This Scorching Earth (27 page)

COLONEL ASHCROFT LEFT GENERAL KEAN'S OFFICES IN
the Dai Ichi Building, motioned for his sedan, closed the door behind him, and told the driver to go to Washington Heights. The General and he had talked from one to five, and this talk had changed Colonel Ashcroft's life. He had been relieved of his post in Special Services, had been told that travel orders would shortly be cut for him, and had been informed that the Army, in honor of his long and faithful services—particularly considering the fact that he had but five years before retirement—would be pleased to place him in a less responsible position in the States. This, however, was but the barest skeleton of their actual conversation.

General Kean, as his friend—they had been in the States, Hawaii, and the Philippines together—was much kinder than the occasion demanded, filling out the few facts he imparted with the most solicitous kind of verbiage. In deference to their long-standing friendship, he intimated rather than stated that the Colonel was being pastured out for possibly subversive opinions—which, just between the two of them, they both knew to be one vast joke, but still one couldn't buck public opinion—and that it was only through deference to his long and even brilliant Army career that reports of these opinions were being killed within the Dai Ichi Building itself and would hence cause him no further difficulty just in case, say, he ever cared to visit Washington.

The Colonel also learned, through this joking, familiar, and indirect manner, that it was a major in his own office who had reported most of the so-called subversive opinions, and that, had it reached the General through non-official channels, it would have ended right there, because, of course, he knew his old friend Rand Ashcroft was constitutionally incapable of anything of the sort. But, as it was, the news was known to many and its approach had been most official. The agency designed for ferreting this sort of thing out had been alerted, and the most the General would be able to do would be to consign the entire case to his closed files.

There were also relatively unimportant side issues: neglect of duty, the uttering of disparaging remarks about the splendid achievements of Special Services, and a general tendency toward playing the martinet—thus earning no little unpopularity with the men. There was also the personal criticism that the Colonel was of a definitely anti-social nature.

Now, of course his old friend Kean knew better than this, but, alas, others did not, and consequently he really thought it the better part of valor to bow to their mistaken conclusions because, after all, the States
were
home, and incidentally, Mrs. Ashcroft might welcome the change.

The Colonel, in the automobile, now thought of all this. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to adapt his own line of reasoning to that of the General's. But, instead of becoming resigned, he, with enormous impracticality considering the number and power of his adversaries, could think only of revenge. And, with still greater impracticality, he privately considered that this natural and healthy emotion was worse than a disgrace—was, indeed, a sin.

The temptation to revenge was very insidious, for it was so easy to rationalize it. The Colonel might, for example, given a bit of time, convince himself that it was not for the sake of revenge that he was exposing Major Calloway and his accomplices. After ail, it was his duty as a military man to apprehend any variety of misdemeanor within his command. It would be for the good of the Occupation, which, naturally, did not approve of such activities as the Major's.

Yet, while knowing this, the Colonel also knew that this would not be his true reason. His reason would be revenge, petty, sinful revenge, through which he would be at once reduced to the moral level of his enemy. He would have sold out, through weakness, and would voluntarily have given the enemy that which it could never have taken from him by force.

The Colonel took off his cap, smoothed his gray hair, looked from the window, and stroked his silver moustaches. His moral code, long held rigid by training both in the Army and through the ever-present example of his father and his father's father, was slowly disintegrating. He himself felt it and realized it daily in the small concessions which he made—a bit less small every day—to others and to himself. Formerly the code had been strong but not inflexible, for it was more like a religion than a philosophy, and his precepts of humanity and justice and liberty had been entirely personal, as he believed they should be for every man.

Now, however, the code had lost its elasticity; it had become brittle, and it cracked under any strain. The Colonel need only look about him to discover that these self-imposed rules by which he lived were antiquated; that he could have been no more anachronistic had he worn the tall plush hat and gaitered trousers of his grandfather. He was silent as to his beliefs and, as yet, listened patiently to the brainless creatures about him who brayed as their own discovery his own most personal principles.

Major Calloway, for example, spoke of democracy as though it were a newly acquired uniform, his own private jet-plane, the lucky prize for the sixty-four dollar question. Yet, had it not been for the wars, and the resultant public reaffirmation, the Major would doubtless have gone through life quite ignorant of the quality in his country and its government in which he now took so personal yet so cursory an interest. He didn't know too well who Jefferson was, but he spoke with authority of the Founding Fathers, among whom he included Sam Houston as the possible framer of the Constitution. His idea of democracy as a government was somewhat like the parvenu's idea of the high society in which he now happily found himself. Lacking any understanding or sympathy for its actual meaning, its real idea, the Major, under the Germans, would have been a perfect Nazi and, under the Japanese of ten years before, would doubtless have been shouting ,'Banzai! " with the best of them. These were the Colonel's thoughts.

And, Colonel Ashcroft was certain, the Major's thoughts—or feelings—on this subject of democracy were those of the majority. For them democracy had become a possession which added somewhat to the wealth of the country. And to their minds the richest and most powerful became indistinguishable from the best. They patriotically believed that America was the best country in the world. So did the Colonel, but for entirely different reasons.

Come to think of it, their reconstruction of democracy was a bit like the reconstruction of Williamsburg, a city the Colonel had seen once and loathed. It was an empty shell, devoid of life, a travesty on what it had once been, a tourist attraction which was generally advertised as something quite noble and special, something to which one might make an occasional pilgrimage. To the Colonel's way of thinking, their America was like this false Williamsburg. One block from the democratic highroad one saw that the house fronts were false facades, that the backyards were no less filthy than anywhere else, that the lip service paid the geniality of Colonial days was based upon misconceptions from the mouths of waitresses dressed as great ladies of the day or of local businessmen wearing periwigs and knee britches for the occasion.

But their opinions had little in common with those democratic beliefs so firmly ingrained in the Colonel that he himself had never once thought of them, taking them for granted, just as he took for granted the sun and the moon and the stupidity of the Army. They were something to cherish and protect, all right, but as one cherished one's heart and protected one's hands. Thus it was that if the Williamsburg opinions touched him at all, they did so only now, in negative as it were, for the very firmness of his beliefs had precluded the necessity of his ever so much as thinking about them.

Thus, the Major barked about "God's Country" and what he called the "Democratic Way of Life"—by which, the Colonel understood, he most likely meant that way which, through its virtues, allowed him to go unpunished. And he became suspicious of the Colonel when he discovered that his own sentiments were not echoed, that the Colonel's lips were formed in a wry, ironic smile, and that come to think of it, the Colonel had more than once expressed the doubt that the Japanese would ever take to democracy.

The Major didn't care if they did or not. That was beside the point. The point was that it was necessary to believe that they would. And if they wouldn't, then they could always be forced to. After all, who won the war?

And so, while the Colonel was only questioning the advisability, indeed the possibility, of exporting so personal a commodity as these beliefs—just as he often wondered if Christianity, in its true state, were not a complex of emotions rather than a set of laws, and hence not too well adapted for natural growth outside those countries where, through the centuries, it had metamorphosed and hence flourished—this questioning was interpreted by the Major and all those like him only as a questioning of the concept itself. When the Colonel, in an unguarded moment, expressed the time-honored thought that America had never lost a war and never won a peace, the Major, shrewdly acute to the signs of the times, detected the heresy of un-Americanism in the Colonel.

But surely, thought the Colonel, it was just as much a sign of strength in his country that the peace should be lost as that the battle be won. Democracy was scarcely a whipping-stick for the defeated. At the most, it was an example to them. It, in its essence, defied the subtleties of diplomacy and just as rigorously disdained attempts at interpretation, for—paradoxically it is true—it was an aristocratic form of government, not an oligarchy, but a rule by that higher aristocracy which every man carries within himself.

The Colonel's beliefs put him into difficulties in yet another way. Just as he refused his support to a man who, though voicing his own—the Colonel's—opinions in any matter, managed, even though on the "right" side, to misrepresent that side, so the Colonel refused to place himself in the equally embarrassing position of seconding the opinions of a man like the Major, even though those opinions, for all the wrong reasons, happened to be right. There was, in the Colonel, perhaps foremost, pique that his own sacred beliefs should be so mishandled, and second, moral indignation that the truth in them should be so mangled that the presentation all too efficiently invalidated the belief. Granted, the Colonel's way of thinking was not practical.

His lack of practicality was, indeed, a point of no small honor with him. He fancied himself to be as impractical—that is, as visionary, as idealistic—as was Jefferson himself, who had been imbued with deistic ideas which in themselves were now entirely anachronistic and, probably, always had been, and had refused to warp his noble plan with material considerations.

Yet, wondered the Colonel, had not this very impracticality—which was the cradle of democracy—ensured its immortality? And, further, was it not the vision of Jefferson and others which, in its honest if naive belief in the application of its theory, rendered the concept of democracy valid even now—through virtue of its being a vision, an illusion, a chimera—despite its many misinterpretations, just as valid as it had been in the very hour of its formulation?

And did it not, the Colonel wondered, best suit, through this quality of genius in it (this incapability of capture, this mirage-like quality of eternal promise)—did it not best suit the true nature of man, that nature which, eternally unsatisfied with reality, would continually strive toward that which it could not attain? And then, did not Jefferson and those others know this, perhaps? If not, why that most telling of images, that most beautiful of thoughts: "the pursuit of happiness"?

It was highly suspicious ideas like these which the Major had been quick to detect and—since they themselves, though strong, were also slender and easily twisted—had been even quicker to misinterpret to others. The Colonel's spoken query whether the Japanese had not, in their own way, won the war after all could be damaging as an admission once the Major had presented it. Worse than this, the Colonel had indulged his sense of irony a bit too often. When he had heard the plan of a high-ranking officer to solve Japan's population problem by giving them Manchuria, he had smiled and asked, then what had the war been about? Nor had the Major been long in reporting this.

The role the Major had played in the betrayal of the Colonel was not too clear to the latter, for Kean had been anything but explicit. Therefore, all of this was simply the Colonel's best surmise of what must have happened, and his surmise happened to be absolutely correct—this is precisely what had occurred.

An enameled clock, covered with rosebuds, struck six, and Colonel Ashcroft sat down to dinner. Years with the Army had made the early hour not only acceptable but also pleasant. He had quite forgotten there had ever been a time—long ago—when dinner (called supper) was at eight.