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PARTISAN REVIEW
at the table with the men. Over and over, they would talk about
their ensigns' cruise around the world, escaping the "reeport," gun–
boating on the upper Yangtse during the Chinese Civil War, keeping
sane and sanitary at Guantanamo, patroling the Golfo del Papaya
during the two-bit Nicaraguan Revolution, when water to wash in
cost a dollar a barrel and was mostly "alkali and wrigglers." There
were the class casualties: Holden and Holcomb drowned in a
foundered launch off Hampton Roads; "Count" Bowditch, killed
by the Moros and famous for his dying words to Commander Hark–
ness: "I'm all right. Get on the job, Bilge."
They would speak about the terrible 1918 influenza epidemic,
which had killed more of their classmates than
all
the skirmishes
or even the World War.
It
was an honor, however, to belong to a
class which included "Chips" Carpender, whose destroyer, the
Fanning,
was the only British or American warship to force a German
submarine to break water and surrender. It was a feather in their
caps that three of their classmates, Bellinger, Reade, and another,
should have made the first trans-Atlantic seaplane flight. They put
their faith in teamwork, and Lindbergh's solo hop to Paris struck
them as unprofessional, a newspaper trick. What made Father and
Commander Billy mad as hornets was the mare's-nest made of naval
administration by "deserving Democrats." Hadn't Secretary of State
Bryan ordered their old battlewagon the
Idaho
to sail on a goodwill
mission to Switzerland? "Bryan, Bryan, Bryan," Commander Billy
would boom, "the pious swab had been told that Lake Geneva was
annexed by the Adriatic." Another "guy with false gills," Josephus
Daniels, "ordained by Divine Providence Secretary of the Navy," had
refused to send Father and Billy to the war zone. "You are looking,"
Billy would declaim, "at martyrs in the famous victory of red tape.
Our names are rubric." A man they had to take their hats off to was
Theodore Roosevelt; Billy had been one of the lucky ensigns who had
helped "escort the redoubtable Teddy to Panama." Perhaps because of
his viciously inappropriate nickname, "Bilge," Commander Harkness
always spoke with brutal facetiousness against the class
bilgers,
offi–
cers whose "services were no longer required by the service." In
more charitable moods, Bilge would announce that he "meant to
accumulate a lot of dough from complacent, well-meaning, although
misguided West Point officers gullible enough to bet their shirts on
the Army football team."
