by Howard Fast
“It was in Italy,” Adams said.
“Oh! Well, we also serve who stay at home and wait. Italy, you said?”
“Italy.”
“Thank you.” The sergeant nodded and returned to his desk.
Then Barney Adams opened the portfolio and began to sort through the documents, scanning a page here and there. But whenever he began to read, his thoughts would wander. He had come a long way and much had happened to him, and he had a sense of great distances and great loneliness. He strove for the mental discipline that would reassure him and convince him that he did not want to be home.
Wednesday 10.15 A.M.
Captain Adams watched the general and waited. Kempton was one of those large, well-fleshed men whose calm façade and controlled facial muscles simulate repose; but he was always a little weary from the struggle he fought against his own nerves and sensitivities. He had been smoking cigarettes before; now he puffed on a cigar. He had an almost unnoticeable habit of clicking the thumb of his left hand against the pinkie nail of his right hand. A mist of perspiration lingered upon his brow and temples; it had been there before, it was there now.
All of this, Barney Adams noticed. He sat behind his own façade, the good-looking face, the clear, untroubled blue eyes, and the soft red hair. It would have surprised General Kempton to know with what detail Barney Adams noticed and itemized, for no matter how much men—Kempton among them—recognized and honored Adams’ courage and excellent manners and good humor, they did not quickly give him credit for being clever. His record was ascribed to an earnest and satisfactory intelligence; he himself did not regard cleverness as a virtue to be paraded, and the knowledge that it troubled those around him added to his own uncertainty. Just as he was never consciously polite, so was his modesty quite unconscious; and out of this combination, those who knew him also knew that he would go to the top. It was accepted that a long and rewarding army career lay before Barney Adams, and General Kempton emphasized this before he went on to anything else.
At the same time, Adams had the advantage, for he knew a great deal about Kempton, about the older man’s hopes and dreams and bitter luck and wretched frustrations—whereas the general, accepting Adams so readily, knew nothing of any depth or importance about him except that he was the son of an old and dear friend. It might also be said, in all fairness, that Barney Adams knew very little about himself; and thus he neither disputed nor regretted the assumption of what lay ahead for him. He had never thought about his assignments very differently.
“The point is,” said General Kempton, “that I want your steps to be good steps, proper steps. And I think that this is a proper step, Barney. I am breaching neither good taste nor procedure when I tell you that you will have your majority when this court-martial is finished, Barney, and in good time I want to let your father know that I have a full colonel, name of Barney Adams, on my staff. I make no promises; I don’t have to. You have three generations of notable military careers in your family. I don’t think it could be otherwise.”
“That is very kind of you, sir.”
“Not at all,” the general said. He sat on his desk, puffed his cigar and gestured toward the portfolio. “How much of that have you read?”
“Only a few pages carefully. But I’ve scanned through all of it. It doesn’t appear too complicated as a case.”
“The picture is plain but the frame is God damn complicated, Barney. The one takes a few minutes in telling; the other involves a century and a half of history and misunderstanding. Five days from now, you will know the facts far better than I do. But I don’t think anything can be altered. There is no confusion of guilt or circumstances—nor is there the slightest doubt about the facts. A Sergeant Arnold Quinn of the British Army was murdered by Second Lieutenant Charles Winston of the United States Army. It happened four weeks ago at a little way-station on the narrow-gauge railroad, a place called Bachree. Sergeant Quinn was unarmed. Lieutenant Winston shot him four times, using his service revolver. There were witnesses to the crime, and the accused man has confessed. All this you must have gathered out of the file—even with a cursory reading.”
“Yes, sir. It seems to be one of those sordid and unhappy things that happen when a great many men are armed. Sometimes I’m amazed that it doesn’t happen more often.”
For some reason, the general appeared to be surprised by Adams’ remark; Adams noticed his glance and raised brow.
“I gather it doesn’t end with the crime itself?” Adams said.
“It doesn’t.”
“And I imagine it created bitter feeling among the British.”
“Oh, the feeling was already there, Barney. This simply made it murderous. It’s no secret that all isnot joy and brotherhood with our British cousins in this theater, and it’s small consolation, if any, to say that I inherited it when I took command six months ago. I’d like to imagine that things are better since I have been here, but the plain truth is that things are worse. There is literally no day that goes by without some incident between the British troops and our troops, and just between us, the provocation is more often on our part than theirs. I’ve become so adept at apology that I do it in my sleep. Take this matter of Major Wyclif, who was in here a few minutes ago. Two of his enlisted men got into a scrap with some GIs in a cheap bordel here. The British soldiers were badly beaten and the place was wrecked. Now the NCOs will cover for the men and the junior officers will cover for the NCOs. I am not going to institute a spy system. I make my apology, for what it is worth, but even apologies wear thin. Are you familiar with this kind of thing between ourselves and the British?”
“I’ve seen something of it in Africa and Italy. But it works itself out in combat, I think.”
“Exactly. But in a situation like this, it does not work out. It festers and becomes worse and worse. Myself, I like the British. That’s not a politic statement. I like them; I enjoy their company, and there are many things about them that I admire. But mine is a minority position. Too many enlisted men do not like them, and the feeling is returned—and that is no damned good. This theater is like a pivot, the Jap war on one side of us, the European war on the other. We have two large armies in a strange colonial land, and neither is looked upon with any affection by the native population.
“Yes, I worry about’ my career, Barney, and I don’t want this thing to blow up in my face and blow me with it, but more than that, I’m an army man with a job to do and my country at war. We won’t win the war here, but we could take a long step toward losing or prolonging it.”
When the general lit his cigar now, his hand was too obviously steady, and Barney Adams felt a sudden rush of sympathy for the big man. It saddens most sensitive people to come to maturity and discover that so many of their contemporaries are soaked with doubt and fear; and to have that reaction toward highly-placed men in uniform affected Barney Adams a good deal.
“I hope I can help, sir,” he said.
“Of course you can.”
“Still, the British know that murders happen. They happen in their forces as well.”
“Yes, Barney, they do—but everything was primed for this. The unarmed man, the brutal use of four shots, the revolver, the violence myth—well, it could have exploded everything. The news ran through the British Armed Forces like wildfire, and lost nothing in the telling. I hate to think of what might have happened. I canceled all leaves and imposed a curfew immediately. The British command was as understanding as they could be, but they demanded the right to try Winston in their own court-martial. I couldn’t permit that, and finally I convinced them that we must try him ourselves. There is one point of agreement—that for the sake of this theater, the alliance and the war, Winston must be sentenced to death and the sentence must be carried out promptly.”
Captain Adams made no response. He sat in difficult and uneasy silence, watching the general and seeking for the proper words to say what should not have to be said.
The general knew, and prod
ded him, “Well?”
“I wish you had not said that, sir,” Adams replied uncomfortably.
“Damn it, Barney, don’t you think I appreciate your position? But I had to say it—and a lot of others are going to say the same thing to you.”
“Nevertheless,” Adams said, slowly and without pleasure, “you cannot ask me to accept a prejudgment of a man I am going to defend. How can I defend him, then, sir?”
“Prejudgment hell! I am talking about the facts, Barney—the trial is up to the Judge Advocate, and I have no intentions of interfering. You yourself admitted that the case is open and shut.”
“And—” Adams began, and then swallowed his words.
“Go on.”
“No—it’s all right.”
The general went over to Adams, and squeezed the younger man’s shoulder, and said, “Barney, Barney—I busted into this thing like a fool. Say what you were going to say.”
“I want to help you, sir. Believe me, I do—and I will, as well as I can.”
“I never doubted that. But that isn’t what you were going to say before.”
“I was going to say, sir—why did you bring me here a week before I was due to report, if the case is open and shut? You certainly have any number of men who can act for Winston’s defense.”
“Are you asking me fair and square?”
“I am, sir.”
“All right. First of all, I want you to have this. I want to give you your majority on it. We don’t talk about such things, but I’m laying it on the table. This was a job, and I thought you could do it better than anyone here. Secondly, the facts are open and shut but lousy with inference. Winston is fifty-two years old.”
“What? You said he was a second lieutenant, sir.”
“So he is—a poor, stupid slob of a second lieutenant and fifty-two years old. Such things happen. This is a large war. Winston was a warehouse boss or manager in Chicago. He has three grown sons who went into the Air Force, so he couldn’t live without being in this war. He got the commission through his brother-in-law, who is a congressman—second lieutenant in the Quartermaster Corps. He put on the heat to go overseas, and they sent him here, and since he is evidently not a likable man, they shipped him on to Bachree, which is a stink-hole. When he killed Quinn, a British medico up there kept him from being lynched and sent him to the General Hospital here as a mental case. The psycho officer in the hospital jumped out of his boredom and decided that Winston was insane. First court-martial postponed, and the righteously indignant British chums breathing fire down my neck. Then a wire from Washington—was I taking it on myself to imperil the whole Grand Alliance by harboring a murderer? By what authority or circumstances had I postponed a court-martial? Well, I called a lunacy commission, and they found Winston as sane as you or me—which may not be a great deal but enough to stand trial for murder. I called the second court-martial, and I got a wire from Winston’s brother-in-law in Congress. Well, Barney, I am not a hero—maybe adequate with bullets and shells, but that doesn’t count I knew that the army would stand behind a conviction—right down the line—but it had to be a conviction without loopholes. There wasn’t a trial counsel in our department here who would put up any better than a sham defense for Winston; there isn’t one of them that has the guts to. They are civilian lawyers and they enjoy their commissions and they are not going to buck city hall. There it is. I postponed again and got you here a week early. But I cannot postpone a third time.”
“Yet you have decided that Winston must be convicted. What difference—”
“Damn it, Barney, I have decided nothing. I know that the court will convict him, because he is guilty as hell. But I want an honest defense on the record, and to put it bluntly and unpleasantly, I want an army man, a man with a combat record, to conduct that defense. If you feel that I am using you, say it! I am using you.”
“We all use people,” Captain Adams answered slowly. “I’m not troubled by that—”
“Very well, then. It will do us no good to discuss this any further, Barney. I’ve placed a jeep and a driver at your disposal—and you have an appointment at two o’clock with Colonel Thompson, our Judge Advocate. Between now and the convening of the court-martial, any reasonable request will be granted. If you should want to see me, I am at your disposal.”
They shook hands.
“Good luck, Barney,” the general said.
Wednesday 11.30 A.M.
The driver of the jeep, Corporal Wayne Baxter, did not suffer from reticence. He was a tall, lean man with sandy hair that needed cutting, and small, deep-set blue eyes. In no time at all, he let Barney Adams know that he was from Nashville, Tennessee, that he was twenty-three years old and ‘had been married for the last five of them, that he had worked at Willie Krause’s filling station at the corner of Elm Street, and that he enjoyed the war.
“What do you enjoy about it, Corporal?” Adams asked him.
“Being twelve thousand miles away from the tomato I married, for one thing,” Corporal Baxter said, “because anyway that saves me from a murder rap for what I’d do to that bitch for shacking up with any wayfarer comes whistling down the street.”
“Oh?”
“I live good, Captain, I eat good. I don’t worry.”
“Good or bad, I haven’t eaten at all today. Where do I find some lunch, Corporal?”
“Well, you got plenty of choice.” They were driving down a broad avenue. Streetcar tracks divided the road, and both sides of the road were lined with single-story stucco houses, old and unrepaired, the stucco cracked and flaking away. Skinny brown children played listlessly in the mud in front of these houses. White cattle wandered as listlessly about the avenue, stopping to munch at the clumps of stringy grass that grew on either side of the streetcar tracks. At the street intersections beggars squatted, their begging bowls gripped by their bony knees, their rags drawn over them, as if some chill reached them even in this intense heat. Bearers, their burdens balanced on their heads, stumbled along the broken sidewalks, and rickshaw boys trotted along pulling British soldiers, American soldiers, fat merchants, baldpated priests, well-dressed ladies, self-important bureaucrats, clerks, civil servants, and any others who could afford the price of a rickshaw. Old taxicabs, driven by turbaned Sikhs, chugged back and forth, and from the distance, like a five-inch shell in passage, came the whining scream of a streetcar.
Every now and then, in the space between the car tracks, a body was sprawled. At first, Adams had thought that these were sleeping people; he realized presently that they were dead.
“If you want to eat outside the army,” Baxter went on, “there are the Chinese restaurants, maybe a half a dozen good ones, and you don’t need to worry about the runs there. There are some others too, the Hotel Grande and the Hotel Britannia and the limey Senior Officer’s Club and the Yellow Sea Bar. If you stick to regular issue, you got your Senior Officer’s Mess at the big barracks on Kitchener Boulevard. They also cook a nice spread at the Makra Palace, just for the population of the place, but then you got to sign for lunch or dinner in the morning, because they only buy enough chow each day for what they got to feed.”
“We’ll make it the Senior Officer’s Mess,” Adams said, and then as they turned off the street, he asked Corporal Baxter about the bodies between the streetcar tracks.
“Dead waugs,” replied Corporal Baxter.
“What?”
“I forgot that you come from where the war is, Captain. A waug is a nigger, local variety.”
Baxter glanced at Adams and saw his mouth tighten. He shrugged, and they rode on in silence for a while until Adams, unable to restrain his curiosity, asked, “What do they die from?”
“The way these waugs are, skin and bones and rotten with malaria and dysentery and God knows what else, you got to ask what do they live from. Now they say that there is a famine out in the hills, and the waugs come into town and die here.”
“You mean bodies ate there every morning?”
“There, other places, all over the city. They find a place to sleep and they don’t get up in the morning.”
“Aren’t the bodies taken away?”
“By and by. They start loading the trucks at one end of the city, Captain, but it’s like everything else. The limeys don’t do nothing like we would do it. The limeys don’t do nothing so that it makes sense. I seen the stiffs lay around two-three days in this heat before they got to them.”
Wednesday 2.00 P.M.
The Judge Advocate, Colonel Herbert Thompson, was a round-eyed, round-faced, bald little man in his middle fifties. He was pink-cheeked, neat, prim, and the shining surface of his mahogany desk was as virgin and nakedly aggressive as if the desk still stood in the furniture shop that had sold it. On the desk was a silver inkstand of native manufacture and two American desk fountain pens. Nothing else. It was as if Colonel Thompson was simply passing through.
Not for a moment was he unconscious of the desk, and he had hardly more than passed the amenities with Barney Adams when he made reference to it, specifying that he did not live or think haphazardly. What should be done, should be done; if it is there to do, do it, and didn’t Captain Adams agree with him?
“I admire the attitude,” Captain Adams said.
“Thank you, sir. May I say that you come highly recommended. May I say that the honors on your breast recommend you beyond words, sir.”
“Thank you. You’re very kind,” Adams mumbled, ill at ease and wondering just what attitude he should take to disguise his distaste for the Judge Advocate. But understanding that, above all, he must cultivate no ill will here.
“I hope we will see a good deal of each other, Captain Adams. I hope your tour of duty in our department will not be limited to the Winston Case. In fact, as I perused your record, I was sorely tempted to defy General Kempton and demand you as a permanent member of my own staff.”
“You may feel differently, sir, after I finish this case.”
