I stood at the end of the bench, waiting for further response. An alarm inside me trilled when the general turned back to the pool and said nothing more.
I moved in front of him, blocking his view. “General Hargrave is asking for you, sir.”
Almost without moving his lips, Clay replied, “Tell him to carry on.”
Then the general truly frightened me. He sighed, a long, hopeless, shuddering exhale, one’s last breath on this earth. I believed him incapable of such a noise.
“You alright, General?”
After several long seconds, he replied, “Jack, you head on back.”
Instead, I sat next to him on the bench. “What’ll I tell General Hargrave?”
There was only silence from him.
I was at a complete loss. The essence of Wilson Clay was his energy and willfulness, his stamina and wild intelligence. Yet there he was, brooding and still. He appeared frail. His jaw seemed to have grown the wattles of age. Mottled gray pouches under his eyes were newly prominent. His eyes were glazed. I had never before seen the general’s shoulders stooped, as if wearing a back-breaking pack. Without his animation, he seemed a shell of himself.
I tried again. “General Clay—”
“Jack, be quiet. Please.”
I sat next to him for one hour and forty minutes. Then military police arrived, deployed by General Hargrave to search for the general. I intercepted them at the edge of the clearing and sent them back. A few minutes later, Hargrave appeared. I tried to cut him off, but he brushed by me and marched to the bench.
“What in hell is going on, General?”
Clay raised his eyes. “I need some time to myself, Alex.”
“For Christ’s sake, we have a collapsing front. You can think while we try to put it back together.”
Clay said lamely, “You carry on for a while, Alex. You’ll do fine.”
Hargrave was dismayed. “General, we’ve got to…” His words died as he saw General Clay turn back to the pool. Hargrave glanced questioningly at me. I shook my head. Hargrave wheeled about and quickly disappeared down the footpath.
I returned to the bench. Another hour elapsed. The general’s gaze switched from the pond to his hands, then back. Otherwise, he was motionless. Each time I gathered the courage to speak again, his despairing stillness stopped me.
I had heard of commanders suffering immobilizing depressions after battle losses. Marlborough was plunged into despondency after the loss of two cities, Bruges and Ghent, to the French in 1708, and was incapable of command until Eugene came to his rescue. After his first defeat in ten years, at the Battle of Aspern/Essling in 1809, Napoleon’s mind was virtually paralyzed for thirty-six hours. Now the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force had been crippled by defeat and was sitting lifelessly while the battle raged nearby. I was overwhelmed by hopelessness.
General Clay abruptly rose from the bench and began back along the footpath. Aggravated by defeat, his limp rocked him side to side. I followed at a distance. His orderly, Charles Elliot, and his physician, William Strothers, had been watching us from under a tree. Elliot’s expression was immeasurably sad. They joined me as I walked behind the general.
Clay disappeared inside his camp trailer. Without an invitation, I entered after him. He sat on the settee and stared at a framed photograph of his wife. And there he stayed for another two hours, as motionless as a headstone.
One journalist has estimated that during the five hours General Clay was immobilized by depression, over two thousand Americans and eight hundred Canadians were killed. My response is that this calculation is sophistry, is “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” General Hargrave did carry on, and very well, as Clay was later to conclude.
But sitting in his trailer with him, watching as General Clay was consumed by despair, I slowly became enraged. I could here the bustle of command outside the trailer. The Wehrmacht was undoubtedly closer by the moment. And here was the American commander, glassy-eyed, his hands clasped together. Forlorn and pathetic.
His slight groan, as if he had just been injured, when there were thousands of truly injured Allied soldiers nearby, set me off. I rose from the wood chair across from him and yelled, “General, you need to get off your ass.”
His head jerked up.
I shouted, “You’ve got an army depending on you, and you’re sitting here doing nothing.”
His eyes dug into me. “Jack, get out of here.”
I was not to be put off. “Sir, you are needed.”
Moving with a lineman’s quickness, he rose from the settee, grabbed my shoulders, spun me around, and pitched me through the caravan’s door. Like a drunk tossed out of a saloon, I landed on my belly.
Colonel Strothers and Corporal Elliot helped me to my feet. Seething and humiliated, I dusted off my uniform.
I will not admit to being crazed with anger, as my next act suggests. But, then again, no one with an ounce of brains would have done what I did. It was dangerous and insubordinate. “And it made you look like a lunatic,” Strothers added later.
I ran toward a perimeter sentry. “You, Corporal. General Clay needs your help.”
The guard started toward the trailer.
I said, “He needs ten or twelve of your best men, right now.”
“Yes, sir.” He blew his whistle.
HQ company sentries ran from their posts on the outskirts of the manor grounds.
Carrying their M1s across their chests, ready for anything, they gathered around me as I started for Clay’s trailer. I improvised, “Headquarters is bugging out again. We have to leave the trailer, and we don’t want the Germans to get their hands on it.”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered. He glanced at one of his men, as if he might have a further clue.
When we reached the caravan, I ordered, “You men line up along this side of the trailer. Hook your hands underneath. When I give the order, lift and shove. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” the sergeant dutifully replied.
Colonel Strothers demanded, “Jack, what are you doing?”
The sentries arrayed themselves along the west side of the trailer, the side with the door.
“Ready?” I called out, grabbing the step under General Clay’s door. “One, two, three, heave.”
The trailer was hoisted to shoulder height, then with grunts and shouts from the sentries, was toppled onto its side. The trailer landed heavily, followed instantly by the crash of chairs and pots and the general hitting the inside wall.
“Thank you, Sergeant,” I said. “You and your men are dismissed.”
They hurried away, talking animatedly among themselves.
“May I dismiss myself?” Strothers asked politely.
I nodded. He fairly sprinted away. Then I grabbed my hands behind my back, stretched my backbone to its limit, and awaited my fate.
I did not wait long. General Clay pushed open the door, now on the topside, and pulled himself through to a sitting position. His cap was over an ear, and he pushed it into place. He looked around.
His eyes came to rest on me, and he said, “You’d better tell me my trailer was just hit by a Luftwaffe bomb.”
“I’m afraid I can’t, sir. This was done on my orders.”
“Are you goddamn bucking for a section eight, Jack?”
“I’d be in pleasant company, wouldn’t I, sir?”
He glared at me. His face may have changed color a time or two. Then he abruptly brayed with laughter, long and loud and convincing.
He swung his feet up through the door, crawled to the edge of the caravan, and slid down to the grass, laughing all the while.
He looked at me again. “Jack, I’m going to court martial you for attempting to assassinate your commander. You’ll help me with the paperwork, won’t you?”