William F. Buckley Jr. Read online

  BOOKS BY WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.

  God and Man at Yale

  McCarthy and His Enemies (with L. Brent Bozell)

  Up from Liberalism

  Rumbles Left and Right

  The Unmaking of a Mayor

  The Jeweler’s Eye

  The Governor Listeth

  Cruising Speed

  Inveighing We Will Go

  Four Reforms

  United Nations Journal: A Delegate’s Odyssey

  Execution Eve

  Saving the Queen

  Airborne

  Stained Glass

  A Hymnal: The Controversial Arts

  Who’s On First

  Marco Polo, If You Can

  Atlantic High: A Celebration

  Overdrive: A Personal Documentary

  The Story of Henry Tod

  See You Later Alligator

  Right Reason

  The Temptation of Wilfred Malachey

  High Jinx

  Mongoose, R. I. P.

  Racing Through Paradise

  On the Firing Line: The Public Life of Our Public Figures

  Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country

  Tucker’s Last Stand

  In Search of Anti-Semitism

  WindFall

  Happy Days Were Here Again

  A Very Private Plot

  EDITOR

  The Committee and Its Critics

  Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr.

  W. F. B.: An Appreciation

  Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?

  American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor

  with a dolphin are trademarks of Doubleday

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE This is the eleventh novel in which I refer to historical figures, dead and alive. In this novel there are characters who are related to historical figures. Needless to say, in this novel as in its predecessors, the whole is a work of fiction.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Buckley, William F. (William Frank), 1925–

  Brothers no more / William F. Buckley, Jr.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Veterans—United States—Fiction. 2. Friendship—

  United States—Fiction. 3. Men—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3552.U344B76 1995

  813’.54—dc20 94–24162

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80320-7

  Copyright © 1995 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  For (the Reverend) Michael Bozell

  el primer sobrino

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Book Two

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Book Three

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Book One

  One

  PFC. DANNY O’HARA had the walkie-talkie in his hand. It was countdown time.

  “Thirty minutes,” he said in a low voice to Private Henry Chafee, who opened the breech of his rifle for the tenth time. Yes, he nodded to himself, he had confirmed that the cartridge was secure in the chamber. Both men were in sweaty blackface. The sergeant had told them to apply the sooty grease also to their hands and faces—“They’ll stand out like flashlights if you don’t.” Danny looked over at Henry and yes, for a long moment after every explosion, his face was visible even through all the muddy camouflage. If they hadn’t blackened their faces they’d have vividly reflected the light of the exploding shells.

  These were exploding more rapidly with every passing quarter hour, beginning two hours ago when they occupied their foxhole, cakey-dry, hot, small, smelly, here at the eastern end of the regimental front. The mandate was straightforward: Their regiment was responsible for overrunning the impacted German unit standing in the way of Allied progress. They could not know its size—a company, perhaps; perhaps a battalion—whatever it was that Field Marshal Kesselring had left behind as he retreated from the Arno line north of Rome.

  Whatever the unit was, its defensive firepower was seemingly inexhaustible, and Colonel Johnson had postponed zero hour from daytime to dark, resigning himself to the futility of his own offensive, up against the stubborn German unit standing in the way. Nothing had worked against it. The drenching artillery, the close air support, the bombs—they hadn’t succeeded in silencing the enemy machine guns and rifles. There wasn’t any doubt about it, the American infantry offensive would need the cover of darkness. But it meant also this, that the charge would need to take place before 2200, which was when the moon would begin to shine on the scrubby, bloody hill. “A funny thing,” Danny said, “the moon somehow illuminates more vividly than the sun. Did you know that, Henry? A matter of contrast, I suppose.”

  “I guess so.” Henry was fanning himself with the aluminum top ripped off the cartridge case. “God it’s hot.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re going to be a lot hotter after we’ve run the distance.” Danny could not be sure exactly how far it was to the firing point he and Henry had been assigned to destroy. He did have the compass bearing on their objective and they agreed that the stars would prove useful in maintaining their course to it. Danny now rechecked the compass and looked up at the stars. “There! That’s just a little left of the course we’ll be running, see it?” He lifted his hand, fingers extended, moving it up and down, pointing to the star. Henry moved his head behind Danny’s to identify the star that would guide them.

  “Yes, I see it,” he said. “It won’t move very much in, what, twenty-five minutes?”

  Danny looked at his watch. “I can’t make out the time. We’ll have to get it from the radio. God, what I would give for a smoke. Henry! You don’t need to check your rifle breech again.… Sorry, getting edgy. Won’t be long now. We’ve got a full battalion—four companies, sixteen platoons, sixty-four squads. And exactly two soldiers, you and me, Henry, are the little point on the left end of the arc. In a way, that means the whole operation swings on us.” He laughed.

  Henry didn’t laugh.

  “If we’re lucky, when we charge up on the target we’ll discover that our Kraut
gunner has already been zapped—” Danny slammed down the palm of his right hand on the surface of his left hand. Another mosquito. His flow of talk was not interrupted. “—hit by one of our artillery shells, maybe. Hell, these guys can’t be immortal! What the fuck, Henry, we’ve been dumping on them since—” He stopped. He would not even try to raise his voice to compete with the two major detonations “—since maybe two o’clock? Oh.” Danny stopped talking. He had spotted the spitting light from the gunner ahead and heard the thup-thup-thup of the bullets. They tore into the earth not many yards from the foxhole in which he and Henry were crouched.

  “I guess there’ll be somebody out there to welcome us after all. Sheeyit it’s hot. Henry?”

  “Yes.”

  “This isn’t much fun, is it. And first battle action for us, too. I forget, Henry. How’d we get into this fucking war? You’re so smart, tell me. Come to think of it, I’m smart as hell too. Maybe General Clark will find out who was responsible and maybe—hey, what you think of this, Henry?—maybe the guy responsible will be sentenced to be shot, and maybe you and I, baby, will be the executioners!” He laughed. “That’s a good one. When they execute somebody, his hands are tied behind him, he’s standing in front of a wall blindfolded—and they use six soldiers to fire! But when it’s a machine gunner in the dark firing at us, two of us are supposed to be enough to take him on! Army logic. I wonder, Henry. Do they teach logic at West Point? At the army war colleges?—Give me some of that water, Henry. We may as well use it up. We’re not going to be carrying extra provisions on our charge of the light brigade.” He returned the canteen and put his ear down to the little radio speaker.

  “Why do they have to say it a hundred times?—Five minutes-five minutes-five minutes. So?—five minutes! In five minutes we go, Henry.”

  Danny looked up again at his guiding star, then raised his head just high enough to make it possible to point the compass arrow at his objective. It lay on an azimuth of 290 degrees. Without looking down at the compass Danny said, “Our star’s pretty much with us still.” He paused. “Great idea, a star lighting your way to the enemy. Well, I guess the Big Star was a light for Herod, right, Henry? Sure. Oh Jesus!” Danny’s voice was hoarse now, struggling to make itself heard over the crashing sound of the great detonations.

  He brought the radio to his ear, first poking his index finger in the ear to trap a mosquito. “Okay, Henry, one minute. They’re counting down now in seconds. Fifty … forty … get ready! … thirty … Henry! Get up!”

  Henry spoke. “I’m not going, Danny.”

  Danny looked down at him in disbelief. The explosions had stopped. It was totally dark, silent. He had to guess exactly where Henry’s head was.

  “Henry! You crazy? We got TEN SECONDS!” With his hand, he felt for Henry’s head. He felt his hair: Henry had removed his helmet.

  The fighter plane pilots, moving away from the fire zone, made out below their wingtips what seemed a sparkling tiara: the 3rd Regiment, on the move. And, on the ground, there was thunderous sound and the staccato light bursts of .30-caliber cartridges fired at waist level as the mile-long arc of men roared toward their targets. Danny spat down on Henry—his disbelief was very nearly hysterical—and then launched himself forward toward his star, squeezing the trigger of his rifle every second. He could make out the three GIs on his right, moving parallel. In less than a half minute the floodlight from the bazooka lit up the whole area and Danny spotted the target gun embrasure, ran headlong toward it and lobbed a hand grenade through the narrow opening.

  One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi. He had counted out the five specified seconds, heard the blast of his grenade. He could now move in, prepared to encounter whatever creature survived the grenade. Cautiously he entered the bunker from the back, with his left hand beaming his flashlight splashily, up, down, right, left, his right on the rifle trigger. The two German soldiers were dead.

  Danny paused. The floodlight was now out, the gunfire suddenly ended.

  He dropped his rifle and ran the seventy, eighty yards back toward his foxhole. He jumped into it, grabbed Henry by the collar, shook him, and whispered roughly, “Come on! Quick! Come with me!” Henry climbed out of the foxhole and, Danny’s arm firmly on his sleeve, jogged alongside, back once again in the direction of their star. Danny’s star, Henry was thinking, not mine, as he wrested free from Danny’s grip, turned his rifle toward his stomach and pushed on the trigger.

  Two

  DANNY O’HARA had been instructed by the senior at Yale who tapped him for Zeta Psi to wear informal clothes for the initiation rituals that evening. “You know, khaki pants, whatever. And coat and tie, of course.” Coat and tie wasn’t any longer quite “of course” at Yale. One master, freshly installed at Silliman College, had specified coats and ties to be worn at meals in his college dining room, and a mere three weeks later the freshly elected twenty-year-old president of the college’s student association called on the master to inform him that it was the consensus of the students that to insist on a coat and tie was intrusive and fascistic.

  “Fascistic?” the master asked. He was a professor of philosophy and frequently took pride in slipping it into casual conversation that he was probably the first academic in the country to start up a faculty chapter of Bundles for Britain. That was back in 1939! “I am about as much a fascist as John Stuart Mill,” he comforted himself.

  Well. Student ignorance. There wasn’t anything—he knew—to be done about that. But he did have the authority to remove any scintilla of evidence that would induce, even if it did not justify, so ugly a label. Accordingly, he repealed his ruling. Undergraduates could henceforth dine at Silliman wearing anything they chose. One student, the next Halloween, took license to do just that, and arrived at the dining room wearing nothing at all.

  But the fraternities held on to fascistic standards for a while longer, so that at 4:45 on the Tuesday, Daniel Tracey O’Hara fixed his tie while looking at the mirror above the sink. He was not so distracted by the social ritual that lay ahead of him as to fail to note that notwithstanding his beard, which tended to heaviness, he was incandescently young in appearance and good-looking, his hair light brown with here and there a curl, his eyes brown and penetrating, his lips fixed, it seemed, in a position at once quizzical and patronizing, his white teeth showing between lips that never seemed absolutely to close. He was lithe and strong and tall, and he winked at himself as he left the washroom to return to the student suite he shared with Henry Chafee.

  Henry of course knew where Danny would be going. There was not the slightest resentment over his roommate’s preferential status. It was two months ago that Danny had asked Henry whether he would be joining a fraternity. He got back the answer—Henry wasn’t coy about it—that Henry couldn’t afford a fraternity. Danny was regretful about this but didn’t distract himself with egalitarian concerns. The administration at Yale forbade fraternity membership to more than 25 percent of the undergraduate body, so that a heavy majority were always on the principal, non-fraternity-belonging side of the tracks, and nobody seemed to have the time to stimulate social resentments. After two years together, Danny had come to terms with differences in economic resources. Danny’s mother lived in Palm Beach with Danny’s incumbent, affluent stepfather. Henry’s widowed mother lived in Lakeville, Connecticut. Danny’s own father had died during freshman year.

  “Died of what?” his date Martha had asked him, the night of the freshman prom.

  “There is some question about that in our family,” Danny said gravely. “There is the school of thought that says Dad died from drinking too many dry martinis. There is the other school that holds that he died because one day he couldn’t get a dry martini.” He then grinned. An infectious grin, so Martha didn’t much mind it that Danny was speaking unkindly about his late father.

  He would need extra money for fraternity dues. Danny was never absolutely sure who it was—his mother? his st
epfather? his father’s trust?—that sent him the monthly checks. They came in from different sources, but they always came. When he had special needs (a car, a European vacation) he would write to his mother. She had instructed him, when he got back from the war, to do this. She would forward his request to whichever of his patrons was, in her judgment, either more affluent at the moment, or else more inclined to make comfortable the life of Daniel T. O’Hara; though he would learn, that summer in France, that his suppliers were not wholly elastic in keeping Danny solvent and happy. “I forget, Mother,” Danny once asked her after getting back from his vacation. “Did Grandfather die rich?”

  “He had money”—his mother referred to her father, the late President—“but not a whole lot of it. Mother needs looking after. Whether there will be much left over after she goes, I’m not sure, and you certainly shouldn’t count on it.”

  “Maybe she will leave me one of Grandfather’s postage stamps?” Danny smiled.

  “You are a nasty, avaricious boy,” Rachel Roosevelt O’Hara Bennett smiled back at him, kissing him lightly on his nose.

  Danny had been content to let the matter rest and reminded himself that since he was taking a major in American history at Yale he might at some point pause to examine what if anything the fawning historians had unearthed about the personal wealth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his grandfather, who had died when Danny was twenty.

  Danny had visited him only once. This was at Hyde Park, the patriarchal estate on the Hudson River where the President spent weeks at a time during the summer. He had been too busy for a leisurely visit, what with the strains of a world war. But a presidential election was coming up, and family photographs were for that reason alone very much in order. The grandchildren were lunched at Hyde Park, were photographed (no interviews), but were not invited to spend the night. His mother had once complained, “Everybody thinks Hyde Park is as big as the Waldorf-Astoria. Actually, it is an enormous house, twelve bedrooms.” Driving home Danny had said, “Mother, isn’t Grandfather going to die soon? I mean, he looks like it, don’t you think?” His mother said not to talk that way, that there was a national election ahead. And anyway, presidents get the best doctors in the world.