The Emperor's General

by James Webb

  He had a knack for luring visitors into certain questions and then springing his own verbal ambush. He was behind his own schedule for retaking Leyte, but when the question came up he would stiffen with a form of irate majesty. “I could retake Leyte in two weeks,” he would assure his questioners. “But I have too great a responsibility to the mothers and wives in America to do that to their men. I will not take by sacrifice what I can achieve by strategy!”

  Despite our successes MacArthur seemed lonely, given to fits, often deeply depressed. During the Leyte campaign Congress awarded him a fifth star, making him one of only a handful ever to reach that rank, and not even that seemed to cheer him. Something else was bothering him, something deeply personal, beyond the ability of his uncanny acting talents to conceal. I knew instinctively what it was, though I would never have dared to speak this truth even to another staff member: having returned to Leyte, the General was indeed looking into the distant mirror of his youth. And there was a sense of loss in this four-decade journey that had troubled him.

  Slowly, despite my admiration and my fear, a part of me had come to pity Douglas MacArthur. Gaggles of sycophants crowded around him, competing for his graces. Some sought to flatter him and to copy his mannerisms. Most looked to him for solutions. But secretly they envied him his eminence and in private loved to trash the very vanity that ineluctably propelled his greatness.

  And some of it he brought upon himself. There is a tragedy that comes with MacArthur’s kind of fame. When one measures a life by the enemies he has conquered rather than the friends he has made, it becomes important never to run out of battles. For what then is peace but a debilitating emptiness?

  But that was not all of it. What was it, I kept asking myself, that this great man so deeply wished for as he stared out from the veranda of the Price mansion at the mountains and ridges that had informed his youth? And then one night in early November I decided that I knew.

  Just after dinner I was summoned outside the mansion by a military policeman who told me a young Filipino man wanted to talk to the General. I greeted the young man fifty yards down the road, where he waited in front of a nearby house. Shafts of light from the house illuminated a clear-eyed, serious face. I could tell that he was about my age, tight-skinned and muscular, with the close-cropped hair of a disciplined guerrilla fighter. Behind him, under the fragrant purple blossoms of a frangipani tree, an older woman watched us expectantly. She was wearing a beautiful yellow dress. The dress seemed to shimmer from the distant light like a low, reflected moon. I could not take my eyes off of it. It seemed incongruous, too beautiful and elegant for the rain and mud and war that then surrounded us.

  The young man’s eyes grabbed mine unblinkingly, and he squared his body before me, clearly regarding me as an equal. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Jay Marsh,” I said. “I work for the General.”

  “How do I know that?”

  His bluntness both impressed and offended me. I towered over him, and my rank was clearly visible on my uniform, even in the dim light. But neither my size nor my having just left the inside of the General’s personal residence fazed him. It finally occurred to me that he was on a mission, and that he would lose great face if he failed.

  “I guess you’ll just have to trust me on it,” I finally answered.

  He thought about that for a moment, looking at me and then back at the woman underneath the frangipani tree. Finally she nodded to him, an approval.

  “All right,” he said. And then he caught himself. “Does MacArthur trust you?”

  “So far. I’m still here, aren’t I?”

  He continued to stare seriously at me, apparently not getting my little joke. For it was common knowledge on MacArthur’s staff that if the General lost his trust in a junior officer, a day would not pass before the unlucky subaltern was out in the mud, chomping on K rations, slapping away mosquitoes, and waiting to be shot. Finally I began walking toward the woman, sensing that she was in control.

  “Let’s put it this way,” I said as the young man walked alongside me. “You’re not going to do any better than me, so you can either talk to me or go back where you came from.”

  She moved toward us as we walked, and soon the three of us were gathered at the edge of the sweet-blossomed tree. Her hair was pulled back behind her face. She wore small gold loops of earrings. She was fair-skinned and oval-faced, of mixed blood, probably from some Spanish priest or soldier of long ago, as were so many in these islands. She had a strong face and a certainty in her eyes that made me think of the great women of history who had suffered and endured and somehow prevailed. She seemed nearly as old as MacArthur, but like him she had held her age well. And she was not in the least bit afraid.

  “This is my nephew Ponce,” she said, as if trying to excuse his rudeness. “He is a very famous fighter here and on Samar. And you must not be offended by him, he is sometimes too loyal.”

  “This is my aunt,” said Ponce, returning the favor. “Her name is Consuelo Trani. MacArthur wants to see her.”

  “How do I know this?” I asked.

  She smiled slowly. “Maybe you should ask Douglas.”

  Douglas, I thought, walking alone toward the mansion. She calls him Douglas? No one except for presidents and royalty, not even his wife, called MacArthur “Douglas,” at least not anymore.

  He was on the veranda, pacing slowly, smoking his pipe and looking out toward the sea. That afternoon five reporters, including the publisher of the New York Times, had visited him. Waving at the ever-present maps, he had walked them through the Philippines campaign in intricate detail. Then he had surprised them by holding forth grandly on the future of the war with Japan and Germany and of the growing threat of the Soviet Union once the war was finished. He had stunned them by announcing that the key to Asian stability after the war would be a peaceful and prosperous Japan and that only a strong relationship between Japan and the United States would limit Soviet expansion. He had teased them by saying he already was designing a seven-point program to be put into place once Japan was defeated. Even here, in the wilderness of Leyte where he had first served as a young lieutenant, he could see beyond the carnage and predict where next his country would be threatened.

  As I had escorted the men out of his room one reporter had blurted out to another, almost without thinking, “He is the most arrogant man I have ever met in my life.”

  “Yes,” observed the other. “And the most brilliant.”

  They were common observations, MacArthur’s yin and yang. And yet now he stood alone on the veranda, far from the power centers where such subjects were being debated, his very arrogance and brilliance having brought him here to this jungled, isolated epicenter of his own personal returning. He seemed oddly peaceful, though, so lost in thought that he did not even hear my approach.

  “General?” I spoke quietly, as if awakening him from sleep. I was still uncertain if I should bother him, and embarrassed at my unnoticed arrival.

  “Yes, Jay?” he answered, having recognized my voice without even turning to see me.

  “There’s someone here to see you, sir. Her name is Consuelo Trani.”

  Far behind us on the other side of the mountains we could hear the muffled booms and cracks of a distant battle. More soldiers were dying in the mud, and tomorrow more bodies would be trucked in from the front lines to be buried in the new cemetery we had started just down the road. Out in the bay a flight of navy planes droned by. MacArthur continued to watch the sea, silently puffing on his pipe. I began to wonder if he had heard me. Then finally he spoke.

  “An old friend,” he said. And then he turned to me, as if catching himself and searching for something more officious. “From a very good family, by the way. Her father was helpful to me after the massacre at Balang Higa.” He saw that I had no memory of Balang Higa and smiled. “Forty years ago, Jay. In another life. Where is she?”

  “I’ll get her, sir.”

  As she stepped o
nto the veranda he greeted her with a pained and awkward stare, not even speaking. In her eyes I could see the pride that comes from a possessive, long-held certainty, as if he had fulfilled his destiny just for her. Ponce and I were both too young to understand the full dimensions of their silent greeting and too foreign to each other even to converse in depth. But it took neither age nor an interpreter to know that something powerful and yet hopeless was passing between them as MacArthur took Consuelo’s hand and welcomed her to his temporary home.

  As if by silent command, Ponce and I left them on the veranda and walked together back toward the road in front of the mansion. Ponce glanced behind his shoulder as we walked, as if he might somehow still see them. Then he stared up into my face.

  “He wrote her many letters,” he said. “I have read them.”

  I remained silent, trudging uncomfortably toward the road. In truth, I preferred to keep my vision of MacArthur simple and military. I did not want to know any more of what Ponce so clearly wanted to share with me.

  “His mother would not let them marry,” said Ponce, still searching my face for some reaction. “What future would an American officer have, married to a Filipina? Tell me that. They would think he had lost his mind. And maybe he would want to run for president. How could he do that with a Filipina wife? What do you think of that?”

  MacArthur with a Filipina wife? I did not know what to think of that. Because Ponce was right. In the army they would have talked quietly about him in sad murmurs, noting that the brilliant young officer had irretrievably “gone Asian.” He would never have been promoted to general, much less made army chief of staff. And so he would never have become MacArthur. I dismissed the thought, pulling out a cigarette from my breast pocket and lighting it as we walked.

  “Lucky Strikes,” said Ponce, pointing to my cigarette pack as we continued to walk. “Lucky Strike Green has gone to war, isn’t that what they say? I read it in Life magazine. An advertisement. But that was two years ago. Maybe three. Do they still say that? May I have one?”

  I gave him mine and lit another. We had reached the road. On the far side of the mountains the battle had begun again. Ponce inhaled deeply, savoring the rich tobacco flavor of an American cigarette. “I am not lying,” he finally said. “We are of a good family.”

  “The General told me that,” I answered.

  “So you know?”

  “No,” I said, not only uncomfortable with what he had told me but suddenly fearful that MacArthur might be angered or even threatened by my very knowledge. “I only know what the General tells me, and that is all he told me.”

  “She never married, you know. She never will. That is the way of our people, at least here in the Visayas. He took her. She is his.”

  “He is married,” I finally replied. “He’s been married twice.”

  “Married or never married, it doesn’t matter,” said Ponce, his eyes resting protectively on the distant, darkened veranda. “Did you know the Spanish were here for three hundred years? Yes, I think you must know that. And the priests could never marry. But if a priest took one of our women and he loved her and she loved him, then she was his. No one else’s, do you understand? Who could take a priest’s lover for his wife? What would God think? MacArthur came and he was more powerful than a priest. His father was governor general! So who would she marry after she was with MacArthur? She has loved him for forty years. She will always love him. It is the way of our people. To the last breath. To the last drop of blood. It is how we fight—waray waray. And how we love.”

  “I don’t understand that,” I said.

  “You don’t have to,” said Ponce, almost absently. “It’s not your burden.” In the house across the street I could see people watching us from the now-darkened porch. I found myself wondering if they also were listening. “Anyway,” said Ponce, “He did not bring his wife.”

  “She’s in Australia,” I said. “We’re fighting a war here.”

  “He will bring her to Manila, even if there’s fighting,” continued Ponce, as if presenting evidence. “My aunt is here in a piña dress, even though there’s fighting.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything.”

  “I don’t have to prove anything,” said Ponce, giving me a suddenly sly look. “Who are you? Why are you here at the headquarters in Tacloban instead of fighting in the jungle?”

  “Because MacArthur trusts me.”

  “So far,” he answered, now winking to show he had indeed gotten the import of my earlier joke.

  “So far,” I agreed. I understood his unspoken point and resolved to keep my mouth shut about Ponce and Consuelo and all the rest of it. At the same time I began to wonder if this incident might be my undoing simply because I had observed it.

  Ponce stood silent for a moment, then looked over at my breast pocket. “May I have another cigarette?” I handed him the full pack of Lucky Strikes. He took only one and abruptly forced the pack back into my hands, his urgency telling me I had threatened his pride. He cupped his hands around the cigarette as I struck my lighter for him, as if he were still in the jungle and was worrying about snipers. Then he pulled away, looking again toward the veranda.

  “MacArthur came back here for her.” He spoke with a certainty that I knew had come from many conversations, as if it were now common knowledge in the islands.

  “I told you, Ponce, he’s married.”

  “Not to marry her. Not to keep her.” Now he seemed irritated, as if I were too naive to understand. “To honor her. We all know that.”

  “He came here to win the war.”

  “I know,” said Ponce, dragging on the cigarette and blowing smoke toward the Price mansion. “He is almost like Christ to us.”

  He paused, considering my face as if looking for signs of intelligence, then again looked away. “Six thousand islands in our country and he chose Leyte. Mindanao? No. Luzon? Not yet. Leyte. The whole American army, right here. To win the war. And also to honor my aunt. He will always love her but he can never have her. So this was his gift, that he came back to liberate her first.”

  It somehow embarrassed me to hear Ponce say those words, but I also found myself believing that they might be true. Standing on the road with Ponce I tried to imagine MacArthur at twenty-three, the same age as I myself at that moment, posted from the unforgiving social bridle of West Point to this jungled yet seductive outpost, for the first time away from an ever-dominant mother and falling in love with this still-beautiful mestiza who was now visiting alone with him on the back veranda of the Price mansion. Real love. Not the society-page, wear-the-right-furs love of his first wife, whom he did not marry until age forty-two and who shortly thereafter humiliated him with her blatant trysts and wanderings. Not the furtive, almost pornographic love of the Eurasian movie actress he kept in downtown Washington while he was army chief of staff, providing her with a limousine and dressing her in black-lace lingerie in her secret apartment while he lived with his mother at Fort Myer. Not the mature, dinner-hosting, “Love, MacArthur” love he surely felt for Jean, whom he married at fifty-seven after his mother had died in Manila.

  Real love. Was this another secret that America’s greatest living actor kept hidden as he earnestly portrayed not the MacArthur who lived but the MacArthur he wanted history to remember?

  Had this chiseled, preening Hannibal ever felt the kind of love that left him gasping but certain as he pressed her hard against him in the sultry darkness while the gentle wind blew in from the sea and caressed their joined and naked bodies, carrying with it the warm perfume of plumeria and the glorious night-blooming jasmine? Had he awakened in her arms when the sky began to blue and the roosters crowed and the water bulls began to stir, then walked happy and fulfilled in dawn’s light to the village well, soaping and laughing as he towered above yapping puppies and the stares of delighted children? Did he bring back two buckets of fresh water so that she might wash herself and then make him breakfast? Had they fed each other jackfruit and macapuno
and sweet golden papayas, laughing as the juice dripped from their chins onto their naked chests, all the while lost inside each other’s eyes, wanting only to fall again into each other’s arms? When he was with her did she make him feel as though there were no other place but Leyte and Samar?

  That kind of love. The kind that opened up to him a world both wonderful and forbidden. The kind that would in the end force him to choose between mother and lover, between the destiny he owed his father and lost brothers and the happiness he might dare to ask for himself. The kind of love, once lost, that made it impossible ever really to love again.

  At that moment I could see MacArthur swept along by that kind of love and then harshly pulled away from it by his mother—or who knows, perhaps even pushed away by a wiser and somehow more knowing Consuelo Trani—so that after it was lost, there was only a career to be made and a destiny to be pursued. And yet never losing that passion when he thought of her, indeed never allowed to see it ripen into the mundane rhythms of the decades, so that this love grew all the more powerful and exotic because he knew he could never really have it. So that in the end the final gesture to the love he was never allowed to keep and the life he had chosen not to live was to bring his army back to Leyte, freeing Consuelo and her family first, and in that way assuring her that what the two of them had been forced to give up somehow was for a purpose, that as they slid toward their dotage on separate islands or continents there had been meaning in their sacrifice.