“By now you have the reports, the action paced off in the war room, set pin for pin like surveyor’s stakes in alignment, the lines drawn in a terrible cat’s cradle of possibility. This, what I do, is something else.
“The buildup was flawless. Men came from the sea, from the air. They peeled off the landing craft and ran up the beach like barbarians. Paratroopers bloomed in the sky like flowers and grew into the ground. The trade routes are really open. I celebrate the Department of Deployment, reinforcements, fresh troops. (There’s something virginal in the sound: showered, shaved, their fight untapped, blossoming in their pink skins. ‘Fresh troops’: it sounds pasteurized.) And cooks to feed them and clerks to count them. And the Japs the same, as good as you in producing populations out of thin air.
“But you know. And who am I, Dick Gibson, to be telling you all this? You know what I think, High Commanders, Chiefs of Staff? This broadcast of mine is a little like prayer. Well, not prayer exactly, but still, there’s a soupçon of reverence and a touch of review. That’s what you want to hear, right? Am I getting warm? That’s why the low band was invented, High Commanders on High.
“I’ll tell you what happened. History is good experience for me, the itinerant radio man.
“Collins is the officer and must command me to rise. Yesterday he came to my room to wake me but I was already up. I’d awakened before dawn. I’d heard some noises and couldn’t fall back to sleep. At first I thought the engagement had begun, but when I went to the window there were just some trucks and black shapes moving in the street. I assumed they were more reinforcements for the garrison. Then it occurred to me that they might be Japanese, but when I called down a British voice yelled up at me, so I went back to bed.
“Then something that has always been undeveloped in me — I mean my sense of place — suddenly surged up and overwhelmed me. Why, here I am, I thought, on Mauritius, one of three or four places on the globe which merely to have seen qualifies a man as a traveler, I mean a wanderer, one of those whose fate it is to be troubled by laundry, mail months old, irregular bowel movements, a certain ignorance about time and a taste gone crotchety through nostalgia for things eaten long before. How did I get this way? I wondered. It can be no accident when one finds himself sizing smooth pebbles on the cold coasts of Tierra del Fuego. To see a desert is to scorn a city, and to lick a finger that has once been in the Weddell Sea is to eschew the ordinary salts forever. What had earned me distance? In America I had crisscrossed the country, leaping in and out of landscape, stitching my wild, erratic journey. The mile is a measure of madness too, and a map is hot pursuit. (This is still the war news.) Gradually the room grew light and I could perceive the objects in it — the four-bladed fan that hung from the ceiling like a great spider, the cane furniture like petrified vegetable, the huge wardrobe, big as a piano crate, the white mystery of the mosquito netting. They were the solid evidences of my own strangeness. Why am I far afield?
“I rang for my tea and porkchop — think of that, a porkchop for breakfast — and the little half-naked native brought it up on a tray. Still standing beside my bed he kneaded the warm half-baked dough they use here as rolls and pinched the last counter-clockwise swirls into it. How does he live? He is fourteen and already married and a father. My 15 percent service charge which must be divided with the chambermaids and hall porters and laundry people and maintenance men cannot keep them all. This hotel has been practically empty since the war began. What strange arrangement goes on here?
“As I was finishing my breakfast Collins came for me and we drove straight to the garrison. It was deserted. The troops I’d seen were not reinforcements. They’d been pulling out.
“‘Where could they have gone?’ Collins said.
“I stood with all my weight on one hip, the deferential stance of one waiting for someone else to make a decision for him.
“‘Something may be up,’ Collins said. ‘We ought to find out where they’ve gone. There’s probably someone around.’
“We found a man in the infirmary who told us the garrison had gone off to make contact with the Japanese at the southeastern edge of the island, about a half-day’s trip over rough terrain.
“‘Looks like the real thing,’ Collins said. He did not seem very happy. ‘What the hell is this about anyway, Dick? How’d a couple of old radio men like us get involved in all this?’
“In a way he was thinking the same thoughts I had earlier, but I only shrugged.
“‘You believe all that shit about the dodo bird?’ I didn’t answer. ‘Bird extinct two hundred and fifty years suddenly shows up. Damned island extinct for about the same length of time, and all of a sudden it’s a major theater of operations. It must have something to do with that bird. That’s what the talk is, but no one knows. What do you make of it?’
“‘I don’t know, Lieutenant.’
“‘You said they’ve got some stuffed dodos at the museum.’
“‘Representations, cunning dolls.’
“‘Let’s take a look at them, see what all the fuss is about.’
“We went to the museum. Collins treated. I knew the collection pretty well by now and I started to take him through. He wasn’t really paying much attention; he barely glanced at the glass cases. ‘We could still be in London, you know that? You had to go haywire.’
“‘No excuse, sir.’
“‘No, hell, water under the bridge. Boy, it sure spooked me when I learned you were so highly connected. What did you have on that general, anyway?’
“‘I once took a burr out of his paw.’
“‘Yeah. Ha ha. You know something? I don’t think this war can last much longer. You going back into radio when it’s over?’
“‘Yes sir.’
“‘Not me.’
“‘No sir?’
“‘Television.’
“Oh.’
“‘That’s where the money will be. Radio’s had it.’
“‘I’ll stick to radio.’
“‘Will you?’
“‘Yes sir.’
“‘Well, it’s all a matter of what you’re comfortable doing, I guess.’
“‘It’s been pretty good to me,’ I said.
“Soldiers had been talking this way for hundreds of years in the respites before big battles. I don’t think Collins saw me, but I began to cry. A chill went through me. Something about our voices, the sound of our dropped-guard friendship, told me that something terrible was going to happen. As he spoke hopefully and confidently about the future, I expected to see Collins die, to be hit by a grenade, his head torn off. Before long, I thought, he’ll be dead at my feet, his neck broken. I wanted to tell him to hush, but of course I couldn’t.
“Then something odd did happen. We were in the picture gallery. All about us were the dark oils of the early settlers — pictures of dodo hunts, the excited Dutchmen ruddy and breathless from the chase, the dodo cornered, maddened perhaps by its ordeal; other paintings, still lifes of Mauritian feasts, tables spread with the island’s fruits, halved cuchacha melons white as moonlight, tangled wreaths of the fruit vines that trellis the cones of the volcanoes, the dodo birds prepared for cooking, split, the guts, like long, partially inflated balloons, tossed into a slopbucket, their long necks limp, the beaks open in death and their bare, old men’s cheeks flecked with blood. I had thought we were alone, but suddenly I heard a low bark of heartbreak. We both turned. It was the captured Japanese civilian, sitting on one of those benches that they put in the middle of picture galleries. There was a strange rapt expression on his face, and he was weeping. Probably he didn’t see us.