It is the sounds I remember, the iron orchestra, the feet on the stairways, the clanging bells, the shouting, cries of Yes, No, I do not know, sir! the clatter of sixty or seventy rifle butts as they came down on the pavement at nearly the same time. Life was anxious minutes, running everywhere, scrambling to formations. Among the things I knew nothing of were drill and the manual of arms. Many of the other new cadets, from tin schools, as they called them, or the National Guard, knew all that and even the doggerel that had to be memorized, answers to trivial questions, dictums dating back to the Mexican War. How many gallons of water were in the reservoir, how many names on Battle Monument, what had Schofield said, what was the definition of leather? These had to be rattled off word for word.
All was tradition, the language, the gray woolen cloth, the high black collars of the dress coats, the starched white pants that you got into standing on a chair. Always in summer the Corps had lived in tents out on the Plain, under canvas, with duckboard streets — Summer Camp with its fraternal snapshots and first classmen lounging against tent poles; this was among the few things that had disappeared. There was the honor system, about which we heard from the very beginning, which belonged to the cadets rather than to the authorities and had as its most severe punishment “silencing.” Someone who was guilty of a violation and refused to resign could be silenced, never spoken to by his classmates except officially for the rest of his life. He was made to room by himself, and one of the few acknowledgments of his existence was at a dance — if he appeared everyone walked from the floor, leaving him, the girl, and the orchestra all alone. Even his pleasures were quarantined.
West Point was a keep of tradition and its name was a hallmark. It drew honest, Protestant, often rural, and largely uncomplicated men — although there were figures like Poe, Whistler, and even Robert E. Lee, who later said that getting a military education had been the greatest mistake of his life.
I remember the sweating, the heat and thirst, the banned bliss of long gulping from the spigot. At parades, three or four a week, above the drone of hazing floated the music of the band. It seemed part of another, far-off world. There was the feeling of being on a hopeless journey, an exile that would last for years. In the distance, women in light frocks strolled with officers, and the fine house of the Superintendent gleamed toylike and white. In the terrific sun someone in the next rank or beside you begins to sway, take an involuntary step, and like a beaten fighter fall forward. Rifles litter the ground. Afterwards a tactical officer walks among them as among bodies on a battlefield, noting down the serial numbers.
Bang! the door flies open. We leap to our feet. Haughty, sway-backed, wearing white gloves, a cadet sergeant named Melton saunters into the room. He glances at us. “Who are you misters? Sound off!” he commands. He turns to the wall lockers on which we have worked for hours preparing for inspection. Everything has its shelf and place, the folds are clean and sharp, the undershirts like pads of paper, the neat linen cuffs, the black socks.
“Whose locker is this?” he asks with disdain. Not waiting for an answer, he sweeps the contents of a shelf to the floor. “It’s a mess. Are these supposed to be folded? Do it over again.” Shelf after shelf, one locker after another, everything is tumbled out. “Do it right this time, understand?”
Implacable hatred floods upwards. “Yes, sir!”
—
One of my first roommates was the son of a congressman. He was twenty. In Chicago, he revealed, he’d been living in an apartment with two prostitutes. As a sort of proof he smoked, walked around in his underwear, and marveled at nothing. We were, for the most part, fingerlings, boys in our teens, and his swagger seemed the mark of an enviable thing with which he was already familiar: dissipation. We ran up and down the stairs together but in formation stood far apart. There I was next to a tall, skinny boy who had a cackling laugh and astonishing irreverence. He was a colonel’s son and had come from Hawaii, crossing the continent in a Pullman and spending the night with a woman in a lower berth as she moaned over and over, “My son, my son.” His name was Horner; in time he introduced me to rum, cards, and as a last flourish, poison ivy.
The most urgent thing was to somehow fit in, to become unnoticed, the same. My father had managed to do it, although, seeing what it was like, I did not understand how. I remembered him only strolling in a princely way; I had never seen him run, I could not imagine him in the exhausting routine of each day.
But it was also hard to be nothing and no one, to be faceless in ranks and unpraised. In still another line, this one in the Cadet Store, where we were being measured for winter uniforms, one of the tailors, a Mr. Walsh, frail and yellowish-haired, noticed my name and asked if I was the son of the honor man in the class of 1919. It was the first feeling I had of belonging, of having a creditable past.
What you had been before meant something — athletic ability mattered, of course — but it was not always enough to see you through. The most important quality was more elusive; I suppose it could be called dignity, but it was not really that. It was closer to endurance.
Downstairs was the former second-string quarterback for Boston College who had a wristwatch he’d gotten for playing in the Sugar Bowl. It had letters instead of numerals circling the dial, S, U, G, A, R, etc., and there were small diamonds between the words, as I recall. Nash had come to play football. The days of players who truly came out of the Corps, mostly with unspectacular results, were ending and the war had made winning a matter of great concern. Nash had an Irish face and an unspoiled nature. He had seen something of the world and his enthusiasm for cadet life was limited. He braced with his neck pulled in reluctantly, like a tortoise. More and more he was above such childishness, and annoyance showed in his face. “Stand up straight, Mr. Nash, pull your shoulders back!”
One day as he was being tormented, he did the inconceivable: he simply stopped obeying. The effect was galvanic — they swarmed around him, almost dancing with rage. In the noon formation he marched calmly to the mess hall, at ease towards it all, with the detached air of a condemned man. He was beyond punishment. The year-end ceremony which marked the end of plebe status was called recognition. The word passed in unbelieving whispers: Nash has recognized himself.
That, of course, was impossible — he was found unfit and left soon afterwards. My last memory of him is on the top floor of barracks where our rooms were, on a hellish afternoon. There was a form of punishment for general delinquency; it had a benign name, clothing formation, and was held once or twice a week. The list of those to attend was read aloud at formation: at such and such a time the following named fourth classmen would report to the sinks of the Xth division. Sinks was the name for the basement, the engine room with pipes, lockers, and storage. There, in the nearly windowless dark, with the showers turned full hot to create steam and make it more unbearable, a program of steady exercise went on, interrupted only by an announcement: everyone had exactly five minutes to go back to his room and return in a different uniform. Up the stairs we fled to change frantically and run down to begin again. It was like the recruits being drilled to “change trains” in All Quiet on the Western Front, the so-called lesson one never forgets. The various uniforms were described item by item in the regulations book and in addition to everything, amid the confusion, had to be looked up. “Drill D!” was the desperate cry, racing up the last stairs, thirty seconds gone already.