“Daughter,” he said. “Do you want me to really tell you, so you will know, if I am not rough telling it?”
“I would rather have you tell me than anything. Then we can share it.”
“It cuts pretty thin for sharing,” the Colonel said. “It’s all yours, Daughter. And it’s only the high-lights. You wouldn’t understand the campaigns in detail, and few others would. Rommel might. But they always had him under wraps in France and, besides, we had destroyed his communications. The two tactical air-forces had; ours and the RAF. But I wish I could talk over certain things with him. I’d like to talk with him and with Ernst Udet.”
“Just tell me what you wish and take this glass of Valpolicella and stop if it makes you feel badly. Or don’t tell it at all.”
“I was a spare-parts Colonel at the start,” the Colonel explained carefully. “They are hang-around Colonels, which are given to a Division Commander to replace one that he may have killed, or that are relieved. Almost none are killed; but many are relieved. All the good ones are promoted. Fairly fast when the thing starts to move sort of like a forest fire.”
“Go on, please. Should you take your medicine?”
“The hell with my medicine,” the Colonel said. “And the hell with SHAEF.”
“You explained that to me,” the girl said.
“I wish the hell you were a soldier with your straight true brain and your beauty memory.”
“I would wish to be a soldier if I could fight under you.”
“Never fight under me,” the Colonel said. “I’m cagey. But I’m not lucky. Napoleon wanted them lucky and he was right.”
“We’ve had some luck.”
“Yes,” the Colonel said. “Good and bad.”
“But it was all luck.”
“Sure,” the Colonel said. “But you can’t fight on luck. It is just something that you need. The people who fought on luck are all gloriously dead like Napoleon’s horse cavalry.”
“Why do you hate cavalry? Almost all the good boys I know were in the three good regiments of cavalry, or in the navy.”
“I don’t hate anything, Daughter,” the Colonel said, and drank a little of the light, dry, red wine which was as friendly as the house of your brother, if you and your brother are good friends. “I only have a point of view, arrived at after careful consideration, and an estimate of their capabilities.”
“Are they not really good?”
“They are worthless,” the Colonel said. Then, remembering to be kind, added, “In our time.”
“Every day is a disillusion.”
“No. Every day is a new and fine illusion. But you can cut out everything phony about the illusion as though you would cut it with a straight-edge razor.”
“Please never cut me.”
“You’re not cut-able.”
“Would you kiss me and hold me tight, and we both look at the Grand Canal where the light is lovely now, and you tell me more?”
When they were looking out at the Grand Canal where the light was, indeed, lovely, the Colonel went on, “I got a regiment because the Commanding General relieved a boy that I had known since he was eighteen years old. He was not a boy any more, of course. It was too much regiment for him and it was all the regiment I ever could have hoped for in this life until I lost it.” He added, “Under orders, of course.”
“How do you lose a regiment?”
“When you are working around to get up on the high ground and all you would have to do is send in a flag, and they would talk it over and come out if you were right. The professionals are very intelligent and these Krauts were all professionals; not the fanatics. The phone rings and somebody calls from Corps who has his orders from Army or maybe Army Group or maybe even SHAEF, because they read the name of the town in a newspaper, possibly sent in from Spa, by a correspondent, and the order is to take it by assault. It’s important because it got into the newspapers. You have to take it.
“So you leave one company dead along a draw. You lose one company complete and you destroy three others. The tanks get smacked even as fast as they could move and they could move fast both ways.