The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  The slovenly percentage dropped to fifty percent and then below. Some of the shaven and self-laundered began to mock him with crisp salutes whenever they met him. He returned the salutes as crisply, with motions right off the parade ground at the Point. The mockery in the salutes gave way to casual touching of the hand to the eyebrow. But they were still salutes. Not to everybody from everybody, but from all the company grade to all the field grade, and from everybody to the senior prisoner and Bellmon.

  He was in command. What good it would do, specifically, he didn’t know. But he believed, devoutly, that the prisoner complement of Stalag XVII-B was a military formation, and a military formation must have discipline. Without discipline, a body of men becomes rabble. Rabble dies, either on the battlefield or in a POW camp.

  Six weeks after the French and British left, a convoy of canvas-topped Hanomag trucks came through the heavy wooden gates of the compound and discharged four truckloads of American enlisted prisoners, twenty-two to a truck.

  Bellmon heard the sound of the trucks and looked out his window and watched the troops get off. Some showed signs of long imprisonment (how he could tell, he didn’t know, but he knew), and others had apparently only recently been captured. They were all dispirited. They sat in groups immediately to the side of the trucks that had brought them, and waited for whatever was going to happen to them. Many of them looked as if they really didn’t care.

  Bellmon buttoned his tunic, straightened his tie in the mirror he had carefully made by polishing a sheet of steel with ashes, and went out into the courtyard.

  At first none of the prisoners reacted to his presence beyond looking at him expectantly. Bellmon put his hands on his hips and let his eyes fall on them, one at a time, looking carefully and without expression. He had looked at perhaps thirty of the prisoners that way when one of them suddenly got to his feet and walked over to him.

  “Sergeant MacMillan, sir,” he said.

  MacMillan wore the stripes of a technical sergeant sewn to the gabardine tunic issued to paratroops. Bellmon could see where the insignia of the 82nd Airborne had been cut from it. The Germans regarded that insignia as a special souvenir, much as Americans were delighted to get their hands on the death’s-head insignia of the SS.

  MacMillan was a young man, stocky and muscular, a typical parachutist. Irish, Bellmon thought. Or maybe Scotch. But he sensed something about this noncom. Somehow he knew that this sergeant was a regular.

  “Is that the way you were taught to report to an officer, Sergeant?” Bellmon asked, quietly. Sergeant MacMillan looked at him for a moment, then popped to attention. He threw his hand to his forehead, held it.

  “Technical Sergeant MacMillan reports to the colonel with party of eighty-seven, sir,” he said.

  Bellmon returned the salute.

  “Fall the men in, Sergeant,” he said.

  Macmillan did a precise about-face movement.

  “All right,” he bellowed. “Fall in!”

  There was some stirring, and one or two men got to their feet, but there was no movement toward Sergeant MacMillan, no suggestion that they intended to obey this order.

  MacMillan didn’t move for a full minute. Then, very deliberately, he walked to the man sitting nearest to him on the ground. He bent over him, picked him up by his shirt front, and punched him in the mouth. The soldier, a buck sergeant, fell on his rear end and put his hand to his bleeding mouth.

  None of the others moved at all, but one man spit.

  “Get up,” T/Sgt MacMillan said, softly, and pointed with his left hand, finger extended, to the spot where he wanted the man to stand. The buck sergeant backed away from MacMillan like a crab, but then got to his feet and walked to where MacMillan had indicated, and more or less came to attention.

  “Anybody else?” MacMillan asked, looking at the faces of the others. No one moved or said a word. “Fall in on him,” MacMillan said. “Three ranks.”

  Slowly, resentfully, the others formed on him. When they were all in place, standing at a position that charitably could be called attention, MacMillan did another snappy about-face and saluted again.

  “Sir,” he said, “the detachment is formed.”

  “Very good, Sergeant,” Bellmon ordered. “Prepare the detachment for inspection.”

  MacMillan did another about-face movement, and gave the commands. “Dress, right, dress! Open ranks, march!”

  Bellmon marched to the left-hand corner of the formation. MacMillan marched to join him. Bellmon went down the ranks, pausing to look at each man, giving each man a chance to look at him. Then he marched out in front again.

  “Stand at ease,” he ordered. “My name is Bellmon. I am the executive officer. The first thing we are going to do is feed you, show you where you will be quartered, and see that you have a shower. We have to fend for ourselves here. Sergeant MacMillan will appoint mess hall, shower point, and delousing details of six men under a noncom each.” He looked at MacMillan, who was standing at parade rest in front of the formation. “First Sergeant,” Bellmon called. “Front and center.”

  MacMillan walked up and saluted still again. Bellmon told him where the kitchen and the shower were.

  “When you get things running, come to my quarters,” he said.

  MacMillan nodded.

  Bellmon raised his voice.

  “First Sergeant, take the detachment,” he said, and then did an about-face and marched back to his barracks building.

  A group of officers had been watching from inside.

  “Colonel, can I ask a question?” one of the captains said. Bellmon nodded. “What would you have done if they had just kept on sitting there?”

  Bellmon felt anger sweep through him. It must have shown on his face, for the captain quickly said, “Sir, the question wasn’t supposed to sound flip.”

  “That’s a regular army sergeant out there, Captain,” Bellmon said. “He would have been unable to leave them sitting there. An officer had called for them to fall in, and they would have fallen in, or somebody, maybe the sergeant, would have been dead.”

  He wondered how he knew, why he was so sure, that Technical Sergeant MacMillan, who was hardly more than a boy, was regular army.

  When MacMillan came to his room, he gave him a cup of the real coffee.

  “How long has the colonel been a prisoner, sir?”

  “Since North Africa,” Bellmon said. “Kasserine Pass.”

  “They got me about three weeks ago,” MacMillan said. “Just before the goddamn war is about over.”

  “We hadn’t heard the 82nd was engaged,” Bellmon said. When MacMillan looked surprised that he had known his division, Bellmon explained he had seen where the patches had been cut off.

  “Operation fucking Market-Garden,” MacMillan said. “We tried to grab the Rhine bridges. Biggest fuck-up in the war. We got the shit kicked out of us.”

  “That’s normally when they catch prisoners,” Bellmon said. “Kasserine was a big fuck-up, too.”

  “How’d the colonel get caught, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I was in a tank. A PzKwIV got us. I got blown off.”

  “We went across this fucking river,” MacMillan said. “Little fucking English boats. No fucking oars. Collapsible sides. They mortared the shit out of us in the water. And then when we got to the other side, there was no fucking ammo. No fucking ammo. How the fuck do they expect you to fight without ammo?”

  “So what happened?”

  “So we took it off the dead, and shot that, and when that was over…what the fuck was I supposed to do? Do a John Wayne? Charge with a fucking carbine bayonet in my hand?”

  “What did you do?” Bellmon asked.

  “I got out of my fucking hole and put my hands up, that’s what I did.”

  “I tried to play dead,” Bellmon said, aware this was the first time he had ever told the story. “But they saw me breathing, rolled me over, and stuck a .45 up my nose.”

  “So what happens to us now
, Colonel?” MacMillan asked.

  “We wait for the war to end,” Bellmon said.

  “We was nine days on the train, plus half a day on the truck,” MacMillan said. “We’re a long way from our lines. How far are we from the Russians?”

  “I just don’t know,” Bellmon said.

  “There’s no sense in trying to get out of this fucking place now,” Macmillan said. “There’s no way we can get back on our own, goddamn it.”

  “MacMillan,” Bellmon said, “there is an active, enthusiastic escape committee here.”

  MacMillan looked at him.

  “If they ever reach the point where they’re going to try it, I will order them not to,” Bellmon said. “But in the meantime, I don’t think you should let your opinion of the situation be known.”

  “Keep ’em busy, huh, Colonel?”

  “If I had some whitewash, I’d have them painting rocks, Sergeant,” Bellmon said. He laughed. He realized it was the first time in a very long time that he had laughed.

  MacMillan grunted understandingly. They were smiling at each other now, two hometown people who had found each other in an alien land.

  “Are there any more regulars here, Colonel? Or is it you and me?”

  “Just you and me, MacMillan,” Bellmon said.

  “Ah, what the fuck, Colonel,” MacMillan said. “If it wasn’t for the war, you’d still probably be a first john, and I’d still be a corporal.”

  II

  (One)

  The United States Military Academy

  West Point, New York

  22 December 1944

  Cadet Corporal Sanford T. Felter, of the class of 1946, sat at attention on the edge of a straight-backed, rather ornately carved wooden chair in the outer office of the Commandant of the Corps of Cadets. His rigid back was three inches from the rear of the chair, and he held his plumed shako in a white-gloved hand. He had been summoned from the dismissal formation following the formal parade immediately preceding the Christmas holidays.

  He was small and slight, rather pasty-faced in complexion, and his face showed signs of the acne which had nearly cost him his competitive appointment to the Academy.

  He was staring straight ahead at a portrait of a senior officer he had never heard of, but who apparently had done something sufficiently meritorious to have his portrait hung in the outer office of the commandant. He was going over in his mind what would likely happen inside the commandant’s office, and what his responses should be. He was uneasy, but determined.

  “If Felter is out there,” a metallic voice came over the intercom, “send him in.”

  “You may go in,” the commandant’s secretary said.

  Felter stood up. He put his shako squarely on his head, and picked up his Ml Garand rifle. As long as he had been at the Point, he had never before reported under arms to an officer indoors. He wasn’t sure if he should march in with the piece at right shoulder arms, and then come to present arms, or whether he should march in with the piece at trail arms, come to attention, and render the rifle salute.

  He decided, right then, to do it at trail arms.

  He knocked at the door, waited for the command to enter, and then marched in, coming to a stop eighteen inches from the huge, polished mahogany desk. He came to attention, lowered the butt of the Garand onto the carpet, and rendered the first movement of the rifle salute. He moved his right hand across his body, fingers extended and stiff, so the fingertips of his right hand contacted the stacking swivel of the Ml he held in his left hand.

  “Sir, Cadet Corporal Felter, Sanford T., reporting to the Commandant of Cadets as ordered, Sir,” he said.

  The major general behind the desk, who was the Commandant of Cadets, returned the salute. He was an athletic man in his late forties, who wore his gray hair in a closely cropped crew cut. He was the sort of man one knew had played football in college, and now spent as much time as he could spare on the golf course.

  Felter completed the salute, snapping his right hand quickly back across his body to his side. He stared six inches above the commandant’s head, at the knees of a portrait of General Philip H. Sheridan.

  “Stand at ease, Felter,” the commandant said. Felter moved the muzzle of the Garand four inches forward, moved his left foot six inches to the side, and put his left hand in the small of his back. The position was that of parade rest, but this was the commandant’s office and the commandant, and he was a cadet corporal, and parade rest seemed to be the position to assume. In at ease it was permissible to look around. Cadet Corporal Felter lowered his eyes and met those of the commandant.

  “I have your resignation, Felter,” the general said. “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Sir, I believe it speaks for itself,” Felter said, without hesitation.

  “Oh, no, it doesn’t,” the general said. “I want to know what curious line of thinking is responsible for it.”

  “Sir, I believe the war will be over before I would graduate,” Felter said.

  “And do you have some notion that you will be able to cover yourself with glory?” The general had pushed himself back in his chair, tilting it.

  “No, sir.”

  “But you would like to get in, personally, on the fall of the Thousand Year Reich, is that it? You have a personal involvement?”

  “If the general is making reference to my Jewish faith, no, sir.”

  “Then what the hell is it?” the general snapped, impatiently.

  “Sir, I have decided that what I would learn in the active army during the last stages of the war would be more valuable in my military career than what I would learn here, as a cadet.”

  “Has it occurred to you, Felter, that your idea has been considered, and discarded, by a number of your superiors? It is their considered judgment, with which I fully agree, that the best place for a cadet at this time is at the Academy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But you don’t agree?” Now there was sarcasm in his tone.

  “No, sir.”

  “You know what’s going to happen to you, don’t you? You’re going to be sent to an infantry replacement training center, run through basic training, and put into the pipeline. Three months from now, maybe less, you’ll be a rifleman in a line company.”

  Cadet Corporal Felter did not reply.

  “I asked you if you knew what this resignation means to you, Felter,” the general said, coldly. “Please pay me the courtesy of a reply.”

  “Sir, I very much dislike having to dispute you, sir,” Felter said, forcing himself to meet the general’s eyes.

  “Goddamn you, you arrogant little pup, dispute me!” the general said.

  “Sir,” Felter said. “According to regulations, when a cadet who has completed two or more years at the Academy enters the ranks, he will be given constructive credit for basic training, sir, and will be eligible for further assignment.”

  “I presume you’re sure of that,” the general said. “I confess I didn’t know that. But all that means is that they will hand you an Ml and a bayonet that much sooner. Goddamn it, Son, the army has invested two years in you. We don’t want you killed off as a goddamned private.”

  “Sir, I have reason to believe that I qualify for one or two procurement programs.”

  “What kind of procurement programs?”

  “There is a critical shortage of interpreters in German and Polish and Russian. There is a critical shortage of POW interrogators with fluency in the same languages. I’m not sure I meet the criteria for a POW interrogator, but I am sure that I am qualified as an interpreter. If the shortage still exists when I go in the ranks, I think it is reasonable to presume that I would be assigned such duties.”

  “And if they hand you a rifle and tell you go stick the bayonet in somebody?”

  “That is the worst possible projection, sir,” Felter said. “But even in that event, I believe that service as an infantry rifleman would be of more value to me in my future career than spending the
next year as a cadet and missing active service, sir.”

  “You keep talking about your career, Felter. You are resigning your appointment. How is that going to affect your career?”

  “I intend to apply for readmission to the Academy following the war, sir, under the regulations providing for the admission of regular army enlisted men.”

  “And what makes you so sure that they’d let you back in?”

  “I don’t feel that active service would be a bar to readmission, sir,” Felter said.

  “There used to be an offense, Felter, called silent insolence. That remark came pretty close to it.”

  “I beg the general’s pardon. No insolence was intended.”

  “This whole goddamned resignation is insolent!” the Commandant of Cadets snapped.

  “It is not so intended, sir.”

  “OK. Felter. I’m calling your bluff. I will give you precisely sixty seconds to reconsider your resignation. You may consult your watch.”

  Felter raised his wrist, watched as the sweep second hand completed a circle from seventeen seconds past the minute. Then he put his hand back to his side.

  “Corporal, I now give you an opportunity to withdraw your resignation,” the commandant said, formally, but not unkindly.

  “Thank you, sir, but no, sir,” Felter said.

  “Report to your battalion tactical officer,” the general said. “Tell him that your resignation is being processed, and that you will remain assigned to your company pending further action. You will not, repeat not, go on Christmas leave.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are dismissed, Mister Felter,” the general said.

  Cadet Corporal Sanford T. Felter rendered the rifle salute, did an about-face, and marched out of the Commandant of Cadets’ office. His stomach hurt, and he was afraid that he was going to be sick to his stomach.

  The Commandant of Cadets put Cadet Corporal Felter’s personal and academic records together in a neat stack, and then he asked his secretary to ask the General’s secretary if the General could give him a couple of minutes. “The General” was the Commandant, the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the Commandant of Cadets immediate and only superior at the Point. He was a lieutenant general. The Commandant of Cadets was aware that there was something actually ludicrous in a situation where a twenty-year-old cadet corporal had backed a major general into a corner, where he had to go ask a lieutenant general what to do.