Ernest Hemingway

ACROSS THE RIVER AND INTO THE TREES
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CHAPTER XXX

THE Colonel and the girl lay quietly on the bed and the Colonel tried to think of nothing; as he had thought of nothing so many times in so many places. But it was no good now. It would not work any more because it was too late.

They were not Othello and Desdemona, thank God, although it was the same town and the girl was certainly better looking than the Shakespearean character, and the Colonel had fought as many, or more times than the garrulous Moor.

They are excellent soldiers, he thought. The damned Moors. But how many of them have we killed in my time? I think we killed more than a generation if you count the final Moroccan campaign against Abdel Krim. And each one you have to kill separately. Nobody ever killed them in mass, as we killed Krauts before they discovered Einheit.

“Daughter,” he said. “Do you want me to really tell you, so you will know, if I am not rough telling it?”

“I would rather have you tell me than anything. Then we can share it.”

“It cuts pretty thin for sharing,” the Colonel said. “It’s all yours, Daughter. And it’s only the high-lights. You wouldn’t understand the campaigns in detail, and few others would. Rommel might. But they always had him under wraps in France and, besides, we had destroyed his communications. The two tactical air-forces had; ours and the RAF. But I wish I could talk over certain things with him. I’d like to talk with him and with Ernst Udet.”

“Just tell me what you wish and take this glass of Valpolicella and stop if it makes you feel badly. Or don’t tell it at all.”

“I was a spare-parts Colonel at the start,” the Colonel explained carefully. “They are hang-around Colonels, which are given to a Division Commander to replace one that he may have killed, or that are relieved. Almost none are killed; but many are relieved. All the good ones are promoted. Fairly fast when the thing starts to move sort of like a forest fire.”

“Go on, please. Should you take your medicine?”

“The hell with my medicine,” the Colonel said. “And the hell with SHAEF.”

“You explained that to me,” the girl said.

“I wish the hell you were a soldier with your straight true brain and your beauty memory.”

“I would wish to be a soldier if I could fight under you.”

“Never fight under me,” the Colonel said. “I’m cagey. But I’m not lucky. Napoleon wanted them lucky and he was right.”

“We’ve had some luck.”

“Yes,” the Colonel said. “Good and bad.”

“But it was all luck.”

“Sure,” the Colonel said. “But you can’t fight on luck. It is just something that you need. The people who fought on luck are all gloriously dead like Napoleon’s horse cavalry.”

“Why do you hate cavalry? Almost all the good boys I know were in the three good regiments of cavalry, or in the navy.”

“I don’t hate anything, Daughter,” the Colonel said, and drank a little of the light, dry, red wine which was as friendly as the house of your brother, if you and your brother are good friends. “I only have a point of view, (...)

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