I didn’t know what we could be doing up there, but I was just as curious to see it at first-hand as the General was. It wouldn’t make me mad if he managed to go up.... Which reminded me that Leon was up there somewhere. I hadn’t heard from him. Didn’t know where he was. Wouldn’t know if he were dead. If anything happened to him, I’d be in a beautiful mess, to be sure!
Yet, somehow, for some unaccountable reason, I just couldn’t picture Leon getting himself killed. I couldn’t imagine him in any field of danger, regardless of the great change that had come over him. My memory of the old Leon was too keen to permit me to worry much about him throwing his life away. So I wasn’t reading the casualty lists very anxiously. I did wonder sometimes if he was in danger and if he’d found it possible to obey the admonition that was the motif of that marching song he so hated: I mean the one about “Keep Your Britches Dry.”
I’d ceased to worry about him, though. What I wanted now was to get married—and how! The Captain was a changed man: honestly, I hardly knew him, he was so different. No more wild parties. No more women. No more anything, but me. He had managed to get the soldier part out of his head and now he thought of me only as a girl. He called me Canwick when Ben or anyone else was around, but the minute we were alone it was “Leona” this and “Leona” that. If he had called me Canwick or Sergeant then, I’d have passed out from the shock: I mean, if nobody was around. We sure were a funny Damon-Pythias combination, and I’ll bet there was more than one man in this man’s army making dirty cracks about us behind our backs.
My rôle now was in many respects more difficult than it was before the Captain learned of my identity. Then I was a man all the time and to everyone. Now I was a man one minute and a woman the next. I had to change character so quickly sometimes and with such little warning that it was a wonder I hadn’t given myself away before this. It was really very trying on the nerves to be feeling nice and comfy with the man you love and then have to effect a sudden transformation into a semihard-boiled egg of a sergeant just because somebody else blew in. And I could see that it was trying on the Captain’s nerves, too.
—2—
Well, part of the difficulties were solved. The Captain hit upon the idea of calling me by the same name “Leony” under all circumstances, in order not to keep him on the jump all the time. Well, I didn’t mind, but I couldn’t retaliate: I mean, I couldn’t call him Clark all the time. I had to hop around between Clark one minute and Captain Winstead the next. However, we were progressing.
Ben was kinda shocked the first time he heard the Captain call me Leony instead of Sergeant or Canwick, but the Captain said, “What the hell’s the matter with you? Haven’t I as much right to call him Leony as you have?... And I call you Ben, don’t I?”
“Sure—sure,” agreed Ben. “It just seems funny to hear an officer callin’ the kid here Leony, that’s all.”
“Aw—go take a drink for yourself, Ben,” the Captain told him laughingly.
So I guess Ben didn’t suspect anything funny. He was so used to being called Ben that it seemed perfectly natural for anyone to call him that. If General Pershing ever happened to mention the name in his hearing, Ben would have assumed at once that the Commander in Chief meant Ben Garlotz, and would have promptly reported to the General.... Ben was a good guy all right, but he didn’t need to get funny ideas just because people used my nickname as well as his. My nickname was as good as his, even if it did sound sort of effeminate and odd. But then there was a lot of odder things in the world than that.