There is a great fireplace in this room, a
fireplace so high that a tall man can walk inside without stooping and could
lie down without scrunching. The mantel over the fireplace is deep with
heraldic carving. This is the lounge. On chairs procured somewhere the GIs sit
and read and listen to the radio. A fine bar has been built against one wall,
where Coca-Cola and pop are sold. And overhead, the arching roof of carved oak,
chiseled and fitted long before America was born. And a soldier leaning back in
his chair is staring fascinated at the ceiling. There is a copy of Yank
in his lap. He squints his eyes and studies the ceiling. He withdraws his
attention and calls, “Hey, Walter, have the Dodgers got twenty-four or
twenty-five games?”
Up the broad stairway is a gallery and then the
thirty rooms or so in which the guests of the couple were made comfortable, for
it is probable that only five or six hundred people knew about this old
scandal, including the lady’s husband. The rooms are large, and each one has
its carved fireplace and its little leaded, diamond-paned window, looking dimly
on the gardens. But the rooms themselves are squad rooms with the cots arranged
in a line, the shoes at attention underneath, the lockers with drawn-up blouses
and trousers and towels and the helmets squarely on top. The rooms are probably
much cleaner than they were when the king’s mistress lived there.
Downstairs in a kind of cave is the kitchen,
where an Army cook is baking square apple pies by the quarter-acre. The floor
is so deeply worn that he has to step over some of the high places. His coal
stove is roaring, and he has arrived at that quiet hopelessness that cooks get
on finally realizing that their work is never going to be finished, that there
is no way of feeding a man once for all.
The CO of the post is a first lieutenant from
Texas and the second in command is a Chicago second lieutenant. They are young
and stern and friendly. The job of keeping the castle in order is just a job to
them.
There is no point to any of this except the
change of pageantry. The place, which was built for heralds and courtiers, for
soldiers in body armor, is in no way outraged by the new thing. The jeeps and
armored cars, the half-tracks that came in through the gates, the helmeted
soldiers on the lawn do not seem out of place. They belong here. They are
probably very little different from the earlier inhabitants. Certainly the king
in question would have been glad for them, because he had his international
troubles too.
