I knew in the smoke and din of Chicote’s that the offensive was a failure and I knew it even stronger when I took my first drink at the crowded bar. When things are all right and it is you that is feeling low a drink can make you feel better. But when things are really bad and you are all right, a drink just makes it clearer. Now, in Chicote’s it was so crowded that you had to make room with your elbows to get your drink to your mouth. I had one good long swallow and then someone jostled me so that I spilled part of the glass of whisky and soda. I looked around angrily and the man who had jostled me laughed.

“Hello fish face,” he said.

“Hello you goat.”

“Let’s get a table,” he said. “You certainly looked sore when I bumped you.”

“Where did you come from?” I asked. His leather coat was dirty and greasy, his eyes were hollow and he needed a shave. He had the big Colt automatic that had belonged to three other men that I had known of, and that we were always trying to get shells for, strapped to his leg. He was very tall and his face was smoke darkened and grease smudged. He had a leather helmet with a heavy leather padded ridge longitudinally over the top and a heavily padded leather rim.

“Where’d you come from?”

“Casa del Campo,” he said, pronouncing it in a sing-song mocking way we had heard a page boy use in calling in the lobby of a hotel in New Orleans one time and still kept as a private joke.

“There’s a table,” I said as two soldiers and two girls got up to go. “Let’s get it.”

We sat at this table in the middle of the room and I watched him raise his glass. His hands were greasy and the forks of both thumbs black as graphite from the back spit of the machine gun. The hand holding the drink was shaking.

“Look at them,” he put out the other hand. It was shaking too.

“Both the same,” he said in that same comic lilt. Then, seriously, “You been down there?”

“We’re making a picture of it.”

“Photograph well?”

“Not too.”

“See us?”

“Where?”

“Attack on the farm. Three twenty-five this afternoon.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Like it?”

“Nope.”

“Me either,” he said. “Listen the whole thing is just as crazy as a bedbug. Why do they want to make a frontal attack against positions like those? Who in hell thought it up?”

“An S. O. B. named Largo Caballero,” said a short man with thick glasses who was sitting at the table when we came over to it. “The first time they let him look through a pair of field glasses he became a general. This is his masterpiece.”