Melville Goodwin, USA

by John P. Marquand

  Melville Goodwin could not list offhand the places he had seen or the sequence of his duties. He had served in Hawaii, the Philippines, China and Panama. He could remember the temples and the blue robes of the Chinese in Tsingtao, but none of this mattered greatly in retrospect. It might be true that if you joined the army you saw something of the world, and you learned, naturally, about sanitation and the care of troops in the tropics and about insect pests and dysentery, but most of the time you were concerned with a way of life. Most of the time you simply saw the army. The army was a closed corporation, and you had to learn its amenities and how to get on with difficult superiors and how not to stick your neck out. The officers corps, Melville Goodwin said, was largely personality, and as time went on you either got the hang of it or you didn’t. He had heard it said by outsiders that army men gossiped like old women when they got together, always telling stories about Mike So-and-so or remembering something about Hank Somebody-else, but this was not all done to pass the time away. At any time there might be new orders and you might be thrown in with Hank and Mike; and then you might be very glad to know what they and their wives were like and whether or not they enjoyed playing Ping-pong and what they thought of a little Saturday’s drinking. Muriel, as time went on, kept notes about army people, and these were very useful, though personally he had never kept a note, finding that he could rely on his memory. You could name almost anyone right now who had served as an officer in the peacetime army, and Melville Goodwin could give you a word sketch of him. No matter how dull the duty was, there was usually someone you could discuss Clausewitz with, or some new idea, confidentially, without sticking your neck out.

  Then, too, there was nothing more solid than an army family. The boys had been a heavy expense at times, even with free doctoring, but he would not have missed having them for anything, and neither would Muriel. He could remember Robert in his play pen at Bailey waiting on the square of lawn in front of the veranda. Charley had come along later when they were out in Oregon just before they went to the Canal. He could remember Charley in his pen, too, on another square of lawn in front of another veranda. It was always great to get back to the quarters and see Muriel and the kids, especially after someone had been chewing on you. Also there were horses to ride and the tennis courts and the golf links and the Saturday nights at the club. It was not a bad life, the peacetime army, if you did not stick your neck out. A lot of it ran together now in his memory, but there was one thing you never forgot, and that was your first post. It was the beginning of your life more than any war, and he and Muriel started together at Bailey.

  They were just kids and they had hardly been anywhere together and it was Muriel’s idea that they should save on their travel allowance by going West on day coaches. The way you handled the various allowances that came to you over and above your base pay made a lot of difference in your living, and Muriel right from the start had a knack for squeezing out the last penny. In fact he often told Muriel that she knew more about finance than anyone in the Finance Department.

  It was late afternoon when they got off the train at Bedeville. They hitched a ride on an army truck to Bailey, Muriel in front with the driver while he sat out in the dust with a quartermaster sergeant who answered his questions about the post. They jolted along the road for about half an hour across miles of uninhabited prairie before they saw the reservation. He had to hand it to Muriel that she was not discouraged by being so many miles from anywhere, but nothing, when he came to think of it, ever discouraged Muriel. At headquarters there was a mixup because they had not heard that he was a married officer, and the news made all the difference. When the colonel saw Muriel, he immediately asked them to supper. By the time they were moved into half a house at the junior end of officers’ row, they were almost part of the family, and Mrs. “Silver” Crosby, the lieutenant colonel’s wife, showed them around herself and called Muriel “my dear” and said they must have a long talk about everything in the morning. Colonel Jones—Jupiter Jones—the post commander, who attended to the housekeeping but who did not conduct the school, was a bachelor just reaching the retirement age and he looked every year of it. Yet when he saw Muriel, he told her that he would have been married long ago if he had ever seen a girl like her.

  “Oh, Melville,” Muriel said when they were alone that night, “it’s like a story, isn’t it? And I just love Colonel Jones. He was so happy after dinner.”

  Melville, too, had observed that Colonel Jones was happier after dinner than before. He had been suffering from a cough before dinner and had excused himself several times to gargle his throat, and each time he returned, his cough had subsided and he was happier. The truth was that Colonel Jones was something of a problem, and the word was that everyone should cover up for the Old Man. You couldn’t help but love him when he began to talk about Indians and the old army. Kansas was a dry state, and the nation was going dry along with it, but there were still the patent medicines. You should have seen the Old Man’s cases of Old Home Elixir and other bracing medicines.

  “Young man,” he told Melville once, “the Civil War would have ended a year earlier if General Grant had known about Old Home.”

  He was always fond of Muriel. In fact when Muriel was having Robert, he would sometimes call on her himself with a bottle of Old Home.

  Characters like old Jupiter Jones amounted to little in one’s professional career, but you always came upon Joneses here and there, and it was useful to know how to handle them. There was one time, he remembered, when Colonel Jones began firing his automatic from his second-floor window because he believed that Arapaho Indians were skulking about the house. Melville was the one who got there first.

  “Sir,” he said, “please give that gun to me quick, there’s an Indian attacking Muriel.”

  “Take it, boy,” the colonel said. “I’ll handle the rest of them barehanded.”

  Stories like that would last for years. People in the service would hear some story about you even before they knew you, and Melville could tell a lot of good Jupiter Jones stories.

  Some of his oldest and dearest friends were among the younger officers who were on the post at Bailey with him. It was his good fortune, too, that he had been able to meet and converse with some of the ablest Infantry officers in the army who came there to the school. He could name them all now if he had to, but then what did names mean? He might, however, mention A. C. Grimshaw, and even civilians ought to remember Grimshaw’s name in World War II. He came to the school for two weeks once to deliver a series of lectures. They called him “Foghorn” Grimshaw because he spoke in a low, deferential voice.

  “Of course there may be a possibility that I’m wrong,” he used to say, but by God, Grimshaw was never wrong.

  Melville met him first over a chess game at the club, and he took one game off Grimshaw, too, which may have been why Foghorn took a liking to him. It was possibly due to knowing Grimshaw at Bailey as much as to his record in the War College that Melville got a staff job under “Tweaker” Beardsley in the middle thirties. It may have been a word from Grimshaw, too, as much as his record, that finally got Mel Goodwin into tanks and to North Africa.

  There had been quite a ripple of excitement when Foghorn Grimshaw had appeared at the school. The word had gone around that both “Black Jack” Pershing and Peyton March had said publicly that Grimshaw had one of the finest tactical and organizational brains in the service. He had been one of the youngest regimental commanders in the AEF, serving with the Ivy Division and then with Corps and finally at GHQ. There was nothing he had not read and nothing he could not do. He could even paint pictures. Put him anywhere, even in a soap factory, and he would have been running it in the end. When Mel Goodwin took a game off him at chess and played another to a draw, he did not realize at all what this might mean to him until he happened to be standing outside his quarters one day after retreat. Melville had just bathed and changed into fresh khaki and had gone out to look over the square of lawn that wa
s drying up, when Major Grimshaw rode by on horseback with an orderly. The school horse he was riding was a scrubby animal named Soby, with a cast-iron mouth and a bad habit of dancing sideways, but even Soby looked stylish with Grimshaw on him.

  “Why, hello, Goodwin,” he said. “Is this where you’re living?”

  “Yes, sir,” Melville said.

  “Have you a chessboard handy?”

  Melville was very lucky. He had bought a pegged-in chess set when he was in Cannes and he had it in the house.

  “It looks cool on that veranda,” the major said. “How about a game if you’ve the time?”

  It would have: been conspicuous and out of line to have invited anyone like Grimshaw to his quarters, but it was different now that the major was inviting himself.

  “Take my horse back to the stables please, Murphy,” the major said, “and thank you for a very pleasant ride.”

  He never forgot an enlisted man’s name, and when he spoke to enlisted personnel, you were never conscious of rank. Muriel was out on the veranda as soon as they were up the steps, and Melville was proud that she did not look surprised or flustered.

  “I’ve just made some lemonade,” she said, and then a while later, after they had finished a game, Muriel asked if Major Grimshaw would not like to stay to supper. They weren’t going to have anything but cold chicken and salad and iced tea, but then perhaps it was too hot to eat much.

  Right from the beginning Muriel was pretty good at things like that. He would not have dreamed of asking the major himself, and he nearly dropped through the floor when Muriel spoke of chicken, but Muriel had run out in back and had borrowed it from the Cromleys, and Muriel had also borrowed cigars. She had heard Mrs. Silver Crosby say that Major Grimshaw liked them, and she had run all the way up the row to borrow some from Mrs. Silver Crosby. She had also borrowed after-dinner coffee cups from the Buddingtons and had asked Colonel Jones if she could pick a few of his begonias.

  During supper they began talking about the war, and Major Grimshaw apologized once, saying he was afraid the talk might be boring to Muriel, but Muriel said she had to learn about those things, being an officer’s wife, and Melville simply would never tell her about them.

  “Melville knocked out two German machine gun nests,” Muriel said. “He threw pineapples into them—isn’t that what you call them, dear?”

  “Now, Muriel,” Melville said.

  “That’s just like Melville, Major Grimshaw,” Muriel went on. “He never wants to talk about himself. Melly, dear, aren’t you going to smoke your cigar?”

  He had only smoked one once, near Hill 302 in the Argonne. Still, he could not very well pretend he did not like cigars when Muriel put him in that position.

  “It was north of Château-Thierry, sir,” he said, “near a little town named Cerey, and Muriel shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “I’ve been through Cerey,” the major said.

  “Now, Melly,” Muriel said, “don’t change the subject.”

  He had to go on and tell about it after that, and as he did, he grew interested in the tactical problem and then the major began talking about tanks.

  “I wish we had a sandbox here,” the major said.

  “Melly,” Muriel said, “get a baking pan and get some sand from the Crosby baby’s sand pile.”

  It turned out to be quite an evening when they mixed a little water in the sand. There were some things that were chores, such as paper work and language and administration, but he always did have an instinctive enthusiasm for terrain. He began to forget who Grimshaw was as they moved from one subject to another, and he began criticizing things more freely than he should have. For instance, he did not believe that horses could go anywhere that motor vehicles couldn’t—if you had the right kind of vehicle. When Major Grimshaw left, it was almost midnight, and Melville did not realize how much he had been sounding off until the major looked at his wrist watch. Then he imagined Foghorn Grimshaw’s telling how he had spent an evening listening to a cocky kid lecturing on logistics and fire power. Muriel was the one who had started him off and after the major had left he told her it was pretty flat-footed. It did no good to have her say that the major enjoyed the evening or he would not have stayed so long.

  “You made me sound like a divisional commander,” he said, “right in front of Grimshaw.”

  They were standing alone in that tiny living room filled with all the furniture that no one else on the post wanted—because of course they were kids and almost anyone could rank them out of anything.

  “But, Melly dear,” Muriel said, there at Bailey at midnight, “you’re going to be a general someday.”

  The funny thing about it was that Muriel had hardly seen a general then, except at his graduation from the Point. It was a year later before she met one personally. Old “Blinders” Blake stopped in to inspect the school and there had been a review, of course, and the customary show on the range, and afterwards one of those receptions at the club. Come to think of it, Muriel had been pretty pregnant then. Wives on a post were always nervous about generals, just as though they might exercise seignoral rights, but Blinders Blake had not looked up to this sort of thing. He looked pretty sprung at the knees at that reception. Melville had worn his ribbons because Muriel had sent him home to get them. She was delighted when Blinders Blake had noticed his DSC.

  “Where did you get that, son?” he had asked.

  “Just outside of Cerey, sir,” he had answered.

  “And is this your wife, son?” the General asked. “It’s nice to know we’re going to have another soldier soon.”

  Things like that always got around. When “Tinhorn” Harry, who was the doctor then at the post hospital, gave Mel the news, he said that General Blake had called the number right. It was a boy. Muriel had told all the girls about the ribbons and about his trying to skip off to the reception without them. She had been right, Blinders Blake had noticed them, because generals were always checking up on medals, and it made a good story.

  In fact General Newhouse, when Mel served down at the Canal Zone, had actually heard the story.

  “Where did you get that, son?” he said to Melville. “I’m quoting General Blake.”

  It only went to show how word could get around.

  It may have been dull in peacetime, but there were a lot of good minds and good men in the service. They were the framework around which the armies of World War II were built. They invented the system of instruction that finally turned out divisions like cars on a production line. All those army schools paid off in the end when everybody, even privates in the rear rank, had to become teachers handling raw material. Yet it took guts to stay with the army in the twenties, when there was no sign of another war. Out in Honolulu perhaps there was a certain reality to the war games, because there was a possibility that the Japs might land there someday. The only trouble was that the navy would handle the Japs. The navy was always throwing its weight around, ready and willing to handle anything, particularly out in Honolulu—but then he was not going to criticize the navy, although he did know some pretty good stories about it.

  Sometimes he wished that army wives were not always watching and worrying about their men, but then there was nothing else much for them to worry about. Their futures were inseparable from their men’s futures, and they only had one horse to put their money on. When things went sour, you could not blame a lot of them for wishing they had married someone else. Maybe Muriel wished she had sometimes, but she very seldom showed it. Of course he could feel that she was watching him, but Muriel very seldom pushed him and needled him. She never showed the bitterness or competitive spirit of many other army wives. On the contrary, she was a good sport and she was popular. She was always helpful and sympathetic, and as time went on she was always kind to younger wives. There was never anyone like Muriel for speaking the army language and saying the right thing.

  When he got promotions she never looked complacent like some of the other wives a
nd when he got passed over for something good, she did not complain. She backed him up the one time that he disobeyed an order and came close to a court-martial. It happened at the Fort Jellison Demolition School when there had been a problem of blowing up a bridge. A Captain Burdock was the instructor, and Melville had commanded the detail that had placed the explosives. When the thing had not gone off, Burdock had ordered him to remove the charge immediately, and he had refused, because of post regulations, to risk the men. He had ended up under arrest in quarters. He still remembered Muriel’s face when he told her why he had come home early, and he could only tell her that he was right according to the book. The charge should have been left for two hours before it was touched.

  “Where’s the book with it in it?” Muriel asked. “I guess I’d better go out and see somebody.”

  It was one of the few times they had seriously quarreled. He had told her that this was his problem and not hers—but he never forgot that she was right behind him.