Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    From Here to Eternity
    From Here to Eternity
    From Here to Eternity
    Ebook1,631 pages35 hours

    From Here to Eternity

    By James Jones

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    • Military Life

    • Friendship

    • Power Dynamics

    • Loyalty

    • Rebellion

    • Loyal Friend

    • Outsider

    • War Is Hell

    • Loyal Soldier

    • Forbidden Love

    • Reluctant Hero

    • Power of Music

    • Band of Brothers

    • Grizzled Veteran

    • Rebellious Soldier

    • Self-Discovery

    • Boxing

    • War

    • Class Differences

    • Love & Relationships

    About this ebook

    A novel of army life in the calm before Pearl Harbor: A New York Times bestseller, a National Book Award winner, and “one of the great books of our time” (Newsday).
      At the Pearl Harbor army base in 1941, Robert E. Lee Prewitt is Uncle Sam’s finest bugler. A career soldier with no patience for army politics, Prewitt becomes incensed when a commander’s favorite wins the title of First Bugler. His indignation results in a transfer to an infantry unit whose commander is less interested in preparing for war than he is in boxing. But when Prewitt refuses to join the company team, the commander and his sergeant decide to make the bugler’s life hell.   An American classic now available with scenes and dialogue considered unfit for publication in the 1950s, From Here to Eternity is a stirring picture of army life in the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
    This ebook features an illustrated biography of James Jones including rare photos from the author’s estate.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMay 10, 2011
    ISBN9781453215111
    From Here to Eternity
    Author

    James Jones

    James Jones (1921–1977) was one of the most accomplished American authors of the World War II generation. He served in the U.S. Army from 1939 to 1944, and was present at the attack on Pearl Harbor as well as the battle for Guadalcanal, where he was decorated with a purple heart and bronze star. Jones’s experiences informed his epic novels From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line. His other works include Some Came Running, The Pistol, Go to the Widow-Maker, The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories, The Merry Month of May, A Touch of Danger, Whistle, and To the End of the War—a book of previously unpublished fiction.

    Read more from James Jones

    Related to From Here to Eternity

    Titles in the series (4)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Classics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Holden Caulfield And The Culture Of Sexual Assault

      Feb 12, 2018

      Since it came out in 1951, The Catcher in the Rye has meant different things to different readers. For some, Holden Caulfield was the rebellious voice of a generation; for many today, he’s a whiny rich kid; for a pair of recent biographers, he’s the

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The 10 Best Novels

      Dec 19, 2016

      The 10 Best Novels
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Roosevelt’s Posse

      Jul 23, 2019

      Roosevelt’s Posse
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Leviathan

      Aug 10, 2022

      After we killed the passengers, we put the bodies in one of the low-pressure, unheated storage compartments. Some people had wanted to have some kind of solemn burial-in-space thing; that was too ghoulish for most of us, though. Mostly the ones we ki

      25 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      I Saw Plenty

      Jun 1, 2020

      I Saw Plenty
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Pleasure Palace

      Sep 1, 2022

      Pleasure Palace
      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Prohibition

      Sep 10, 2021

      It had been ten days since my last fix. I knew what I was going to do was wrong, but unless you knew the yearning that your body exerts, the internal pull which strangles your very soul into submission, then you cannot judge me. Yes, it was wrong. Ye

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lol

      May 30, 2024

      Lol
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Excerpts From The Works Of The 2024 Whiting Award Winners

      Apr 10, 2024

      The 2024 Whiting Award winners were announced Wednesday night. Below are excerpts from their work.

      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      I Met Myself Coming Back

      Oct 6, 2022

      I Met Myself Coming Back
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Righteous

      Jan 22, 2019

      Righteous
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Today Is a Day Like Any Other

      Jun 10, 2024

      Content Disclosure: Mild Violence, Suicidal Themes The door opened, near-silent from the fresh coat of WD-40 applied by Randy. He peered through the small crack, gloved hands already slipping the lockpicking kit into one of the many pockets covering

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Joke

      Sep 1, 2020

      Although best known for his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury was also a prolific writer of short stories, having published his first while still a teenager. This previously unpublished story likely dates to 1950, the year The Martian Chronicle

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Devil You Know

      Jul 10, 2021

      I met the Devil today. He was walking down main street, right by the undertaker in B____, which is a little town near here, and which, for obvious reasons, I’d better not name. I recognized him straight away because he had furry legs with hooves for

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Storyteller

      Nov 4, 2021

      Storyteller
      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Equinox

      May 18, 2022

      In this strange world, where identities change with the rising and setting of the sun, supernatural forces are at work – and they’re causing trouble… St Leonars prison was an appropriately imposing building. It rose out of the surrounding shacks and

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Speedboat

      Mar 24, 2022

      Nobody died that year. Nobody prospered. There were no births or marriages. Seventeen reverent satires were written – disrupting a cliché and, presumably, creating a genre. That was a dream, of course, but many of the most important things, I fi nd,

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Watch Your Step

      Nov 19, 2020

      Watch Your Step
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Lol

      Sep 9, 2020

      Lol
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      THE DUKE OF Edinbrough Hotel

      Nov 13, 2019

      THE DUKE OF Edinbrough Hotel
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Mother's Fall – And The Descent Of Man

      May 1, 2024

      Mother fell. She ended up sitting, back against the wall, like a weary-looking soft toy on a slow edition of The Repair Shop. I called the emergency services. While I was on to them, I told them my underactive thyroid medication had recently delivere

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Life After Death

      May 27, 2022

      Life After Death
      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Spider MAN

      Oct 16, 2024

      ‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Queen Camilla, as we stood together on a down escalator at Waterloo station, ‘I could murder a gin and tonic.’ ‘You’re the Queen,’ I said. ‘What’s stopping you?’ Her Majesty treated me to one of her 30-yard stares, which wa

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for From Here to Eternity

    4/5

    330 ratings14 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      This is a real slow-burner. I read The Thin Red Line a number of years ago and half-expected a dramatic tale of infantrymen with the backdrop of the bombing of Pearl Harbour. However, the first Japanese Zeroes don't show up until the last few chapters and by then you are so invested in the characters and the realistic portrayal of garrison life that they seem like an unwelcome distraction from the main piece. Interestingly Jones originally wanted to re-use the same characters for The Thin Red Line, and ended up using facsimiles of Prewitt (Witt), Warden (Welsh) and Stark (Storm).
    • 5/5
      I will remember this novel for its wide-ranging, but in-depth character development. The progression of Prew into and through his stockade experience and to the inexorable result tells a tale of a man trapped in circumstances that evokes empathy and understanding. The author's description of the choices that Warden makes about his position and his surrounding relationships acts as a counter-point to Prew's life and keeps the book humorous despite the clearest retelling of organizational bullying that I have ever seen. But there is so much more.
    • 5/5
      I found this a memorable read. Though I read it over 50 years ago I still remember it, including the poignant though ironic ending.
    • 3/5
      It was a controversial best seller when published because of the language and overt sex. But I'm bored by it. The repetition may be Jones's way of introducing the numbing effect of military drill, but it just drove me crazy. The book could have been half the length and still given the message. What disturbed me even more, though, is that at base I do not think Jones likes the American soldier. And that just turned me off.
    • 4/5
      Military families, soldiers, and those they come in contact with on Hawaii right before World War II starts - not my usual reading choice of subject, but I read Kaylee Jones' autobiography and that made me curious about her father's work. The parts describing military life while the men were on duty bored me, but the other parts - the soldiers off time, their families, romances, and off time were very interesting. The novel goes into the heads of many of the characters, which is good and bad. By the end, I was attached to several of the characters. Overall, an enjoyable listen.
    • 4/5
      I bought this book in hard cover in 1989. It was first published in 1951 and I had read it in the 70's. It was so moving I wanted to read again, and it now resides in private library.
    • 4/5
      The first book of his war trilogy. If you only know this from the movie (which is a great classic ) you are missing a real treat. The story is so much more and so different as to be a totally new animal. A long slow read but well worth the trip.
    • 5/5
      Not sure why I finally got around to reading this book. Perhaps the war in Ukraine. More likely chance. A vivid depiction of Amy life and life in Honolulu just before and after Pearl Harbor. Characters come to life on the telling of the story. The narrator does a good job of bringing personality into the characters voices. Some unexpected twists.
    • 4/5
      I have a picture of my father taken the day he and my mother were married. Recently discharged from the US Army and a deployment to a black, rubble-strewn Japan, his youthful swagger is evident. His hair is slicked back and parted to one side. A khaki suit coat drapes off of his square shoulders, open to expose a wide, flowered tie, hanging just to the top of his pants. He gazes stridently at the camera with a smile that says, “I’ve seen it and what I haven’t seen, well, I can deal with that, too.” He is more Burt Lancaster than Lancaster could have managed on his best day. Every time I look at that picture, I am reminded that my father was more than I ever could have known – and that his generation, with their silent strength, was indeed the Greatest Generation.James Jones captured my father, and every subtle gradation of man like him, with his novel, [From Here to Eternity]. This is not a story that can be summed up by a few seconds of film showing a passionate embrace in the surf, as it is in most people’s minds. This is a much deeper and more difficult story. Set at Schofield Barracks in the months before Pearl Harbor, the story follows the exploits of the men of the 27th Infantry. Captain Holmes and First Sergeant Warden command Company G. The company is being split apart by a struggle between the career men and the newly inducted men. James brilliantly captures the complexity and nobility of this generation of men from the ground up, in their struggles to serve nobly while maintaining a sense of individuality.Now that the generation of men and women who served as Jones’ subjects have nearly all left us, I’m not sure that we will ever completely understand them. But Jones’ honest and straightforward contemporaneous examination of their lives is a good start. Personally, I felt like I understood a small piece of my father that he never shared with me.Bottom Line:The men and women of the Greatest Generation in all of their complexity.4 bones!!!!!
    • 4/5
      A doorstop (nearly 1000 pages) published in 1951 tells the fictional story from the inside of a number of enlisted men of an infantry division of the United States Army posted in Hawaii in 1941 taking in the attack on Pearl harbour. The author James Jones enlisted in the US army in 1939 at the age of 17 in the 25th infantry division stationed in Hawaii and uses that experience to make his novel drip with the realism of life in an army barracks during the first year of the second world war for the United States. This is not a novel for the feint hearted and forcibly expresses the culture of army life in the 1940's when men were hardened for war and all the women were called whores. It is a novel that takes you into another world, one that probably still exists to a certain extent and I found myself wrapped up in the edginess of the characters who fight to make sense of the life of men who serve in the armed forces.

      About three quarters of the way through the novel Private Robert E Lee Prewitt is court-martialled for assaulting a senior offices. He is a man who you would be wise to ask first before using his nickname Prew. His pride and his obstinacy have set him up against the system that he knows and loves. He has been overlooked for a promotion and transferred to another unit who take him because of his boxing skills (before hostilities, commissioned officers lived or died by the athletic successes of the men they commanded), but Prewitt for personal reasons will not join the boxing team. He is given the "treatment" by his commanding officers who want to break his spirit and make him change his mind. When an irresistible force meets an immovable object then Prewitts path to a court martial and time in prison (the Stockade) seems inevitable

      In room no 2 in the stockade Prew thinks that he is amongst men just like himself - he thinks “that he did not have to explain", because each one of them had the same hard unbroachable  sense of ridiculous personal honour that he had never been able to free himself from either.

      Hard labour in the stockade comes with cruel beatings as the breaking of a man's spirit is the only way of getting him in the right frame of mind to take his place back in the army.

      Private Prewitts story runs in parallel to that of Milt Warden a staff sergeant who takes pride in his ability to play the system for his own ends. Like Prewitt he has the same pride in his abilities; pouring scorn on those around him who he can harass and bully. The Warden as he is called finds himself in deep water when he falls in love with his commanding officers wife. His playing of the system does not stretch quite far enough to allow him to indulge in a long term affair with Karen Holmes and like Prewitt who falls in love with Alma the most beautiful girl in the services-men's brothel he struggles to contain his feelings within the context of the harsh army life that he leads.

      Towards the end of the novel the attack on Pearl Harbour which results in the infantry seeing action for the first time albeit far enough back from the centre of the attack so as not to endanger life: leads to the army being put on a war footing with the inevitable tightening of security measures. Both Prewitt and Warden are forced to make choices in a new lockdown situation.

      Author James Jones knew how the army works and his own experiences would have enabled him to draw and refine the male characters that people his novel and while he may have too rosey a picture of the women who work in the brothels, he is more convincing with the restrictions that army wives must undergo and the life that they are forced to lead. His book bristles with machismo and sexism as the cultural norm, but there is room for finer feelings and briefly Warden and to a lesser extent Prewitt attempt to find a more enlightened viewpoint. They indulge themselves in cod psychology and Prewitt is searching for someone to provide him with some answers that he can accept. Jones is careful not to take this too far and the level of discussion is probably fitting to that of young army recruits, however these young recruits do not lack experience of the culture of a disciplined service that needs to be ready for war.

      Jones attempts to re-create the dialogue that he would have heard during his time in the army and so there is some slang; phrases are shortened and words are made up or misspelt. This gives his story some authenticity, but is not overdone to the extent of making parts of his book unreadable. I found the whole novel very readable indeed. This was Jones first novel and he went onto write [Some Came Running] and [The Thin Red Line] among others in which his military experience and knowledge also played a major part. I am pleased to have been taken into the world that Jones inhabited, but probably won't feel the need to read another. However 4 stars for this mammoth undertaking.

      I hope to catch a showing of the 1953 film soon if only to see Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling about in the surf on the beach.
    • 5/5
      A very good novel indeed. I am surprised that so few Library Thingers possess a copy. The story of a soldier who wants to do a simple hitch in the army. He falls afoul of military politics, and the various levels of it lead to his tragic death. There are numerous well realized characters and a genuine feel for time and place. Time for a revival of this work.
      I read it at least twice.
    • 5/5
      From Here to Eternity is one of the most authentic and realistic war novels ever penned, despite the fact that it includes very little actual combat. Its setting is the months and days preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as viewed through the eyes of personnel stationed at an Army Barracks on Oahu. Perhaps its authenticity is in some way due to the proximity of its writing to the events themselves.

      I’ve read many “war” novels, a good number of which deal with World War II, but there were aspects of army life from this period that I was completely unaware of prior to reading this book. For example, the interaction between the Hawaiian servicemen and the local homosexual population (was this limited to Hawaii?) was completely unknown to me, as were many of the issues relating to military discipline. Much of the jargon and regimental culture was also new. While there were some aspects of the military which were somewhat confusing (a lot of different classes of sergeant), by and large the book was extremely educational as it relates to the period and the military culture on the island at the time.

      This novel is “real” and in your face, with very little symbolism or subtlety. Having read it, I will immediately pursue the author’s other work, especially the Thin Red Line, though I saw the movie and thought it was awful. I have a feeling the book will be a major improvement.
    • 3/5
      Not a book that has worn well with time. Jones renders dialect through misspelling; the male voices are all rendered in misspelled "casual" English to denote their lack of education and informal use of slang when they speak. The women -- oddly -- speak grammatically in spite of being similarly scantily educated. Jones writes women well, but not children and not non-WASPs.

      As far as describing a lost generation of comparatively uneducated (by present day standards) men given few options as a result of the Depression, Jones has written a perfect military counterpoint to "The Grapes of Wrath." There is a thematic love-hate relationship in the novel: love for Hawaii, hate for the Army experienced by the main characters and strongest in Karen Holmes. Overarching all is the feeling of alienation within all the characters -- major and minor, a theme widely explored by writers in the mid-century. Jones interestingly lards his novel with the motif of fertility and Nature's strong drive for life set against the looming threat and actuality of mindless slaughter, whether of the individual (Prewitt) or in the mass of humanity (Pearl Harbor). Underlying the entire novel is the menace of violence -- boxing, physical abuse and the threat of abuse of women by men, fist fights and knifings, culminating in the aerial attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor.

      Sadly, because it's seldom the case and because imagination ranges more deeply in books, the movie version of the novel is more powerful and tightly delivered, which illustrates how Jones' would have benefitted from better editing, which isn't to say censoring, that the book underwent. To the reader's ear, it's hard to distinguish the "voices" of the male characters, certain scenes go on too long (such as the card game in the latrine), and Jones uses repetition of phrases in dialogue too often for it to be effective, thus it's reduced to being annoying.

      All that aside, the portraits of Prewitt, Warden, Maggio, and Karen Holmes are strong, human, realistic, and memorable. Yet, one wonders if that isn't so because of one's knowledge of the movie characters rather than from one's experience of them in the novel.
    • 4/5
      A deeply profound reading experience, and investigation into self and responsibility, and the tropes of alienation that more generally mark post-war American fiction. Jones' characters are stubbornly drawn and confounding. Reading Jones is a reading of one's own stumbling through the illogics of desire while attempting to conform to the structural prerogatives of society.

      As part of the naturalistic tradition in American literature, including Twain, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, Jones' compellingly drawn characterizations and scenes are not formally tight, but, are, instead raw and human and often confusing/confused, which, here, is a very good thing.

    Book preview

    From Here to Eternity - James Jones

    From Here to Eternity

    James Jones

    Edited and with an Afterword by George Hendrick

    TO THE

    UNITED STATES

    ARMY

    "I have eaten your bread and salt.

    I have drunk your water and wine.

    The deaths ye died I have watched beside,

    And the lives ye led were mine."

    —RUDYARD KIPLING

    Contents

    Book One: The Transfer

    Chapter 1

    Chapter 2

    Chapter 3

    Chapter 4

    Chapter 5

    Chapter 6

    Chapter 7

    Chapter 8

    Book Two: The Company

    Chapter 9

    Chapter 10

    Chapter 11

    Chapter 12

    Chapter 13

    Chapter 14

    Chapter 15

    Book Three: The Women

    Chapter 16

    Chapter 17

    Chapter 18

    Chapter 19

    Chapter 20

    Chapter 21

    Chapter 22

    Chapter 23

    Chapter 24

    Chapter 25

    Chapter 26

    Chapter 27

    Book Four: The Stockade

    Chapter 28

    Chapter 29

    Chapter 30

    Chapter 31

    Chapter 32

    Chapter 33

    Chapter 34

    Chapter 35

    Chapter 36

    Chapter 37

    Chapter 38

    Chapter 39

    Chapter 40

    Chapter 41

    Chapter 42

    Chapter 43

    Chapter 44

    Book Five: The Re-enlistment Blues

    Chapter 45

    Chapter 46

    Chapter 47

    Chapter 48

    Chapter 49

    Chapter 50

    Chapter 51

    Chapter 52

    Chapter 53

    Chapter 54

    Chapter 55

    Chapter 56

    Chapter 57

    Preview: The Thin Red Line

    The Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience.

    —EMERSON, Essays: First Series, History

    Book One

    The Transfer

    Chapter 1

    WHEN HE FINISHED packing, he walked out on to the third-floor porch of the barracks brushing the dust from his hands, a very neat and deceptively slim young man in the summer khakis that were still early morning fresh.

    He leaned his elbows on the porch ledge and stood looking down through the screens at the familiar scene of the barracks square laid out below with the tiers of porches dark in the faces of the three-story concrete barracks fronting on the square. He was feeling a half-sheepish affection for his vantage point that he was leaving.

    Below him under the blows of the February Hawaiian sun the quadrangle gasped defenselessly, like an exhausted fighter. Through the heat haze and the thin mid-morning film of the parched red dust came up a muted orchestra of sounds: the clankings of steel-wheeled carts bouncing over brick, the slappings of oiled leather slingstraps, the shuffling beat of scorched shoesoles, the hoarse expletives of irritated noncoms.

    Somewhere along the line, he thought, these things have become your heritage. You are multiplied by each sound that you hear. And you cannot deny them, without denying with them the purpose of your own existence. Yet now, he told himself, you are denying them, by renouncing the place that they have given you.

    In the earthen square in the center of the quad a machine gun company went listlessly through the motions of its Loading Drill.

    Behind him in the high-ceiling squadroom was the muffled curtain of sound that comes from men just waking and beginning to move around, testing cautiously the flooring of this world they had last night forsaken. He listened to it, hearing also the footsteps coming up behind him, but thinking of how good a thing it had been to sleep late every morning as a member of this Bugle Corps and wake up to the sounds of the line companies already outside at drill.

    You didnt pack my garrison shoes? he asked the footsteps. I meant to tell you. They scuff so easy.

    They’re on the bed, both pair, the voice behind him said. With the clean uniforms from your wall locker you didnt want to get mussed up. I pack your diddy box and extra hangers and your field shoes in the extra barricks bag.

    Then I guess that’s everything, the young man said. He stood up then, sighing, not a sigh of emotion but the sigh that is the relaxing of a tension. Lets eat, he said. I got an hour yet before I have to report to G Company.

    I still think you’re makin a bad mistake, the man behind him said.

    Yeah I know; you told me. Every day for two weeks now. You just dont understand it, Red.

    Maybe not, the other said. I ain’t no temperamental genius. But I understand somethin else. I’m a good bugler and I know it. But I cant touch you on a bugle. You’re the best bugler in this Regiment, bar none. Probly the best in Schofield Barricks.

    The young man thoughtfully agreed. That’s true.

    Well. Then why you want to quit and transfer?

    I dont want to, Red.

    But you are.

    Oh no I’m not. You forget. I’m being transferred. Theres a difference.

    Now listen, Red said hotly.

    You listen, Red. Lets go over to Choy’s and get some breakfast. Before this crowd gets over there and eats up all his stock. He jerked his head back at the awakening squadroom.

    You’re actin like a kid, Red said. You’re not bein transferred, any more than I am. If you hadn’t of gone and shot your mouth off to Houston none of this would ever happened.

    That’s right.

    Maybe Houston did make his young punk First Bugler over you. So what? It’s only a formality. You still got your rating. All the brunser gets out of it is to play the Taps for funerals and sound Retreat for the shorttimer parades.

    That’s all.

    It ain’t as if Houston had had you busted, and give the kid your rating. Then I wouldnt blame you. But you still got your rating.

    No I ain’t. Not since Houston asked the Old Man to have me transferred.

    If you’d go see the Old Man like I tell you and say one word only, you’d have it back. Chief Bugler Houston or no Chief Bugler Houston.

    That’s right. And Houston’s punk would still be First Bugler. Besides, the papers’ve gone through already. Signed; sealed; and delivered.

    Aw hell, Red said disgustedly. Signed papers you can stick up you know where, for all they mean. You’re on the inside, Prew, or at least you could be.

    Do you want to eat with me? the young man said, or dont you?

    I’m broke, Red said.

    Did I ask you to pay? This is on me. I’m the one that’s transferrin.

    You better save your money. They can feed us in the kitchen.

    I dont feel like eating that crap, not this morning.

    They had fried eggs this morning, Red corrected. We can still get them hot. You’ll need your money where you’re goin.

    All right, for Chrisake, the young man admitted wearily. Then this is just for the fucking hell of it. Because I want to spend it. Because I’m leavin and I want to spend it. Now do you want to go? or dont you?

    I’ll go, Red said disgustedly.

    They walked down the flights of steps and out the walk in front of A Company, where the Bugle Corps was quartered, crossed the street and walked along Headquarters building to the sallyport. The sun heat hit them, bearing down, as they left the porch and left them just as sharply as they stepped inside the tunnel through Hq building that was called the sallyport now, in honor of the old days of the forts. It was pain’ted emphatically with the Regimental colors and housed the biggest of the Regiment’s athletic trophies in their lacquered case.

    It’s a bad thing, Red said tentatively. You’re gettin yourself a reputation as a bolshevik. You’re settin yourself up for all kinds of trouble, Prew. Prew did not answer.

    The restaurant was empty. Young Choy and his father, Old Choy, were chattering behind the counter. The white beard and black skull cap disappeared at once back into the kitchen and Young Choy, Young Sam Choy, waited on them.

    Herro, Prew, Young Choy said. Me hear you move ’closs stleet some time soon I think so maybe, eh?

    That’s right, Prew said. Today.

    Today! Young Choy grinned. You no snowem? Tlansfe’ today?

    That’s her, he said grudgingly. Today.

    Young Choy, grinning, shook his head with sorrow. He looked at Red. Clazy dogface. Do stlaight duty,’stead of Bugle Corpse.

    Listen, Prew said. How about bringin our goddam food?

    Aw light, Young Choy grinned. Bling light now.

    He went behind the counter to the swinging kitchen door and Prew watched him. Goddam gook, he said.

    Young Choy’s all right, Red said.

    Sure. So’s Old Choy all right.

    He only wants to help.

    Sure. Like everybody else.

    Red shrugged, sheepishly, and they sat silent in the dim comparative coolness, listening to the laziness of the electric fan high up on one wall, until Young Choy brought out the eggs and ham and coffee. Through the sallyport screen door a weak breeze carried the sleepily regular belltones of the monotonously jerked bolt handles, Dog Company’s Loading Drill, a ghostly prophecy that haunted Prew’s enjoyment of that sense of loafing while the morning’s work moves on around you.

    You one number one boy, Young Choy said, returning, grinning, as he shook his head in sorrow. You leenlistment matelial.

    Prew laughed. You said it, Sam. I’m a Thirty—Year—Man.

    Red was cutting up an egg. Whats your wahine goin to say? when she finds out you took a bust to transfer?

    Prew shook his head and began to chew.

    Everything’s against you, Red said, reasonably. Even your wahine is against you.

    I wish she was against me, right up against me, right now, Prew grinned.

    Red would not laugh. Private pussies dont grow on no trees, he said. Whores are all right; for the first year; for kids. But a good shackjob is hard to find. Too hard to take a chance on losin. You wont be able to make that trip to Haleiwa every night when you’re pullin straight duty in a rifle compny.

    Prew stared down at his round ham bone before he picked it up and sucked the marrow out. I reckon she’ll have to make up her own mind, Red. Like every man has got to do, in the end. You know this thing’s been comin for a long, long time. It ain’t just because Houston made his angelina First Bugler over me.

    Red studied him; Chief Bugler Houston’s tastes in young men were common knowledge and Red wondered if he could have made a pass at Prew. But it could not be that; Prewitt would have half-killed him, Chief Warrant Officer or no.

    That’s good, Red said bitterly, made up her own mind. Where is her mind? In her head, or down between her legs?

    Watch your goddam mouth. Since when is my private life your business anyway? For your information, its between her legs and that’s the way I like it, see? You liar, he thought.

    Okay, Red said. Dont blow your top. Whats it to me if you transfer? Its nothing in my young life. He took a piece of bread and washed his hands of all of it by wiping the yellow from his plate and swilling it down with coffee.

    Prew lit a tailormade and turned to watch a group of company clerks who had just come in, sitting over coffee in the far corner when they were supposed to be upstairs in Personnel working. They all looked alike, tall thin boys with the fragile faces that gravitated naturally toward the mental superiority of paper work. He caught the words Van Gogh and Gauguin. One tall boy talked a little while and the others waiting to get in their say, then in a pause for breath another tall boy took over and the first frowned and the others waiting impatiently again. Prew grinned.

    It was queer, he thought, how a man was always being forced to decide these things. You decided one thing right, with much effort, and then you thought you’d coast a while. But tomorrow you had to decide another thing. And as long as you decided the way you knew was right you had to go right on deciding. Every Day a Millennium, he thought. And on the other hand was Red, and those kids over there, who because they decided wrong just once were free from any more deciding. Red placed his bet on Comfort out of Security by Conformity. As usual, Comfort won. Red could retire and enjoy his winnings. Red would not quit a soft deal like the Bugle Corps because his pride was hurt. Sometimes he got confused and could not quite remember what the reason was, the necessity that had been at the beginning of this endless chain of new decidings.

    Red was trying logic on him. "You got a Pfc and a Fourth Class Specialist. You practice two hours a day and the rest of your time’s your own. You got a good life.

    Every Regiment’s got a Drum and Bugle Corps. That’s S. O. P. Its just like a craft on the Outside. We get the gravy because we got special ability.

    The crafts on the Outside ain’t been gettin gravy. They been lucky if they had jobs at all.

    That ain’t the point, Red said disgustedly. That’s the Depression—why you think I’m in the goddam army?

    I dont know. Why are you?

    Because. Red paused triumphantly. Same reason as you: Because I could live better on the Inside than I could on the Outside. I wasnt ready to starve yet.

    That’s logical, Prew grinned.

    Goddam right. I’m a logical guy. Its only common sense. Why you think I’m in this Bugle Corps?

    Because its logical, Prew said. "Only, that ain’t the reason I’m in the army. And it ain’t the reason I’m in, was in, this Bugle Corps."

    I know, Red said disgustedly. Now he’s going to start that crap about the thirty year men.

    All right, Prew said. But what else would I be? Where else would I go? Me! A man has got to have some place.

    Okay, Red said. But if you’re a thirty year man, and you love to bugle so, why are you quitting? That ain’t like no thirty year man.

    All right, Prew said. Lets look at you: Since the Depression’s gettin over, since they started makin stuff to send to England for this war, since they started this peacetime draft—you’re on the Inside behind your common sense, like a man behind the bars. Your old job’s waitin for you, and you cant even buy out now since the peacetime draft came in.

    I’m markin time, Red explained to him. "I dint starve while Prosperity was behind that stack of howitzers, and before we get in this goddam war my hitch will be up, and I’ll be back home with a good safe job makin periscopes for tanks, while you thirty year men are gettin your ass shot off."

    As Prew listened the mobile face before him melted to a battle-blackened skull as though a flamethrower had passed over it, kissed it lightly, and moved on. The skull talked on to him about its health. And he remembered now the reason for this urgency of deciding right. It was like with a virgin, one wrong decision was enough to do it; after one you were not ever the same again. A man who ate too much got fat, and the only way to keep from getting fat was not to eat too much. There was no short cut in elastic trusses for ex-athletes, or in the patented rowing machines, or in synthetic diet; not if you ate too much. When you cut with life you had to use the house deck, not your own.

    The reason was, he wanted to be a bugler. Red could play a bugle well because Red was not a bugler. It was really very simple, so simple that he was surprised he had not seen it standing there before. He had to leave the Bugle Corps because he was a bugler. Red did not have to leave it. But he had to leave, because he wanted most of all to stay.

    Prew stood up, looking at his watch. Its nine-fifteen, he said. I got to be at G Company at nine-thirty for my interview. He grinned as he pulled the last word with his mouth, twisting it the way a badly silvered mirror subtly changes faces.

    Sit down a minute more, Red said. I wasnt going to mention this, unless I had to.

    Prew looked down at him and then sat down, knowing what it was that he would say. Make it quick, he said. I got to go.

    You know who the Compny Commander of G Compny is, don’t you, Prew?

    Yeah, Prew said. I know.

    Red could not let it ride. Captain Dana E. Holmes, he said. "‘Dynamite’ Holmes. The Regimental boxing coach."

    Okay, Prew said.

    I know all about why you transferred into this outfit last year, Red said. I know all about Dixie Wells. You never told me, Prew, but I know it. Everybody knows it.

    All right, Prew said. I don’t care who knows it. I dint expect it could be hid, he said.

    You had to leave the 27th, Red told him. When you quit the boxing squad and refused to fight any more, you had to transfer out. Because they wouldnt let you alone, wouldnt let you just quit in peace. They followed you around and put the pressure on. Until you had to transfer out.

    I did what I wanted to do, Prew said.

    Did you? Red said. Dont you see? he said. "They’ll always follow you around. You cant go your own way in peace, not in our time. Unless you’re willing to play ball.

    "Maybe back in the old days, back in the time of the pioneers, a man could do what he wanted to do, in peace. But he had the woods then, he could go off in the woods and live alone. He could live well off the woods. And if they followed him there for this or that, he could just move on. There was always more woods on up ahead. But a man cant do that now. He’s got to play ball with them. He has to divide it all by two.

    I never mentioned it to you, Red said. I saw you fight in the Bowl last year. Me and several thousand other guys. Holmes saw you, too. I’ve been sweatin him out to put the pressure on you, any time.

    So have I, Prew said. I just guess he never found out I was here.

    "He won’t miss it on your Form 20 when you’re in his compny. He’ll want you for his boxing squad."

    There’s nothin in the ARs says a man has got to jockstrap when he doesnt want to.

    Come on, Red taunted. You think the ARs’ll bother him? when the Great White Father wants to keep that championship? You think he’ll let a fighter who’s got the rep you have just hibernate? in his own company? without fightin for the Regment? just because you decided once you wouldnt fight no more? Even a genius like you cant be that simple.

    I dont know, Prew said. Chief Choate’s in his compny. Chief Choate use to be the heavyweight champ of Panama.

    Yes, Red said. But Chief Choate’s the Great White Father’s fair-haired boy because he’s the best first baseman in the Hawaiian Department. Holmes cant pressure him. But even so, Chief Choate’s been in G Compny four years now, and he’s still a corporal.

    Well, Prew said. If the Chief would transfer out, he could make Staff in any other compny. I guess if it gets too rough I can always transfer out myself.

    Yeah? Red said. You think so? You know who the top kicker of George Co is?

    Sure, Prew said. I know. Warden.

    That’s right, man, Red said. Milton Anthony Warden. Who use to be our Staff in A Compny. The meanest son of a bitch in Schofield Barricks. And who hates you worse than poison.

    That’s funny, Prew said slowly. I never felt that Warden hated me. I dont hate him.

    Red smiled bitterly. After all the run-ins you’ve had with him? Even you cant be that green.

    It wasnt him, Prew said. It was just that that was what his job was.

    A man is his job, Red said. And now he’s not a Staff; he’s got two rockers and a diamond now. Listen, Prew. Everything’s against you. You’re movin into a game where every card is in the other hand.

    Prew nodded. I know that, he said.

    Go up and see the Old Man, Red pleaded. Theres still time this morning. I wouldnt steer you wrong. I’ve had to play politics all my life for what I wanted. I can sense the way a thing is going. All you got to do is see The Man, and he will tear them papers up.

    Prew stood up then, and standing, looking down into the anxious face of him who was his friend, he could feel the energy of sincerity that was pouring from Red’s eyes, pouring over him with a firehose concentration whose name was sincerity. And somehow it was a thing that startled him, that it should be there, and that he could see it, pleading with him.

    I cant do it, Red, he said.

    As if for the first time he was really giving up, was actually believing it, Red slumped back in his chair, the concentrated pouring dispersed and dissipated against this wall he did not understand.

    I hate to see you go, he said.

    I just cant help it, Red, Prew said.

    Okay, Red said. Have it your way, kid. Its your funeral.

    That’s whats the matter, Prewitt said.

    Red ran his tongue over his teeth slowly, probing. What do you aim to do about the git-tar, Prew?

    You keep it. Its half yours anyway. I wont have no use for it, Prew said.

    The other coughed. I ought at least to pay you for your half. Ony I’m broke right now, he added, hastily.

    Prewitt grinned; this was the Red he knew again. I’m giving you my half, Red. No strings attached. Whats a matter? Dont you want it?

    Sure. But?

    Then keep it. If your conscience hurts you, you can say its payment for helping me to pack.

    I hate to do that, Red said.

    Figure it this way, Prew said. I’ll come back over now and then. I’m not going Stateside. I’ll come over and use it, every now and then.

    No, you wont, Red said. We both know you wont. When a guy moves, he moves it all. The distance doesnt matter.

    Before this sudden honesty Prew had to look away. Red was right and Prew knew it, and Red knew he knew it. Transferring in the army was comparable to a civilian moving from one city to another. His friends either moved with him or they lost him. Even when he moved from, perhaps, a city that he loved to a city where he was the stranger. The chances for adventure in such moves were vastly overrated by the movies, and both knew it. It was not adventure Prewitt wanted; Red knew that he had no more illusions of adventure.

    The best bugler in the Regment, Red said helplessly. He just dont quit and go back to straight duty. They just dont do it.

    The git-tar’s yours, Prew said. I’ll come back and play it now and then though, he lied. He turned away quickly so he would not have to meet Red’s eyes. I got to go.

    Red watched him toward the door and humanely did not contradict him. Prew never had been able to lie convincingly.

    Luck to you, Red called after him. He watched until the screendoor slammed. Then he took his coffeecup over to where Young Choy was sweating industriously at the steamy nickel urn with its spouts and glass tube gauges, wishing it was five o’clock and he could have a beer instead.

    Outside in the sallyport Prew donned his campaign hat, adjusting it meticulously, low on the forehead, high in back, cocked just a little bit. Around the band was the robin’s-egg-blue cord and acorns of the Infantry. Stiff as a board with sugar and the hatter’s iron it rode his head, a fresh blocked crown, the proud badge of his profession.

    For a moment he stood looking at the lacquered trophycase, feeling the scant breeze the shadowed sallyport collected like a funnel collects rain. Among the other cups and statues in it, holding the place of honor, was the Hawaiian Division traveling trophy that Holmes’s boys had won last year, two golden fighters in a roped ring of gold.

    He shrugged, and then he turned and paused, seeing the scene that never failed to touch him, a pain’ting done in solid single tones, the timbre diminishing with the deepening perspective, framed by the entryway of the sallyport. The pale red-dusted green of the earthen square and on it the blue fatigues of Dog Company, and the olive halos. Behind them the screaming whiteness of the Second Battalion barracks; and behind the barracks, rising slowly, the red-and-green striping that was the mathematical fields of pineapple, immaculate as a well-kept tomato patch, a few bent figures indistinct in the distance toiling over them. And then the foothills, rolling higher, in that juicy green that has never starved for water. And then, fulfilling all the rising promise, the black peaks of the Waianae Range, biting a sky that echoed the fatigues, and cut only by the deep V of Kolekole Pass that was like a whore’s evening dress, promising things on the other side. More like a whore’s evening dress because he had been to Waianae and looked with disappointment on the other side.

    Along the flanks of the hills his eye picked out the thin tracery of a line that faded out to the South. That was the Honouliuli Trail, the officers went riding there, with their women. You could always find innumerable condoms along the trail, and trees where the idle horses had chewed off bark. Your eyes always hunted for them, hiking, with a vicarious breathlessness that, if it had not been visible in each man’s face, would have shamed you.

    Did a pineapple enjoy its life? or did it maybe get sick of being trimmed like seven thousand other pineapples? fed the same fertilizer as seven thousand other pineapples? standing till death did them part in the same rank and file like seven thousand other pineapples? You never knew. But you never saw a pineapple turn itself into a grapefruit, did you?

    He stepped down on the sidewalk treading catlike on the balls of his feet the way a fighter treads, hat tilted, clean, immaculate, decisive, the picture of a soldier.

    Chapter 2

    ROBERT E LEE PREWITT had learned to play a guitar long before he ever learned to bugle or to box. He learned it as a boy, and with it he learned a lot of blues songs and laments. In the Kentucky Mountains along the West Virginia Line life led him swiftly to that type of music. And this was long before he ever seriously considered becoming a member of The Profession.

    In the Kentucky Mountains along the West Virginia Line guitar playing is not considered the accomplishment it is most places. Every well-bred boy learns to chord a guitar when he is still small enough to hold it like a string bass. The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, an understanding, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something. The songs stayed with him, but the guitar playing did not give him anything. It left him cold. He had no call for it at all.

    He had no call for boxing either. But he was very fast and had an incredible punch, developed by necessity on the bum, before he entered The Profession. People always find those things out. They tend to become manifest. Especially in The Profession where sports are the nourishment of life and boxing is the most manly sport. Beer, in The Profession, is the wine of life.

    To tell the truth, he had no call for The Profession. At least not then. As a dissatisfied son of a Harlan County miner he just naturally gravitated toward it, the only profession open to him.

    He really had no call for anything until the first time he handled a bugle.

    It started as a joke on a battalion beer convention and he only held it and blew a couple of bleats, but he knew at once that this was something different. It was somehow something sacred, the way you sit out at night and watch the stars and your eye consciously spans that distance and you wonder if you’re sitting on an electron that revolves around a proton in a series of infinite universes, and you suddenly see how strange a tree would look to one who had never lived upon the earth.

    He had wild visions, for a moment, of having once played a herald’s trumpet for the coronations and of having called the legions to bed down around the smoking campfires in the long blue evenings of old Palestine. It was then he remembered that hint about pointlessness that the blues songs and laments had given him; he knew then that if he could play a bugle the way he thought a bugle he would have found his justification. He even realized, all at once, holding the bugle, the reason why he had ever got into The Profession at all, a problem that had stumped him up till then. That was actually how much it meant to him. He recognized he had a call.

    He had heard a lot about The Profession as a boy. He would sit on the railless porch with the men when the long tired, dirty-faced evening rolled down the narrow valley, thankfully blotting out the streets of shacks, and listen to them talk. His Uncle John Turner, tall, rawboned and spare, had run away as a boy and joined The Profession, to find Adventure. He had been a corporal in the Philippine Insurrection.

    The boy Prewitt’s father and the others had never been beyond the hills, and in the boy’s mind, already even then bludgeoning instinctively against the propaganda of the walls of slag as the fœtus kicks frantically against the propaganda of the womb, this fact of The Profession gave to Uncle John Turner a distinction no one else could claim.

    The tall man would squat on his hams in the little yard—the coal dirt was too thick on all the ground to sit—and in an abortive effort to dispel the taste of what the Encyclopedias call Black Gold he would tell them stories that proved conclusively there was a world beyond the slag heaps and these trees whose leaves were always coated black.

    Uncle John would tell about the Moro juramentados, how their native Moslem datu would call the single volunteer up before the tribe and anoint him and consecrate him to the heaven he was getting ready to attend and then, practically, bind his balls and pecker with wet rawhide before he ran amok, so that the pain of the contraction of the drying leather would keep him going. That was why, said Uncle John, the Army first adopted the .45. Because six slugs from a .38 Special would not knock a juramentado down. And, in his condition, obviously, you had to knock him down to stop him. The .45 was guaranteed to knock any man off his feet, if it only hit the tip of his little finger, or your money back. And the Army, said Uncle John, had been using it effectively ever since.

    The boy Prewitt doubted that about the little finger, but he liked the story. It impressed him with a sense of seeing history made, as did the stories of young Hugh Drum and young John Pershing and the expedition on Mindanao and the trek around the edge of Lake Lanao. They proved the Moros were good men, worthy opponents of his Uncle John. Sometimes when his Uncle John had swilled enough white lightning he would sing the song about the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga that had been his Regimental song. And he would alternate the Philippines with Mexico and stories of an older, much less informal Blackjack and of young Sandy Patch, not yet too great a man to be informal.

    But Uncle John always made it plain, especially to the boy, the reason why he had come home in 1916 and stayed in Harlan mining coal all during the World War. Uncle John wanted to be a farmer, and it was probably this that kept him from acquiring that Great, American, Retrospective Spirit of Romance.

    It would be nice to think of a grubby miner’s son with a dirt-rimmed mouth possessed of so burning a dream to see the world and help make history, via The Profession, that he refused to have it thwarted. But the sons of Harlan miners cannot afford that greatest luxury of all: Romance; at that time they did not even have a movie house to help them kid themselves. And Uncle John Turner was not the kind of man who’d let his nephew dream of a life of adventure, via The Profession, and have it on his conscience.

    It happened quite, quite differently.

    When the boy Prewitt was in the seventh grade his mother died of the consumption. There was a big strike on that winter and she died in the middle of it. If she had had her choice, she could have picked a better time. Her husband, who was a striker, was in the county jail with two stab wounds in his chest and a fractured skull. And her brother, Uncle John, was dead, having been shot by several deputies. Years later there was a lament written and sung about that day. They said blood actually ran like rainwater in the gutters of Harlan that day. They gave Uncle John Turner the top billing, a thing he doubtless would have decried with vigor.

    The boy Prewitt saw that battle, at least as near as any man can ever come to seeing any battle. The only thing he saw and could remember was his Uncle John. He and two other boys stood in a yard to watch until one of the other boys got hit with a stray bullet, then they ran home and did not watch the rest.

    Uncle John had had his .45 and he shot three deputies, two of them as he was going down. He only got to fire three times. The boy was interested in proving the guarantee of the .45, but since all the deputies were hit in the head they would have gone down anyway. Uncle John did not hit any of them on the tip of the little finger.

    So when his mother died there was nobody to stop him except his father in the jail, and since his father had beaten him again just two days before the battle he did not figure his father counted either. Having made up his mind, he took the two dollars that was in the grocery jar, telling himself his mother would not need it and it would be good enough for his father and would help to put them square, and he left. The neighbors took up a collection for his mother’s funeral but he did not want to see it.

    The disintegration of a family, where the family still has meaning, emotes tragedy in every one. Its consolatory picture is of the surviving member freed to follow his lifelong ambition, a sort of Dick Whittington with a bandanna tied to a stick but no cat. But it was not this with him either, any more than it was the burning dream to see the world and help make history. He had never heard of a Lord Mayor and he had no ambition. The Profession, and the bugle, came much later.

    As she was dying his mother made him promise her one thing. Promise me one thing, Robert, she wheezed at him. From your father you got pride and endurance and I knowed that you would need it. But one of you would have kilt the other if it hatnt of been for me. And now, I wont be standin atween you no more.

    I’ll promise anything you want, ma, whatever you say for me to promise, whatever it is you say, the boy, watching her die in front of him, looking at her above his haze of disbelief for signs of immortality, said woodenly.

    A deathbed promise is the most sacred one there is, she hawked at him from the lungs that were almost, but not quite, filled up yet, and I want you to make me this promise on my deathbed: Promise me you wont never hurt nobody unless its absolute a must, unless you jist have to do it.

    I promise you, he vowed to her, still waiting for the angels to appear. Are you afraid? he said.

    Give me your hand on it, boy. It is a deathbed promise, and you’ll never break it.

    Yes maam, he said, giving her his hand, drawing it back quickly, afraid to touch the death he saw in her, unable to find anything beautiful or edifying or spiritually uplifting in this return to God. He watched a while longer for signs of immortality. No angels came, however, there was no earthquake, no cataclysm, and it was not until he had thought over often this first death that he had had a part in that he discovered the single uplifting thing about it, that being the fact that in this last great period of fear her thought had been upon his future, rather than her own. He wondered often after that about his own death, how it would come, how it would feel, what it would be like to know that this breath, now, was the last one. It was hard to accept that he, who was the hub of this known universe, would cease to exist, but it was an inevitability and he did not shun it. He only hoped that he would meet it with the same magnificent indifference with which she who had been his mother met it. Because it was there, he felt, that the immortality he had not seen was hidden.

    She was a woman of an older time set down in a later world and walled off from knowing it by mountains. If she had known the effect of the promise she exacted from her son, upon his life, she would not have asked it of him. Such promises belong in an older, simpler, less complex and more naïve, forgotten time.

    Three days after he was seventeen he got accepted for enlistment. Having been used to certain elemental comforts back in Harlan, he had already been turned down a number of times all over the country because he was too young. Then he would go back on the bum awhile and try some other city. He was on the East Coast at the time he was accepted and they sent him to Fort Myer. That was in 1936. There were lots of other men enlisting then.

    It was at Myer he learned to box, as distinguished from fight. He was really very fast, even for a bantamweight, and with that punch, all out of proportion to his size, he found he might have a future in The Profession. It got him a PFC in the first year of his hitch, a thing that, in 1936, when getting any rating at all in your first hitch was considered a sin that made for laxity of character by every soldier who had begun his second three-year term, bespoke his talent.

    It was also at Myer where he first handled the bugle. It made a change in him right away and he dropped out of the boxing squad to get himself apprenticed to the Bugle Corps. When he truly found a thing he never wasted time, and since he was still a long ways from being a Class I fighter then the coach did not think it worth his while to hold him. The whole squad watched him go without any sense of loss, figuring that he did not have the staying power, that the going was too rough, that he would never be a champion like Lew Jenkins from Fort Bliss, as they would be, and marked him off the list.

    He was too busy then to care much what they thought. With the call driving him he worked hard for a year and a half and earned himself another, totally different reputation. At the end of that year and a half he had earned himself a rating of First and Third and he was good, good enough to play the Armistice Day Taps at Arlington, the Mecca of all Army buglers. He really had a call.

    Arlington was the high point and it was a great experience. He had finally found his place and he was satisfied to settle into it. His enlistment was almost up by then and he planned to re-enlist at Myer. He planned to stay there in that Bugle Corps for his full thirty years. He could see ahead down the line, obviously, and quite clearly, how smoothly it would go and the fullness it would be. That was before the other people began to come into it.

    Up until then it had only been himself. Up to then it had been a private wrestle between him and himself. Nobody else much entered into it. He had been like a writer who discovered his talent and matched it with his desire and then shut himself away to work hard in perfecting it, thinking that that was all there was, not realizing that publishers and agents and editors of magazines would ever come into this thing. After the people came into it he was, of course, a different man. Everything changed then and he was no longer the virgin, with the virgin’s right to insist upon platonic love. Life, in time, takes every maidenhead, even if it has to dry it up; it does not matter how the owner wants to keep it. Up to then he had been the young idealist. But he could not stay there. Not after the other people entered into it.

    At Myer all the boys hung out in Washington on their passes and he hung out there too. That was where he met the society girl. He picked her up at a bar, or she picked him up. It was his first introduction into the haut monde, outside of the movies, and she was good looking and definitely high class, was going to college there, to be a journalist. It was not a great love or anything like that; half of it, for him, for both of them, was that the miner’s son was dining at the Ritz, just like the movies said. She was a nice kid but very bitter and they had a satisfying affair. They had no poor little rich girl trouble because he did not mind spending her money and they did not worry and stew about an unladylike marriage. They had good fun for six months, up until she gave him the clap.

    When he got out of the GU Clinic his job was gone and his rating with it. The army did not have sulfa then, it could not make up its mind to adopt the doubtful stuff until the war, and it was a long and painful process, getting cured, with lots of long-handled barbs and cutters. One boy he met there was on his fourth trip through the Clinic.

    Unofficially, nobody really minded the clap. It was a joke to those who had never had it and to those who had been over it for a little while. No worse than a bad cold, they said. Apparently the only time it was not a joke was when you had it. And instead of hurting your unofficial reputation it boosted you a notch, it was like getting a wound stripe. They said that in Nicaragua they used to give out Purple Hearts.

    But officially it hurt your Service Record, and it automatically lost you your rating. On your papers it put a stigma on you. When he put in to get back in the Bugle Corps, he found that while he was away they had suddenly gone over-strength. He went back on straight duty for the rest of his enlistment.

    Already the other people were beginning to come into it. It seemed that any man could drive a car, but the only man who never had a wreck was the guy who drove not only for himself but for the other driver too.

    When his time was up they tried to re-enlist him for the same outfit, there at Myer. He wanted that hundred and fifty dollar bonus, but he wanted to get as far away from there as he could go. That was why he picked Hawaii.

    He went up once, to see his society girl before he left. He had heard guys say they would kill any woman who gave them the clap; or they would go out and give it to every woman they could lay; or they would beat her up until she wished she had of died. But having the clap did not make him bitter against all women or anything like that. It was a chance you took with every woman, white, black or yellow. What disillusioned him, what he did not understand, was that this of the clap should have cost him his bugle when he still could play it just as well as ever, and also that a society girl had given it to him. And what made him mad was that she did not tell him first and leave it up to him to choose, then it would not have been her fault. He found out, that last time he went to see her, after he had convinced her he was not going to beat her up, that she had not known she had it. After she saw he wouldnt hit her, she cried and she was very sorry. It was a society boy she had known since she was a kid. She was disillusioned, too. And she was having a hell of a time getting herself cured, and on the sly, so her parents would not know. And she was truly very sorry.

    When he arrived in Schofield Barracks he was still very bitter about the bugle. It was this that made him go back to fighting, here in the Pineapple Army where fighting was even more prolific than it was at Myer. That was his error, but it did not seem so then. The bitterness about the bugle, added to all the other bitternesses, gave him something. Also he had put on more weight and filled out more until he was a welterweight. He won the Company Smoker championship of the 27th and for that he got a corporalcy. Then he went on, when the Division season opened, to make Schofield Class I and become the runner-up in the welterweight division. For that, and because they expected him to win it the next year, he got a sergeantcy. Also, the bitternesses in some subtle way seemed to make him more likeable to every one, although he never did quite figure that one out.

    Everything would probably have gone on like that indefinitely, since he had convinced himself that bugling was nothing, had it not been for that deathbed promise to his mother and for Dixie Wells. And actually it happened after the season was over. Perhaps it was his temperament, but he seemed to have a very close working alliance with irony.

    Dixie Wells was a middleweight who loved boxing and lived for boxing. He had enlisted because business was not so good for fighters during the Depression, and because he wanted time to mature his style and season it without being overmatched in some ham and egger, and without having to live on the beans a ham and egger has to eat while he is trying to work up to the big time. He planned to come out of the Army and go right into the upper brackets. A lot of people on the Outside had their eye on him and he was already having fights downtown in Honolulu at the Civic Auditorium.

    Dixie liked to work with Prewitt because of the other’s speed and Prewitt learned a lot from Dixie. They worked together often. Dixie was a heavy middle, but then Prewitt was a heavy welter. They are very professional about those things in the Army; they keep every pound that they can squeeze; they always figure a man for ten pounds more than what he weighs in at when they match him; they dry him out and then after he has weighed in they feed him steak and lots of water.

    It was Dixie who asked him to work this time, because he had a fight coming up downtown. Also, it was Dixie who wanted to use the six ounce gloves, and they never wore headgear anyway.

    Things like that happen more often than any one suspects. Prew knew that, and there was no reason why he should feel guilty. He had known a wizard lightweight at Myer who also had a future. Until he went into a civilian gym half-tight one night and wanted to put them on. They used new gloves, and the man who tied them on forgot to cut the metal tips off the laces. Gloves often come untied. This was like the old kid game of crack the whip, a wrist flick drove the metal into the wizard lightweight’s eye like an arrow into a target. The fluid of his eye ran down over his cheek and he had to buy a glass one, and as a wizard lightweight he was through. Things like that just happen, every now and then.

    Prew was set, flat on his feet when he caught Dixie wide with this no more than ordinarily solid cross. Dixie just happened to be standing solid too. Maybe he had heard something. From the way he fell, dead weight, a falling ingot or a sack of meal dropped from the haymow that shudders the barn and bursts its own seams, Prew knew. Dixie lit square on his face and did not roll over. Fighters do not light on their faces any more than judo men. Prew jerked back his hand and stared at it, like a kid who touched the stove. Then he went downstairs to get the Doc.

    Dixie Wells was in a coma for a week but he finally came out of it. The only thing was that he was blind. The doctor at the Station Hospital said something about concussion and a fracture, a pressure on or injury to a nerve. Prew went up to see him twice but after the second time he could not go back. The second time they got to talking about fighting and Dixie cried. It was seeing the tears coming out of those eyes that could not see that made him stay away.

    Dixie did not hate him, nor was he bitter, he was just unhappy. As soon as he was able, he told Prew that last time, they would ship him back to the States, to an old soldier’s home, or to one of Hines’s VA hospitals which was even worse.

    Prew had seen a lot of those things happen. If you hang around any profession long enough you will learn about the things the brethren never talk about to the public. But just seeing them had been like it is with getting wounded, this man’s handless arms have no relation to yourself, it happens to the other guy, but never you.

    He felt a great deal like an amnesia case must feel, upon waking in some foreign land where he had never been and hears the language that he cannot understand, having only a vague, dream-haunted picture of how he ever got there. How came you here? he asks himself, among these strange outlandish people? but is afraid to listen to the answer himself gives him back.

    My god! he wondered. Are you a misfit? What happened to you does not bother any of these others. Why should you be so different? But fighting had never been his calling, bugling was his calling. For what reason then was he here, posing as a fighter?

    It would probably, after Dixie Wells, have been the same whether or not he had been haunted by his promise to his mother. But the old, ingenuous, Baptist-like promise was the clincher. Because the uninitiated boy had taken it, not like a Baptist, but literally.

    One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sport and gambled on it. He had never looked at it that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.

    Since the boxing season was already over he could have waited until next December before he told them his decision. He could have kept his mouth shut and rested on his hard-earned laurels, until the time came round again to prove his right to them. But he was not honest enough to do a thing like that. He was not honest enough to dupe them, when he himself refused to be their dupe. He had not the makings of that honest man to whom success comes naturally.

    At first when he told them why he was quitting they would not believe him. Then, later when they saw that it was true, they decided he had only been in the sport for what he could get out of it and did not love it like they did, and with righteous indignation had him busted. Then, still later, when he did not come around, they really did not understand it. They began to build him up then, they began to heckle him, they called him in and talked to him man to man, told him how good he was, explained what hope we have in you and are you going to let us down, enumerated what he owed the regiment, showed him how he ought to be ashamed. It was then they really began not to let him alone. And it was then he transferred.

    He transferred to this other regiment because it had the best Bugle Corps in the Lower Post. He did not have any trouble. As soon as they heard him play they got him transferred quick. They had really, truly, wanted a good bugler there.

    Chapter 3

    AT EIGHT O’CLOCK that same morning, when Prewitt was still packing, First Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden came out from the Orderly Room of G Company. The Orderly Room opened onto a well-waxed corridor that ran from the porch inside the quad to the Dayroom that was on the outside street. Warden stopped in the corridor doorway and leaned against the jamb, smoking, his hands jammed deep in his pockets, watching the Company lining up for drill with rifles and web belts in the dustless early morning. He stood a moment in the sun rays slanting in on him from the east, and feeling the coolness that was already seeping away from what would be a hot day again. The spring rainy season would be breaking soon now, but until it did it would be hot and parched in February, just as it was hot and parched in December, and then when the rainy season broke it would be very damp, and chilly in the night, and the saddlesoap would be out and fighting desperately against the mould on all the leather. He had just finished the Sickbook and the Morning Report, and sent them out and now he was smoking a cigaret in laziness, watching the Company go out because he was glad he did not go out, before he went into the Supply Room to work hard again, this time at work that was not his.

    He threw the cigaret in the flat iron pot pain’ted red and black, the Regimental colors, and watched the tail end of the Company move out the truck entrance and out of sight, then stepped down onto the slick concrete of the porch and walked along it to the Supply Room’s open door.

    Milton Anthony Warden was thirty-four years old. In the eight months he had been topkicker of G Company he had wrapped that outfit around his waist like a money belt and buttoned his shirt over it. At intervals he liked to remind himself of this proud fact. He was a veritable demon for work; he liked to remind himself of that, too. He had also pulled this slovenly organization out of the pitfalls of lax administration. In fact, when he thought about it, and he often did, he had never met a man who was as amazingly adept at anything he put his hand to as was Milton Anthony Warden.

    The monk in his cell, he taunted, entering the open one of the double doors. After the brilliant sunlight he had to pause and let his eyes adjust to the windowless Supply Room where two electric bulbs like burning tears dangling from the ends of chains increased the gloom. Ceiling-high cupboards, shelves and stacks of crates closed in heavily on the homemade desk where First-Fourth Leva, wry and bloodless as if the perpetual gloom of his castle had been transfused into his veins, sat, his thin nose greasy in a pool of light from the desk lamp, laboriously typing with two fingers.

    With a suit of sackcloth and a tub of ashes, said Warden, whom a fond mother had named for St Anthony, you could get yourself canonized tomorrow, Niccolo.

    Go to hell, said Leva, not looking up or stopping. Has that new transfer showed up yet?

    Sain’t Niccolo of Wahiawa, Warden plagued him. Dont you ever get tired of this life? I bet you got leather mould all over your balls.

    Has he showed? or not? Leva said. I got his papers ready.

    Not yet, Warden leaned his elbows on the counter, and for my dough I hope he never does.

    Why not? Leva asked, innocently. I hear he’s a damn good soldier.

    He’s a hardhead, Warden said, amiably. I know him. A goddam hardhead. Have you been over to Wahiawa to Big Sue’s lately? Her girls will fix that mould up for you. They got good saddlesoap, homemade.

    How can I? Leva said. On what you people pay me? I hear that this Prewitt is quite a fighter, he

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1
    pFad - Phonifier reborn

    Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

    Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


    Alternative Proxies:

    Alternative Proxy

    pFad Proxy

    pFad v3 Proxy

    pFad v4 Proxy