to
_Hiram Haydn_
The
Long
March
[Illustration]
One noon, in the blaze of a cloudless Carolina summer, what was left of
eight dead boys lay strewn about the landscape, among the poison ivy and
the pine needles and loblolly saplings. It was not so much as if they
had departed this life but as if, sprayed from a hose, they were only
shreds of bone, gut, and dangling tissue to which it would have been
impossible ever to impute the quality of life, far less the capacity to
relinquish it. Of course, though, these had really died quickly, no
doubt before the faintest flicker of recognition, of wonder,
apprehension, or terror had had time to register in their minds. But the
shock, it occurred to Lieutenant Culver, who stood in the shady lee of
an ambulance and watched the scene, must have been fantastic to those on
the periphery of the explosion, those fifteen or so surviving marines
who now lay on the ground beneath blankets, moaning with pain and
fright, and who, not more than half an hour before, had been waiting
patiently in line for their lunch before the two mortar shells,
misfired--how? why? the question already hung with a buzzing, palpable
fury in the noontime heat--had plummeted down upon the chow-line and had
deadened their ears and senses and had hurled them earthward where they
lay now, alive but stricken in a welter of blood and brain, scattered
messkits and mashed potatoes, and puddles of melting ice cream. Moments
ago in the confusion--just before he had stolen off from the Colonel’s
side to go behind a tree and get sick--Lieutenant Culver had had a
glimpse of a young sweaty face grimed with dust, had heard the boy’s
voice, astonishing even in that moment of nausea because of its clear,
unhysterical tone of explanation: “Major, I tell you I was on the field
phone and I tell you as soon as they come out the tube I knew they were
short rounds and so I hollered....” Of course it had been an accident.
But why? He heard the Major shout something, then Culver had heard no
more, retching on the leaves with a sound that, for the moment, drowned
out the cries and whines of the wounded and the noise of trucks and
ambulances crashing up through the underbrush.
It was not that he had a weak stomach or that he was unacquainted with
carnage that allowed him to lose control. If anything, he prided himself
on his stomach, and as for blood he had seen a lot spilled on Okinawa
and had himself (although through no act of valor whatever) received a
shrapnel wound--in the buttocks, a matter which even in retrospect, as
he had often been forced to remind his wife, possessed no elements of
comedy at all. In this case it was simply that on the one hand he
himself had been shocked. The sight of death was the sort of thing which
in wartime is expected, which one protects oneself against, and which
is finally excused or at least ignored, in the same way that a beggar is
ignored, or a head cold, or a social problem. But in training here in
the States in peacetime (or what, this sweltering summer in the early
1950s, passed as peacetime) one had felt no particular need for that
type of self-defense, and the slick nude litter of intestine and
shattered blue bones, among which forks and spoons peeked out like so
many pathetic metal flowers, made a crazy, insulting impact at Culver’s
belly, like the blow of a fist. And on the other hand (and the pulsing
ache at his brow now as he vomited helplessly onto his shoes lent
confirmation to what he’d been trying to deny to himself for months): he
was too old, he was no longer an eager kid just out of Quantico with a
knife between his teeth. He was almost thirty, he was old, and he was
afraid.
Lieutenant Culver had been called back to the marines early that spring.
When, one Saturday morning, his wife had thrown the brown envelope
containing his orders onto the bed where he lay sleeping, he experienced
an odd distress which kept him wandering about, baffled and mumbling to
himself, for days. Like most of his fellow reserves he had retained his
commission after the last war. It was an insouciant gesture which he had
assumed would in some way benefit him in case of an all-out conflict,
say, thirty years hence, but one which made no provisions for such an
eventuality as a police action in Korea. It had all come much too soon
and Culver had felt weirdly as if he had fallen asleep in some barracks
in 1945 and had awakened in a half-dozen years or so to find that the
intervening freedom, growth, and serenity had been only a glorious if
somewhat prolonged dream. A flood of protest had welled up in him, for
he had put the idea of war out of his mind entirely, and the brief years
since Okinawa had been the richest of his life. They had produced, among
lesser things, a loving, tenderly passionate wife who had passed on to
their little girl both some of her gentle nature and her wealth of
butter-colored hair; a law degree, the fruits of which he had just begun
to realize, even though still somewhat impecuniously, as one of the
brightest juniors in a good New York law firm; a friendly beagle named
Howard whom he took for hikes in Washington Square; a cat, whom he did
not deign to call by name, and despised; and a record-player that played
Haydn, Mozart and Bach.
Up until the day that his orders came--the day that he tried to forget
and the one that Betsy, his wife, soon bitterly referred to as “the day
the roof fell in”--they had been living in a roomy walk-up in the
Village and experiencing the prosaic contentment that comes from eating
properly, indulging themselves with fair moderation in the pleasures of
the city, and watching the growth of a child. This is not to say that
they were either smug or dull. They had a bright circle of friends,
mostly young lawyers and newspapermen and doctors and their wives. There
were parties and occasional week ends in the country, where everyone
became frankly drunk. There were the usual household skirmishes, too,
but these were infrequent and petered out quickly. Both of them were too
sensible to allow some domestic misdemeanor to develop into anything
horrible; they were well adjusted and each of them found it easy to
admit, long after the honeymoon, that they were deeply in love. Months
later at camp, ensnared futilely in the coils of some administrative
flypaper, Culver would find himself gazing up from his work and out
across the smoky hot barrens of pine and sand, relieving his vast
boredom in a daydream of that vanished simplicity and charm. His mind
seemed to drift toward one recurrent vision. This was of the afternoons
in winter when--bundled to the ears, the baby-carriage joggling bravely
in the van and the melancholy beagle scampering at their heels--they
took their Sunday stroll. On such days the city, its frantic heartbeat
quieted and clothed in the sooty white tatters of a recent snow, seemed
to have an Old World calm, and the people that passed them in the
twilight appeared to be, like themselves, pink-cheeked and contented, no
matter what crimson alarms flowered at the newsstands or what evil
rumors sounded from distant radios. For Culver the waning Sunday light
had not spelled out the promise of Monday morning’s gloom but of
Monday’s challenge--and this was not because he was a go-getter but
because he was happy. He was happy to walk through the chill and
leafless dusk with his wife and his child and his dog. And he was happy
to return home to warmth and peanut butter and liverwurst, to the
familiar delight of the baby’s good-night embrace, to the droll combat
between beagle and cat, to music before sleep. Sometimes in these
reveries Culver thought that it was the music, more than anything, which
provided the key, and he recalled himself at a time which already seemed
dark ages ago, surrounded by beer cans and attuned, in the nostalgic air
of a winter evening, to some passage from some forgotten Haydn. It was
one happy and ascending bar that he remembered, a dozen bright notes
through which he passed in memory to an earlier, untroubled day at the
end of childhood. There, like tumbling flowers against the sunny grass,
their motions as nimble as the music itself, two lovely little girls
played tennis, called to him voicelessly, as in a dream, and waved their
arms.
The sordid little town outside the camp possessed the horror of
recognition, for Culver had been there before. They left the baby with
a sister and headed South where, on the outskirts of the town, they
found a cramped room in a tourist cabin. They were there for two weeks.
They searched vainly for a place to live, there was no more room at the
camp. They turned away from bleak cell-like rooms offered at five times
their value, were shown huts and chicken-coops by characters whose bland
country faces could not hide the sparkle, in their calculating eyes, of
venal lust. The aging proprietress of the tourist camp was a scold and a
cheat. And so they finally gave up. Betsy went home. He kissed her
good-by late one rainy afternoon in the bus station, surrounded by a
horde of marines and by cheap suitcases and fallen candy wrappers and
the sound of fretful children--all of the unlovely mementoes, so
nightmarishly familiar, of leave-taking and of anxiety. Of war. He felt
her tears against his cheek. It had been an evil day, and the rain that
streamed against the windows, blurring a distant frieze of gaunt gray
pines, had seemed to nag with both remembrance and foreboding--of tropic
seas, storm-swept distances and strange coasts.