The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  He rested the front end of the BAR where he had fired the M1. There were two more men at the machine gun now, one picking up the ammo cans, the other scooping up the machine gun itself.

  The BAR jumped in his hands. Two short bursts. There were now four dead men at the machine gun. No. Three. One of the bastards was still alive! The BAR jumped again in his hands.

  And then one more man came to the machine gun. Didn’t you get the message, you sonofabitch? The BAR jumped again, and then stopped. Empty. Lowell ducked behind the rock, pulling the BAR down with him. He changed magazines, then got back in position.

  Nothing moved. And there were no yellow flickering muzzle blasts. Just the bluish white clouds of smoke, followed a moment later by the crump as the sound of mortar shell’s detonation reached them.

  The shit was drying, caking, on his leg. He could smell it. He threw up again, dry. There was nothing left to come out of his stomach. He felt faint and rested his cheek on the rock, smelling the tung oil on the BAR stock as he stared at the empty .30–06 shell casings scattered around him.

  When there was quiet, he carefully aligned eight cartridges in a clip and loaded the M1; and leaving the BAR where it was, he went back to Nick. He pulled off his Ike jacket and placed it over Nick’s shattered head.

  The Greek captain came over to him and made the sign of the cross over Nick, and then, with tears in his eyes, he held Craig Lowell’s head against his chest, and very gently kissed the top of his head.

  Lowell went to the stone hut he had shared with Nick, took out his bedroll, and took from it all his spare underwear. Then he went to the water barrel, and took off his boots and his pants and dipped a T-shirt in the water barrel and wiped the feces off his legs.

  It took a long time. He thought that he was going to be sick again. Then one of the Greeks came up to him. He handed him a pair of Greek (actually English) woolen pants, well worn but clean. And then he handed him a British battle jacket. It had his second lieutenant’s bar and his tank on the collar points.

  “Thank you,” he said. The Greek soldier nodded and pointed to the left epaulet. There was a cheap, gray metal pin pinned to it. The insignia of the 113th Regiment, 27th Royal Hellenic Mountain Division. The Greek, who was a pockmarked old fart who needed a shave, reached out and tenderly ran his rough hand over Lowell’s face and said something to him. Lowell had no idea what he said, but he smiled and nodded his head. The Greek bent over and picked up the shitty trousers and skivvy shorts and the T-shirt Lowell had used as a shit wiper and carried them off.

  (Seven)

  Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell, wearing mostly a Greek uniform, was leaning on the stone and sandbag walls of his hut, puffing on his next to last cigar when Lt. Colonel Paul T. Hanrahan and First Lieutenant Sanford T. Felter drove into No. 12 Company’s area. Hanrahan was driving.

  When the weapons carrier stopped, Hanrahan got from behind the wheel and looked at Lowell, who made no move to get off the wall. Hanrahan glanced at the body, which was under a sheet of canvas now. A crucifix rested on top of the canvas. Then he walked toward Lowell.

  When he was ten feet away, Lowell pushed himself off the sandbags and saluted. Hanrahan returned the salute as casually.

  “You all right, Lieutenant?” Hanrahan asked.

  “I’m alive, Colonel.”

  “What happened to your face?” Hanrahan asked. Lowell unconsciously put his fingers to the already formed scabs on his face.

  “Stone splinters, I think,” Lowell said.

  Colonel Hanrahan put his finger out and touched the regimental insignia on his epaulet.

  “They give that to you?” he asked. The implication was clear, Lowell thought. I am wearing something I should not be wearing.

  The Greek captain, seeing what Hanrahan had done, came up and, taking him by the arm, led him behind the bunker where the dead of the engagement were laid out in two rows. On one side were the Greeks, under cheap cotton flags. On the other the enemy were on their backs with nothing covering them. Captured weapons and supplies were piled between them. The Greek captain led Hanrahan to the end of the line where five bodies lay in a group. A machine gun and some small arms and some supplies were at their feet.

  Lowell had seen the bodies before, but only then, when he saw the captain indicating him, did he understand why these bodies and the machine gun were in a special group. These were the men he had killed.

  I don’t feel a fucking thing, he realized. Not one fucking thing. If I’m supposed to be all upset because I have taken human life, I’m not.

  “The captain seems to think you’re pretty hot stuff, Lowell,” Lt. Colonel Hanrahan said, coming back to him. “A regular Sergeant York.”

  “We’re going to need another interpreter up here, Colonel,” Lowell said.

  “There’s one coming with the trucks to get the other bodies and this stuff,” Hanrahan said. “I wanted to come get Nick myself.”

  They had brought with them in the weapons carrier an American flag and a locally made cheap pine coffin, which was already splitting. Lt. Col. Hanrahan and Lieutenant Felter carried it to the tarpaulin-covered body. Hanrahan and Lowell picked Nick up and put him in the coffin, and then Hanrahan got on his knees and nailed the flag to it. Finally, Hanrahan and Lowell hoisted the coffin into the weapons carrier.

  “I’ll take care of writing the next of kin,” Hanrahan said. It was the first Lowell had even thought about that.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said.

  “And I’ll send you some clothes with the other trucks.”

  “Is the mail coming up with the trucks?” Lowell asked.

  Hanrahan pointed to Lt. Sanford T. Felter, who, looking ashamed, handed Lowell his only mail. It was from the Constabulary officer’s club. He owed a twenty-five dollar initiation fee and three months dues of ten dollars per month. Unless the bill was paid within seventy-two hours, it said, his commanding officer would be notified.

  “The mail is terribly fouled up,” Felter said, lamely.

  “Yeah, sure it is,” Lowell said.

  (Eight)

  After his junior officer had passed satisfactorily, more than satisfactorily, through his first engagement, Paul Hanrahan was not surprised that he immediately started going Greek. Although Hanrahan would never have said it out loud, it was the Brotherhood of Arms. Probably without knowing it, and certainly without thinking about it, Lowell had joined the tribe. The tribe happened to be Greek. He wanted to be like the others, so he dressed like them, thought like them, acted like them.

  Within a month, to the disgust of many of the American officers at Ioaninna, Lowell was far over the line. He had helped himself to a supply of British uniforms from a building full of British surplus at Ioannina. A Greek mama washed it for him to get rid of the awful smell of the British antimoth preservative. He wore a second lieutenant’s bar pinned to one collar point, and a U.S. was on the other. These were the only things that distinguished him from a Greek officer.

  Under the battle jacket, he wore an open khaki shirt, a GI sweater, and a silk scarf. In one of the Greek companies he instructed, he had acquired a black leather belt and Luger holster the Germans had left behind. The buckle was a solid brass affair, cast with the words GOTT MIT UNS in inch-high letters.

  Probably to mock Felter’s parachute wings, Hanrahan thought, he had moved the 113th Regimental pin above his breast pocket from his epaulet. Felter had gone Greek only in that he wore British boots and no necktie. Hanrahan sensed that the only reason Felter was wearing his parachutist’s wings was that he had noticed Hanrahan wearing his own.

  Felter was spending most of his time around the division and regimental headquarters. His fluency in Russian fitted in perfectly with Hanrahan’s personal obsession. Lt. Col. Red Hanrahan took personal umbrage at the Russian insistence that the Greek revolution was nothing more than an internal affair and that they had nothing to do with it. He was determined to capture one of their Russian counterparts (they could hear them on the
radio) and personally take the sonofabitch to Athens.

  Lowell got back to Ioannina once or twice a week to sleep overnight, to run messages and errands from the regimental advisors, and to get an American ration meal. And, Paul Hanrahan knew, to wait for a letter that never came.

  Paul Hanrahan often thought that if he could get his hands on the little German bitch who had dumped Lowell, he could have cheerfully choked her.

  Lowell had received two letters from his mother, both of them still addressed to Private Lowell. She wrote that she remembered Athens from her honeymoon, and she gave him the addresses of restaurants he simply shouldn’t miss. While he was there, she wrote, he should take advantage of the opportunity and take a week’s cruise among the Greek islands.

  Lowell never got around to answering his mother’s letters.

  The letter he was waiting for took seven weeks to come. The civilian mail service between Greece and Germany was practically nonexistent, and the APO service apparently wasn’t much better.

  Dear Craig,

  After waiting for a month, I know why you haven’t written to me. I understand completely. I want to thank you for being so kind to me, and I want you to know that I will ever remember you with most fond thoughts. Your little German friend.

  Ilse.

  Craig Lowell had no way of knowing, of course, that two weeks after he had left Germany, General Walls had called Fat Charley into his office and with great delight told him he stood relieved. When Lowell’s letters to Ilse arrived in Germany, care of Fat Charley, they were duly forwarded by the Army Postal Service, surface shipment, to Headquarters U.S. Army Recruiting District, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to which Fat Charley would report for duty six weeks after landing in the States.

  It was only the night that Craig finally got Ilse’s letter that Sanford Felter heard the whole story about how Craig had met Ilse. He learned, too, that Lowell was only nineteen years old and had lasted at Harvard College only three months before being placed on indeterminate suspension.

  Sanford Felter wrote Sharon about it the next day—after he’d sobered Lowell up and sent him out of Ioannina lying in the back of an ammo carrier.

  He told her that he really felt sorry for Lowell because of the girl. The thing was, despite everything, despite his good looks and his wealthy background and all, and even the way he’d become almost famous for his icy courage under fire, Craig was really just a boy who had been taken in by a German girl. She obviously was interested in him only for what he could bring her from the PX.

  He had offered a prayer for Lowell, Sanford wrote, because the kid was likely to do something very foolish in his mental condition. It made me realize, he added, how good God has been to me in giving me a fine woman.

  He wrote, too, that he had come to really respect and admire Colonel Hanrahan; but, because he didn’t think she would either understand or care, he hadn’t gone into much detail.

  Hanrahan had sought out Felter’s company the night before. An ad hoc social night, Hanrahan thought privately, of the Ioannina Chapter, West Point Protective Association. He needed somebody to talk to; and he guessed correctly that he could talk to Felter in confidence.

  In Felter’s room, over a cup of tea, they talked of many things, what they were doing, their wives, the Greeks, and, of course, the Future of the Army.

  He asked Felter, and Felter told him, why he had volunteered for Greece. And then Felter had put the question to him, and Hanrahan had enough ouzo aboard to answer him.

  “What about you, Colonel?” Felter said. “Why are you here?”

  “The function of an officer in peacetime,” Hanrahan said, “is to prepare to fight the next war. That seems pretty goddamned simple to me, but most people I know don’t understand it.”

  “You don’t mean that we’re going to fight here,” Felter replied, “nor that our next war is going to be a guerrilla war, do you?”

  “Award the short lieutenant the cement bicycle,” Hanrahan said. “No, I don’t. What I’m talking about is leading other people’s troops.”

  “Mercenaries? That’s the reason the Roman Empire fell.”

  “I don’t mean mercenaries. I mean helping people fight their own wars. Phrased simply, Felter, whether we like it or not, we’re going to have to keep the Russians from taking the world over. And since there’s no way we can match them man for man, we have to use other people’s troops. We’re the most sophisticated society in the world, and we have enough people to train other people.”

  “That’s not mercenaries?”

  “Pay attention. I said ‘to fight their own wars.’ It is to the Greeks’ advantage to keep the Russians out. And their own men are doing just as good a job, probably a better one, than the 82nd Airborne could do. We give them the equipment, and we train them to use it.”

  “You think this is the future, then?”

  “I want to be a general just as much as anybody else who went to school on the Hudson, Felter. And I am not noble. If I thought the way to get to be a general was to be at Bragg playing paratrooper again, that’s where I would be. I intend to be the fucking expert when it comes to fighting other people’s wars with other people’s soldiers.”

  Then he realized that he was talking too much, even to Felter, and went to bed.

  Neither did Sandy Felter tell Sharon that he had written a staff study for Colonel Hanrahan, an intelligence estimate actually, concerning the situation. He wasn’t sure if Colonel Hanrahan would have the time to read it, and if he did read it, what he would think of it. He might just laugh at him.

  Sanford Felter had taken the facts as he saw them and come up with what he thought was a very likely course of enemy action.

  The thin line that the 27th Royal Hellenic Mountain Division had stretched across its portion of the Albanian border was growing more and more effective as time passed. Many pathways across the border from Albania had been dynamited and rendered impassable. All roads wide enough for trucks were now covered by mortars, machine guns, and even by 37 mm mountain cannon in a few places. The enemy was no longer able to infiltrate supplies across the border with reasonable impunity, or with a rate of losses he could afford to pay.

  Behind the thin line of the mountain division, however, the same paths were open as they had been for thousands of years. The same paths and a great many caves.

  If he were the enemy, Sanford Felter reasoned, rather than send supplies piecemeal across the line, he would breach the line. In a sudden attack, he would take out a couple of the little fortresses guarding the roads. Once they were out of the way, he would send truckloads of supplies through. The trucks would be lost, but if they penetrated a couple of miles behind the mountain division’s lines, and guerrillas were waiting to hide the supplies in the mountains, the trucks could be considered expendable.

  And certainly the Russian-supported guerrillas and, more importantly, the Red Army advisors on the other side of the border would be influenced by the basic Red Army tactic, which was massive attack. In this case, probably with mortars.

  A massive, hour-long attack by mortars against positions which heretofore had not been subject to more than an occasional round, would probably succeed, the valor of the Greeks not withstanding.

  To Sandy’s immense pleasure, Colonel Hanrahan sent the study to Athens with the comment that he found it very interesting and was taking appropriate measures, within the limits of his assets, to help the mountain divisions resist such an attack.

  There weren’t very many assets available to the senior U.S. Army advisor to the 27th Royal Hellenic Mountain Divison. But he organized what he had as best he could—three M8 armored cars, six half-trucks, two six-by-sixes, and five weapons carriers—into a mobile light armored column cum ammo train.

  The vehicles and the men were now set aside and parked, awaiting the attack Felter prophesied. They were identified, and on receipt of a signal, their drivers would be given orders to report to a designated location. There a basic combat load of ammunit
ion for the vehicles and troops and a load of mortar and small arms ammunition to resupply the fortresses under attack had been cached.

  Lt. Col. Hanrahan didn’t actually make these arrangements himself. He received and approved the arrangements made by Lieutenant Felter. He had come to admire Felter, a process which began with something close to paternal amusement. Felter was the archetypical West Point lieutenant, taking himself and his mission very seriously. But unlike most young lieutenants, Felter made very few mistakes. He neither left important things out, nor had to be cut down to reality. It occurred to Hanrahan one day that the only thing wrong with Felter was that he looked like a mouse. Hanrahan was regularly furious with himself for not being able to remember his first name; he kept calling him Sidney. He thought of him as the Mouse, and had not been surprised to learn from Felter that they had called him “the Mouse” at the Academy.

  Once he had given Mouse Felter the go-ahead to set up his relief column, Felter had presumed that he would be in command should it be necessary to actually employ the column. At first, Hanrahan had thought the idea ludicrous, but had not hurt Felter’s feelings by telling him so. But as Felter’s analysis of the enemy’s intention seemed more and more plausible, the idea of letting the Mouse have the command seemed more logical. Felter had run several dry runs: gathering the vehicles together, loading them up, forming the column. He worked the kinks out, made alternative arrangements and additions (the incorporation of three ambulances, for example) and so turned an idea into a working arrangement.

  And then Hanrahan got the failed ring-knocker, and that blew the Mouse out of the saddle.

  Once a week, or perhaps every ten days, a Stinson L-5 flew into Ioannina and picked up Hanrahan and flew him to Athens. Sometimes they wanted to see him in Athens; more often he went to Athens to plead for more supplies. And sometimes he went and flew back the same day because that way he could pick up the mail sacks and maybe a couple of bottles of whiskey.