A Separate Peace.pdf - Southwest High School

7910That night I made for the first time the land of journey which later became the monotonousroutine of my life: traveling through an unknown countryside from one unknown settlement toanother. The next year this became the dominant activity, or rather passivity, of my armycareer, not fighting, not marching, but this kind of nighttime ricochet; for as it turned out Inever got to the war.I went into uniform at the time when our enemies began to recede so fast that there had tobe a hurried telescoping of military training plans. Programs scheduled to culminate in twoyears became outmoded in six months, and crowds of men gathered for them in one place weredispersed to twenty others. A new weapon appeared and those of us who had traveled to threeor four bases mastering the old one were sent on to a fifth, sixth, and seventh to master thenew. The closer victory came the faster we were shuttled around America in pursuit of a role toplay in a drama which suddenly, underpopulated from the first, now had too many actors. Or soit seemed. In reality there would have been, as always, too few, except that the last act, a massassault against suicidally-defended Japan, never took place. I and my year—not "mygeneration" for destiny now cut too finely for that old phrase—I and those of my year werepreeminently eligible for that. Most of us, so it was estimated, would be killed. But the men alittle bit older closed in on the enemy faster than predicted, and then there was the finalholocaust of the Bomb. It seemed to have saved our lives.So journeys through unknown parts of America became my chief war memory, and I thinkof the first of them as this nighttime trip to Leper's. There was no question of where to findhim; "I am at Christmas location" meant that he was at home. He lived far up in Vermont,where at this season of the year even the paved main highways are bumpy and buckling fromthe freezing weather, and each house executes a lonely holding action against the cold. Thenatural state of things is coldness, and houses are fragile havens, holdouts in a death landscape,unforgettably comfortable, simple though they are, just because of their warmth.Leper's was one of these hearths perched by itself on a frozen hillside. I reached it in theearly morning after this night which presaged my war; a bleak, draughty train ride, a dampdepot seemingly near no town whatever, a bus station in which none of the people were fullyawake, or seemed clean, or looked as though they had homes anywhere; a bus whichpassengers entered and left at desolate stopping places in the blackness; a chilled nighttimewandering in which I tried to decipher between lapses into stale sleep, the meaning of Leper'stelegram.I reached the town at dawn, and encouraged by the returning light, and coffee in a thickwhite cup, I accepted a hopeful interpretation. Leper had "escaped." You didn't "escape" fromthe army, so he must have escaped from something else. The most logical thing a soldier