The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  “On whom are you calling, gentlemen?” he asked.

  “Mrs. Frederick C. Lowell,” the major said.

  “You mean Mrs. Pretier,” the doorman corrected him.

  “No, I mean Mrs. Frederick C. Lowell,” the AGC major insisted.

  “Mrs. Frederick Lowell is now Mrs. Andre Pretier,” the doorman said. “Does Mrs. Pretier expect you, gentlemen?”

  “No, she does not,” the AGC major said. “This is official business.”

  Mrs. Pretier could not come to the telephone—she was dressing—but Mr. Pretier gave the doorman permission to pass the gentlemen through to the elevator.

  Mr. Pretier, who despite his name was a sixth-generation American, came to the door on the heels of the maid.

  “My name is Pretier, gentlemen,” he said. “What is it you wished to speak to my wife about?”

  “We would prefer, sir,” the major said, “to speak to Mrs. Pretier personally.”

  “Well, if you insist, and it won’t take long. We’re on our way out, so to speak. Can I offer you something?” He raised his martini glass.

  “No, thank you, sir,” they said in unison, the chaplain a bit more sternly because he was a Southern Baptist and as such a total abstainer.

  Mrs. Janice Craig Lowell Pretier entered the living room, which overlooked Central Park, a few moments later. She swirled through the door to show off her dress to her new husband, and stopped at the bar where she picked up a martini glass.

  “Aren’t you darling, Darling,” she said. “Just what I need before I face those awful people.”

  Her eyes fell upon the two officers standing at the entrance to the thirty-five by fifty foot room holding their uniform hats in their hands. Both were impressed by the room and its furnishings, and made just a little uneasy by the opulence and what it represented.

  “What’s this?” Janice Pretier asked with one of her winning little smiles. “Oh, it’s about the jeep,” she added. “I thought someone would show up eventually about that.”

  “Ma’am?” the AGC major asked.

  “Three weeks ago,” Mrs. Pretier explained, “someone in the army in Brooklyn telephoned to say there was a jeep over there, and could I come for it. It must be my son’s. He’s a soldier, you know, but I haven’t…”

  “Ma’am,” the AGC major said, “we’re here about your son. Your son is Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell, is he not?”

  “And that’s something else strange I’ve wanted to ask somebody about. One day he’s a private playing golf in Germany, and the next thing I hear is that he’s a lieutenant in Greece. A lieutenant is an officer, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the AGC major said.

  “Then what’s this all about? My son is just a boy. You people really shouldn’t have drafted him at all.”

  “Mrs. Pretier, your son has just been recommended for the award of the second highest medal the King of Greece can bestow.”

  “Craig? You must be mistaken. A medal? What for? You people must have your wires crossed or something.”

  “No, ma’am, if your son is Craig W. Lowell, there’s no mistake,” the major said. “And I’m afraid I have some disturbing news, as well,” he added.

  “Disturbing? What do you think this has been so far? What are you talking about?”

  “I’m afraid, ma’am,” the chaplain said, “that your boy has been injured. He’s in no danger—”

  “Injured? What do you mean, injured?”

  “He’s suffered some cuts on his shoulder and arm,” the chaplain said. “He is in no danger.”

  “Surely, this must be some ghastly mistake,” Mr. Pretier said.

  “And how did that happen?” Mrs. Pretier asked, icily, no longer smiling, now holding the major and the chaplain personally responsible for damage to her baby.

  “It seems that Craig,” the chaplain said, “was wounded in action…”

  “Wounded in action? What are you talking about? The war is over.”

  “There is a revolution in Greece, ma’am,” the major said.

  “What’s that got to do with my Craig?” she asked.

  “Your son is assigned to the American Military Advisory Group in Greece,” the major said.

  “I don’t understand any of this,” Mrs. Pretier said. “Andre, darling, get Daddy on the phone, like a dear, will you?”

  He went to the telephone and dialed a number.

  “Lieutenant Lowell had been flown to the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, for treatment,” the major said. “It is one of the finest hospitals in the world. The treatment is unsurpassed.”

  “I still think this is some horrible mistake, a nightmare. You are actually standing there and telling me my son has been shot, and is in a hospital?”

  Andre Pretier carried the telephone to his wife. She snatched the handset, which had a silver sheath over it, from his hand.

  “Daddy? Daddy, there are two soldiers here in the apartment, and they’ve got some crazy story about Craig being shot and being in a hospital in Greece or Germany or someplace; and Daddy, here, you talk to them.”

  The chaplain was closest to her. She thrust the phone at him.

  “This is Chaplain Foley of First Army Headquarters, sir. I understand that you are Lieutenant Craig Lowell’s grandfather. Is that the case, sir?”

  “I was going to go in the service myself,” Andre Pretier said to the major from the Adjutant General’s Corps. “But they found a heart murmur.”

  (Four)

  Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  9 September 1946

  The ambulance, a civilian-type Packard rather than a GI ambulance, rolled without stopping past the guard at the gate of the 97th General U.S. Army Hospital on the eastern outskirts of Frankfurt.

  The huge, attractive hospital was a rambling, four-story structure, built just before World War II. The ambulance drove to the Emergency entrance, turned around carefully, and backed in.

  A nurse and two medics who had gone to Rhine-Main Air Base to meet the plane got out; and four medics, in hospital whites, rolled a stainless steel body cart out to the ambulance. Between them, they got the patient out of the ambulance and onto the cart and rolled him quickly through automatically opening glass doors.

  An officer of the Medical Service Corps met them right inside the door. His eyes rose when he saw the patient was holding a holstered German luger against his chest with his one good hand.

  “Have you got a permit for that gun?” the Medical Service Corps captain demanded. “Is it registered?”

  “Registered?” Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell said, incredulously. He started to laugh, but it hurt. “Oh, shit,” Lowell said, shaking his head.

  “I’ll have to ask you to give me that pistol, Lieutenant,” the captain said.

  “Fuck you,” Craig W. Lowell said.

  “Watch your language, Sonny boy,” a middle-aged nurse dressed in operating room greens said, walking up to the wheeled cart. A green mask hung around her neck, a green cap covered most of her gray hair, and her feet were in hospital slippers.

  Lowell looked up at her.

  “There’s a lady present,” she said.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  She put her fingers on his wrist, and took his pulse. She snapped her fingers, and a younger nurse pushed a flask of fresh blood on a wheeled stand up to the body cart. The older nurse snapped her fingers again, and one of the medics handed her an alcohol wipe. Moving with speed born of skill and experience, she found his artery, slipped a needle into it, and watched until the blood began to flow into him. Then she signaled for the medics to start wheeling the body cart.

  “What about that pistol?” the Medical Service Corps captain asked.

  There was no reply.

  The middle-aged nurse walked rapidly down the highly polished linoleum of the corridor, past the emergency examining rooms, directing the cart with one hand behind her. They came to a bank of elevators. After a moment a door whooshed open. There we
re three people on it, one in whites, two in uniform.

  “Out,” the middle-aged nurse said, gesturing with her hand.

  The body cart, and the fresh blood stand, and the nurse and the two medics pushing the cart got on the elevator. There was no room for the captain. When the door started to close automatically, he put out his hand and held it open.

  “He can’t bring that pistol in the hospital,” he said to the middle-aged nurse, who was a major in the Nurses Corps.

  “Not now, goddamn it,” she said. “Not in his shape. I’ll take care of it later. Let go of the door.”

  The door closed, and the elevator started to rise.

  She looked down at Lieutenant Lowell.

  “Relax,” she said. “I just did that to get him off your back about the gun. How do you feel?”

  “Shitty,” he said, “now that you’ve asked.”

  “I’m going to give you a bath anyhow,” the nurse said. “Washing your mouth out won’t be much extra work.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  The elevator stopped and the door whooshed open.

  “What happens now?” Lowell asked, as they rolled down another corridor.

  “Well, the first thing we’re going to do is get that cruddy uniform off you,” she said.

  “And give you a bath. And pump some blood in you.”

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “And then we’ll see what else you need,” she said.

  “You’re not going to knock me out,” he said.

  “We won’t? Get this straight, Sonny boy: I’ll do whatever I damned well please to you.”

  “I’m not going to let you knock me out and grab the pistol,” he said.

  “What’s with that pistol, anyway?” she asked.

  “It saved my ass, and I intend to keep it,” he said.

  She looked down at him with surprise in her eyes, but said nothing. The cart was rolled into a private room. The orderlies moved him from the cart onto the bed. She saw his face go white from the pain.

  “We’ll just cut that jacket off,” she said to him. “It won’t hurt that way.”

  “I want the jacket, too,” he said. “I want the jacket and the pistol. The rest of it you can have.”

  What she should do, she knew, was give him something to knock him out. And cut his clothes off, and give him a bath, and take the pistol. He was probably going right up to the OR anyway.

  “You’ve got a hard head,” she said, and bent over him and pulled the intravenous needle from the inside of his wrist. Then she reached for the holstered pistol he clutched to his breast.

  “I’ll put it under your mattress,” she said. The young nurse with the whole blood looked at her in surprise when she did exactly that.

  “Help me to get his jacket off him,” the operating room nurse said. “And then send for one of the Schwestern to help me undress him and give him a bath. For reasons I can’t imagine, it embarrasses healthy young men to be undressed by a healthy young woman.”

  She was pleased when the boy in the filthy, blood-soaked uniform chuckled. She wondered what had happened to him.

  “Major, really,” the nurse in the crisp whites and the starched cap and the lieutenant’s bar said.

  “Good God,” the operating room nurse said. “You’re lousy. Where the hell have you been, anyway?” She looked at the young nurse. “He’s going to have to be deloused before we do anything else.”

  The young nurse left the room. Two middle-aged German nurses, called Schwestern, sisters, came in and matter-of-factly, impersonally, efficiently, stripped him, deloused him, and then bathed him in alcohol. The major pulled off his bandages, looked, and put them back. The blood transfusion apparatus was hooked up again.

  “You need a haircut and a shave, too,” the major said. “But that can wait.”

  “I’m hungry,” he repeated.

  “If we have to put you under,” the major said, “you’ll just throw up all over the recovery room.”

  “I was sewn up at Ioannina.”

  She picked up the telephone and gave a number. She asked for a colonel, and then said, “OK,” and hung up. A few moments later, a doctor in surgical whites pushed open the door.

  “I thought you were going to prep him and bring him right up.”

  “It looks to me like the guy in Greece knew what he was doing,” the major said. “I just called up to ask you to look at him.”

  “How do you feel, Son?” the doctor asked, very tenderly raising the loosened bandages and examining the sutures.

  “I’m hungry,” Lowell said.

  “Well, that’s a good sign.”

  “He was lousy,” the major said.

  “I don’t see any point in opening him up now,” the doctor said. “Not until we get some X rays, anyhow. And let’s get some more blood in him. Are you in pain?”

  “I feel like I was run over by a locomotive,” Lowell said.

  “What happened?”

  “I forgot to duck,” Lowell said.

  “Let’s get some more blood in him,” the surgeon said. “And get him something to eat. We’ll have another look in the morning. I asked if you were in pain. You want something for it?”

  “Hell, yes.”

  The surgeon scribbled an order. He smiled down at the bed. “You’re going to be all right,” he said. “Sore, but all right.”

  The ward nurse, a captain, had come into the room. The surgeon handed her the orders. The immediate care of the patient was no longer the responsibility of the operating room nurse. She left the room, and started toward the elevators. Then she changed her mind, and turned around, and walked to the kitchen.

  “Hello, Florence,” the dietician said. “What brings you here?”

  “You got a steak in the cooler?” she asked. The dietician, a captain, raised her eyebrows. “You’re about to get an order for a high-protein, low-bulk meal for 505,” the operating room nurse said. “505 is about thirteen years old. He came in lousy, skinny as a rail, just about out of blood, and stitched up like a baseball. I figure we can do better for him than a couple of poached eggs on toast.”

  “All right, Florence,” the dietician said. “I’ll see to it.”

  “Thank you,” the operating room nurse said. She picked up the telephone and gave a number, and when it answered, she said, “This is Major Horter. If anybody wants me, I’ll be with the multiple shrapnel case in 505.”

  Major Horter walked back down the corridor to the PX refreshment stand. She reached into the flap of her operating room whites and took a dollar in script from her brassiere and bought two Cokes from the attendant. Then she went to 505.

  “Chow’s on the way,” she said, handing him one of the Cokes.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “There’s a phone line to the States,” she said. “You got a number, I’ll call your mother or somebody and tell them you’re all right.”

  “No,” he said, immediately, firmly. Then he smiled. “Thanks, anyway.”

  “By now, she’s going to have a telegram, or they sent somebody to tell her,” Major Horter said. “She’s liable to be worried.”

  “When Mother heard I was in Greece,” he said, “she sent me a list of restaurants I shouldn’t miss. The less she knows about all this, the better off she’ll be.”

  The ward nurse came in carrying a tiny paper cup on a tray.

  “What’s that?” Major Horter asked. The ward nurse told her.

  “I’ll give it to him, after he’s eaten.”

  “He’s supposed to have it now,” the ward nurse said.

  “He’s an emergency surgical patient, and I’m the Chief Emergency Surgical nurse,” Major Horter said, flatly. “OK?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the ward nurse said, snippily. She set the tray and the pill on the bedside table and marched out of the room.

  “You’re a real hard-nose, aren’t you?” Lowell said to her.

  “Takes one to know one,” she said. “You want a cigarett
e?”

  “I don’t use them, thank you,” he said. “I smoke cigars.”

  “You’re not old enough to smoke cigars,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  When the WAC from the kitchen brought him his steak, Major Horter cut it up for him, and fed it to him, piece by piece. When she asked him if he wanted the bedpan, he said he could make it to the toilet, and she realized that unless they put somebody in the room to hold him in bed, he was going to try it the minute he was alone, so she helped him to the john, and smoked a cigarette until he was finished, and then she helped him back in bed.

  “You want me to clean your Luger?” she asked. He was surprised at the offer.

  “It’s not the first one I’ve ever seen, Sonny boy,” she said. “I got one in a leather case with a shoulder stock. Captain from the 2nd Armored gave it to me. I know how to clean a Luger.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “Who’d you shoot with it?” she asked, idly.

  “He was supposed to be a Greek. But he was blond. He was probably a Russian,” he said. “Sonofabitch sneaked up behind us and started throwing grenades.”

  “Is that what happened to you? A grenade?”

  “No,” he said. “I’d been hit two hours before that.”

  She gave him his medication. Then she took the Luger from under the mattress and wrapped it up in his bloody, dirty British battle jacket. She stood by the side of the bed and waited until the narcotic got to him and his pupils dilated and his eyelids fell. Then she lowered the top of the bed, and walked out of the room.

  She went to the dressing rooms for Operating Ampitheaters Four and Five, and put the battle jacket in the linen sterilizer, giving it fifteen minutes at 500 degrees to kill the lice and whatever else it was infested with. Then she took it and the Luger, now wrapped in surgical towels, to her rooms. She filled the bathub, added Lux and got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the battle jacket. The rinse water was still dirty, so she filled the tub again, and left the jacket to soak overnight. She took her baths in the OR dressing room anyway.

  Then she took the Luger and removed the magazine. There was one round in the magazine, and when she worked the action, another 9 mm case came flying out. Then she took it apart, cleaned it and oiled it, wrapped it again in the surgical towel, and put it in the top drawer of her dresser under her khaki shirts.