by Howard Fast
“Well, now, let me tell you something, Captain Adams,” the Judge Advocate insisted, leaning forward against his shining desk and poking a pudgy, manicured finger at Adams. “I would feel a damn sight easier if you were prosecuting—I can tell you that.”
“I understand that it makes no difference who is prosecuting and who is defending.”
“In terms of a conviction—you are right. The man is guilty as hell, and I may tell you, Captain—speaking man to man, of course—that there isn’t a senior officer in this whole bloody damned theater who would vote to acquit.” When he used words like bloody and damned, he sucked and tasted them. They were not his words but words for the occasion, and his listener would understand and appreciate.
“Not that I don’t have a good trial officer—the best! As fine a man as you would want to shake hands with, Major Freddie Smith, who was eleven years with Willisten, Goode and Cunningham. You know the firm, Captain?”
Adams explained that he didn’t know the firm. “I never practiced civilian law, Colonel, or military law, for that matter. But my training at West Point was in military law—that is, what legal training I had there. Afterwards, at Harvard, I specialized in military law. At best, I’m an amateur with a little study behind me.”
“Of course it’s none of my business, Captain, but I’d be curious to know why you chose the infantry.”
His tone was understanding, regretful, with just a shade of condescension, and he tolerantly accepted the slight shrug of Barney Adams’ shoulders. “The way the chips fall—eh? Well, I was saying that Freddie Smith is as good a trial officer as you’ll find anywhere, but he doesn’t have those ribbons you’re wearing, Barney. Mind if I call you Barney?”
“Not at all,” Captain Adams said.
“We don’t have much protocol here, or much West Point either. Not that I don’t respect the Point. Turns out man-flesh, if you understand me—good, red-blooded men. And there is a war on—we forget that sometimes. Today, Willisten, Goode and Cunningham don’t amount to a row of beans; a purple heart and a silver star do.”
Barney Adams concentrated on his own face; the flesh became still, the lips set and drawn. He felt suddenly fatigued, tired, empty and homesick, but his face did not change appreciably. He knew his own face very well, the face he shaved each morning and washed each night, the regular and unimpressive features, the childlike blue eyes, the pink lips. He lived with a face that unimaginative and highly paid illustrators for the best national agencies paint over and over—a small boy’s face on a man’s body, a cheerful, untroubled, unemotional, insensate and vacuous countenance that had become a sort of national pride, that proclaimed the silly, immature, surface jubilance of a people who had never dared seriously to confront themselves aloud. Nor did he pretend that he had ever confronted himself; but he knew his own face; he relied upon it, as he knew, more than was good for himself or for any man; and he faced Colonel Thompson with it, only permitting himself to think: Now he will ask me to call him Herb. Call me Herb, Barney. We’re not at the Point, are we?
Adams was wrong. Colonel Thompson spoke one word, forthrightly, “Right?”
Adams nodded.
“Of course—and I wanted you for the trial officer. I told General Kempton that it was our business”—punctuating his words by stabbing his forefinger at the shiny desk-top—“to make the prosecution airtight, solid, beyond question solid. Let the whole world look at it, and they would say: There, by God, is due process! Well, sir, he saw it differently. He runs the theater, not me, praise God. He wanted a solid defense, and he’s got it, if I know my man. Just as well. There’s too much talk that Winston will hang as high as Haman because our British cousins want it. Sure they want it, and they’ve got every right to want it. Sure it’s important, and the unity of this theater is important!”
He rose, leaning across the desk toward Barney Adams. “But more important is the fact that this man is a murderer! And he will die because murder cannot be tolerated!”
The judgment hung in the air. Adams drew a deep breath and remained silent.
“Well, sir?” the little man demanded, sinking back in his chair and wiping the sweat from his shining pink face.
“I am his defense counsel,” Adams said softly.
“Of course—of course. The general spoke of you so much that I keep forgetting you only arrived last night. I accept you as one of the family. Tell me, Captain Adams, are you familiar with the case?”
Adams nodded at the Manila envelope on his lap. “I read through the general’s file during lunch. To that extent I’m familiar with it.”
“How do you see it?”
“Well, Colonel, as I said, I’ve read through the file.”
“The essence is there; I’ve sent the general duplicates of every pertinent document. It’s not a complicated case.”
“May I smoke, sir?”
The colonel took an ashtray from a drawer in his desk and watched Adams light a cigarette.
“I take it you are familiar with the procedure of a general court-martial?”
“In the academic sense, yes, sir, I am.”
“But you’ve never actually seen one function?” Thompson asked him.
“Not a general court-martial, no, sir.”
“Then it behooves us to put on a proper show, doesn’t it, Barney? And we will. For your part, sir, you can call all the witnesses you find necessary to establish due process. It should be a memorable occasion—something to add to your many and varied experiences.”
“Yes, sir, I am sure it will be.” Barney Adams nodded. “But if I might ask you a question or two, sir—concerning the case?”
“Two or twenty. Fire away, young man!” Thompson was the benign executive now. He had stamped Barney Adams with his approval and had embraced him into the “family.”
“As I understand it, Winston was brought down from Bachree and admitted to the psychiatric section of the General Hospital here.”
“Correct.”
“Then there was some presumption of insanity?”
“There was presumption, sir. He never should have been admitted, Barney—between you and me. And I’m not alone in that opinion. Not by any means.”
“I won’t argue that, sir. But once the medical officer signed him in, this medical officer or whoever was in charge of the psychiatric section would have to write a report on his case and present the report to the commanding officer of the hospital. Or am I wrong, sir?”
“Oh?” Thompson remained neutral and noncommittal.
“I spent five weeks in a general hospital,” Adams explained.
“You happen to be right, Captain. I believe that is a recognized procedure.”
“I can’t find either the report or a copy of it in this file.”
“For obvious reasons, Captain. The Judge Advocate never requested the report.”
“What?” In spite of himself, it came out—burst out.
“You seem surprised. I don’t find that so strange, Captain. The defendant was discharged from the hospital—in good health.”
“But who discharged him, sir?”
“Colonel Burton. The commanding officer at the hospital,” Thompson answered, smiling helpfully as if he appreciated and understood Adams’ interest but desired to underline the fact that such interest was no less academic than the case itself. “I’m sure that his report is in your file.”
“Yes. But if I may say so, sir, it is not a medical report. It is simply a statement that Winston, having been pronounced sane and responsible by the lunacy board—of which he himself was chief member—was then discharged under armed guard to the Provost Marshal. By the way, sir, where is Lieutenant Winston now?”
“In the Central Guardhouse, Captain. I’ve given orders that you may see him whenever you desire. And if I may make a suggestion, I would see him today, if I were you. There is your best source of working material—the man you must defend.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Not that I don’t approve of a th
orough knowledge of the facts as a basis for a case, but we are simply attempting to set up a sturdy display of due process. Even Winston himself presses for a conviction.”
“Sir?”
“Yes, indeed, Captain. I am not coloring my words. He has confessed freely, and now he desires only to have the sentence passed and to get it over with.”
“Nevertheless,” Adams said, slowly, quietly, but with a persistence that Colonel Thompson was beginning to find tiresome, “I have been ordered to undertake his defense, and I think that I must do so.”
“Check! Right to the point, sir! And what else have we been trying to do, but to help you in every way possible, to expedite matters. Remember, Barney—we have lived with this case for weeks. We have wept and bled over it. And now there is nothing we want more than to finish with it and wipe the slate dean. That is why I say to you—go to the jail. See Winston. Talk to him. Get his point of view. And then relax for a week end before the trial. Our British colleagues have a very passable club here, nothing like the grass at home, of course, but very decent. You do play golf?”
“A little,” Adams nodded.
“There you are. Now, would you like me to call the Provost and have them roll out the red carpet for you?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
“Oh?”
“I would like to talk to Colonel Burton. If you have no objections, sir?”
Suddenly the fat little pink-cheeked man showed an edge, not much of an edge, but nevertheless an edge, sharp and keen. “You know that I have no objections, Captain,” he answered. “You have the right to speak with or call any witness you please. Certainly you learned that at West Point, Captain.”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“Then you have every right to talk to Colonel Burton. It may be that my own knowledge of military law is cursory, but I would suppose that your first duty would be to your client.”
“I agree with you, sir—after the fact.”
“What fact?”
“The fact of myself, sir, the uniform I wear, the …” Adams paused. The Judge Advocate was annoyed now, and that was not what he had ever intended. He finished lamely, saying, “I am sorry, sir. I don’t think I make myself plain. It’s a good many years since I have opened a lawbook, and this is not as easy for me as for those of you who keep a hand in it always.”
“Of course,” Colonel Thompson agreed with a smile. “The idea is to get a foot wet. Then just plunge in and swim.”
Wednesday 4.30 P.M.
Four white cows barred the path of their jeep, and stood there, looking at them stupidly. Traffic piled up behind the jeep. Corporal Baxter leaned on his horn, and behind them the Sikh drivers joined in the chorus until the whole street screamed and wailed with sound. A small, thin man in native dress observed the situation thoughtfully, and then without any great show of force or persuasion, he led the cows put of the way.
“Mother-loving waugs talk the cows’ language,” said Baxter. It annoyed him that the captain limited small talk. Baxter liked talkative people.
They drove on and came to a square block given over to an open pool of dirty water. Brown-skinned boys, clad only in loincloths, were diving and swimming and shouting gleefully. It occurred to Barney Adams with something of a shock that this was the first laughter he had heard today.
“If the water was clean—a swim would be good in this weather.”
“That’s no public pool,” said Baxter. “It’s a ghat, a ritual bath. It fills up in the rainy season, and that water festers and stinks all year through.”
Adams shook his head.
“What the hell—there are plenty of waugs. Reproduction, that’s the big industry here.”
They drove on, twisting and turning until they reached a wide boulevard that ran on toward the edge of the city. This avenue was lined with houses that seemed originally to have been built after the style of the great palaces in the center of the city, but smaller, their domes no more than ten feet across, their minarets reminding Adams of the decorations on roadside drive-ins in California. Then, beyond the houses, for about half a mile the boulevard was lined with day huts, windowless, formless; and women and children crouched at the doors to these huts, their apathy full of hunger and the fatigue of sickness.
Then there were fields, with here and there a flat-topped stucco house, and then the long, sprawling bulk of the General Hospital.
Many years before this time, the British had built the core of the hospital as an army barracks. This part was one story high, foot-thick day walls finished with stucco and painted pink. Around each building, there was a veranda approached through archways; grass mats hung in these archways and, sprinkled all day by water-bearers, provided a primitive sort of cooling system. The U.S. Army had joined these buildings with plywood corridors, and had added a dozen more buildings at each end of the installation, using pre-fabricated Quonset huts. As it stood now, the General Hospital was a full half-mile long, and around it were palm trees and acacias, concealing some of its ugliness.
“Drive around it,” said Adams.
“Sir?”
“I said drive around it.”
“It’s none of my business—”
“No, it isn’t, Baxter. But if you’re curious, I want to look at it.”
“At the hospital, Captain?”
“That’s right—at the hospital.”
Baxter drove the jeep around the hospital twice, muttering to himself, while Barney Adams studied it searchingly and thoughtfully.
Wednesday 5.00 P.M.
People who meet in odd places for the first time wear masks. They are reborn when they shake hands, for each is new to the other, without history, mistakes or the heavy burdens of shared memories. In this case, however, Colonel Archer Burton, commanding officer of the General Hospital, had the advantage; he knew that Barney Adams was an infantry officer, new to the theater, and assigned by General Kempton to the Winston defense. He also knew that General Kempton had a good opinion of Adams, and that there was some kind of old family or army hierarchy relationship. And he knew that Adams had a service record that made him an asset to the speedy and proper conclusion of the case.
On the other hand, about Burton, Barney Adams knew nothing at all—and could just sense that faint tinge of irritation which marks an ambitious ex-civilian confronted by a Regular Army man.
In this, Adams was right. Burton was an older man, tall, commanding in appearance, and very conscious of himself. Even in this mercilessly hot and damp weather, his uniform was creaseless and spotless, and never for a moment was he unaware of his uniform. He touched buttons, felt his eagles, checked his belt with his fingertips, and constantly shot glances at sleeve and trouser leg. What deep and satisfying feeling his present command gave him, Barney Adams did not know—nor could he know why.
Yet in the huge, sprawling organism of the United States Army, Colonel Burton’s story was not singular. He had enlisted in the army in 1940, an end-of-the-road action of defeat and despair. Before that, he had been a company physician for one of the smaller auto firms in Detroit. He accepted a tactful suggestion that he resign, after diagnosing a heart attack as acute indigestion and costing the company more money than they felt he was worth. Before that, he had eked out a poor living with a dwindling practice in Cleveland.
His career had been dogged by a combination of small talent and bad luck, and indeed even his error at the auto plant was a curious case which a much better physician might have misnamed. The fact that his Cleveland practice never netted more than three thousand dollars a year turned his ambitious wife into a carping, pushing shrew, and it was she who had pressed him to accept the offer in Detroit; inversely, his growing dislike for her persuaded him to respond to the mushrooming army’s plea for physicians. His commission and his uniform gave him his first sense of worthiness or importance, and he soon discovered that while he was only a mediocre doctor, he did have a gift for command. The fortunate choice of several subordinates with o
rganizing ability enabled him to rise to a position of importance and power.
Such, briefly, was his background; but unknown to Barney Adams, who, like so many infantrymen, had an overwhelming esteem for the caduceus on the colonel’s lapel. So Adams was almost apologetic as he explained his difficulties at being flung into this case abruptly, and his subsequent bewilderment at finding no copy of the attending physician’s medical report.
The colonel, cordial and smiling, had given Adams a chair, a cigarette and a glass of ice water. He himself stood at the other side of his office, calm and knowledgeable.
“That is wholly understandable, Captain,” Colonel Burton said. “Your bewilderment matched my own.”
“Sir?”
“I simply say that I was equally bewildered.”
“But surely you read the report?”
“That was the occasion of my bewilderment.” Colonel Burton smiled.
“Sir?”
“Well, I put it to you, Captain Adams. A general hospital is a vast and complex administrative task. This hospital is almost half a mile in length and we have six separate departments, or wards as we call them. Just to walk through this hospital on the most cursory consultive basis is half a day’s work. We have two laboratories, four operating rooms. Hundreds of people do their work here, and their work must be supervised. This is not the States, Captain Adams. We have three wards of tropical diseases, malaria, cholera, plague, an assortment of dysenteries, jaundice, eczemas never encountered or dreamt of at home, ringworms, fungoids—in addition to the regular statistical ailments that every theater deals with. In addition, we serve as base general hospital for the Burma war—wounds, infections, invalidism and battle fatigue. That’s a very quick survey—a good deal left out. Could you conceive of me dealing with this personally?”
“It’s a big and complex job,” Adams admitted. “No commanding officer is expected to deal with his command in personal terms.”
“Precisely. Well, sir, this report you speak of was the responsibility of the commanding officer in the NP Ward.”
