I’ll never forget how sick it made me the first time I knew he was a cobarde. Go on, say it in English. Coward. It’s easier when you have it said and there is never any point in referring to a son of a bitch by some foreign term. He wasn’t any son of a bitch, though. He was just a coward and that was the worst luck any man could have. Because if he wasn’t a coward he would have stood up to that woman and not let her bully him. I wonder what I would have been like if he had married a different woman? That’s something you’ll never know, he thought, and grinned. Maybe the bully in her helped to supply what was missing in the other. And you. Take it a little easy. Don’t get to referring to the good juice and such other things until you are through tomorrow. Don’t be snotty too soon. And then don’t be snotty at all. We’ll see what sort of juice you have tomorrow.
But he started thinking about Grandfather again.
“George Custer was not an intelligent leader of cavalry, Robert,” his grandfather had said. “He was not even an intelligent man.”
He remembered that when his grandfather said that he felt resentment that any one should speak against that figure in the buckskin shirt, the yellow curls blowing, that stood on that hill holding a service revolver as the Sioux closed in around him in the old Anheuser-Busch lithograph that hung on the poolroom wall in Red Lodge.
“He just had great ability to get himself in and out of trouble,” his grandfather went on, “and on the Little Big Horn he got into it but he couldn’t get out.
“Now Phil Sheridan was an intelligent man and so was Jeb Stuart. But John Mosby was the finest cavalry leader that ever lived.”
He had a letter in his things in the trunk at Missoula from General Phil Sheridan to old Killy-the-Horse Kilpatrick that said his grandfather was a finer leader of irregular cavalry than John Mosby.
I ought to tell Golz about my grandfather, he thought. He wouldn’t ever have heard of him though. He probably never even heard of John Mosby. The British all had heard of them though because they had to study our Civil War much more than people did on the Continent. Karkov said after this was over I could go to the Lenin Institute in Moscow if I wanted to. He said I could go to the military academy of the Red Army if I wanted to do that. I wonder what Grandfather would think of that? Grandfather, who never knowingly sat at table with a Democrat in his life.
Well, I don’t want to be a soldier, he thought. I know that. So that’s out. I just want us to win this war. I guess really good soldiers are really good at very little else, he thought. That’s obviously untrue. Look at Napoleon and Wellington. You’re very stupid this evening, he thought.
Usually his mind was very good company and tonight it had been when he thought about his grandfather. Then thinking of his father had thrown him off. He understood his father and he forgave him everything and he pitied him but he was ashamed of him.
You better not think at all, he told himself. Soon you will be with Maria and you won’t have to think. That’s the best way now that everything is worked out. When you have been concentrating so hard on something you can’t stop and your brain gets to racing like a flywheel with the weight gone. You better just not think.
But just suppose, he thought. Just suppose that when the planes unload they smash those anti-tank guns and just blow hell out of the positions and the old tanks roll good up whatever hill it is for once and old Golz boots that bunch of drunks, clochards, bums, fanatics and heroes that make up the Quatorzième Brigade ahead of him, and I know how good Durán’s people are in Golz’s other brigade, and we are in Segovia tomorrow night.
Yes. Just suppose, he said to himself. I’ll settle for La Granja, he told himself. But you are going to have to blow that bridge, he suddenly knew absolutely. There won’t be any calling off. Because the way you have just been supposing there for a minute is how the possibilities of that attack look to those who have ordered it. Yes, you will have to blow the bridge, he knew truly. Whatever happens to Andrés doesn’t matter.
Coming down the trail there in the dark, alone with the good feeling that everything that had to be done was over for the next four hours, and with the confidence that had come from thinking back to concrete things, the knowledge that he would surely have to blow the bridge came to him almost with comfort.
The uncertainty, the enlargement of the feeling of being uncertain, as when, through a misunderstanding of possible dates, one does not know whether the guests are really coming to a party, that had been with him ever since he had dispatched Andrés with the report to Golz, had all dropped from him now. He was sure now that the festival would not be cancelled. It’s much better to be sure, he thought. It’s always much better to be sure.