Free Burning the Days by James Salter Page B

schoolboy skits. Others were more serpentlike, and most companies had a table that was Siberia, ruled by a stern disciplinarian, in our case an ugly Greek first classman, dark and humorless. In the table assignments you made your way downward to it and there, among the incorrigibles, even felt a kind of pride.
    It was the year of Stalingrad. One Saturday evening following a football victory when we were eating at ease, a waiter I had come to know, an older man whose feet gave him trouble, showed me a clipping from his wallet. From an English newspaper, fragile and forgotten, it was the notice of his having been awarded, at Passchendaele, the Victoria Cross. Yes, he had gotten it, although more important at the time, he remembered quietly, was what he had gotten with it, a tin of cigarettes. He spoke with a slight accent; he was Belgian. How he had ended up, a civilian with worn heels waiting on tables, I forget. Above our heads, covering an entire wall, was a mural of the great captains of history and beneath, unnoticed, shuffled one of their own.
    ——
    The hour before dawn, everything silent, the air chill with the first bite of fall. The Area empty, the hallways still.
    The room was on the second floor at the head of the stairs, the white name cards on the door. I waited for a moment, listening, and cautiously turned the knob. Within it was dark, the windows barely distinguishable. At right angles, separated by desks, were the beds. Waters, a blue-jawed captain, the battalion commander, slept in one. Mills, a sergeant and squad leader, was in the other. I could not hear them breathing; I could hear nothing, the silence was complete. I was afraid to make a sound.
    “Sir!” I cried and shouting my name, went on, “Reporting as ordered, ten minutes before reveille!” A muffled voice said, “Don’t make so much noise.” It was Mills. His quilt moved higher against the cold and as an afterthought he muttered, “Move your chin in.”
    I stood in the blackness. Nothing, not the tick of a clock or the creaking of a radiator. The minutes had come to a stop. I might stand there forever, invisible and ignored, while they dreamed.
    It was Mills who had ordered me to come, for some misbehavior or other, every morning for a week. He was my squad leader but more than that was famous, known to everyone, as king of the goats.
    The first man in the class was celebrated; the second was not, nor any of the rest. It was only when you got to the end that a name became imperishable again, the last man, the goat, and it was with well-founded pride that a goat regarded himself. Custer had been last in his class, Grant, nearly. The goat was the Achilles of the unstudious. He was champion of the rear. In front of him went all the main body with its outstanding and also mediocre figures; behind him was nothing, oblivion.
    It was a triumph like any other, if you were not meant for theclassroom, to end up at the very bottom. Those with worse grades had gone under, those with only slightly better were lost in the crowd. Mills had a bathrobe covered with stars. Each one represented the passing of a turn-out examination, the last, all-or-nothing chance in a failed subject—his robe blazed with them. He had come to this naturally; his father had made a good run at it and been fifth from last in 1915. Mills knew the responsibilities of heritage. He had fended off the attacks of men of lesser distinction who nevertheless wanted to vault to renown. Blond and good-looking, he was easy to admire and far from ungifted. A well-executed retreat was said to be among the most difficult of all military operations, at which some commanders were adept. It meant passing close to the abyss, skirting disaster, and surviving by a hair. It was a special realm with its tension and desperate acts, men who would purposely spill ink over their drawing in engineering on the final day when nothing else, no possibility, was left.
    Mills was also a good athlete. He had