From Here to Eternity

by James Jones

  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 h
ad 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 painted 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 an
d 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?”

  “Saint 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 teased, “that he will be a fine addition to Dynamite’s menagerie.”

  “That he will be another worthless mouth for me to feed,” Warden said. “Did you hear that too? Why not? I’m used to it. Its too bad he had to wait till February, till the ending of the boxing season. Now he’ll have to wait till next December for his sergeantcy.”

  “You poor, poor, unhappy man,” Leva said, “that everybody takes advantage of.” He leaned back and waved his hand at the piles of equipment stacked everywhere and that he had been working on for three days now. “I’m glad I got a nice soft easy well-paid job.”

  “A goddam hardhead,” Warden lamented, grinning, “a worthless Kentuckian, but who will be a corporal in six weeks, but who will still be a worthless goddam hardhead.”

  “But a good bugler though,” Leva said. “I’ve heard him. A damn good bugler. The best bugler on the Post,” he said, grinning.

  Warden banged his fist down on the counter. “Then he should of stayed in the fucking Bugle Corps,” he shouted, “instead of fucking up my outfit.” He flung back the folding countertop, kicked open the plywood door and went inside the counter, threading through the piles of shirts and pants and leggins on the floor.