The whole trouble seems to lie in generalities. Once you have made a generality you are stuck with it. You have to defend it. Let’s say the British and/or American soldier is a superb soldier. The British and/or American officer is a gentleman. You start in with a lie. There are good ones and bad ones. You find out for yourself which is which if you can be let alone. And when you see an American second lieutenant misbehaving in a London club, it is expected that you will deny it. Or if you meet an ill-mannered, surly popinjay of a British officer, the British are expected to deny that he exists. But he does exist, and they hate him as much as we do. The trouble with generalities, particularly patriotic ones, is that they force people to defend things they don’t normally like at all.
It must be a great shock to an Englishman who is convinced that Americans are boasters when he meets a modest one. His sense of rightness is outraged. Preconceived generalities are bad enough without trying consciously to start new ones. Recently a Georgia boy with a face like a catfish and the fine soldierly bearing of a coyote complained bitterly that he had been here four days and hadn’t seen a duke. He had got to believing that there weren’t any dukes and he was shocked beyond words.
Somewhere there is truth or an approximation of it. If there is an engagement and the British say, “We got knocked about a bit,” and the Americans say, “They shot the hell out of us,” neither statement is true. Understatement is universally admired here and overstatement is detested, whereas neither one is near the truth and neither one had anything to do with the fighting quality of the soldier involved. We know that you can’t say the Americans are something or other when those Americans are crackers and long-legged men from the Panhandle and the neat business men in bifocals and shoddy jewelry salesmen and high riggers from the woods in Oregon. And it is just as silly to try to describe the British when they are Lancashiremen and Welshmen and cockneys and Liverpool longshoremen. We get along very well as individuals, but just the moment we become the Americans and they become the British trouble is not far behind.
BIG TRAIN
LONDON, July 25, 1943—Private Big Train Mulligan, after induction and training and transfer overseas, found himself, with a minimum of goldbricking, in a motor pool in London, the driver of a brown Army Ford, and likely to take any kind of officers anywhere. It is not a job the Big Train dislikes. He drives generals or lieutenants where he is told to drive them at the speed he is told to drive them. Leaves them. Waits. Picks them up. You have only to tell him what time you want to get there and he will have you there, and although the strain on you and pedestrians and wandering dogs and cats will be great, Big Train will not be affected at all.
In his position he probably knows more military secrets than anyone in the European theater of operations. But he explains, “Mostly I don’t listen. If I do, it goes in one ear and out the other. I’ve got other things to think about.” He has arrived at a certain philosophy regarding the Army and his private life. About promotion he has this to say: “If you want to be a general, then it’s all right for you to take stripes, but if you figure that maybe you personally can’t win the war, then you’re better off as a private and you have more fun.” He doesn’t like to order other people about any more than he likes to be ordered about. He can’t avoid the second, but he gets around the first by just staying a private. “Not that I’d mind,” he said. “I’d take the hooks for a job like this, but I don’t want to tell a bunch of men what to do.”
Having decided (1) that he couldn’t win the war single-handed, (2) that the war was going to last quite a long time, (3) that he wasn’t going to get home on any given day, and (4) what the hell anyways, the Big Train settled down to enjoy what he couldn’t resist.
He probably knows England as well as any living American. He knows the little towns, the by-roads, north and south, and he has what is generally considered the best address book in Europe. He talks to everyone and never forgets a name or address. The result of this is that when he deposits his colonel, two majors, and a captain at some sodden little hotel in a damp little town, there to curse the beds and the food, when the Big Train gets dismissed for the night he consults his address book. Then he visits one of the many friends he has made here and there.
The Big Train gets a piece of meat and fresh garden vegetables for supper. He drinks toasts to his friends. He sleeps in clean white sheets and in the morning he breakfasts on new-laid eggs. Exactly on time he arrives at the sodden little hotel. The colonel and the majors are exhausted from having fought lumps in their beds all night. Their digestions are ruined by the doughy food, but the Big Train is rested and thriving. He is alert and eventually will leave his officers in another tavern and find a friend for lunch.
The Big Train is not what you call handsome, but he is pleasant-looking and soft-spoken and he particularly likes the company of women, the casual company or any other kind. He just feels happy if there is a girl to talk to. How he finds them no one has ever been able to discover. You can leave the Big Train parked in the middle of a great plain, with no buildings and no brush, no nothing, and when you come back ten minutes later there will be a girl sitting in the seat beside him, smoking the colonel’s cigarettes and chewing a piece of the major’s gum, while the Big Train carefully writes down her address and the town she comes from.
His handling of women and girls is neither wolfish nor subtle. It consists in his being genuinely interested in them. He speaks to them with a kind of affectionate courtesy. Is a stickler for decorum of all kinds. He addresses all women, whether he knows them or not, as “dear” and he manages to make it convincing, probably because it is true. The result is that the women always want to see him again and, if the war lasts long enough, this wish will be granted in time. Mulligan is perfectly honest. If he should give the colonel’s cigarettes to the girl, a whole package of them, he explains this fact to the colonel and agrees to replace them as soon as he gets back to London. The colonel invariably refuses to consider such a thing, as being ungallant on his part. Of course the girl should have his cigarettes. He puts the girl at her ease, a place she has never left. Goggles at her, puffs out his chest and drives away. Big Train knows where she lives and who lives with her and he has already calculated what he will be likely to have for dinner when he calls on her.
About the English the Big Train has terse and simple ideas. “I get on all right with the ones I like and I don’t have nothing to do with the ones I don’t like. It was just the same at home,” he says. It is probable that he has more good effect on Anglo-American relations than two hundred government propagandists striving to find the fundamental differences between the nations. Big Train is not aware of many differences except in accent and liquor. He likes the ones he likes and he refuses to like for any reason whatever a man he wouldn’t like at home.
His speech is picturesque. He refers to a toothy, smiling girl as looking like a jackass eating bumblebees. He refuses to worry about the war. “When they want me to do that let them pin stars on my shoulders,” he says. “That’s what we got generals for.” Big Train Mulligan, after two years in the Army and one year overseas, is probably one of the most relaxed and most successful privates the war has seen. When they want him to take up his rifle and fight he is quite willing to do so, but until someone suggests it, he is not going to worry about it. There are good little dinners waiting for him in nice little cottages all over England. And so long as the colonel’s cigarettes hold out the Big Train will not leave his hostess empty-handed.