight of curlews, and looking back with hatred, waiting to have the last word if the distance was ever safe.
It is a pity they weren’t ten against one, the Colonel thought. They might have fought. I should not blame them, since they were defeated.
But their manners were not good in respect to a man of my rank and age. Also it was not intelligent to think all fifty year old Colonels would not understand their language. Nor was it intelligent to think old Infantrymen would not fight this early in the morning against the simple odds of two to one.
I’d hate to fight in this town where I love the people. I would avoid it. But couldn’t those badly educated youths realize what sort of animal they were dealing with? Don’t they know how you get to walk that way? Nor any of the other signs that combat people show as surely as a fisherman’s hands tell you if he is a fisherman from the creases from the cord cuts.
It is true they only saw my back and ass and legs and boots. But you’d think they might have told from the way they must move. Maybe they don’t anymore. But when I had a chance to look at them and think, Take the two of them out and hang them, I believe they understood. They understood quite clearly.
What’s a man life worth anyway? Ten thousand dollars if his insurance is paid up in our army. What the hell has that got to do with it. Oh yes, that was what I was thinking about before those jerks showed; how much money I had saved my government, in my time when people like Benny Meyers were in the trough.
Yes, he said, and how much you lost them at the Chateau that time at ten G’s a head. Well nobody ever really understood it except me, I guess. There’s no reason to tell them now. Your commanding general sometimes puts things down as the Fortunes of War. Back at Army they know such things are bound to happen. You do it, as ordered, with a big butcher-bill and you’re a hero.
Christ, I am opposed to the excessive butcher-bill, he thought. But you get the orders, and you have to carry them out. It is the mistakes that are no good to sleep with. But why the hell sleep with them anyway. It never did any good. But they can certainly crawl into a sack sometimes. They can crawl in and stay in there with you.
Cheer up, boy, he said. Remember you had a lot of money on you when you picked that one. And you might have been stripped if you lost. You can’t fight a lick anymore with your hands, and you didn’t have any weapon.
So don’t be gloomy, boy, or man, or Colonel, or busted General. We’re almost to the market now and you made it without hardly noticing.
Hardly noticing is bad, he added.
CHAPTER XXII
HE loved the market. A great part of it was close-packed and crowded into several side streets, and it was so concentrated that it was difficult not to jostle people, unintentionally, and each time you stopped to look, to buy, or to admire, you formed an îlot de resistance against the flow of the morning attack of the purchasers.
The Colonel liked to study the spread and high piled cheeses and the great sausages. People at home think mortadella is a sausage, he thought.
Then he said to the woman in the booth, “Let me try a little of that sausage, please. Only a sliver.”