From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [151]
“Him too,” Angelo said. “A fine pal.”
“No, he’s all right.” When times changed, you accepted it. The days of Jeb Stuart and the plumed hats and the highwayman came riding, riding up to the old inn door; that was the Civil War, that wasnt now. The days when the Emperor was nourished through hardship and the long walk home from Moscow by the full hearted devotion of the Old Guard and the Young Guard who still loved him in defeat, that wasnt now either but even earlier, they didnt have gas warfare then, why, they didnt even kill the enemy, in those days, if they could help it. Times change is all, or maybe those were only stories, maybe only dreamed up afterwards, because they would have liked it to have happened that way. “Just because he use to eat breakfast with me in Choy’s, does that make him owe me something? The Chief’s a damned good man.”
“Sure,” Angelo said. “So was Pilate.”
“Oh, balls. Can it, will you? You dont understand it. Stick to things you understand.”
“Okay,” Angelo said and stuffed his cigaret pack and book of matches into a cartridge pocket. “We’ll need these. Jesus, my head. And that goddam Stark layin out down in the cooks’ room sleepin up a fog. We better be gettin outside?”
The guard bugle in the quad sounding the repeat answered him and from downstairs S/Sgt Dhom’s big voice boomed up through the screens, sounding very like a soldier.
“All right, up there, you men. Outside for drill. Everybody outside. Lets jerk that lead. Outside. Drill Call.”
“Lets go, my squad,” Chief Choate bellowed. “Grab your hats and grab your bats, this war is on.” He lumbered gracefully light footed down the stairs singing Drill Call in a natural basso that carried far, “Fall out for drill, like hell I will, I aint had no chow. I said Fall out for drill, you bet I will, the compny commander’s here now.”
“But he can sing,” Angelo said grudgingly.
All over the big squadroom men were moving, picking up their rifles and heading for the stairs.
“Well. Lets cut this cake,” Prew said, picking up the long wood, clean steel, solidness of his own.
From the third floor porch he could look down out over all of it, the whole ritual of drill call, the first call after the rainy season. He stopped to watch it. Angelo stopped too, waiting for him, indifferent to the picture.
It was a good picture though, a soldiering picture, like the Pall Mall ad (they pronounce that Pell Mell, dont they, like the bloody English peerage. I like Pall Mall better though, its American, even if it aint highclass) that he still had scotchtaped to the inside of his footlocker top, a fine picture, if you were a thirty year man. The quadrangle was alive with men in blue fatigues and the khaki almost faded white of belts and leggins and the sharp-brimmed olive drab campaign hats, pouring out the walks and lining up in their companies, very soldierly, the kind of soldierly that wins a war, he thought proudly, any war, but all those other companies were remote, even the bugle corps was remote he noticed, all faceless figures and remote, a background for our Company, where every face was a face he knew so that the sameness of uniform did not matter, even enhanced the individuality of the faces, each face with its special orbit that revolved around the central sun of Captain Holmes (dead star, he thought, but then maybe The Warden is our sun), asteroid faces, not big enough for a private orbit, too small to be classed as planets (like Dhom, or Champ Wilson, or Pop Karelsen, or Turp Thornhill, Jim O’Hayer, Isaac Bloom, Niccolo Leva—good names, he thought, good old American names—or like the new man Mallaux who was a coming featherweight, or Old Ike Galovitch—was Ike a planet? Ike was more like a third rate moon).
Looking down through the screens he could see the asteroid face of Readall Treadwell, that was one of them, Readall Treadwell (christened “Fatstuff” but who was no more fat than Man Mountain Dean was fat) who could hardly re