Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  He waved me back down. “Just swallowed wrong. Will it be coffee or tea?”

  “Let’s be civilized. Tea.”

  As he set the pot on, he rummaged in the cupboard and held out a bottle of Black & White. “Or…?”

  I shook my head no.

  “Taken the pledge, have we, my son?”

  “I’m just off it for a bit. I’ve no intent to make a passion of it, though.”

  He smiled and turned to put the bottle back on the shelf. He hesitated a moment, studied the bottle, then I saw his shoulders rise and fall in a sigh and he put the bottle away. He brought the tea out on a tray with a plate of biscuits.

  “The missus bakes those herself. Hope your teeth are in good shape, my son. Personally, I use them to knock the pigeons off the eaves. Ah, now,” he said, settling in his chair alongside me in front of the fire, “isn’t this all nice and snug?”

  Actually, compared to my bare little flat, it was quite nice.

  “You’ve been quite the foxhound of late. You were a regular dervish yesterday, first to old Danny Brooks, and Daphne St. Claire, and then Bertie Welles. By Christ, you won’t work that hard when I want you to!” He smiled without mirth. “What is it about Sir John Duff that so intrigues you, my son?”

  I couldn’t help but show my surprise, but even before I could ask how he knew, he was already giving me an admonishing look. Of course he knew; he was The Boss Himself. “Or perhaps you are not at liberty to say?”

  “You wouldn’t be warning me off, would you?”

  He chuckled. “If I could warn my lads off of big game so easily, they wouldn’t be my lads. In fact, it’s been good to see you on the hunt again. It’s been a while since I’ve seen you do it… as if you mean it.” His lips pursed thoughtfully. He was always a man who knew his own mind; I could not recall ever seeing him hesitate to act once he saw a course of action. “You know I’ve never been one to meddle in the personals of my people,” he said finally.

  “You say this to me over tea in front of your fire?”

  He chuckled. “Yes, well. I suppose longevity breeds a certain… He frowned, looking for the word.

  “Intimacy?”

  He winced. “Let’s say familiarity Jesus, my son, I know you longer than the missus. I’ve been worried.”

  “About me? How thoughtful. You are a love, love.”

  “Sip your tea and shut up, thank you.” He set his cup down on the side table, looking away from me, unnecessarily busying himself with the doily on the table. He mumbled something.

  “Eh?”

  “I said,” and he turned to me, “perhaps it’s not my place. You’ve been back on your game all nice and regular the last day or so. Perhaps you’ve turned the comer. Or perhaps it’s just… I’m worried it’ll pass and you’ll be back where you were.”

  “I think it’s just this business with Cathryn —”

  “We all come into this profession with the passion of new priests. All of us. Even the ones more interested in their byline than a story, the dirt-diggers who work for the tabloids trying to find some MP in flagrante delicto — at some level we all believe we’ve joined the same priesthood. We’re the elite that’s privy to The Truth with capital Ts. That’s quite exciting. My God, what we put on paper can change the world!”

  “Impassioning.”

  “I’d run my pencil through prose that purple, but yes. Then some years go by and we come to that unhappy moment when we realize it’s not the gospel we’re delivering. We work ungodly hours, we humiliate ourselves to court contacts, we sacrifice. Wives, families.” His eyes, in a very deliberate manner, settled on my artificial leg. “Sometimes more. This is what we give to bring The Truth to our loyal readers. And what do our loyal readers do with it? The men’d rather read the rugger scores, the ladies Daphne St. Claire. Both are more interested in some Dr. Crippen sex criminal than in poor conditions for the miners in South Wales.

  “Still, we keep on. We cultivate this very cynical, very world-weary air because, after all, we are the ones in the know. We know the world in a way all the little blissfully, conscientiously ignorant misters and missuses out there” — he nodded at the rain-splattered window — “can’t see. But you still come to the day when you wonder: Why did you willingly give up so much? To what end?” He reached for a cigarette box on the side table and offered me one.

  “Should you be doing that?” I asked. “Won’t the missus smell it when she comes home?”

  “I’ll tell her it was yours. That bloody Scots bastard filling our home with his filthy soot!’ She’ll have your liver on a plate.” A deep draught set him coughing. “Some keep on simply for the pay,” he continued. “One gets used to eating and having a dry, warm place to live. Hard to argue with that. Some keep on because it’s all they know. But they’re all like priests; the passion dies, they keep themselves going through the motions by nipping at the sacramental wine.” His eyes turned to the flames with a softness in them I’d never seen. “I would tell anyone in that situation… anyone… that it’s time to leave the Church. Better to start all over than go on like that. You’ve not a lot of time; that’s no way to waste it.” He took a brightening breath. “Then there’s those who pass through it. They find religion again. Somehow.”

  “All this, all what you’re saying… Did you go through it?”

  “Anyone in this work who says no is a liar. Or deranged.”

  “You passed through it.”

  He shrugged modestly.

  “How did you find God again?”

  He turned to me and he was his old self just then, the condescending, all-knowing smile. “You accommodate, my son. The front-page sex crime pays for the page-three story on some MP’s fiscal malfeasance.”

  “Which our loyal readers skip over on their way to the sports scores or Daphne’s latest tale of what fat grande dame wore what at some high tea. Why bother, then? They don’t care, so why bother?”

  “They don’t have to care, you silly ass.” He took a sip of his tea and gave me that same smile. “Only I do.”

  Chapter Nine: Earth Born Men

  Harry yawned himself awake, trying to make himself comfortable amid the crates he’d formed into a little cubby. He took the cigarette Ricks was holding out to him, then looked out the waist window of the C-87. Below, the Mediterranean was a rippling gold lame in the afternoon sun. “Where are we?” he asked.

  “We turned off at Bizerte about ten minutes ago. We should see Sicily in about twenty minutes, be on the ground ten, fifteen minutes after that.” Ricks held out a light for Harry. “I’m going to get on the horn and set things up for us.”

  Ahead, almost lost in the glare on the water, Harry could make out the sparkles of wakes turning in the sun, each curl of glitter topped by the black oblong of a ship. The C-87 began to ease down and the stocky forms of a dozen Liberty ships became clear. Patrolling round them, like herding dogs, were three escorting corvettes. The C-87 passed over the convoy low enough for Harry to see the upturned faces of the men on the decks, their hands fluttering in hullos.

  When Ricks returned, he found Harry staring at a small square of paper: the ID photograph of Armando Grassi.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  Harry nodded forward to where Woody Kneece was ensconced in the Perspex nose of the aeroplane. “When he first came to see me,” Harry said and slipped the photo into his pocket. “He must’ve forgotten it.”

  “Like hell.”

  A C-87 is a cargo conversion of the four-engined B-24 Liberator bomber. Having been designed to carry bombs rather than passengers, it lacked even the elementary comforts Doheenys ship had offered, and with its narrow fuselage and lower silhouette, there was little room to move about, a fact complicated by the ship’s being packed with medical supplies.

  Ricks brooded over the stacks of crates and their attention-getting red crosses. “Something must be cooking for them to be in such a rush for this stuff they can’t wait for the regular convoys. Man, I hope
we’re not walking into something.”

  Thirteen hours in the cramped cargo plane had left Harry Voss, Peter Ricks, and Woody Kneece logy and stiff, particularly the young captain. He’d spent most of the trip in the C-87’s claustrophobic nose compartment, where he could take in the horizon-to-horizon vista of such enthralling sights as Gibraltar, the swaying palms of the African coast, the dull, arid bluffs of the Atlas Mountains behind. “Oh, man, somebody get me some binoculars! I think I can see guys on camels down there! Camels!”

  They stumbled arthritically out the fuselage hatch at Palermo. Before the propellers stopped windmilling, a fuel lorry lurched up to the aircraft, and a “deuce-and-a-half’ — two-and-a-half-ton cargo lorry — had backed up to the loading hatch.

  “C’mon c’mon c’mon!” barked the sergeant in charge of the ground crew, clapping his hands, spurring the chain of men passing cargo from the ship to the lorry bed. “I got three more o’ these pregnant cows comin’ need this slot! This crate’s gotta be off the ground ten minutes ago. Let’s go!”

  The entire airfield was similarly energized, C-47’s and 46’s from North Africa, and C-87’s from England constantly clanging down onto the metal runway matting, deuce-and-a-halfs rumbling up, rumbling off. Beyond the swarm of men busying themselves with Harry’s particular ship, a rangy-looking sergeant atop the hood of a jeep waved at them with a clipboard.

  “Major Voss and party? You better climb in, sir, there’s not a lot of time. You must be Lieutenant Ricks, got a radio message for you, sir, got to sign for it.”

  While Ricks signed the chit and quickly scanned the message, Kneece turned to Harry with a mockingly castigating eye. “This is your party now?”

  Harry pointed to Ricks. “He made all the calls.”

  “Always play your highest card,” Ricks explained as they climbed in the jeep.

  “Say, Sarge, where’s your mess hall?” Woody Kneece asked. “Factually, we’ve been on that plane a loooong time, and I wouldn’t mind —”

  “No time, sir, sorry, don’t even know you got time to piss, got you gentlemen on a transport pulling out with a Naples convoy in two hours,” the sergeant rattled on efficiently. The jeep smoothly navigated the bustle of the aerodrome. “Found you a platoon of replacement tanks heading to the same sector, piggyback your way practically all the way you got to go, make sure you tell ’em you’re JAG priority ’cause that’s the only thing gettin’ you outta here so fast.”

  Harry frowned at Ricks while the grinning CIC captain silently mouthed, “‘JAG priority’?” Ricks looked away, ignoring them.

  In minutes the speeding jeep was vaulting its way down a frighteningly narrow road snaking out of the Monte Pellegrino hills. Harry had only a glimpse of Palermo’s red tile rooftops shooting up toward them, and the busy harbor beyond, before they were winding through the tight, cobbled streets of the city. Palermo was a jumble of buildings clinging to the hillsides that led down to the sea. Some of the streets were no more than alleys, choked still more by a stuttering flow of bodies — most in American uniform — and military vehicles. There was a brief burst of daylight as they broke through into the Piazza della Vittoria, roared past the Royal Palace where Patton had made his headquarters when Palermo had fallen, and then back into the shadows of the labyrinth. The claustrophobic vias fell away at the waterfront, and before them lay a panoramic view of the harbor, filled with milling naval vessels, all tinged with the crimson of the lowering sun.

  The quay was thronged with men, vehicles, supplies. MP’s stood atop crates, their faces red from constant use of their traffic whistles, and beach-masters blared instructions over Tannoy speakers to the LSTs and smaller craft filing up to the quay for loading.

  “What the hell is going on?” Ricks asked the sergeant as the jeep pulled to a stop. “This isn’t reinforcing. This is a buildup.”

  The sergeant shrugged. “You know how it is, Lieutenant, there’s all kindsa poop floatin’ around, we’re gonna hit the boot up north and take Rome from the sea, we’re gonna land in southern France. Who knows? This is as far as I go, sirs — you’re lookin’ for a tank platoon under a Sergeant Angstrom. Even in all that mess a tank platoon can’t be too hard to find.”

  Harry and Kneece climbed out but Ricks slid into the seat next to the sergeant. “You two go ahead. I’ll meet up with you. Sergeant, where’s the Quartermaster’s?”

  As the sergeant whipped the jeep into a turn, Harry called after Ricks: “What do you think you’re doing?” Harry wasn’t quite sure he correctly heard what the lieutenant shouted back to him. He turned to Woody Kneece.

  Kneece looked equally puzzled. “It sounded like he said something about ‘proper attire.’”

  As the sergeant had predicted, it was not hard to find the platoon of Sherman tanks, like a string of rocks poking above foaming rapids. The four Shermans were parked in a line, facing rearward toward the bay A seaman in Navy denims used signal flags to guide an LCT into the quay The front ramp of the LCT clanged down onto the centuries-old stones, the craft’s diesels revved, the propellers stirred foam at the stem to hold the vessel in place.

  Harry looked unhappily at the bobbing landing craft. “I thought that sergeant said we were going on a ship,” he moaned. “Isn’t that more of a boat?”

  “Factually, I think he used the word ‘transport.’”

  “Which is double-talk for little boat.”

  A Landing Craft Tank is a hundred-foot-long version of the smaller Higgins boats used to carry troops to beach landings. A drawbridge-like ramp at the front led into an open-topped cargo well. Aft, where the helm for a Higgins would be, sat a small superstructure housing the engine compartment and topped by a cramped bridge.

  Harry went up to the nearest Sherman and called up to the sergeant standing in the commander’s hatch. “Are you Sergeant Angstrom?”

  The tank commander pointed to another sergeant conferring with the signaling seaman.

  Just then, Angstrom twirled his gloved finger in a “wind-’em-up” signal, and the four 460 BHP Chrysler engines coughed and backfired noxious blue clouds until they settled into a dull roar. The seaman and Angstrom began to help guide each Sherman as their clanking steel treads carried them rearward down the loading ramp into the LCT’s cargo well. As the last tank eased its way into the landing craft, the seaman noticed Harry and Kneece standing anxiously nearby.

  “If you sirs are goin’ aboard, now’s the time.”

  “We’re waiting for somebody,” Harry said.

  “Sir, you can wait for ‘im here, or you can wait for ‘im in Naples, but this cigar box is leavin’ in one minute.”

  “‘Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred,’” he heard Kneece recite as the captain followed him down the ramp. “Since the lootenant made all the arrangements I guess you don’t have any idea what we’re supposed to do when we get to the other side?”

  “Not a damned clue,” Harry muttered, glumly watching the seaman signal to the LCT’s bridge to start the ramp winch. The ramp had just begun to rise from the quay when the seaman signaled for a halt and a wheezing, red-faced Peter Ricks, laden down with two packed seabags, several webbed belts tossed over one shoulder, two Ml rifles slung on his other, and three helmets hanging by their chin straps from one forearm, came skidding down the ramp.

  “You cut that a little close, Lootenant,” Woody Kneece commented.

  “Captain, Major, with all due respect — get naked.”

  “Right here?” Harry asked.

  “Why not?” Kneece cooed, affecting the face of a mooning lover. “The music is soft, the sunset romantic, the sea air sweet…”

  Peter Ricks emptied the seabags. “I couldn’t get full outfits, but this should do. I had to guess at sizes.” He handed out combat fatigue trousers, shirts, boots and leggings, windcheaters such as the tankers favored, and the little woolen beanies worn inside helmets. “Is this familiar to you?”

  Kneece took the rifle, snapped to attention, held the weapon
at inspection arms, and slickly thumbed the breech open. “The Garand Ml rifle is a gas-operated, semiautomatic —”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Ricks cut him off as he handed him a webbed belt carrying canteen, bayonet, first-aid pouch, and ten magazines for the rifle. “You were moaning about being hungry.” From the seabag he tossed him a boxed K ration. “There’s a couple more in here, but make them last. We don’t know when we’ll get a chance to stock up again.” He handed another belt to Harry; this one held a holster with.45 automatic and spare pistol magazines. “I had a feeling you wouldn’t want a weapon, but where we’re going I’d be a lot happier if you had something. You know how to use this?”

  “Sure,” Harry said. Ricks looked doubtful when Harry couldn’t even figure out how to adjust the webbed belt.

  Ricks turned to Angstrom, who was instructing the tank crewmen to stretch shelter halves between the parked tanks. “Hey, Sarge! You Angstrom? This your platoon?”

  Angstrom was what the Americans refer to as a fireplug: short and sturdy He was nearly thirty, with a full, light mustache and serious blue eyes so light they seemed to glow in the darkening shadows of the cargo well. There was a seasoning to him the other tankers didn’t have. The others — their commanders included — were younger, chattering and bouncing about like children on a first campout. But Angstrom moved up and down the rank of Shermans, quietly issuing his orders, looking to be sure that nothing was left undone or overlooked.

  Ricks introduced himself, Harry, and Kneece, then offered the sergeant a cigarette to show that the formalities could be set in abeyance for the moment. “What’re your orders?”

  “We’re replacement tanks, supposed to fill in a tank company up around someplace called Minga-something.”

  “Mignano.”

  “Yessir, that’s it. I got the extra rocker” — a reference to his five stripes as tech sergeant — “so I’m supposed to baby-sit ’em ’til we get there, and then they’ll split us up.”

  “That’s where I was until this bought me a vacation.” Ricks pointed to his bandaged eye. “We’re heading up to the same sector. Mind if we hitch a ride with you once we land?”