They were realizing increasingly that they had a mission to perform and that they, too, were part of the Team. Their mission was to tell smug, self-satisfied and ignorant civilians at home what war was really like, civilians engrossed in their petty selfishnesses who had never seen a dead body upon a battlefield or had never heard a gun go off. True, our group had not seen a dead body yet, but they had seen the Omaha beachhead. Now that they were in Paris and soon to go forward to study the ruins of Aachen, they might encounter a dead body at any moment. They might even be in an air raid and be dead bodies themselves, killed in a noble cause. Since most of the group had been engaged at least in the fringes of creative literature, they possessed the vivid imagination that enabled them both to appreciate and exaggerate. Some of them, in fact, were discovering latent powers of leadership and, in the few leisure moments allowed them, were beginning to indulge in military critiques. Being guests of the army, they were allowed to buy uniforms without insignia if they wished, and it was even suggested that the girls should wear trousers when they got to Aachen. They were very, very tired. They were making their own small sacrifices. They were having a wonderful time.
As Dottie Peale expressed it, the army couldn’t have been sweeter, and sometimes the army was so sweet that it almost made her want to cry. I must say I was sometimes surprised that the army was so sweet to them, not that this made me lachrymose, since it was my business to be sweet to them myself. Looking back, I believe that the army was really impressed and bewildered by our party, because no army had ever seen anything just like it, even from a distance. No one knew, except in the vaguest way, who any of our people were, but officers, old and young, always seemed convinced that this ignorance was their loss and that it betrayed a regrettable lack of personal cultivation. They were always saying—even the generals, when they asked me in subdued voices just who these people were and what they had written—that they did not have much time to read—and somehow those pocketbooks issued by the army seldom included the works of these particular Very Important People. Finally the brass even began to respect me, the mere cicerone of a traveling circus, because I could tell them what it was my charges did back there in the States. Thus I myself began to live in reflected glory by the time we got to Paris. I, too, was almost a man of letters.
I do not recall who in our party wanted to hear all about the Battle of the Bulge. This affair was still a sensitive subject in some quarters, since it was feared that the American public had gained the impression, especially after some acid comments by old General Peyton March, the World War I Chief of Staff, that this German offensive may have come to our leaders as a nasty surprise. It obviously must have seemed very important to somebody that these Very Important People, who had so much influence in civilian life, should be handed the real truth. At any rate, I was very much surprised on our second evening in Paris to be summoned by a very high-ranking officer and told that arrangements were being made to give my whole group a definitive lecture on the Battle of the Bulge. This was to be a confidential talk, and intelligence officers were already collecting the material, and efforts were being made to locate some competent general officer to deliver the address. I was to have my whole party at the place named at three o’clock. The day’s schedule would be changed accordingly, and transportation would be supplied to take the party from the Ritz. I knew that this idea would not be well received by my charges, since they were pretty tired and had been promised a trip the next afternoon to Versailles, but it was not for me to argue.
The group found itself in a cold and bare room at one of the headquarters buildings precisely at the hour named. The lecture being confidential, there was a guard at the door to check credentials, which gave an atmosphere of humorless melodrama. Collapsible chairs were arranged as in a university classroom. There was a lecturer’s platform, and there were specially prepared maps, covered by a drawstring curtain, with two officers to shift them. A worried-looking lieutenant colonel from Intelligence directed all the doors closed after asking me in a low voice whether everyone had been checked in, and I could see from the faces of our group that they understood that they had finally reached an inner sanctum. This was one of those strictly military occasions when everyone concerned had a word to say, and I had been ordered to make the first remarks. It was amazing how much trips like these had taught me about extemporaneous addresses, and thus I was able to step onto the platform grimly and confidently and to speak in that voice which Gilbert Frary had yet to discover.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “we are now in what is known as ‘a guarded room.’ It is here that the day-to-day situation at the Front is explained to suitably cleared personnel. I am asked to emphasize to you particularly that all you may see and hear during this hour is of a Confidential nature, which means that it is only just below the category of Secret. For this reason you are asked to take no notes. I believe that is all I was ordered to explain, isn’t it, Colonel?”
“Yes, Major Skelton,” the colonel said. “Thank you, Major Skelton.”
I stepped off the platform, taking a place beside Dottie Peale on one of the uncomfortable folding metal chairs with which these rooms were always furnished, and the lieutenant colonel followed me on the platform.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “in arranging this er—little show, which everyone hopes you will enjoy, we are fortunate in having with us a divisional commander who took an active part in this battle and who has been kind enough to agree to outline it to you personally.” He paused and cleared his throat and nodded to a sergeant in battle dress, who stood by a door next the platform. “All right, Sergeant,” the colonel said, “if the General is ready for us.”
The sergeant opened the door with a snappy one-two movement and then stood at attention. As someone involved in such arrangements had said, if you are going to do a thing, you might as well do it right. The army couldn’t have been sweeter, and it was quite a—er—little show, with everything ticking according to plan. As the door opened, a two-star general, who must have been waiting in the corridor, strode in, deliberately, calmly, and stepped solidly onto the platform.
It was General Goodwin, whom I recognized immediately. He was a man of about fifty, of medium height, and his uniform was smartly pressed, even though its elbows and his ribbons looked well worn. His step was firm but at the same time light and co-ordinated. His sandy-gray hair was freshly barbered in a crew cut. His eyebrows were heavy, and the lines around his mouth were as correct as the creases in his trousers. His class ring immediately suggested West Point, not that a ring was necessary. He had an aloof but agreeable look which you might have called boyish, in that it made you think he had been a nice boy once, but he was no longer a boy. He was a two-star general, and not a staff general either. You could be sure of this without being able to explain, why. He looked very much as I had seen him at the front at Saint-Lô, reliable and competent.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the lieutenant colonel said, “this is Major General Melville Goodwin, commanding the armored division known as the Silver Leaf Division, which saw action in the Battle of the Bulge.”
There was a faint ripple of attention but no applause. After all, it was a confidential meeting. The General looked thoughtfully at the map curtain flanked by the two lieutenants.
“Have you got a pointer here?” He spoke gently and agreeably like a mechanic asking for a monkey wrench. The lieutenants and the lieutenant colonel scurried about the platform, searching with a galvanized sort of consternation, but somehow the pointer that always accompanied maps had disappeared.
The General raised his voice only slightly.
“There ought to be one around,” he said, “one of those things you point places out with, Colonel. I always feel more at home when I have a stick in my hand.” He smiled in a very friendly way at the Very Important People, and they tittered, realizing at once that the General was an affable man.
“Well, go ahead and find one.” His voice was a shade lou
der. “Run out and get one, Sergeant, a ruler or a cane or something. And now while we’re waiting, I might begin to tell you the whole secret of how to win a fight, now that we’re going to talk about a fight in a minute. This little ruckus”—General Goodwin strode toward the front of the platform and looked as though he were enjoying himself—“that we found ourselves in around Christmas time has all the principles of any other engagement, and the secret of winning a fight has been, I think, very well described by an old fellow who was a Confederate general in the Civil War. Mind you, I don’t call it the War Between the States, because my grandpappy fought in the Union Army.”
The General paused and smiled again in a friendly way, and I knew what was coming. It would inevitably be the good old chestnut that invariably flashed before the military mind.
“The party’s name was General Forrest, but maybe you know of him, because they tell me that you are all high-ranking writers here, though I didn’t know we had so many lovely lady writers.” I saw the General smile and I saw that he was looking approvingly at Dottie Peale. “Now this General Forrest was an uneducated old fellow. He didn’t go to the Point like General Lee, but he knew about war, and this is what he said in his simple way, and the principles of war are pretty simple, as you know if you’ve read Napoleon or Clausewitz, not that I’m giving a literary talk to literary people. This General Forrest said, the principle of winning a fight is, and I quote, to git thar fastest with the mostest men. Well, in this Christmas time ruckus we didn’t git thar fustest because the Jerries were attacking, but we did end up with the mostest and we rubbed their noses.”
The General rubbed his hands together. The aphorism of General Forrest was successfully off his chest. The sergeant was back with a pointer.
“Well, sons,” he said to the lieutenants, “what are you waiting for? Pull back those curtains if they work and let’s take a look at the map. You people must excuse me if I run right on informally. I’m not a public speaker.”
The lieutenants drew aside the curtain. Major General Melville Goodwin was squaring up to his task. The preliminaries were over.
“Sid,” Dottie Peale whispered, “he couldn’t be sweeter.”
As far as I knew, Public Relations in the European Theater of Operations had never been called upon to “humanize” Major General Melville Goodwin—a term used quite without irony in certain quarters when it became advisable to seek out homely and endearing qualities in the character of a general officer for the purpose of making him better understood and more beloved by the American public. Thus in spite of our previous brief acquaintance, I had never endowed the General in my own mind with any particular individuality. Until that afternoon he had been for me more of a species than a person, and when one was in uniform oneself, sharing the symbolism of rank, it was generally advisable to consider higher ranking officers in this manner. Then when they started pushing you about, instead of disliking them as people, you could blame their actions on a great system far beyond the control of any individual.
Up there on the platform General Goodwin was true to his species. His use of the old chestnut, the “git thar fustest” gambit, was reassuringly characteristic, and more suitable for a major general than a brigadier. His whole talk had what you might term a two-star competency, good and solid, without trespassing on the realms of three-star brilliance. His explanations of mobility and logistics were concise and unclouded, because there could be no embarrassed stumblings in a major general’s talk. Those people had been trained since they were shavetails to marshal facts and present them to increasingly critical groups. Everyone was always giving a talk about something in the army.
Personally I had developed a healthy imperviousness to tear-jerking orators and would-be humorists and melodramatists. The easiest to take were the plain talkers, and the General was good and plain. As I sat there wishing to goodness that I were in some cafe near the Luxembourg Gardens, I began, in spite of myself, to think of him as an individual. The neat threadbare quality of his uniform indicated a sort of self-respect not acquired by looking in a mirror. He did not try, like so many of his kind, to project his personality or to exhibit the dynamics of leadership. He had learned somehow that this sort of thing was unnecessary, and this was not always so with major generals, a lot of whom had never held a rank above lieutenant colonel before the beginning of the war. He did not appear to have himself on his mind, although he was addressing Very Important People, an experience which often made the army make an ass of itself. He spoke sensibly, not once drawing on personal reminiscence or saying that the American soldier is the greatest soldier in the world. Without being especially impressed, I began to wonder what there might be behind this façade, where he had come from, and what he might be like if one simply met him without the chain of command interfering—but then this was inconceivable.
In the middle of a sentence General Goodwin’s talk came to a full stop, which startled me because I had not believed that a faint bustling sound in the rear of the room would have disturbed him, but when I turned to look, I saw that he should have paused. A three-star general had joined us, the one who had in fact initiated the whole show. He was an elderly-looking man with horn-rimmed glasses, and he stood watching like a proud headmaster approving of one of his teachers’ efforts.
“I was just explaining the position of the Hundred and First Airborne, sir,” General Goodwin said.
The visitor gestured to a sergeant to bring him a chair.
“Go right ahead, Mel,” he said, “don’t mind me. I am sorry I wasn’t here at the beginning—but now that I’ve interrupted I might make one slight contribution to this discussion. War is always war, ladies and gentlemen. The concept is always the same in spite of modern weapons, and that concept was ably expressed by a Confederate officer in the Civil War named Forrest. He said it was all a question of ‘gittin’ thar fastest with the mostest men.’”
It was an inspiration, almost, to observe General Goodwin’s face, for he seemed to have heard these remarks for the first time, and he gave them a subordinate’s prompt approval.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Well, go ahead, Mel, and don’t mind me,” the Lieutenant General said, and he sat down.
“Yes, sir,” General Goodwin answered. “Well, up here is the position of the Hundred and First Airborne.…”
Years of discipline and the instinctive respect for rank and for the flag gave that little interchange a quality all its own, and aspects that might amuse a civilian were utterly lost on those two officers. Perhaps at some secluded meeting, in a poker game perhaps, Mel Goodwin would have called his visitor Dick or Charlie, since sometime in the course of their careers they must have been thrown closely together. Perhaps they had played polo once or had swum together on some Hawaiian beach. They were obviously friends, because of the word “Mel,” but here rank kept General Goodwin in his place. He had picked up his chain of thought again, exactly where he had dropped it, and the Battle of the Bulge went on, down to its triumphant conclusion.
“Now that’s about all I have to say on the subject,” General Goodwin finally said. “But in closing, I don’t want anyone here to think that there is anything definitive about these statements. All the reports aren’t in yet. It will take years to evaluate them. A confusion called the fog of battle always settles over any of these ruckuses and somehow just never lifts. There’s still a fog over the Battle of Gettysburg.” He coughed apologetically. “Don’t you agree with me, sir?”
It was very nicely done. He had tossed the ball over to his superior, exactly as he should have, and now his superior could carry it or toss it back, and the Lieutenant General tossed it.
“That’s quite correct,” he said. “You people would be surprised at the study any battle involves, but General Goodwin is carrying the ball for us. Go ahead, Mel.”
It was all very nicely done. The Very Important People were basking in the relaxed confidences of the two military men.
“Well, sir,�
�� General Goodwin said, “maybe I’d better put the ball down now.” He smiled, and his youth came back to him when he smiled. “I don’t want to stick my neck out with one of my bosses listening.” There were appreciative chuckles from the Very Important People. “It’s been a great pleasure talking to you like this, off the record, and I hope I haven’t put you all to sleep. Now maybe we’d better start thinking how we’re going to cross the Rhine. Of course we’re going to cross it. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.”
There was a gentle scraping of chairs. Then someone clapped timidly, since it might not be right to applaud a confidential talk, but finally everybody clapped until the Lieutenant General’s voice rose above the applause.
Melville Goodwin, USA Page 8
