James Salter - Burning the Days

It was the year of Stalingrad. One Saturday evening following a football victory when we were eating at ease, a waiter I had come to know, an older man whose feet gave him trouble, showed me a clipping from his wallet. From an English newspaper, fragile and forgotten, it was the notice of his having been awarded, at Passchendaele, the Victoria Cross. Yes, he had gotten it, although more important at the time, he remembered quietly, was what he had gotten with it, a tin of cigarettes. He spoke with a slight accent; he was Belgian. How he had ended up, a civilian with worn heels waiting on tables, I forget. Above our heads, covering an entire wall, was a mural of the great captains of history and beneath, unnoticed, shuffled one of their own.

—

The hour before dawn, everything silent, the air chill with the first bite of fall. The Area empty, the hallways still.

The room was on the second floor at the head of the stairs, the white name cards on the door. I waited for a moment, listening, and cautiously turned the knob. Within it was dark, the windows barely distinguishable. At right angles, separated by desks, were the beds. Waters, a blue-jawed captain, the battalion commander, slept in one. Mills, a sergeant and squad leader, was in the other. I could not hear them breathing; I could hear nothing, the silence was complete. I was afraid to make a sound.

“Sir!” I cried and shouting my name, went on, “Reporting as ordered, ten minutes before reveille!” A muffled voice said, “Don’t make so much noise.” It was Mills. His quilt moved higher against the cold and as an afterthought he muttered, “Move your chin in.”

I stood in the blackness. Nothing, not the tick of a clock or the creaking of a radiator. The minutes had come to a stop. I might stand there forever, invisible and ignored, while they dreamed.

It was Mills who had ordered me to come, for some misbehavior or other, every morning for a week. He was my squad leader but more than that was famous, known to everyone, as king of the goats.

The first man in the class was celebrated; the second was not, nor any of the rest. It was only when you got to the end that a name became imperishable again, the last man, the goat, and it was with well-founded pride that a goat regarded himself. Custer had been last in his class, Grant, nearly. The goat was the Achilles of the unstudious. He was champion of the rear. In front of him went all the main body with its outstanding and also mediocre figures; behind him was nothing, oblivion.

It was a triumph like any other, if you were not meant for the classroom, to end up at the very bottom. Those with worse grades had gone under, those with only slightly better were lost in the crowd. Mills had a bathrobe covered with stars. Each one represented the passing of a turn-out examination, the last, all-or-nothing chance in a failed subject — his robe blazed with them. He had come to this naturally; his father had made a good run at it and been fifth from last in 1915. Mills knew the responsibilities of heritage. He had fended off the attacks of men of lesser distinction who nevertheless wanted to vault to renown. Blond and good-looking, he was easy to admire and far from ungifted. A well-executed retreat was said to be among the most difficult of all military operations, at which some commanders were adept. It meant passing close to the abyss, skirting disaster, and surviving by a hair. It was a special realm with its tension and desperate acts, men who would purposely spill ink over their drawing in engineering on the final day when nothing else, no possibility, was left.

Mills was also a good athlete. He had come from South Carolina and gone to The Citadel for a year. There was a joy of life in him and a kind of tenderness untainted by the merely gentle.

Nothing more had been said to me. I stood in silence. There was neither present nor future. They were unaware of me but I was somehow important, proof of their power. I began to feel dizzy, as if the floor were tilting, as if I might fall. I had lost track of how long I had been there; time seemed to have stopped when from the distance came a single, clear report: the dawn cannon.

Immediately, like a demonic machine, the sounds begin. Outside in the void, drums explode. Someone is shouting in the hallway, “Sir, there are five minutes until assembly for reveille! Uniform, dress gray with overcoats! Five minutes, sir!” Music is playing. Feet can be heard overhead and on the stairs. The hives of sleeping men are spilling forth. The drums begin again.

In the room, not a movement. It is still as a vault. Four minutes until assembly. They have not stirred. The plebes are already standing in place with spaces between them that will be filled by unhurrying upperclassmen. The drums start once more. Three minutes.

Something is wrong. For some reason they are not going to the formation, but if I am late or, unthinkable, miss it entirely … The clamor continues, bugles, drums, slamming doors. Two minutes now. Should I say something, dare I? At the last moment a bored voice murmurs, “Post, dumbjohn.”

I hurry down the steps and into the cold. Less than a minute remains. Hastily making square corners I reach my place in ranks just as two figures slip past, overcoats flapping, naked chests beneath: Waters and Mills. Fastening the last buttons, Waters arrives in front of the battalion as the noise dies and final bells ring. He appears instantly resolute and calm, as if he had been waiting patiently all along. In a clear, deep voice he orders, “Report!”

I did not exist for Waters, and for Mills, barely. We marched, early one Saturday, down to the river, where the Corps boarded a many-decked white dayliner to sail to New York. At the football game that afternoon, jammed in the halftime crowd, Mills was coming the other way, by chance behind a very beautiful girl, just behind her, with an expression of innocence on his face. As he passed me, he winked.

His class graduated early, that January of 1943, hastened by the war. There was a tremendous cheer as he walked up to receive his diploma, and for some reason I felt as they did, that he was mine. I thought of him for a long time afterwards, the ease and noble face of the last man in his class.

—

In the safety of that autumn, I foundered. The demerits began again — unpolished shoes, dirty rifle, late for athletics, Blue Book misplaced — there were fifty the first month. One night in the mess hall a spontaneous roar went up when it was announced that at the request of a British field marshal — I think it was Field Marshal Dill — all punishments were revoked. According to custom, a distinguished visitor could do that. The cheers passed over my head, so to speak, but the amnesty did not; I had thirty-five tours erased, seven weeks of walking.

Still I was swept along as if by a current. I felt lost. There were faces you did not recognize, formations being held no one knew where, the pressure of crammed schedules, the formality of the classrooms, the impersonality of everyone in authority from the distant superintendent to the company tactical officers … it was plain to see why they called it the Factory. It was a male world. In the gym we fought one another, wrestled one another, slammed into one another on darkened fields battling for regimental championships and came raw-knuckled to supper. There were no women except for nurses in the hospital and hardened secretaries, but there was the existence of women always, outside. An upper-classman had his laundry come back with a note pinned to the pajama bottoms, which had gone out with a stiffened area on them. A girl who worked in the laundry had written, The next time you feel like this, call me.

The hospital was a narrow granite building that stood edge to the road like a town house. There you met other convalescents and formed brief, intense friendships that were overwhelming. I remember a tough, handsome face from the other regiment. We sat in the white-tiled washroom for hours and talked. There is a little tendril now that quivers to make me wonder why he found me so admirable — he was in some sort of nameless trouble — but I was unquestioning, feverish and recovering from the flu. His brothers had been killed in the war, he told me. For a few days he seemed the perfect comrade. Afterwards he disappeared.