The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  “No offense, Craig, but you don’t look old enough to have played much polo. I don’t suppose you’re rated, are you, Son?”

  “Three goals, sir,” Craig Lowell said.

  “Where did you play, Craig?” the general asked, gently.

  “West Palm, sir, Ramapo, Houston, Los Angeles.”

  “You know Bryce Taylor?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Craig Lowell replied.

  “And how is he, these days?” the general asked, idly.

  “Rather poorly, sir, I’m afraid,” Lowell said. “I think he may even be dead. My grandfather wrote he’d spoken to Mrs. Taylor…”

  “You come with me and keep me company, Craig,” the general said. “While I get out of my shirt.”

  The general winked at MacMillan. Goddamn, he had at least a three-goal rated player. With Fat Charley, who was rated at two before the war, and that ugly man halfway down the line, he just might be able to field a team that could take the frogs. A three-goal player was more than he had hoped for. The general was rated at seven.

  The general bounded up the folding metal stairs of a van. The inside was plush, ornate. The general had crossed Europe in this vehicle. His rolling home and command post. There was coffee steaming in a pot, a jug with ice water, a plate of sandwiches covered with a towel.

  “Help yourself, Craig,” he said. “And tell me the bad news about Bryce.”

  The general pulled off the leather jacket, and the pink uniform shirt beneath it, and a sleeveless silk undershirt under that. He pulled on a GI T-shirt, on which had been neatly lettered, front and back, with the numeral 1.

  Craig Lowell told him what he had learned from his grandfather about the terminal illness of Bryce Taylor.

  “What did you say your grandfather’s name was?” General Waterford asked.

  “Geoffrey Craig, sir.”

  “Oh,” Waterford said. “You’re a Craig.”

  “My mother’s name is Craig,” Lowell said.

  “That’s right, you’re a Lowell. The Cabots speak only to the Lowells, and the Lowells speak only to God. Boston, right?”

  “No, sir,” Lowell said. “New York.”

  “But you have the Harvard accent,” the general said.

  “I went to Harvard, sir.”

  “Yes,” the general said, pleased with himself. “Of course you did.” Then he turned to look at MacMillan.

  “I want you to find out about my old friend Bryce Taylor, Mac,” the general said. “(A) If he’s dead. If he is dead, write a nice letter of condolence. Get the address from Craig here. (B) If he’s still alive, find out where and in what condition, and what I can do.”

  “Yes, sir,” MacMillan said.

  “Where do you usually play, Craig?” the general asked, unzipping his fly, tucking the T-shirt in, and grunting as he fastened the tight trouser band against his middle.

  “Three, sir.”

  “OK, we’ll try it that way. Go tell the others to mark their shirts. But you’ll play number three against me. Tell Fat Charley he’s number one with you. We need to get some of that high-living fat off him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Craig Lowell said. He walked back out of the van and crossed the field. A sergeant had led four ponies up the van. They weren’t much, in Lowell’s judgment, as a string. But they were the best available, and they had been reserved for the general. What were left over for the others to play were worse.

  They played two “fool-around chukkers,” as the general put it, and then they played a game, six chukkers. Blues, led by the general, won 7–4.

  The general accepted a large glass of heavily sweetened iced-coffee, and drank it quickly. He was in a very good mood.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “MacMillan has arranged accommodations for us in one of the Bad Nauheim Kurhotels. The Germans, among other odd notions, apparently believed that the foul water in this bucolic Dorf had medicinal qualities. “What we are going to do now is load into the staff cars, go have a bath, and get something to drink. Mac has imported the water to mix with the whiskey.”

  The general and Fat Charley got into a Ford staff car. MacMillan rode in front with the driver. The others, with one exception, got into other staff cars. The procession started off.

  “Stop the goddamned car!” the general shouted. The driver slammed on the brakes. The cars behind almost ran into his car. “Where the hell is he going?” the general demanded rhetorically. He rolled down the window.

  “Craig, goddamnit, where are you going?” he shouted.

  “To walk the horses, sir,” Craig Lowell replied.

  “Goddamnit, we have enlisted men to do that.”

  “General,” MacMillan said, “I didn’t have time, the way the general sort of rushed out there on the field, to…”

  “What are you telling me, Mac?” the general asked, slowly.

  “Sir, that’s Private Lowell.”

  The general waved at Private Craig Lowell, rolled up the window, and gestured for the driver to move on.

  “Mac, goddamnit, you shouldn’t have done that to me. I embarrassed that boy.”

  “No excuse, sir,” MacMillan said.

  “Goddamn it, I told you to round me up every polo player in the division, and in division support troops,” the general said.

  “Yes, sir. That’s exactly what the general said.”

  “What the hell is a three-goal polo player doing in the goddamned ranks?” the general asked. “And he’s a gentleman, too, Mac, goddamnit. He’s a Lowell and a Craig. You heard what he said. For Christ’s sake! What the hell is he doing as a goddamned private?”

  “He’s on the division golf team, General,” Mac replied, taking the question literally.

  “The golf team! The golf team!”

  “Yes, sir,” Mac said. “He’s a jock.”

  “I didn’t think you’d go rooting around in the goddamned Form 20s, for God’s sake. Sometimes, Mac, you’re just too goddamned efficient a dog robber.”

  “May I have the general’s permission to explain, Sir?”

  “You can try, Mac. Right now my first thought is to send you back there to help him shovel the horseshit,” the general said.

  “With the general’s permission, sir, it happened this way. When the general laid this requirement on me, I was faced with the problem of not knowing very much about polo.”

  “Or about much else, either,” the general said.

  “I asked around if anyone happened to know anything about polo. Lowell did, and he helped me out. He really knows a good deal about the game, General.”

  “I saw that,” the general said. “If Fat Charley had been able to get his ass out of dead low gear, the Reds would have won. He set you up half a dozen times, Charley, and you blew it.”

  “I’m a little out of shape, sir,” Fat Charley said.

  “That’s the understatement of the week. Go on, Mac.”

  “General, I brought Private Lowell along just to be prepared,” MacMillan said. “All the other players are officers.”

  “Mac,” the general said. “(A) In six weeks and two days, my polo team is going to play the team of the Deuxième Division Mécanique of the French Army, under General Quillier. (B) Because the French do not socialize with enlisted men, my team will be made up solely of officers. (C) My team will win. (D) My team cannot win without that Lowell boy as my number three.”

  “I believe I take the General’s meaning, sir,” Lieutenant MacMillan said.

  (Five)

  Bad Nauheim, Germany

  12 May 1946

  After Private Craig W. Lowell, working with the German stableboys, had walked the horses, he got in his privately owned black jeep and drove across town to the Constabulary golf course, where he was billeted in an attic room over the pro shop.

  He fantasized about being stopped by one of the Constabulary MPs, or better yet, by one of the more chickenshit young officers of the Constabulary.

  “Trooper,” he would be challenged. The Constabulary wa
s playing cavalry, and soldiers were “troopers” not soldiers. “Trooper, where the hell did you get so dirty?”

  “Actually,” he could then reply, “I’ve been playing polo with General Waterford. And the provost marshal.”

  He was not stopped. He parked the jeep behind the pro shop and climbed the narrow stairs to his tiny room. The only thing that could really be said for his special billet was that it was away from the barracks. He was left alone. If they wanted him, they had to send for him, and that was generally too much trouble, so some other “trooper” would be grabbed and given an unpleasant task to perform.

  He pulled off his boots, and then stripped out of the sweat-soaked breeches, shirt, and underwear. The general had run their asses off. If the others were as tired as he was, he thought with a certain satisfaction, the officers and gentlemen with whom he had played must really be dragging their asses. All of them except the general, he thought. The general was the only one who had not looked to be on the edge of exhaustion when the jeep horn signaled the end of the last chukker.

  Lowell had been as surprised to find that General Waterford was a first-rate polo player as the general had been surprised to learn that Craig was a private.

  Naked, Lowell bent over and examined his inner legs. He was tall and well muscled, not like a football player, but with something of the same suggestion of great strength and endurance. He was chapped, slightly, or that was heat rash. Nothing serious.

  He wrapped a towel around his middle and went down the stairs to the men’s locker room and took a shower. He took his razor with him, and shaved under the streaming hot water. His beard was as light as his hair, but for some reason, more than eight hours’ growth stood out on his skin as much as if it had been jet black. The Constab was big on clean-shaven troopers.

  Lowell was mildly concerned about what would happen now that Major General Peterson K. Waterford had learned of his enlisted status. But he was more curious than worried. For one thing, he certainly hadn’t tried to pass himself off as anything but a private. Lieutenant MacMillan knew he was a private. If the general decided to send lightning bolts of rage, his target would be MacMillan. Privates were invisible to generals.

  In any event Lowell thought it unlikely that MacMillan would be struck by a lightning bolt and toppled. Craig Lowell had realized—while eavesdropping on the conversations of majors and colonels at the nineteenth hole of the Bad Nauheim golf course—that they had erred in their assessment of Lt. MacMillan. It was generally believed that MacMillan was the jester in the court of King Waterford. A pleasant fool who had somehow won the Medal. MacMillan’s third-person manner of speaking to the general and other very senior officers was probably close to the official division joke.

  But it was Private Craig Lowell’s assessment of MacMillan that if he wasn’t the Éminence Gris behind the throne, then he was at least a Knight Companion of the Bath. Not a simple dog robber and not a jester. Lowell had nothing really concrete on which to base this opinion, except for a combination of small things. There was a certain look in the general’s eye, a certain shading of his behavior, when, for some reason, MacMillan was not at his side, and a certain relaxation when he showed up.

  Lowell also had gotten to know Mrs. Waterford. She was a tall, thin, gray-haired woman, not at all the counterpart of her flamboyant husband. When she called the golf club, she asked when it would be convenient for her to play. The two other generals’ wives, Mrs. Deputy Commanding General, and Mrs. Chief of Staff, as well as the senior colonels’ wives, Mesdames G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4, even Mrs. Division Surgeon, called to announce when they intended to play.

  Mrs. Waterford asked when she could play, and she generally played very early in the morning, and invariably with Mrs. Rudolph G. (Roxy) MacMillan, a redheaded, buxom woman with a hearty belly laugh. There were seven children between them. Mrs. Waterford was twice a grandmother.

  The first time Lowell had met Mrs. Waterford, she had understandably come to the conclusion that he was German. She had overheard him talking to the caddies in German. The only thing lower on the social scale than a private was a kraut.

  “Good morning,” Mrs. Waterford had said, graciously, in rather badly accented German in the belief he was a kraut. “Isn’t it a lovely morning?”

  “A beautiful morning, Frau General,” Lowell had replied, and then switched to English. “I’m Private Lowell, the caddy master.”

  “And you’re also the best golfer in the division, according to Lieutenant MacMillan,” she replied, without missing a stroke. “Do you think you could play with us? We could kill two birds with one stone. God knows, we need golf instruction. Mrs. MacMillan and I are ashamed to play with anybody but each other. And we both need practice in conversational German.”

  “Oh, do we need you!” Mrs. MacMillan said. She put out her hand. “I’m Roxy MacMillan.”

  By the time they had finished the first round, Lowell decided he liked both of them very much. Mrs. Waterford was a lady who reminded him of his late grandmother, and Mrs. MacMillan was—he thought of the old-fashioned phrase his grandmother had used to describe nice people who were rather simple—“a diamond in the rough.”

  The role of golf in the army had surprised Lowell when he had first come to Bad Nauheim and the U.S. Constabulary. He had always thought golf to be the sport of the middle and upper classes, not at all the sort of thing sergeants (who were the yeomen in the military social hierarchy) would do. But apparently, before the war, everybody in the army over the grade of corporal had been out there swatting balls. He finally realized that it was because the government paid for the upkeep of the courses, and that in order to justify the expense, and thus their own playing, the brass had had to encourage the yeomen to get out there and knock the ball around.

  Lieutenant MacMillan, whom Lowell at first had also pegged as one of the yeomen, played every Wednesday afternoon, usually with the Constabulary finance officer, Major Emmons. They were joined infrequently by the general, but normally it was just MacMillan and Major Emmons. They played nine holes, and then spent a couple of hours at the nineteenth hole, eating hamburgers and drinking beer.

  Several weeks after Lowell had begun to play with Mrs. Waterford and Mrs. MacMillan on a more or less regular basis, MacMillan had come up to Lowell when Lowell had been leaning against the wall of the caddy house and pro shop, devoutly hoping not to be pressed into service as a golf instructor. When MacMillan walked up to him, he handed Lowell a dollar in script.

  “Get us a couple of beers and meet me in the locker room,” he said. He spoke pleasantly enough, but it was a command, not an invitation.

  When Lowell brought the beer into the locker room MacMillan was coming out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his middle. MacMillan turned his back, dropped the towel, and pulled on a pair of jockey shorts.

  “I understand you’ve been giving my wife golf lessons,” he said, his back still to Lowell.

  “Yes, sir,” Lowell replied.

  “And German lessons,” MacMillan pursued, as he turned around.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where did you learn to speak German?” MacMillan asked. He did not like Lowell’s type. He was generally suspicious of handsome young men, and this handsome young man was also charming, had a hoity-toity manner of speaking, and was a draftee to boot.

  “A lady who took care of me when I was a kid was German,” Craig replied.

  “What do you want out of the army, Lowell?” Mac asked.

  “I don’t quite understand you, sir.”

  “Military government is always looking for people who speak German,” he said. “You could make buck sergeant in six months, probably staff before your time is over.”

  “Well, if I have a choice, sir, I’d rather stay right here.”

  “That’s right, you don’t need the money, do you?” MacMillan said.

  “No, sir, I don’t.” Lowell wondered how MacMillan had found out about that; but he was not surprised that he had.
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br />   “My wife thinks you’re a very nice young man,” MacMillan said. “If you change your mind, let me know.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I was a jock myself before the war,” MacMillan offered. “I was Hawaiian Department light-heavyweight champ.” He opened the beer bottle, drained it, and finished dressing. Lowell couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I don’t think you’re a nice young man,” MacMillan said to him, finally. “I think you’re a goddamn feather merchant.” When he saw that this had sort of stunned Lowell, he went on. “A word of advice, feather merchant: Don’t try to take advantage of being the general’s lady’s golf pro and instructor in kraut.”

  Lowell flushed, but said nothing.

  “I know, of course, that that had never entered your mind, Private Lowell,” MacMillan said. Then he walked out of the locker room.

  A month after that, MacMillan sought him out again.

  “I’ve got a question for you, feather merchant,” he said. “What do you know about polo?”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “What would I like to know, sir,” MacMillan corrected him.

  “Yes, sir,” Lowell said. He had just noticed that MacMillan’s lieutenant’s bar had been replaced with the railroad tracks of a captain. “I wasn’t trying to be disrespectful.”

  “I don’t suppose you were,” MacMillan said, after looking at him for a moment. “But I’ll tell you something, Lowell. That’s the way you come across. As if you think everybody in the army is a horse’s ass.”

  “I don’t mean to do that,” Lowell said, sincerely.

  “But you do think that we’re a bunch of horse’s asses, don’t you?”

  “I don’t think you are,” Lowell replied, without thinking. MacMillan’s eyes tightened, and his eyebrows went up. Lowell remembered only a moment later to add, “Captain.”

  “I’m flattered,” MacMillan said, sarcastically. But it was evident to Lowell that the sarcasm was pro forma. MacMillan had recognized the truth when he heard it, and he was flattered.

  “Speaking of horse’s asses,” MacMillan said, “tell me about polo.”

  “What would you like to know?”