Don't Cry For the Brave Page 11

  Gail’s voice came from inside the quarters. “Hullo! You’re out there?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Let me get you something,” she said.

  I heard the snap of the refrigerator door and the hiss as she punctured two cans. She appeared in the garden with a tray bearing beer and glasses, wifely even in this billet.

  “Come over here out of the sun,” she said, setting the tray down.

  I sprang up, kissed her lightly and fell back in a deck chair. I pressed my hand to one of the cans and felt the numbing cold. “Busy?” I asked.

  She drew a line with her finger through the drops of moisture condensed on the outside of her glass, her usually pale face slightly red. “It’s been an awful morning. I shouldn’t talk about it.” Her capable theatre-sister hands, square and scrubbed, squeezed the glass with determination.

  “Tell me… it might help me.” She was going to tell me anyway.

  “We had three Navy boys in today. One for an emergency op. They flew a surgeon in from Guam. He actually spoke to me in theatre as though I was a human being.”

  “You’re more than just a human being.”

  Even a doctor in this wilderness would have to notice. She had changed now into a light tan uniform skirt and shirt, and shaken out her long copper hair. No sign of the nurse other than in her attitude.

  “Bob, you know I thought I’d seen everything violent that can happen in my job – the casualty wards at home with people smashed and cut and burned. I thought that’s the way it was in our crazy lives. But war is different.”

  I wiped moisture from my face with a forearm and gulped more beer. I ought to have stopped her.

  “War is different because these men with broken bodies have trained for it. Injury is part of the game. The guy that had the big op was a flier, a captain, probably a clever man. And a good-looking one. This is what all his work and study have come to.”

  “What’s poetry or Picasso beside the mystique of controlling an F4 Phantom?” I sounded callous because that was the only way I could deal with her thoughts.

  “He’ll never fly again. He’ll be lucky if he lives.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He lost one leg at the ankle and another at the groin.”

  The words hit me in my own groin. “No dick, eh? It spoils things.” I couldn’t take this talk.

  “When’s the hearing? I can’t stand this,” she said, covering her face momentarily with her hands. Her diamond engagement ring looked thin and dull.

  “A week or so, then the trenches. A preparatory pounding with artillery before we go in. Back to business.” I tried to sound casual.

  “You’ll get off?”

  “The lawyer says so.”

  “You don’t seem all that confident.”

  “I’m not.”

  “What happened, Bob? It’s not like you to get into a dust-up with authority.”

  “I had an argument with my CO, we grappled and he fell badly. I suppose I lost it, just for a millisecond. Pushed too hard.”

  “Uh-huh. Want to tell me what it was about?”

  “Just Army shit. A man of mine was being stitched up on a serious charge and I thought I had to say something.”

  “Jim said in a letter that you were sick, battle fatigue. You ought to see a doctor.”

  “It’ll happen. Part of the trial.” Her resort to medical science for the solution to problems irked me. “Maybe Jim’s sick.”

  “Why on earth do you say that?”

  “Oh, we’re all slightly crackers or we couldn’t do what we’re doing. I mean, if you saw this from Mars, and you were asked whether you’d like to participate, I guess you’d say, ‘No thanks’.”

  She gave me a glassy, unbelieving look as though I might really be ill. I was thinking the same about her. She was certainly overwrought, and that was understandable. She picked up the tray and went inside and brought out salted cashew nuts and potato crisps, and more beer. In her capable, domestic way she had taken over.

  I waited patiently for her to come to what she wanted to say. We chewed and sipped the beer.

  “I’m going home, Bob.” Her voice was tremblingly casual, her eyes downcast.

  “Do you think it’ll rain again today?” I asked, grinning.

  She laughed quickly, tears poised on her eyelashes. “I mean it. I love nursing but I can do it anywhere. I’ve done my stint here. I’m entitled to go. The braver the boys, the more I cry. I can’t take much more. This is no place for cry babies.”

  “If you feel like that, you should go,” I said, slipping out of my chair on to my knees beside her. Her disturbed lips were close to mine. I touched the soft wave of her hair. I kissed her; she was unresisting but inert.

  She pulled away to look at me, saw – no doubt – the yellowed skin, the wrinkled eye sockets, the bloodshot eyes, and she must have seen something more. “I don’t know how I’ll bear to leave you.”

  “I’ll write a lot,” I said, pressing close, but she pushed me away good naturedly.

  “We better talk,” she said.

  Then there was a knock at the door; it was a servant with a plate of cold chicken and salad – my lunch. The servant offered to bring more food when he saw Gail, but we refused. Gail arranged the salad on two plates.

  “What’s it all about, Bob?” she asked, as she worked at the bench, her back to me.

  The clattering of plates and cutlery disturbed me. I was silent. She looked round.

  “Are you ill?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Your judgment about what you’re doing is all to hell.”

  “Maybe.”

  She reached out with the blue earthenware coffee percolator in her hand, absently trying to find a place for it on the gas jet, and it overbalanced and fell, shattering on the tile floor, spreading coffee grounds, water and fragments.

  “You need treatment, Bob.”

  “I don’t see any way out… ”

  “I don’t own you, but I have some claim on you. Oh, what’s the use! That’s why I’m going back. If it hadn’t been for you I’d have gone back months ago,” she sobbed.

  I put an arm round her shoulders and led her to the couch. She collapsed full length and I lay down beside her. She had lost her bloom. She was still attractive, but she wasn’t a young single girl anymore. The war had used up the girl, and she was a woman. I felt her stir against me and we made love.

  *

  When we broke apart afterwards we thought our separate thoughts in silence for a time. Then Gail showered and busied herself with the food. As I showered I thought I didn’t want to surrender Gail to anybody else; a personable surgeon from Guam or Hawaii perhaps. Instinctively I wanted to possess her; it was like not letting anybody have a piece of your property, a self-centred and ultimately painful thought.

  Gail, wearing my towel robe, was sitting on a deck chair in the garden and staring at her salad when I came out in boxer shorts to join her. Her expression was hidden by mirror sunshades. I picked up my plate and sat beside her. I was hungry. The lettuce broke crisply in my mouth. The chicken had a coriander sauce. The food here was better than the officers’ mess and Gail had a way of dishing it up.

  “You’ve done magic with the cook boy’s work.”

  “I still feel the same, Bob.”

  “I’m sorry if I seem confused, Gail… because I am. We’re going to get married when I get out of here.”

  I still clung firmly to this intention; it was the star which had guided me for nearly two years. Except to be heavy with the cowardice of my behaviour at Kam Sung, I hadn’t evaluated where Jim Blake stood, and might continue to stand, in my life. I’d shied away from thinking about it, and that allowed me to avoid thinking about where Gail stood. Gail and her brother were perhaps inextricably connected.

  “You had to help this man of yours.”

  “There’s a limit… my own army career could be… ”

  “What’s a career alongside
the consequences of war? And you face those every day, Bob. Maiming and death.”

  24

  On the afternoon of the case, which was due to start at fifteen-thirty, the miserable figure I saw in the mirror startled me: the long-nosed face with its filmy eyes and the vertical channels on each side of the mouth. I eased my fingertips through the fine spray of silver hair at my temples. I was ageing by the day.

  I could hear the footfall of more than one person coming down the corridor towards my room. I took a last glance outside the open window and heard the babble of the clerks across the garden. I had become familiar with their routine. I knew when the head clerk was in the room with them, when they had their tea, when they were preparing to go home. I knew how they reacted to jokes and horseplay, and I could even distinguish the voices of a couple of the leading personalities, all without having the slightest idea what they were saying.

  There was a sharp rap at the door: the escort. I was marched by three military police – it seemed excessive – to a spacious stone building near my quarters, standing amidst unkempt lawns. The pitch of the roof swept low over a verandah which ran around the outside of the upper floor. The corner ends of the gables were decorated with carved wooden serpents in faded red.

  I was taken to the upper floor. The folding doors were open. The yellow walls inside the vast room were peeling. Two fans turned tiredly in the high-raftered ceiling. The planks of the polished wood floors were hollowed with the tread of many feet. A long bench spanned a dais at one end with six high-backed chairs on it. In front, at floor level, were smaller desks for the clerk of the court and a shorthand writer. Two lines of benches for counsel faced the dais, and behind them a legion of bamboo chairs for the audience. The building was an old structure which had absorbed the contests of many courts and councils.

  Amherst, sitting over his papers, smoking, noticed my uneasiness and watched with his crooked smile. “A bloody awful place. Better in an army hut. Sitting up on that bench you get the idea you’re God, instead of an officer having an easy day.”

  I didn’t respond, uncertain who the man beside Amherst was.

  “Colonel Vale,” Amherst announced, gesturing.

  Vale turned from his papers and nodded, a minimum of recognition for a brother officer who was, after all, innocent at the moment. He appraised me vaguely from behind his spectacles. He stood up, moving to exercise himself a little. I had expected a tall, satanic figure; instead I saw a short, plump, elderly man with a wisp of grey hair which became unusually thick and curly at the sides and back. He had a nose which had expanded to push his small eyes further apart, giving him an elephantine look.

  The court orderly draped a US flag on the wall behind the bench, and laid out pads and pencils. He disappeared through a door to the rear and I had a quick glimpse of a smartly uniformed figure with silver hair. I quivered. He was one of the men who would try me.

  Amherst motioned me to sit. “This will be a court of five officers with a military judge to deal with legal issues.”

  “Very high-powered. Who are they?” I asked, simply to become engaged.

  “The Judge is Henry Talbot, an experienced former Mississippi court of appeals man. He’ll direct the other five. The President is Nathan Aramson, a pen pusher in 3rd Army Supplies Div. Done a lot of courts. Very fair. The others I don’t know. It’s really a question of availability. But you’re in safe hands.”

  The air quickened. Uniformed officials began to come in and take seats. The Prosecutor’s assistant brought a pile of law manuals. The shorthand writer settled in front of her machine. I looked out of the open door-space across roofs of faded orange tiles, and the topmost foliage of trees, towards a spacious purple haze… freedom.

  The orderly came through the door behind the bench. “Silence! Stand up for the Court!” he shouted. He was followed by the members. The Judge swore in the members, and the President swore him in, and they took their seats. The members of the Court looked almost amiable. A young major and an artillery captain seemed bemused at the austere surroundings. I could feel the curious gaze of all of them. I wiped the wet palms of my hands with a tissue.

  Amherst dug me in the ribs. “Your turn now. Make it good. It’s all they’ll hear from you for a while,” he whispered.

  I stood on the orderly’s command, identified myself and heard the charges read; assault on a senior, failure to obey a lawful command and conduct prejudicing military discipline.

  “You understand the charges?” the orderly asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you plead?”

  The word ‘guilty’ jumped into my throat involuntarily, choking me as I tried to speak. “Not guilty,” I said, as boldly as I could.

  25

  Vale stood to make his opening statement, flipping casually through his papers, and then putting the folder down on his bench and stepping out into the space before the lawyers’ benches. I thought he was trying to give the impression that his case was so simple that he required no notes.

  He spoke quietly of the role of a fighting unit in war, the exhaustion, the inevitable and tragic loss of men, the sapping of morale. I leaned to one side to see the effect on the main members of the Court. Amherst whispered, “He’s standing between me and the President so the President can’t get any idea what I’m thinking, but of course that’s a trick that works for me when my turn comes.”

  “The low state of morale is shown by a brawl which broke out,” Vale said, “and a soldier was seriously injured with a broken bottle. The culprit, Darrel Trask, was identified by an independent witness, charged by the CO in his orderly room, and sentenced to ninety days’ detention. Trask was a member of the accused’s platoon. The CO ordered the accused to read the charge and punishment at a Regimental parade as a very proper marker that violent behaviour would be met by severe punishment. The accused refused, violently punching his CO Colonel Vaughan in the chest. Colonel Vaughan fell to the floor, striking his head.”

  My already feeble confidence ebbed as Vale spoke. I began to think that Amherst’s buoyancy was misplaced. Amherst was scribbling, his mouth tight with concentration, and then he said in an aside, “It’s about time I broke this up. Vale’s getting too pally with the Court.” He moved out in front of the benches beside Vale, apologised, and asked, “Is the Court going to hear from Major Weston and Ann James in support of these events?”

  Vale retorted testily, “Captain Weston, yes. I don’t see the need for Ann James.”

  The President smiled. “I’m surprised a woman enters the picture. Tell me more.”

  Amherst snatched the initiative. “Ann James is the entertainer who identified Trask, sir. Later she told Mr McDade that she had done so only to avoid being delayed in getting away to her next engagement.”

  “And that’s why McDade refused the order?”

  “Exactly, sir. McDade tried to persuade Colonel Vaughan that a mistake had been made.”

  The President nodded and looked both ways along the line of members; they too were nodding their understanding.

  Vale growled and barged back into the limelight. “She’s not material. She identified Trask in the presence of both the CO and the Adjutant.”

  The President conferred with the Judge and then said, “I think James is material and you’ll have to present her for cross-examination at least, Colonel Vale.”

  Amherst sat down, satisfied with the effect of the skirmish. “That broke up Vale’s opening nicely,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

  I had listened to the exchange with misgiving. “You’ve decided to call her?”

  “Not necessarily, but I’ve spoken to her. I’ll tell you later.”

  Vale called Colonel Vaughan. The CO advanced nervously between the rows of chairs. His hair had been newly cropped and the grey hairs were lighted by his shiny scalp. His uniform jacket with its medal ribbons hung on him loosely. He had lost weight. He jerked around in the witnesses’ chair waiting for questions. Vale took him caref
ully through the riot, the investigation of the assault, the identification by James, the punishment imposed on Trask and my alleged assault on him.

  Amherst stood up to cross-examine. “Is McDade a reliable officer, Colonel?”

  “Up to the time he assaulted me.”

  “You asked him personally to investigate possible charges against Trask?”

  “Yes I did, or Captain Weston did.”

  “He told you before the charge was laid that he doubted Trask’s guilt?”

  “He said there was no direct evidence, but then we got the girl to identify him.”

  “He told you Ann James was lying or mistaken?”

  “I was present. Her identification was very positive.”

  “But he told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you go ahead?”

  “I’d seen and heard the girl. I thought he was just trying to swing it for one of his men. It was a very serious disciplinary situation.”

  “Wasn’t there another reason why you wanted Trask put away?”

  “No,” Colonel Vaughan frowned and looked around innocently.

  “Hadn’t Trask complained to you about the killing of some villagers by a patrol?”

  “Baseless allegations by a coward.”

  “You didn’t want an inquiry into a possible crime which might reflect badly on the unit?”

  The members of the Court were alert and leaning forward in their chairs, frowning. An orderly room squabble had veered off into dark matters.

  “I tell you the allegations were baseless and any investigation would have found that.”

  “Putting Trask away silenced him, or at least cast a doubt on his credibility about the killings?”

  “That wasn’t my intention.”

  “Court martialling Mr McDade also silenced him about the killings because he wanted an investigation, didn’t he?”

  “Just a moment, Major Amherst. What precisely are these allegations?” the President asked impatiently.

  “I was just coming to that, sir.” Amherst held up my copy of Trask’s hand-written complaint. I could see that Amherst was in full possession of the case, and Vale sidelined, as tortuous alleys he didn’t know existed opened up. But I was disturbed at being portrayed as a proponent of investigation.