The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  Ludwig smiled at him, shook his head, then nodded. “Yes, you are,” he said. “And I would suspect that in time you’ll be a very good one.”

  Lowell changed the subject. Ludwig’s compliment embarrassed him. Not for himself, because the notion that he would become a good officer was absurd, but for Ludwig, who had been a bona fide officer in a losing army, and was now reduced to a stable boy paying outrageous compliments to a nineteen year old.

  “You’re quitting? When?”

  “I will stay until after you play the French,” he said. “I would like very much to see my team beat the French.” He held open the door, and bowed Lowell through it, half mockingly.

  None of the other players said anything when Lowell walked into the locker room to change into riding clothes except to nod hello. If the Germans already knew of the change in his official status, Lowell thought, certainly the officers must know.

  They don’t want to burn their fingers, Lowell thought, by getting too close to the fire.

  MacMillan is probably right, he thought, as he pulled on his boots. I am a survivor. He thought about what Ludwig had said about his being a soldier, and in time a very good soldier. It was a compliment, very flattering. And a blivet, which is defined as five pounds of horseshit in a one pound bag.

  He walked out of the locker room and to his string.

  “Guten Morgen, Herr Leutnant,” the exercise boy said, smiling from ear to ear as he gave him a hand up on the chestnut mare.

  (Two)

  It was a brilliant, splendid spring day, ideal for polo, and they played until eleven, saving the better ponies for the afternoon session when the general would play. There were three polo players, Lowell decided: the general, Fat Charley, and Private Lowell. The others played at polo, and there was a difference.

  He smiled. He corrected himself. The three polo players were the general, Fat Charley, and Lieutenant Lowell. He wondered why he had not just been equipped with a gold bar when it was time to play the French, and told to behave like an officer. On the surface, that would seem to be a lot simpler solution to the problem. Probably, Lowell decided, it was another example of contorted military ethics. Falsely identifying him as a commissioned officer and gentleman would not be gentlemanly; hanging a commission on him when he was wholly unqualified to be an officer was something else. There was no question, now that he thought about it, that he was in fact an officer. All those papers he had signed, and Colonel Webster’s unconcealed rage as he had administered that very impressive oath, left no doubt.

  Fat Charley, sweat-soaked, red-faced, finally called the session off. Lowell had just scored a goal, and was at the opposite end of the field from the grooms and the three-quarter-ton truck on which the Veterinary Corps officer and his troops, and the troops with the towels and the ice water, waited and watched. Lowell rested his mallet over his shoulder and started down the field at a walk.

  Fat Charley cantered up to him, turned, and rode beside him.

  “Nice shot, Lowell,” he said.

  “Luck,” Lowell said, modestly, although it had been, in fact, a damned good shot, a full stroke at the gallop that had connected squarely and sent the ball through the goalposts like a bullet.

  “Could I catch a ride to lunch with you?” Fat Charley asked. “I’ve got to stop by my office a moment.”

  “Certainly, sir,” Lowell said. Fat Charley, Lowell had learned by eavesdropping on his fellow polo players, had been with General Waterford in the war. He was an armor officer. But he had been detailed to the Corps of Military Police, and was the Constabulary’s provost marshal. The idea was that he would become provost marshal general, which called for a major general. There was no way the establishment was going to let some asshole cop commissioned from civilian life be named a general officer.

  There was an exception to that, Lowell had also learned. The European Command provost marshal was Brigadier General H. Norman Schwartzkopf, formerly Colonel Schwartzkopf of the New Jersey State Police. Schwartzkopf had been the man who had caught the kidnapper of Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh’s baby, and was second in fame only to J. Edgar Hoover. The next provost marshal of the U.S. Army would be Schwartzkopf, and Fat Charley would be his replacement.

  Only after Fat Charley had asked him for a ride to lunch did Lowell consider that as an officer he could no longer eat as a transient in the enlisted mess of the Signal Battalion, which was near the stables. And only a moment after that did he realize that Fat Charley had thought of that before he had and was helping him to ease the problem of transition.

  Whether Fat Charley really had business at his office (a one-and-a-half-story brown stone building that reminded Lowell of a gas station) or whether that had simply been an excuse to have Lowell accompany him, he was in the building no more than three minutes.

  He came out and heaved himself into the jeep beside Lowell, leaning back on the seat, his right booted leg outside of the jeep body and resting on the horizontal rear portion of the fender.

  “The Bayrischen Hof,” Fat Charley began without preliminaries, “is one of three hotels for bachelor officers, most of them company grade. Most senior officers are both married and have their dependents here. At lunch, the dining room feeds the married men who don’t want to go home for lunch. Some of them stop in the bar for a drink or two on the way home. Dinner, and the bar afterward, is generally for the bachelors and transients. Now that the antifraternization ban has been lifted, you generally find frauleins, of all kinds, from the wholly respectable to the other end of the spectrum, in the dining room and bar.”

  Lowell nodded. He didn’t say anything, because he didn’t know what to say.

  “It seems to have been decided,” Fat Charley went on, “that if young officers are going to get falling down drunk and make asses of themselves over girls who are available for a pound of coffee or a couple pairs of stockings, it’s better to have them do it where they’re out of sight of the troops.”

  They were at the Bayrischen Hof by the time he’d made his little speech. Fat Charley pointed the way to the parking lot, and then led the way through the rear door of the four-story Victorian hotel to the dining room. He walked to a table occupied by a military police captain, who stood up at his approach.

  “Have you room for a couple of old horse soldiers?” Fat Charley said, slipping into a chair. “Captain Winslow, Lieutenant Lowell.”

  They shook hands. A German waitress immediately served coffee, and laid a mimeographed menu before them. Lowell saw, a little disappointed, that the food was the same food served in the enlisted mess. When Fat Charley left beside his plate thirty-five cents in the paper script they used for money, Lowell did likewise.

  “Lowell,” Fat Charley said, when they had finished eating, “if you want to make sure you’re properly checked in, I’ll have another cup of coffee with Captain Winslow.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Lowell said. “Nice to have met you, Captain.”

  “I’ll see you tonight, probably,” Captain Winslow said. “I live here, too.”

  As he walked across the dining room, he heard Fat Charley say to Winslow that he had “just arrived. Nice boy. Fine polo player.”

  The sergeant at the desk went with him to his room, a pleasant, airy double room on the top floor. He told him how the laundry was handled, and advised him to make sure he locked up his cigarettes and other goodies, because the krauts would sure as hell steal anything that wasn’t nailed down.

  Fat Charley was waiting in the lobby when he came down from his room.

  (Three)

  The general showed up, with MacMillan, in a liaison aircraft precisely at 1430. His polo players were waiting for him, with the better ponies; and ten minutes after the general landed, the first chukker began.

  At one point in the game, when the jeep horn sounded the end of the fourth chukker, Lowell found himself alone with General Waterford at the far end of the field. They walked their mounts back together.

  “It’s you, Fat Charle
y, and me,” the general said. “Think it over, and then tell me who else we should play with.”

  By God, Lowell thought, here I am, on my first day as a second lieutenant, and the general is already asking my advice.

  When the game was over, there were cocktails at the general’s van, served by the general’s orderlies and attended by such officer’s ladies as happened to be in the area. He was introduced to Mrs. Fat Charley. She was very much like Mrs. Waterford, Lowell thought.

  Afterward, Lowell drove to the Bayrischen Hof, and went to his room. He took a leisurely shower and then spent the hour and a half until the bar opened reading the Stars & Stripes and listening to his radio.

  The other polo players, when they came in, acknowledged his presence in the bar with a nod or a word, but none joined him where he sat at the end of the bar, and he was not invited to join any of the groups at their tables.

  They’re afraid of me, Lowell realized, or at least they don’t know what to do with me. It is easier to stay away from me.

  At six o’clock, after two beers, he went into the dining room and ate alone. Then he got in the jeep and drove across the park to the municipal auditorium, which like most of the useful buildings in Bad Nauheim, had been requisitioned by the army. He bought a ticket for twenty-five cents, and sat in the officer’s loge, and watched a Humphrey Bogart movie.

  After he’d returned to the Bayrischen Hof, he intended to go right to his room; but Captain Winslow, to whom he had been introduced at lunch, saw him passing through the lobby and called out to him. After Winslow had bought him a beer and he had bought Winslow a beer, Winslow offered the information that Fat Charley and the general and Winslow’s father had been classmates at West Point.

  Soon after that Lowell’s eyes fell upon a tall, blond, dark-eyed fur-line at a table with another fur-line and two officers. The officer with her groped her, or tried to, under the table. His reaction was ambivalent. He thought that his new status would give him opportunity to rent a little pussy himself, something as good looking as that, something he had been reluctant to do so far because he had nearly been nauseated by the technicolor VD movie he’d been shown on arrival in Germany. Renting one of the fur-lines on the street for a box of Hershey chocolate bars or two boxes of Rinso was something a reasonable man just did not do. Renting one in an officer’s hotel, however, might be something else again. Certainly, he reasoned, the army must take some measures to insure that the officer corps in an official officer’s billet did not contact gonorrhea, syphilis, or even crabs.

  He was also offended and angry that a nice-looking young girl like that should have to permit herself to be pawed by a drunken oaf like the captain at the table.

  Then he told himself that it was none of his business, and said good night to Captain Winslow, who seemed to be a decent sort, and went to bed.

  At midnight, there were sounds of crashing glass, and a feminine scream, and shouted male oaths, and of opening and slamming doors. He got out of bed and went to the door and stuck his head out.

  The girl he had seen being groped in the bar was huddled against the wall at the end of the corridor, hurriedly fastening her clothes. Her blond hair, which she had worn in a bun at her neck, was now hanging loose and mussed. It made her look very young; and her wide blue eyes showed terror. The oaf Lowell had seen pawing her in the bar, dressed in only his skivvies, was being urged back into his room by two other officers and the sergeant from the desk downstairs.

  As soon as they had the oaf inside his room, the room next to Lowell’s, the sergeant turned to the girl and in broken German told her to get her hustling little ass out of the hotel, right goddamn now, and don’t come back.

  She scurried like a frightened animal down the corridor, past Lowell. There was shame and anger and terror and helplessness all at once in her eyes. She was entirely too good looking, Lowell thought, to be a whore. Whores are supposed to look lewd, lascivious, and tough. This one looked like somebody’s kid sister. He thought about that. She looked like Cushman Cuming’s little sister. What the hell was her name? The one he always mispronounced: Penelope. He had once seen Pen-ell-oh-pee Cumings in her nightgown with her boobs pushing out in front.

  He watched as the whore fled down the stairs beside the elevator.

  Lowell closed his door. He could hear, but not completely understand, the drunken outrage of the oaf next door. For some reason, he was as excited as he had been when he had seen Cush’s kid sister in her nightgown in Spring Lake. He had been ashamed when that had given him a hard-on, and he was embarrassed now that what had just happened had also given him a hard-on.

  He walked to the French windows and opened them, then looked out the window to the street below.

  In a moment the fur-line came out of the hotel, walking quickly. She stopped on the sidewalk, looked both ways, and then hurried across the street into the municipal park. She disappeared into the shrubbery. She was probably taking a short cut through the park, Lowell thought. And then he saw that she had stopped twenty yards inside the park and was leaning on a tree.

  What she is going to do, Lowell decided, is wait for a GI or an officer to come down the street, and offer herself. Strangely excited, he decided he would watch.

  Two soldiers came down the sidewalk. The girl didn’t move from her tree. Then an officer walking from another of the hotels to the Bayrischen Hof walked past her. She didn’t approach him either.

  There was a tightness in Lowell’s chest, an excitement. He turned from the window, took his trousers from the chair where he’d laid them, and began to dress. He ran down the stairwell and walked past the knowing eyes of the sergeant on duty at the desk and into the street.

  He entered the park. She wasn’t leaning on the tree where he had last seen her, and for a moment he felt like a fool. Then he saw the edge of her dress behind the tree. She had seen him coming and was avoiding him.

  “Guten Abend,” Lowell said. She stepped from behind the tree, and stood clutching her purse against her chest. She smiled at him, a smile so forced it gave him a pain in the stomach. He saw that she had combed her hair. It was now hanging down past her shoulders. Damn it, she did look like Cush’s sister.

  “Guten Abend,” she said, softly, barely audibly.

  “He was drunk,” Lowell said. She said nothing. “Are you all right?” She said nothing. “Can I take you home?” Lowell asked.

  “I am very expensive,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation, in English, as if she was embarrassed.

  Lowell was suddenly enraged. He had meant what he said; it was not a euphemistic phrase for “Wanna fuck? How much?” He had been offering to take her home. Period. He reached in his pocket, took what paper script his hand found, and thrust it at her.

  She took it, counted it, nodded, her head bent, and jammed the money into her leather purse. He found himself looking at the purse. It was an alligator purse, a good one. But it was a woman’s purse, not a girl’s. It was obviously not hers. He counted the money as she counted it. He had given her fifty-five dollars, five or ten times the going rate.

  She looked at him, met his eyes. There was defiance in them. Defiance and fear.

  “Even for that much money,” she said, in English, “I will not do anything with the mouth.” She spoke decent rather than GI English, he realized. The partially understood complaints of the oaf suddenly came into focus. He had wanted her to blow him; she had refused. He turned around and started to walk out of the park.

  “Where do you go?” she asked.

  “To get my jeep,” he said. “To take you home.”

  “It would be better that we go to your room,” she said.

  He had been torn between wanting to screw her, wanting to help a young woman in distress, and wanting to confirm his own wisdom and righteousness by telling himself he wouldn’t touch a syphed-up kraut slut like that with a ten-foot pole.

  Now he wanted to fuck her. He desperately wanted to fuck her. To impale her. To fuck the ass off her. Was
it, he wondered, because she looked so much like Cush’s practically certified virginal sister? That was a pretty disgusting thing to consider. Was he really, deep down, some sort of pervert, who wanted to mess around with little girls?

  This was not a little girl, he reassured himself, no matter what she looked like. She might look about sixteen years old, with those blue eyes and that innocent little face, but she was as much a certified whore as Cush’s sister Penelope was a certified virgin.

  He waited until she caught up with him, then took her arm and hustled her across the street and into the hotel. The sergeant at the desk looked up, recognized the girl, and started to say something.

  “Stay out of this, Sergeant,” Lowell heard himself say, surprised at his boldness.

  “I don’t want any more trouble in here tonight, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said, backing down.

  “There will be no trouble,” Lowell said. He got the girl in the elevator, down the corridor past the oaf’s door, and into his room.

  She looked around the room. She looked at him, very intently. She went into the bathroom, and he heard the water running and the toilet flushing, and when she came out, she was naked save for a pair of cheap cotton underpants. Her breasts weren’t very large, he saw, and he could hardly make out the nipples, but they stood out erectly in front of her. She was pale, and thin, but she had very feminine hips.

  She walked to the bed, flipped the covers down, and lay down on it. He looked at her. She reached down and hooked her hands in her pants and raised her hips and slipped them down. The tuft of hair at her groin was no wider than his thumb. She met his eyes, and then turned her head to the side.

  She just remembered to act modest and shy, Lowell decided. He had no way of knowing, of course, that she had just told herself that she was glad, now she was about to do it, that the first time she did it would be with a young man, and a good-looking young man, too, and not the captain who had wanted to commit a perversion with her, and had beaten her when she refused.