Why Were You Sent Out Here?

by JOHN HERSEY

WITH abrupt acceleration, the heavy revolving front door of the Wagons-Lits Hotel started to swing around. After the door flaps had thudded twice, Colonel Potter Watson emerged on the outer side. He was about thirty-five years old, florid and strong-looking. He had on his lapels the brass vial-and-flame of Chemical Warfare, and he displayed, above his left breast pocket, only one overseas ribbon — a brand-new Asiatic Theater stripe. When he had stepped clear, the door slowed down a lot and let out Colonel William de Angelis, who wore the insignia of an infantryman and several decorations from the First World War. The second officer’s face, that of a man about sixty, was a pattern of meaningless lines on contours that had apparently been interesting once, like an action map in a rear echelon headquarters after the fighting is over. Everything about the older man looked slightly dilapidated, except for a beautiful, flexible, braided swagger stick tucked under his left arm.

Colonel Watson stepped out to the front of the marble platform of the entranceway and greeted the heavy Chinese doorman by name, “Good morning, Sung.”

The doorman tipped his visored khaki hat and said, “Good morning, master,” and bowed slightly.

The older colonel, coming along behind, said dully, “Good day.”

“Good morning, sir,” Sung replied, and did not bow to the older man. He told the officers that the eight o’clock shuttle bus to Peking Union Medical College, their headquarters, had just left.

Colonel Watson, the younger officer, said, “Nice spring morning like this, why don’t we take a ricksha?” Colonel de Angelis acquiesced. Sung lifted a fat hand as a signal to the coolies lounging on the footboards of a row of fancy Legation Quarter rickshas across the street. Several grabbed up the shafts of their vehicles and ran, pulling the rickshas, across to the entranceway and shouted competitively for the Americans’ favor. Colonel Watson, recognizing a puller he had engaged once before, said, “I’ll take Number Thirty-Four here.” Colonel de Angelis, who did not know one coolie from another, accepted the most insistent puller. This man had run up the steps and was actually trying to push the elderly colonel toward his own ricksha. “All right,” Colonel de Angelis said, “take your hands off me.”

Instead of giving instructions in English to Sung for translation, Colonel Watson spoke directly to his coolie in fairly well pronounced Chinese: “To Executive Headquarters. How are you today?”

The coolie mumbled a reply and pulled out ahead. The older colonel’s puller followed.

Colonel Watson turned and said over his shoulder to his companion in the other ricksha, “No dust today. Look at that sky.”

The two rickshas turned into Legation Street. Along the sidewalks, the horse chestnuts and acacias, whose leaves had suddenly fanned out from buds after a rain the week before, were st ill and fragrant. Policemen in black uniforms argued noisily in front of a large building on the left, which they were apparently appropriating as a station; their hubbub seemed to be all about how to unload some furniture they were moving. A couple of Chinese college girls rode up the street on bicycles, careless of the way their slit dresses exposed their thighs; Colonel Watson watched them, but the older man did not. He was looking, as he had been bid to do, at the sky. How sharply the roof tiles of the buildings they passed were edged against the blue! And what blue! Pure, a color one could see only over Peiping, with the lucency of porcelain, he thought. He saw Colonel Watson turn again and heard him shout cheerfully, “Spring moves along a lot faster here than it does in Hartford.”

Colonel de Angclis found the younger man’s exuberance annoying. He realized all at once that he had nothing specific and absolute with which to compare the North China weather, for he had nothing to remember as home —just the series of camps through which a regular Army man passes: was there ever spring at Fort Bragg or Camp Mills or Fort Sam Houston? how fast did all those seasons move along? Colonel Watson’s remarks, whether he intended it or not, were irritating, the older man reflected. He remembered, in sudden focus — as, for some reason, he had quite a few times in recent days, while he had been rooming with Colonel Watson — several scenes at Fort Sam Houston: a parade there, the barbershop on the post, his desk at C Company headquarters.

As the rickshas swung into Rue Marco Polo and passed a couple of curio shops, Colonel Watson leaned around again and called out, “Don’t get sucked into those places. Terrible gyp joints. Have you been down to Embroidery Street?”

“No.”

“I’ll take you down there some day. Chinese city. Same stuff as up here, only you can bargain. I’ll take you down.”

Colonel de Angclis decided at once that he did not want to go to Embroidery Street with Colonel Watson, who surely would bully the merchants and boast later of his triumphs. Colonel de Angelis was rather surprised at the vehemence of his feeling about the younger colonel. Ever since they had been put in the same room at the hotel, he had been annoyed by little things Watson did — the young man’s long throat-clearing sessions in the bathroom in the mornings, his frequent and positive contradictions of what people said, his excellent appetite, his constant good spirits, his knowing everything and wanting to be so helpful — but Colonel de Angelis had not realized so clearly before how much he really disliked his roommate. Colonel de Angelis thought again of Fort Sam Houston; something about that place had been trying to crowd into his memory ever since he had spent his first day with Watson. Maybe, he decided, it was because he had been about Watson’s age when he was there. That was in 1921 and 1922; twenty-four and -five years ago. Yes, he thought, that must be it.

Colonel Watson had turned around again. “I got a honey of a Shantung table set down there,” he said, “a breakfast set, I think you call it. Only seven bucks. I knocked ‘em down from twelve.” Then Watson snapped his fingers at Colonel de Angelis’ ricksha puller and said to him in English, “Say, boy, hubba-hubba a bit. Come alongside here.” He beckoned and flagged the coolie up. “The Colonel and I want to talk to each other. That’s better.”

The rickshas ran parallel. “Seems funny,” Watson said, “the way they sent so many of us over here at once — colonels and lieutenant colonels. Like it, so far?”

“Well,” Colonel de Angelis said, “the food in the hotel is certainly punk. If they offer me another of those cold rice pancakes after breakfast —”

“I don’t know,” Colonel Watson said, as he always did in preface to a disagreement. “They have a darn good steak in the grille. I don’t think the food is so bad.” He paused, then said, “How did they happen to send you out here? Did you ever hear?”

Colonel de Angelis wondered: Why did they send a hundred colonels and lieutenant colonels over to North China in one batch? How did they happen to choose one man or another from the tremendous replacement pool? How did they happen to pick so many men who had been passed over for promotion, and so many who had already been bumped back from brigadier? Why did they send me over here? The older colonel shrugged. “You know the Army,” he said.

“I put in for this duty,” Watson said. “The way I figured was, with the war over and me not getting overseas while it was on, China seemed like the best possible chance for advancement — for a younger man, that is,” he added.

2

COLONEL DE ANGELIS thought again of Fort Sam. What was it he was trying to recall? At Fort Sam Houston he had been a captain. Those were dismal barracks. He had had the fourth bunk from the end on the right side in G. His sergeant major — what was his name? Benny something or other — that was great the time Benny pretended to trip and butted into Rassmussen. What a pathetic old character Captain Rassmussen was! Pathetic old — wait! wait!

A silver C-54 roared low over the city and for a moment it seemed to be framed, from where the colonels rode, within the pailou, the high, skeletal ceremonial gate near the top of Rue Marco Polo. “Look at that!” Colonel Watson shouted, and at once he launched into what was certain, if past recitals meant anything, to be a long account of his uneventful flight across the Pacific. Colonel de Angelis only half listened. The rasping, effusive voice went on and on; “. . . hit the runway right on the nose, and we hadn’t been out of the overcast since Kwajalein . . .”; the story touched on all the commonplaces. Colonel de Angelis tried to distract himself by looking at the market, already crowded and obstreperous, spread out on the old glacis of the Legation Quarter, to their right as they rode — at the too colorful Japanese obis hung like wash on a line; booths where cloth shoes, old bottles, peanuts, suitcases, sweet potatoes, Chinese fiddles were for sale; men hawking, arguing in shouts, and talking loudly simply to be heard; and, at some distance on the curb, a bicycle tire repairer waiting patiently a few yards beyond a pool of broken glass he had scattered in the street. Colonel de Angelis remembered that he had had a bicycle at Fort Sam Houston. Fort Sam after the first war hadn’t seemed such a bad place; there was not much to do except avoid mistakes. On the whole, looking back, it was pretty good duty. A captaincy is a satisfying rank, when you’re young. It couldn’t have been so much fun for Captain Rassmussen, at his age. (“. . . I never saw so many wrecked ships,” Colonel Watson was saying, “as we did going in over Buckner Bay. My God, that must have been some typhoon . . .”) Colonel de Angelis, called back by the younger man’s voice when it seemed all at once to get louder, wondered what it was he so disliked about Colonel Watson. The other newcomers seemed to like him all right; they considered him cheerful, a good drinker, marvelous at liars’ dice, skillful at bargaining with the Chinks — a great fellow, they said. One man had even congratulated de Angelis on the luck of his draw for roommate. Anyone could room with Watson who wanted to. Perhaps, Colonel de Angelis thought, he could speak to the Chinese WASC representative at the hotel that afternoon and get himself shifted to a single room. Let’s see, he thought: Get a haircut, go over to the PX for nail scissors — what was the other thing he had to do in the afternoon? (“. . . absolutely clear over Shanghai . . .”) What was it Watson brought to his mind — or to the very edge of his mind? Was it, he wondered for a moment, something about Captain Rassmussen?

On the way into Morrison Street, Watson directed the ricksha coolies in Chinese to turn in towards Executive Headquarters at the third hutung, rather than the second, so that they could go in the side entrance. “You taking up Chinese?” he asked Colonel de Angelis. “Or,” he went on in an affectionately teasing tone, “are you one of these old dogs that refuse to learn new tricks? Helps a lot, I can tell you. I got a start on it back in the States. You see, I got wind of this assignment— ” and he paused, as if waiting to be told that he would always land on his feet, and then went on, as if taking the compliment for granted, “It doesn’t hurt to keep some wires out. So when I heard about this, I lined myself up to have a couple of months in the language school up at New Haven. I still work on it pretty hard. It makes a difference, specially on bargaining. These merchants dope it out that they can’t fool around: anybody that speaks even a few words must be an old China hand, that’s the way they figure it. You meet a different type of people, too, with the language. You take down in Shanghai, while we were waiting to be shipped up here, I darn near got myself lined up with a sleeping dictionary. She was a honey. Belonged to a second lieutenant who got shipped home —”

The insults this bastard devises, Colonel de Angelis thought. The rickshas turned off Morrison Street into the third alley on the right. The older man looked at the headquarters compound, which now came into sight at the dead end ahead — the massive, handsome, pseudo-Oriental buildings that had once comprised a hospital and medical school, endowed by the Rockefellers, he had heard; now a house divided three ways — two kinds of Chinese and some Americans, all ostensibly trying to bring an end to civil war. What could he do there? He knew nothing about China. Every day he grew more confused as he watched the opposing Chinese and the Americans addressing one another with elaborate but artificial gestures, like those of marionettes, as if they were trying by sheer energy to make convincing the things they were saying — things that nobody could possibly believe. He had been in Peiping two weeks, and still there had been no decision as to whether he would be in the operations section here in Peiping or would be sent out with a field team. He was somehow afraid of the buildings, with the kind of vague fear he would have felt if the compound were still a hospital, with ether heavy in the corridors.

Colonel Watson, who had also been looking at the buildings, turned and asked, “No, really, aside from the food, do you think you’re going to like it here?”

Like it? Like it? “I guess it’ll be all right.”

And then, unmistakably, in the sound of that “Like it?” he recognized the one of whom Colonel Watson reminded him: it was of himself.

3

THE Crescent, though by no means the finest speakeasy in San Antonio in 1921, nor that with the safest liquor, seemed to attract more soldiers and officers than any other. Its mirrors, cheap smoked wood wainscoting, and brass chandeliers were like those of an old saloon; the place was ironically decorated, Colonel de Angelis remembered, with cartoons of John Barleycorn, photographs of Volstead and Miss Frances Willard and a convention of Band of Hope children, framed clippings of prohibitionist news, and a cross-stitched motto: “The voters do not have the courage to vote as they drink — Dr. N. M. Butler.”

Colonel de Angelis remembered that he and Captain Rassmussen had sat that night — a winter night, late in 1921, it must have been — at a table against the wall opposite the bar. The place was crowded with all sorts: fairly well dressed couples, workmen in denim, girls looking for pickups. Captain de Angelis’ uniform was crisp and his buttons bright. Captain Rassmussen seemed very tired. He was nearly sixty and would never be anything but a captain. He had blond hair with some gray in it, and a ruddy, finely wrinkled face. He had been at Fort Sam Houston only about a month, and de Angelis had asked him, a few days before, to take a seventy-two with him to San Antonio.

When he had invited Rassmussen, de Angelis had believed he did it because he liked the older man, who had been cheerful enough around the post, and full of stories of the old-time Army; on the way into San Antonio, he had decided it had been because he pitied Rassmussen; and after a few hours in the town, when he had found that the older man had no appetite for food, hadn’t the faintest desire to work up a date with a girl, wanted only two drinks, was satisfied with a captaincy, did not dislike his superiors, laughed about everything but never as if he meant it, wanted nothing, had nothing, was nothing— then de Angelis realized that he resented Rassmussen. He began to tease him. At first he was fairly subtle, and stuck so close to the truth, alternately praising and criticizing the elderly captain, that Rassmussen could not, at first, be anything but gratified, if slightly puzzled, by his young friend’s interest in him.

Later, however, when de Angelis found that his anger at the older man only grew with his own elation, he began to be comparatively obvious. He made more and more references to age. He talked about the Army’s retirement and pension systems. He remarked that he had noticed how exhausted Rassmussen had looked out on parade a couple of days before. And he asked over and over whether Rassmussen liked being a captain at his age. Eventually this had become a half-drunken refrain: “Do you like it? Do you like it?” At last the older officer said, without particular anger, but looking quite defeated, “Say, I believe you’re being darned unkind.” De Angelis apologized and protested — quite convincingly, he felt — that he hadn’t meant a thing by his remarks. He had, of course; he knew he had. He had meant that he was young and had the best of his career ahead of him, and Rassmussen was getting old.

The rickshas pulled up at the side gate of the headquarters compound. Colonel Watson asked in Chinese how much his coolie wanted, and after several sentences of conversation, in which mock outrage was displayed on both sides, he gave the coolie some bills and turned away laughing.

“How much do you give these jokers?” Colonel de Angelis asked.

“Let him have five hundred,”Watson said. “It’s too much, but he’ll give you a better ride next time.”

Colonel de Angelis handed his puller some bills. At once the coolie began protesting in noisy Chinese. “What’s he saying?” the older Colonel asked Watson.

“Just the usual stink. Come on.”

Colonel de Angelis stepped over the shafts and started toward the entranceway. The coolie followed with hands outstretched, sneering at the hill he held, talking louder and louder, higher and higher, and — it seemed to Colonel de Angelis — more and more abusively. The older colonel turned and said with as much authority and contempt as he could convey in a language that would not be understood, “That’s enough. Now hang up.” He wheeled and walked on. But the coolie only shouted more, and he ran and caught up with the Colonel and put a dirty hand on the officer’s sleeve and then grabbed the sleeve and waved the bills in front of the American’s face.

“Come on!” Colonel Watson shouted. He was about ten paces ahead. His voice was cheerful, and it was young.

The coolie tugged hard at Colonel de Angelis’ sleeve. The elderly colonel turned abruptly and, reaching across with his right hand, pulled out his swagger stick and aimed and flashed it backhand.

Colonel de Angelis knew at once what he had done. He glanced around and saw that Watson had started walking springily — perhaps tactfully? had he seen? — up the steps into the entrance court. Colonel de Angelis looked out to see if there had been any American officers coming along the street; there had not. The coolie stood with his right hand partly hiding the red stripe the swagger stick had printed on his cheek, his left hand still stretched out waving the paper money; he was silent now.

With a slow, awkward, exaggerated movement, like that of a drunken man, Colonel de Angelis groped in his breast pocket for his wallet, took it out, opened it, got out a bill for a thousand Chinese dollars — twice the original fare — and offered it to the coolie, who took it and turned away without speaking. Colonel de Angelis stepped rather erratically toward the entrance. The two Chinese sentries standing at the gate saluted him with mechanical eagerness. He transferred the swagger stick from his right hand back under his left arm, and returned their greeting. As the old colonel started up the steps, he saw that the younger man was already indoors. There didn’t seem to be any faces in the windows around the wide ent rance court.