by Robert Adams
"It's plumb beautiful, top. How much of all this does Queer Guido know about?"
"Not one damn thing, 'cept for that he's shippin' out to regimental Head and Head. And he better not hear nothin', neither, Harry. You don't tell nobody, hear? Not Mr. Cobb, not your bunkie, nobody!"
O'Connor nodded, then chuckled, "Naw, nobody, top, not me. I wouldn't want to miss this shit circus for the fuckin' world. Wouldn't surprise me none if them two plumb dehorned each other!" He chuckled again, grinning to show tobacco-stained teeth and rubbing the palms of his calloused, grease-stained hands together in an excess of anticipated glee.
"Milo, you done been taught how to run a trainin' platoon," said First Sergeant James Lewis, "so I ain't gonna give you a whole fuckin' shitpile of orders and all on it. The onliest thing's gonna be diffrunt from your platoon and the others in this comp'ny is I'm gonna shift all the furriners over to you, since you can talk with them and the resta us cain't. You gone have Corp'ral Perkins as long as you thinks you needs him with his first bunch, so you should oughta make out okay."
And Milo did, of course, being a natural leader and having been thoroughly schooled in the NCO Academy. The only desertion was that of a gypsy, but despite the black mark against platoon, company and battalion, Milo, Lewis and the rest of the cadremen felt more relieved than anything else, for the decamped man's appalling proclivity to petty theft from his mates and his utter aversion to even the basics of personal hygiene had earmarked him as a murder waiting to happen.
And all the regiment was gossiping already about the supposedly hushed-up affair in Signal Company, where First Sergeant Call had been attacked while asleep and horribly maimed, nearly killed, by none other than PFC Guido Carbone, who had been a platoon sergeant, in a training company for some years. Following the crime, PFC Carbone had taken French leave and now, like the unmissed gypsy, was listed as a deserter.
Sergeant Jethro Stiles and Milo quickly became fast friends and buddies, a relationship strongly encouraged by First Sergeant Lewis, who occasionally joined them when his and their duties allowed for a weekend of ease and cards and talk and drink at Stiles' comfortable rented bungalow off-post. Surrounded by bed on bed of roses, peonies, chrysanthemums, asters, altheas, irises, lilies, tulips, hyacinths, daffodils and a dozen or more other varieties of flowering plants, all springing up out of ground-covering cushions of phlox and baby's breath and vinca minor, the bungalow had been Stiles' home for years and fitted him like an old glove.
There were few rooms—living room, dining room, bedroom, bath, kitchen, a small room furnished with only a desk and chair and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves packed with books; there was also a basement which housed a furnace and coalbin, a workbench and its tools and a varied, extensive wine cellar—but Jethro managed well, doing his own cooking, cleaning and gardening with obvious relish. The man was a superlative chef; Milo could not remember ever before having been treated to such culinary masterpieces, all of them served on a table agleam with crystal, sterling silver and fine china, the food invariably prepared with herbs from the garden.
After one such epicurean delight, he and Lewis both stuffed to repletion and beyond, all three of them sipping at hot coffee and a fine old cognac, Milo remarked,
"Jethro, you are always referring to yourself and to me, too, as a 'gentleman ranker.' May I ask why? What does that term mean?"
But Lewis answered first. "Means just what it means, Milo. You and Jethro is gentlemen, no two ways about it. You should rightly oughta be off'sers… prob'ly will be, too, afore long, when thishere shootin' war that's comin' sure as God made us all gets around to gettin' the U.S. of A. mixed up in it."
But their host demurred, saying, "Milo, yes, he'll make a splendid officer, but not me, James. If offered a commission, I'll have to refuse it. I prefer the basic anonymity of the other ranks; also, it is a part of my penance."
"I know you all wonder about me, who I really am, why I am here among you, but being true friends you never have been so rude, so crude as to ask, nor would I have told you had you done so. All that I will tell you is this: When I was far younger and foolish and full with the arrogance and selfishness of being born to wealth and position, I did a terrible, monstrously evil thing, and worse, I did it carelessly, without so much as a thought for whom my act might hurt and how much it would hurt them."
"I was protected, of course, from my due punishment by the power and influence and wealth of my family. Nonetheless, it was considered in the best interests of all and sundry that I leave the country for a bit. I left for Europe with a letter which allowed me to draw any amount I might need out of family accounts in certain Swiss banks. I never have returned to my home. My father and mother are long dead, as too are all of the other principals in the tragedy I brought about so long ago, yet still I am not free to resume the life I inherited, the position I degraded."
"I am a self-exiled man, and I shall continue to pay the price for my misdeed for as long as God gives me to live."
Then, in a soaring tenor voice, Stiles sang Kipling's "Gentleman Rankers" to them.
Milo was long in forgetting that evening.
The training cycles came and went, commenced and ended, grinding out replacement personnel to meet the meager requirements of the small standing army which was all that the Land of the Free felt that it needed to remain that way, with the "war to end war" now more than two decades in the past.
Kept penurious by a depressed economy and an anti-military, tight-fisted Congress, they trained and drilled with the outdated, antique weapons and vehicles and equipment and tractics of the long-ago trenches of France. It was an army of orphans, threadbare and despised by the very people they were sworn to protect from enemies foreign or domestic. And the need to extend that sworn obligation would be upon them all too soon, and the soldiers all knew it, even if their employers chose to ignore the signs of the impending bloodbath.
They did what they could with what they had available, and they did well, as everyone learned before it was over, despite a general and appalling paucity of bare necessities.
While on extended training exercises the Army of the United States of America made do with "field expedients" to simulate the weapons and equipment they lacked— mockups of stovepipe and plyboard to give an unconvincing illusion of the missing heavy mortars and artillery pieces, rickety trucks standing in for the still-unsupplied half-tracks and tanks—the modern and fully equipped Wehrmacht was on the march in Europe and the Imperial Japanese Army moved deeper and deeper into China and strengthened the fortifications of Pacific islands with strange names.
But at long last, the sands of time trickled so low as to leave nothing in which the stubborn American ostrich could longer hide its head. Poland fell to German and Russian arms, then Russia attacked Finland. In the early spring of 1940 Germany conquered tiny Denmark and invaded Norway. Next to feel the might of the war machine of the Third Reich were Holland and Belgium, and even as French and British troops tried to hold the shaky line in Flanders, the panzers and the Wehrmacht infantry were racing through the supposedly impenetrable Ardennes to strike deep into France, rolling up her scattered bands of ill-trained, ill-equipped, ill-led troops.
And as the French and British armies, which had suffered many of the same injustices from their respective countrymen and governments as had the American army, were taken, utterly routed and thoroughly defeated, off the beach at Dunkirk by a makeshift fleet of civilian boats, leaving behind them the bulk of their weapons and equipment as well as any thought that this new war would be a static conflict as had been the last one, the sluggish American Congress began to face the fact that a large army, a modern army, a strong army might well be needed… soon.
The training regiment as well as the understrength combat-ready (which was a very unfunny joke) units scattered about the forty-eight states and its possessions overseas began to see a slow trickle of long-overdue equipment, weapons and supplies. New buildings began to be thrown up on existing ope
n posts and on reopened ones as well as newly purchased or condemned-to-government-use land.
And then, on the 16th of September, 1940, the first peacetime Selective Service Act was signed into law, and long before anyone was ready for it, the onrushing floods of drafted men were virtually inundating every training facility.
Chapter VI
Almost overnight, the training regiment became a training division. With the overall size more than quadrupled while the available numbers of cadre remained almost static, new and exalted ranks fell like so much confetti. The captain of Milo's company became a light colonel and took James Lewis along with him to be his captain-adjutant in his new battalion command. The company exec should then have advanced to company commander save for the fact that he had already been bumped up to major and was serving on the staff of the division. Two of their three second lieutenants were also bumped up and shipped out, leaving only the newest officer, Second Lieutenant Muse, to become a first lieutenant and take over the company. As Lewis had long planned, this frantic shuffling left Jethro Stiles in the position of first sergeant and Milo, bumped to tech sergeant, as field first.
By the time they had managed to get the first class of draftees through their mill and off to advanced basic training, there were none of the original cadre contingent remaining at a rank lower than sergeant, and the resultant situation was so critical as to lead to the virtual shanghaüng of trainees showing even the bare minimum of needed talents or of prior military experience to fill empty cadre slots in the company Table of Organization and Equipment (TO&E). Nor were they alone in this practice; from division down it was the same story. The general preference was for enlistees, but they would take draftees, too, figuring—rightly, as it turned out—that all of the men would be around for however long the war lasted.
The world continued to turn, and the new training division and many another like it continued to painfully remold their quotas of soft civilian levies into reasonable facsimiles of soldiers. Class after class after class of them passed through the hands of Lieutenant Muse, First Sergeant Stiles and Sergeant Moray on the initial steps along a path that would lead, for some, to death or dismemberment.
Elsewhere on that same world, II Duce, Benito Mussolini, launched the Italian army on an offensive against the small, weak army of Greece, moving out of already occupied Albania. The Greek forces of General Alexander Papagos not only stopped the numerically superior, vastly better-supplied and -armed Italian army, they launched two ferocious counterattacks that drove the invaders in full rout back over the Albanian border. Papagos then took the offensive, his troops pouring into occupied Albania in full pursuit of the demoralized Italians. Reinforcements of men and materiel poured in from Italy, of course, but even with these, the best that Italian General Visconti-Prasca could do was to hold a little over half of Albania, the rest being occupied by the Greeks. It is most probable that that unhappy man thought quite often of the hoary folk proverb involving the best treatment of sleeping dogs.
Completely lacking any air force, the Greeks had been aided in this regard by elements of the British forces engaged against the Italians in North Africa. Had the British not constructed airbases and supply points on the Greek mainland and on Crete, chances are good that Mussolini's Teutonic allies would have allowed Visconti-Prasca and his stymied, stalemated army to twist slowly in the wind of the Albanian mountains until hell froze over solidly. But the German high command, just then preparing to invade their sometime ally, Russia, and not at all savoring the thought of Greek-based British planes menacing a flank of their Russia-bound army, elected to drag the well-singed Italian chestnuts from out of the Greek fire.
When once the Nazi propagandists had thoroughly cowed the leaders of Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, forced them in their terror to sign degrading treaties and sent in German troops to occupy and prepare for an invasion of Greece, Britain sent General Henry Wilson with upward of sixty thousand British troops from North Africa (where they, too, had recently inflicted a humiliating defeat on Italian arms in the deserts).
But Wilson's sixty thousand and the remainder of Papagos' hundred and fifty thousand proved just no match for the Waffen-SS, Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe units thrown against them in their hastily erected position. The German invasion had commenced on April 6, and by April 29 the shattered remnants of the Greek army had surrendered and the only British still remaining in Greece were either captives or corpses.
The conquest of Crete took only about ten days and was a purely Luftwaffe victory, even the ground troops being of the Luftwaffe Fallschirmjager or airborne troops. The lightning-fast victories of German arms made it abundantly clear to a closely watching world that only large, strong, well-trained and, above all else, well-supplied and well-armed forces could represent any sort of a match for the triumphant forces now scouring Europe and the Balkans with fire and steel.
The United States of America was not as yet formally a warring nation, but only fools could doubt that she soon must be such. This became more than abundantly clear when the U.S. Navy destroyer Kearny, while helping to protect a Canadian merchant convoy in the waters off Iceland, was torpedoed by a German U-boat on October 17, 1941. A brand-spanking-new vessel replete with all modern appurtenances, DD Kearny survived the torpedoing and limped back to port safely. But not so with the elderly four-stacker DD Reuben James, two weeks later. The James was torpedoed without warning, the deadly "fish" struck her main magazine and the explosion ripped her completely in two. The bow section sank immediately and the stern section stayed afloat only long enough to e'xplode into millions of pieces; all of the ship's officers went down with her, and a bare forty-five of her men were saved.
"If you don't want to go to war," First Sergeant Jethro Stiles remarked to Milo, "then isn't it a bit silly to allow your warships to escort the merchant shipping of a combatant? Roosevelt—or someone very close to him, at least—wants us in the war against Germany and Italy, you can bet your GI shoes on that, my friend. Of course, it may well be economics, pure and simple. Arming for a war and then fighting it is a surefire way of pulling a country out of a depression. He's tried damned near everything else, the crippled old socialist bastard, so maybe he figures this war business to be his last card. I tell you, Milo, the people of this country are going to live to heartily regret allowing that man and his near-Bolshevik cronies to play their socialistic New Deal games on the citizens and institutions and economy of this country. And now he and they are going about making damned certain that, like Wilson, they drag us into another war in which we have no real business."
Stiles sighed deeply, then shrugged. "Naturally, I could well be wrong on the whys. Roosevelt and his Red-loving friends may just be all a-boil to help Mother Russia, but that's as poor a reason to send Americans to be killed and butchered as any of the others. Josef Stalin is as much a murderous animal as is Adolf Hitler, if not more so; power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, and Stalin has been in power for longer than Hitler, so we can be certain that he has become far and away more barbaric. And if proof of that last were needed, consider his recent purge of his own army's officer corps."
"If this is Roosevelt's reason for plunging our nation into another European war, it is akin to making alliance with a bear to fight a pack of wolves; even if we win, what is there to stop the bear from attacking and eating us? Maybe that's just what Roosevelt and his crew want to happen."
"Maybe it's what is ordained, too. Russell and Wells and not a few others seem to be of the opinion that socialism is the wave of the world's future. Sometimes I get the sinking feeling that we—the world's republics and monarchies—are at the best only fighting a grim, foredoomed, rearguard action against that which is to be."
Abruptly, he switched back to his everyday, workaday voice and manner. "Oh, shit, Milo, if I keep on in this fucking vein, I'll be singing 'Einsamer Sonntag' and opening a few of the larger, more important of my own veins."
" 'Lonely Sunday'?" que
ried Milo. "I don't think I've heard of that song, Jethro."
"It's called 'Gloomy Sunday in this country and other English-speaking countries. It was written some years ago by a Hungarian, I believe, and has become infamous because so very many people, worldwide, suicided while listening to it. Also, it is said, every artiste who recorded it has come to a bad end."
"Which, my friend, is precisely the end you and I are going to come to if we don't get cracking and have this report ready for our little captain to turn in to Colonel Oglethorpe on Monday."
One weekend in late 1941, one class having just finished and another not due until the middle of the coming week, Stiles and Milo had left the skeleton-manned company in the hands of a weekend charge of quarters and taken a few days of accrued leave together at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Free-spending Jethro had easily snagged a brace of attractive and complaisant "ladies" to share the beachside cottage he had earlier rented. When he and Milo were not fishing in the icy surf or enjoying their catch along with a plenitude of other foods and alcohol, they enjoyed the attentions of their bed warmers.
On the Sunday afternoon, Milo and the two women sat close to the driftwood fire blazing on the hearth while Jethro basted for the last time a bluefish stuffed with herbs, spices, breadcrumbs, onions and finely chopped shellfish. The aroma of the baking fish, of the horse potatoes baking with it and of the other savories simmering in the battered saucepans atop the gas burners filled the small parlor with mouthwatering cheer every bit as much as did the opened magnum of champagne and the two unopened still-chilling ones nestled in a washtub full of cracked ice.
Pleasantly tiddly, Milo had but just arisen from his place to fetch a fresh magnum when he heard rapid foot-steps ascending the shaky stairs, then an even more rapid pounding on the front door. He opened it to admit their landlord, Hueil Midgett, a long-retired Coast Guard chief of about sixty years.
