"Maybe. I haven't thought about it. Even so – save your breath."
"Why?"
"They can't do it."
"They can do anything," Louise said. "And if I ask them…"
"Nothing doing. It will go back to Washington, and it will be turned down."
"Why?"
"Because there's a man in Washington who says I'm a Communist."
"Nonsense."
"It's nonsense," Michael said, "but there it is."
"Are you a Communist?"
"About like Roosevelt," said Michael. "They'd keep him from being commissioned, too."
"Did you try?"
"Yes."
"Oh, God," Louise said, "what a silly world."
"It's not very important," said Michael. "We'll win the war anyway."
"Weren't you furious," Louise asked, "when you found out?"
"A little maybe," said Michael. "More sad than furious."
"Didn't you feel like chucking the whole thing?"
"For an hour or two, maybe," said Michael. "Then I thought, what a childish attitude."
"You're too damned reasonable."
"Maybe. Not really, though, not so terribly reasonable," said Michael. "I'm not really much of a soldier, anyway. The Army isn't missing much. When I went into the Army, I made up my mind that I was putting myself at the Army's disposal. I believe in the war. That doesn't mean I believe in the Army. I don't believe in any army. You don't expect justice out of an army, if you're a sensible, grown-up human being, you only expect victory. And if it comes to that, our Army is probably the most just one that ever existed. I believe the Army will take care of me to the best of its abilities, that it will keep me from being killed, if it can possibly manage it, and that it will finally win as cheaply as human foresight and skill can arrange. Sufficient unto the day is the victory thereof."
"That's a cynical attitude," Louise said. "The OWI wouldn't like that."
"Maybe," said Michael. "I expected the Army to be corrupt, inefficient, cruel, wasteful, and it turned out to be all those things, just like all armies, only much less so than I thought before I got into it. It is much less corrupt, for example, than the German Army. Good for us. The victory we win will not be as good as it might be, if it were a different kind of army, but it will be the best kind of victory we can expect in this day and age, and I'm thankful for it."
"What are you going to do?" Louise demanded. "Stay in that silly office, stroking chorus girls on the behind for the whole war?"
Michael grinned. "People have spent wars in worse ways," he said. But I don't think I'll only do that. Somehow," he said thoughtfully, "somehow the Army will move me somewhere, finally, where I will have to earn my keep, where I will have to kill, where I may be killed."
"How do you feel about it?" Louise demanded.
"Frightened."
"Why're you so sure it will happen?"
"I don't know," he said. "A premonition. A mystic sense that justice must be done by me and to me. Ever since 1936, ever since Spain, I have felt that one day I would be asked to pay. I ducked it year after year, and every day that sense grew stronger; the payment would be demanded of me, without fail."
"Do you think you've paid yet?"
"A little," Michael grinned. "The interest on the debt. The capital remains untouched. Some day they're going to collect the capital from me, and not in the USO office, either." They turned down into St James's Street, with the Palace looming dark and medieval at the other end, and the clock glistening palely, a soft grey blur, among the battlements.
"Maybe," Louise said, smiling, in the darkness, "maybe you're not the officer type after all."
"Maybe I'm not," Michael agreed gravely.
"Still," said Louise, "you could at least be a Sergeant."
Michael laughed. "How the times have slid downhill," he said. "Madame Pompadour in Paris gets a Marshal's baton for her favourite. Louise M'Kimber slips into the King's bed for three stripes for her PFC."
"Don't be ugly," Louise said with dignity. "You're not in Hollwood now."
The Canteen of the Allies, for all its imposing name, was merely three small basement rooms decked with dusty bunting, with a long plank nailed on a couple of barrels that did service for a bar. In it, from time to time, you could get venison chops and Scotch salmon and cold beer from a tin washtub that the proprietress kept full of ice in deference to American tastes. The Frenchmen who came there could usually find a bottle of Algerian wine at legal prices. Almost everyone could get credit if he needed it, and a girl whether he needed it or not. Four or five hard-eyed ladies, nearing middle-age, whose husbands all seemed to be serving in Italy in the Eighth Army, ran the place on a haphazard voluntary basis, and it conveniently and illegally served liquor after the closing hour.
When Michael and Louise entered, someone was playing the piano in the back room. Two English sergeant pilots were singing softly at the bar. An American WAC corporal was being helped, drunk, to the lavatory. An American Lieutenant-Colonel by the name of Pavone, who looked like a middle-aged burlesque comedian and who had been born in Brooklyn and had somehow run a circus in France in the 1930s, and had served in the French cavalry in the beginning of the war, and who continually smoked large expensive cigars, was making what sounded like a speech to four war correspondents at a large table. In a corner, almost unnoticed, a huge dark Frenchman, who, it was reputed, dropped by parachute into France two or three times a month for British Intelligence, was eating martini glasses, something he did when he got drunk and felt moody late at night. In the small kitchen off the back room, a tall, fat American Top Sergeant in the MPs, who had taken the fancy of one of the ladies who ran the place, was frying himself a panful of fish. A two-handed poker game was being played at a small table near the kitchen between a correspondent and a twenty-three-year-old Air Force Major who had that afternoon come back from bombing Kiel, and Michael heard the Major say, "I raise you a hundred and fifty pounds." Michael watched the Major gravely write out an IOU for a hundred and fifty pounds and put it in the middle of the table. "I see you and raise you a hundred and fifty," said his opponent, who wore an American correspondent's uniform, but who sounded like a Hungarian. Then he wrote out an IOU and dropped it on the small flimsy pile in the middle of the table.
"Two whiskies, please," said Michael to the British Lance-Corporal who served behind the bar when he was in London on leave.
"No more whisky, Colonel," said the Lance-Corporal, who had no teeth at all, and whose gums, Michael thought, must be in sad shape from British Army rations. "Sorry."
"Two gins."
The Lance-Corporal, who wore a wide, spotted greyish apron over his battledress, deftly and lovingly poured the two drinks.
From the piano in the other room, quivering male voices sang: My father's a black-market grocer, My mother makes illegal gin, My sister sells sin on the corner, Kee-rist, how the money rolls in!
Michael raised his glass to Louise. "Cheers," he said. They drank.
"Six bob, Colonel," said the Lance-Corporal.
"Put in on the book," said Michael. "I'm busted tonight. I expect a large draft from Australia. I have a kid brother who's a Major there in the Air Force, on flying pay and per them."
The Lance-Corporal laboriously scratched Michael's name down in a gravy-spotted ledger and opened two bottles of warm beer for the sergeant pilots, who, attracted by the melody from the next room, drifted back that way, holding their glasses.
"I wish to address you in the name of General Charles de Gaulle," said the Frenchman, who for the moment had given up chewing on martini glasses. "You will all kindly stand up for General Charles de Gaulle, leader of France and the French Army."
Everyone stood up absently for the General of the French Army.