To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [123]
He put both hands softly, silently on the keyboard. He did not play the piano, had no idea how to make the music, something that came so naturally to DeLaage. The keys were chipped and yellowed, and he studied them for a long moment, felt something cold and silent open up inside of him, something that had been shut down for a very long time. As the men of the escadrille had fallen away, death had become more than commonplace, it had become expected. But he remembered that one awful day, nearly three years before, when death had been a crushing devastating shock. In 1914, the war still seemed unreal to him, some kind of screaming match between braying jackasses, posturing fools who shouted down from the heights of palace walls. And then, Marc Pourpe had died. Lufbery had known grief then, the kind of paralyzing sadness that he had never known before. It had changed him, as it had changed every infantryman in this war. The mind took control, showed you how to ignore the pain, gather the grief, and put it all away. That’s the real survival, he thought. You lock it all away in that dark place, and if you are fortunate, you do not return. He pressed a key on the piano, the silence of the room shattered by the sound. The single note echoed in his mind, faded slowly, jarring the dark place, stirring the pain. I never thought we would lose you, Lieutenant. You were a kind soul. He couldn’t see the keys now, lowered his face gently down on his hands, and began to cry.
WASHINGTON, D.C.—MAY 24, 1917
HE HAD LAID THE LETTER ON TOP OF THE PILE, STARED AT IT FOR a long moment, picked it up again. He could not just toss it aside, treating it as just another piece of paper from yet another earnest old soldier, hoping to find his last bit of glory by sailing to France. He scanned the letter again, looked now to the bottom, read the postscript.
P.S. If I were physically fit, instead of old and heavy and stiff, I should myself ask to go under you in any capacity down to and including a sergeant; but at my age, and condition, I suppose that I could not do work you would consider worthwhile in the fighting line (my only line) in a lower grade than brigade commander.
The letters were finding him now every day, requests for assignment, some from officers who had been retired for years. To so many, the request was more of a demand, that Pershing would somehow owe it to those who had given their service once before, some in the Spanish-American War, others simply by their longevity in the army. The requests shared one characteristic, beyond each man’s desire to serve. Not one of them seemed willing to accept any position that did not involve command, usually at a general’s level, and, of course, every one of them expected to lead troops in the field of combat. He read the postscript again, the writer acknowledging he was too old for field work, and so would naturally expect command. He had begun to lose patience with this type of request, as though each man believed that command was simply a reward, that it carried no expectation of any real work, nothing physically demanding. It was exactly the sort