The General

They were drawn up at six and the General came at eleven.

Nobody had told them he was coming until the Wednesday night. Then everybody had, all at once, the corporal with the voice like a mule going down the numbered streets with a megaphone after lights out shouting it into every hut, reveille four-thirty, full kit, parade ground six, and then, at the end of it, the thing that made forty men in hut forty-one sit up in their bunks in the dark: the General.

There was only one General. There were others, a great many; there was a general who commanded the division, an old man with white whiskers they saw once a week on a horse, and generals above him, somewhere, in New Westminster. But there was only one the corporal could have meant, shouting it down the numbered streets of Camp Smoky Hill at half past ten at night, and every man in the camp knew it.

He was in the Realm. They had known that. He had come back from France in the spring, the papers said, for the Selective Service legislation and the camps, and had been to New Westminster and to West Point and to the camps in the east, and the papers had photographs of him getting out of motor cars with his hand at the peak of his cap. Lucien had seen them in L’Abeille in March, held up on the wharf by old Tregre. A grey moustache. A straight back. A face like a closed door.

They were drawn up at six. The whole division, on the great parade ground of dust at the east end of the camp, by regiments, by battalions, by companies, in ranks, in full kit, with their rifles and their packs and their new boots, twelve thousand men in rows on the dust in the morning sun, with the band of the Second Kansas at the front of the regiment and the colours, and the wind coming from the south over the grass the way it always did and blowing the dust up off the parade ground in little whirls that went along the ranks and got into everybody’s eyes.

And they stood there. For five hours.

---

By nine o’clock it was a hundred degrees.

Men fainted. Lucien had not known men fainted standing up. They did; a man in the front rank of B Company to their left went down at half past eight, all at once, like a tree, straight forward, onto his face in the dust with his rifle under him, and two corporals came and took him by the arms and dragged him away to the back, and nobody in the ranks moved, and a quarter of an hour later another one went, and another. By ten there was a line of them behind the division, on the grass, under the one tree on the whole parade ground, being given water by men from the hospital, and the sergeants were walking along the ranks saying don’t lock your knees, don’t lock your knees, and the corporal with the voice like a mule had lost it.

Lucien did not faint. He had stood in the Marie-Ange on the lake in August at noon with the sun coming off the water from below and above at once, for hours, hauling. It was not as bad as that. He thought about the lake. He thought about the colour of it at half past five in the morning, like milk in a bowl with a little blue in it, and about the pelican, and his father at the tiller with his pipe in his pocket, and the heat went over him and through him and did not stop him.

Beside him, Harlan stood like a fence post. He had stood behind a plough in July on the plains. He did not move at all.

The men talked. Not out loud; you could not talk in the ranks. Under their breath, out of the sides of their mouths, without moving their heads, the way men talk in a church. About the heat. About the stew. About the General.

“He lost his wife,” said Sol Weintraub, behind Lucien, very low, in the third rank. “Two years ago. In San Francisco. A fire. At the Presidio, the army post. The house burned down in the night. His wife and three little girls.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“The boy got out,” said Sol Weintraub. “His son. Warren. He was six. A soldier got him out of a window. The others didn’t get out.”

“How do you know that?” said Kerrigan, out of the side of his mouth.

“It was in the papers. In New York. Everybody knows it.”

Lucien had not known it. He stood in the ranks in the heat and thought about it. A house, at night, on fire. A man away. A wife and three little girls. A boy of six, out of a window. And a man coming back to it, and finding it, and going to Mexico the next year after a bandit, and then to France, and now riding across Kansas on a horse to look at twelve thousand men standing in the dust.

He did not know what you did with that. He thought of his father, at the kitchen table over the trap in the floor, at midnight, in the dark, not moving, with his mother singing to him.

---

He came at eleven.

They heard him before they saw him. A motor car, out on the road from the siding, and then another, and the band of the Second Kansas, at the front of the regiment, started up, all at once, a march, very loud, and the whole division came to attention with a sound like a wave hitting the shell beach at the end of the camps, twelve thousand rifles coming in against twelve thousand shoulders; and the cars came along the edge of the parade ground in the dust and stopped by the reviewing stand, which was a platform of raw pine with flags on it, and men got out.

Lucien could see them from the third rank of C Company. A long way off. A knot of officers by the platform, small, in the heat, with the dust going round them. One of them got onto a horse.

A bay horse. Big. Somebody had been holding it for him by the platform since nine. He got onto it the way a man gets onto a horse who has been getting onto horses for forty years, without seeming to do anything, and sat on it, very straight, and the horse moved, and he rode out onto the parade ground, at a walk, alone, with the staff a long way behind him on their own horses, along the front of the division.

He rode along the front of every regiment. At a walk. Slowly. It took an hour. Lucien watched him come, far off, along the front of the first regiment, and the second, very small, a grey man on a bay horse in the heat with the dust going up round the horse’s legs, stopping sometimes, in front of a company, for a moment, and going on.

He came to the Second Kansas at twelve.

---

He was older than the photographs.

That was the first thing. He was fifty-seven, Sol Weintraub said afterwards; the papers said so. The photographs in L’Abeille had shown a grey moustache and a straight back and a face like a closed door. The face on the bay horse coming along the front of the Second Kansas at a walk was all of that and older. Lined. Brown from the sun, the way his father’s was, and lined the way his father’s was, in the same places, round the eyes and down from the nose to the corners of the mouth. The moustache grey and cut close. The eyes small and very pale under the peak of the cap, going along the ranks, slowly, the way the eyes of the British sergeants went along the edge of the grass, without the head moving.

He was looking at feet.

Lucien saw it. He did not believe it and then he saw it. The General rode along the front of the Second Kansas at a walk on his bay horse and his eyes went along the ranks, and they did not go along the faces. They went along the boots. Every man’s boots, in the front rank, one after another, the way Sergeant Cutter’s had gone along the boots of hut forty-one on the first afternoon.

He stopped in front of C Company.

He stopped the horse, and sat on it, very straight, ten yards in front of the front rank, and looked at C Company. At the boots first. Then, slowly, up. Lieutenant Whitcomb, at the front, with his sword at the carry, had gone white under his sunburn, and was not breathing.

The General’s eyes went along the front rank. And stopped.

On Sergeant Cutter.

---

Sergeant Cutter was at the right of the front rank, where the senior sergeant stood, very brown, very lined, with his campaign hat with the brim flat and the ribbon on his chest that nobody in hut forty-one knew.

The General looked at him for a long moment, from the horse.

Then he said two words. Lucien heard them. Everybody in the first three ranks of C Company heard them. The General did not raise his voice; he did not need to; the band had stopped and the parade ground was very quiet, twelve thousand men not breathing in the heat, and the voice came across ten yards of dust, dry and flat and level, the voice of a man who has said a great many things to a great many men across a great deal of dust.

“Sergeant. Jolo.”

Sergeant Cutter did not move. He was at attention and he stayed at attention. But something happened to his face, under the flat brim of the campaign hat, that Lucien had not seen happen to it in three months: it moved.

“Sir,” said Sergeant Cutter.

That was all. The General looked at him for a moment longer. Then he looked along the front rank again, and the second, and the third; and for a moment, for less than a moment, the small pale eyes under the peak of the cap went across Lucien’s face, in the third rank, and did not stop, and went on.

Eleven seconds. Lucien counted them, afterwards, in his head, the way he had counted the pieces of a summer, the four words a morning. The General’s eyes on C Company of the Second Kansas, from the horse, in the heat: eleven seconds.

Then he touched the horse with his heel and rode on along the front of the regiment, at a walk, and the staff came along behind him on their horses, and the dust went up round their legs, and C Company stood at attention and watched the back of a grey man on a bay horse go away from them along the front of the division, very straight, small, getting smaller.

Lieutenant Whitcomb breathed. They heard him do it. He had forgotten to salute. He had stood at the front of his company with his sword at the carry while the commander of the Realm’s armies in Europe sat on a horse in front of him for eleven seconds, and he had forgotten to salute, and he knew it, and C Company could see on the back of his neck that he knew it.

---

“Jolo,” said Kerrigan, at supper. “What’s Jolo?”

They were all at the long table in the cookhouse with the stew that was not stew, sunburned and filthy, with the dust of the parade ground in their hair and their eyebrows and the corners of their mouths. Sergeant Cutter was not there. He ate with the sergeants, in their own mess, and had gone there straight from the parade ground without a word to anybody.

“It’s an island,” said Sol Weintraub. “In the Philippines. In the south. Where the Moros are. There was a fight there. The General was in command. I think.” He looked uncertain. “In 1913. Or before.”

“And Cutter was there?”

“He must have been.”

They looked at each other along the table. Nobody in hut forty-one had ever asked Sergeant Cutter anything about anything. You did not. He looked at your feet and told you what to do, and you did it.

“Eleven years in the Philippines,” said Harlan, slowly, from the end of the table. He had been listening. “He said that, the first week. Eleven years. Shot twice.” He ate some stew. “And the General knew him. From a horse. In a division. Out of twelve thousand men.”

“He knew his face,” said Kerrigan, impressed despite himself.

“He knew his boots,” said Lucien.

The table looked at him.

“He looked at the boots,” said Lucien. “All the way along. Not the faces. The boots. Like Cutter does. Then he looked up and saw Cutter.” He did not know how to say the rest of it in English. He thought it in French and could not find the English for it. “He knew Cutter’s boots before he knew his face.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“That’s a hell of a thing,” said the cowboy from Montana, at last, quietly. “That’s a hell of a thing to know about a man.”

---

He wrote it to his grandmother on the Sunday. On the blue paper. In their French.

Le Général est venu. Il a regardé les bottes. Il connaissait le sergent. Il a perdu sa femme et trois petites filles dans un feu. Il a un garçon. Il a l’air de Papa.

The General came. He looked at the boots. He knew the sergeant. He lost his wife and three little girls in a fire. He has a boy. He looks like Papa.

He looked at the last line for a long time before he blotted it. He did not know whether to leave it. He thought about his grandmother reading it out at the window, in her old Ursuline voice, to his father on the cane chair, with the net that had nothing to be mended for across his knees. Il a l’air de Papa.

He left it.

He did not know what had been in the General’s face. He had seen it for eleven seconds from the third rank, coming along the front of the Second Kansas on a bay horse in the heat, looking at boots, and then up, and then saying the name of an island to a sergeant in two words; and he had looked at that face harder than he had ever looked at anything, harder than at the colour of the water over a sandbar, and he did not know what was in it. He knew what was in his father’s. He had always known, without being told, from the look of it over the gunwale at four in the morning. He did not know this one.

He thought, folding the blue paper, that perhaps nobody did. That perhaps that was what the face was for.