A Special Providence by Richard Yates Read Free Book Online

of a gentle hill leading back into the pines, there were always a number of parked civilian cars surrounded by women and children – officers’ families come out to watch the parade before supper. In the abrupt silence after the band had stopped the little major threw back his head to yell, “Battally-
awn
!” Then, bellowing the commands with such force that it seemed his red neck might burst with every syllable, he put them through a massive manual of arms.
    And nobody ever noticed it, but Prentice was very nearly perfect on parade. He was never out of step, his posture was impeccable, and his eyes always where they were supposed to be; he performed his manual of arms with a speed and precision he could never achieve in the company street, where it mattered so much more, and he took a craftsman’s pride in making his own small role indistinguishable from the mass. He wanted it to look good for the women and children on the hill.
    When the arms drill was over there was a long, stock-still wait until they were called to attention to hear the faraway notes of the bugler sounding the Call to Retreat, and the pause after this first, intricate part of the call was filled with nothing but silence.
    “Pre-sent –
homms
!”
    All the rifles snapped vertical at chest height, the company guidons whipped earthward, the major wheeled to join his superiors in a hand salute, and the bugle took up the simpler and more melancholy strains of “To the Colors” as the flag came down.
    Then it was time to pass in review. The band started up again, proclaiming Hitler’s deformity to all Virginia; the color guard led the musicians out across the field and back, and the companies fell in behind them at shoulder arms. There was a left turn and then a difficult left flank, a long moment of tension as they passed the reviewing party at eyes right, each man trying mightily to stay in line; then they turned eyes front again and another left-flank command put them back into easier marching order, and then it was all over.
    All they had to do now was get back on the road and back to the barracks. At the intersection the music dwindled quickly as the band disappeared down its own street; then the other companies peeled away until only the single company was left, marching to the distant sound of the drums.
    “Bunch of God damned chickenshit Boy Scouts,” somebody muttered, and somebody else said something about playing tin soldiers. Soon the grumbling and the bitter laughter had become so general that the first sergeant had to turn around and call,
“At
ease back there.”
    But Private Robert J. Prentice was not among the offenders. Even without the music he was marching well in the gathering dusk, his face very sober and his eyes straight ahead, fixed on the high, fluttering infantry blue of the guidon.

Chapter Two
    Late in December, just after the German breakthrough in the Belgian Ardennes, long trainloads of infantry replacements began to arrive many times a day at Fort Meade, Maryland. The men were counted off and formed into long shuffling columns, and they stood in the snow waiting for everything – to eat, to be medically examined, to receive new issues of clothing and equipment, and to be told where to go next. In the overheated barracks there were hours of preparation for full-field inspections that didn’t, at the last minute, take place after all, and there were full-field inspections that took place hysterically on ten minutes’ notice; and there was such a continual breaking up and reforming of groups that everybody said you were lucky if, by the end of your several days at Meade, you had any friends left at all.
    Prentice was lucky: owing to the alphabetical proximity of their names he got to stay with Quint, and he was lucky too in that most of the more troublesome men from Camp Pickett were alphabetically sheared away. He and Quint came to share a double-decker bunk in a squadroom full of strangers from other training