You could sum up their attitude in this phrase, “Don’t shit me, Jack.”
And since I had been an un-killed character for around twenty-eight years I could understand their attitude. But they were soldiers, so most of them got killed in those woods and when we took the three towns that looked so innocent and were really fortresses. They were just built to tempt us and we had no word on them at all. To continue to use the silly parlance of my trade: this could or could not be faulty intelligence.
“I feel terribly about the regiment,” the girl said. She had wakened and spoken straight from sleep.
“Yes,” said the Colonel. “So do I. Let’s drink to it once. Then you go to sleep, Daughter please. The war is over and forgotten.”
Please don’t think that I am conceited, Daughter, he said, without speaking. His true love was sleeping again. She slept in a different way than his career girl had slept. He did not like to remember how the career girl slept, yes he did. But he wanted to forget it. She did not sleep pretty, he thought. Not like this girl who slept as though she were awake and alive; except she was asleep. Please sleep well, he thought.
Who the hell are you to criticize career girls? he thought. What miserable career did you attempt and have failed at?
I wished to be, and was, a General Officer in the Army of the United States. I have failed and I speak badly of all who have succeeded.
Then his contrition did not last, and he said to himself, “Except the brown-nosers, the five and ten and twenty percenters and all the jerks from wherever who never fought and hold commands.”
They killed several men from the academy at Gettysburg. That was the big kill day of all kill days, when there was a certain amount of opposition by both sides.
Don’t be bitter. They killed General McNair by mistake the day the Valhalla Express came over. Quit being bitter. People from the Academy were killed and there are statistics to prove it.
How can I remember if I am not bitter?
Be as bitter as you want. And tell the girl, now silently, and that will not hurt her, ever, because she is sleeping so lovely. He said lovely to himself since his thinking was often ungrammatical.
CHAPTER XXXIV
SLEEP softly, my true love, and when you wake, this will be over and I will joke you out of trying to learn details of the triste métier of war and we will go to buy the little negro, or moor, carved in ebony with his fine features, and his jeweled turban. Then you will pin him on, and we will go to have a drink at Harry’s and see whoever or whatever of our friends that will be afoot at that hour.
We will lunch at Harry’s, or we’ll come back here, and I will be packed. We will say good-bye and I will get into the motoscafo with Jackson, and make some cheerful crack to the Gran Maestro and wave to any other members of the Order, and ten to one, the way I feel right now, or two will get you thirty, we will not ever see one another again.
Hell, he said to no one, and certainly not aloud, I’ve felt this way before many fights and almost always at some time in the fall of the year, and always when leaving Paris. Probably it doesn’t mean a thing.
Who gives a damn anyway except me and the Gran Maestro and this girl; I mean at command level.
I give very much of a damn myself. But I certainly should be trained and adjusted by this time not to give a muck for nothing; like the definition of a whore. A woman who does not etc.
But we won’t think about that boy, lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, general sir. We will just lay it on the line once more and the hell with it, and with its ugly face that old Hieronymus Bosch really painted. But you can sheathe your scythe, old brother death, if you have got a sheath for it. Or, he added, thinking of Hurtgen now, you can take your scythe and stick it up your ass.