The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  On the way to see him in the morning, she stopped by the PX and got a really weird look from the clerk when she handed him her ration card, and said she wanted a box of the best kind of cigars.

  (Five)

  “Dearest Sharon,” the Mouse wrote from Ioannina, “you remember what Scott Fitzgerald wrote about the rich being different from you and me. I want you to remember that if Craig Lowell comes to see you. I don’t know why I said ‘if.’ He said he would come to see you, and I think he will. I will be surprised and I guess hurt if he doesn’t, because I have come to think of him as a friend, probably the best friend I have ever had, and I don’t think he would have promised to come see you unless he meant it.

  “What happened to him sounds like a movie starring John Wayne.

  “I already wrote about him sort of adopting one of the Greek companies up near the border. I don’t know if Colonel Hanrahan knew what he was doing or not. If he did know, he looked the other way when Craig stole anything that wasn’t nailed down, as they say in the army, and carried it to ‘his’ company. Food, liquor, clothing, fuel, and even an oil heater from the senior (U.S.) officer’s quarters here.

  “He was up with ‘his’ company when there was a large attack on it. The communists were trying to overrun the forts. They used a lot of mortars; and a large number of people, including all the Greek officers, were killed or wounded. Craig was badly wounded himself. But he took command (which is really unusual, since the Greeks normally won’t take orders from anyone but another Greek) and held out until we were able to get a relief force up to help. When they got there, there were only twenty-eight men left alive (out of 206), and they were nearly out of ammunition.

  “When they got Craig back here, the doctor had to give him five pints of blood. He’d lost that much. They flew him out of here on a Royal Air Force seaplane to an army hospital in Germany. The doctor said he will be all right, but when I first saw him, I was frightened for him. He was gray.

  “He thinks he’ll be coming back here, but Colonel Hanrahan doesn’t think so. Colonel Hanrahan thinks they will probably, eventually, ship him to the United States. Colonel Hanrahan is usually right, which means that you will probably soon get to meet the fellow I’ve written so much about. I don’t want you to judge him by first impression, and I want you to warn Mama and Papa beforehand that he will certainly say something that will either hurt them or make them mad, or both. The language Craig uses—and sometimes it’s really raw, honey, if you know what I mean—I guess is some kind of a defense mechanism, to hide his feelings, but you had better be prepared to be shocked. You’ll have to remember that he doesn’t mean anything by it. Tell Mama and Papa that.

  “I want you all to be very nice to him. I don’t think he has many friends, and not much of a family either. I really don’t understand his relationship with his mother. He just doesn’t seem to care about her at all. And she feels the same, from what I’ve seen, about him.

  “That’s all I have time for now, except to tell you that Colonel Hanrahan liked an intelligence analysis I drew up for him, and is going to put something about it in my efficiency report. I told him that I wanted to be an intelligence officer, and this will probably help me.

  “And tell Papa that Colonel Hanrahan said he would have me flown to Athens for the Holy Days. And never forget even for a second, that I am

  Your faithful and loving husband,

  Sandy

  (also known as “the Mouse”)

  (I don’t even mind anymore.)

  (Six)

  Headquarters, War Department

  Office of the Surgeon General

  The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

  13 September 1946

  “Within the hour,” the surgeon general of the United States Army said, “I’m delighted to be of service, Senator.” He broke the connection with his finger, and then tapped the phone to get his secretary on the line.

  “Ask Colonel Furman to come in here right away, will you, please, Helen?”

  Colonel William B. Furman, Medical Service Corps, Chief of Administrative Services, Office of the Surgeon General, appeared ninety seconds later.

  “Get on the phone, Bill,” the surgeon general said. “Call the 97th General Hospital in Frankfurt, and get me a complete rundown on the medical condition of a soldier named Craig W. Lowell.”

  “Do you have his rank and serial number, sir?”

  “No serial number. But he’s either a lieutenant or a private, if that’s any help,” the surgeon general said, smiling. And then he thought a moment. “And, Bill, when you get his rank and serial number, send a TWX. Medical condition permitting, space available, have him put on the next medical evacuation flight to Walter Reed.”

  “He’s somebody important, I gather, sir?”

  “I just had the senior senator from New York on the phone. He leads me to believe that Private Lowell, or Lieutenant Lowell, whatever he is, owns just about a square mile of downtown Manhattan Island,” the surgeon general said.

  “I’ll get right on it, sir.”

  (Seven)

  The commanding officer of the 97th General Hospital was an old friend of Major Florence Horter. They had served together three times before, and it was unofficial but rigid Standing Operating Procedure that when the hospital commander scheduled an operation, Major Florence Horter was scheduled as his gas-passer; and if the Medical Corps officers who were board-certified anesthesiologists felt slighted, tough teat.

  Major Horter, in a green blouse and pink skirt, and wearing all of her ribbons, walked into his office.

  “What the hell is going on, Flo?” the hospital commander asked.

  “About what?”

  “With you and this kid from Greece,” he said. “Don’t tell me May and December.”

  “Don’t be a horse’s ass,” Major Horter exploded. “He’s a nice kid, that’s all.”

  “And that’s why you’re taking him off on a weekend pass? Two days after you tell me, and I TWX the surgeon general, that he shouldn’t be airlifted for at least a week?”

  “How’d you find out about that?” she asked, curiously.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

  “OK. He’s got a girlfriend. Or he had one. He can’t find her, and we’re going to look for her.”

  “A girlfriend, or a fraulein?”

  “Both,” she said.

  “The policy of this command is to discourage emotional involvements between troops, especially officers, and frauleins.”

  “Tom,” Major Horter said. “This boy is going to go look for that girl whether or not the army likes it. You want to get involved with an AWOL charge?”

  “I can call him in here and scare him a little,” the hospital commander said.

  “He won’t scare,” Major Horter sad. “Not only is he a boy who thinks he’s in love, but he’s a real hard-nose.”

  “Where are you going to look for the fraulein?”

  “Bad Nauheim,” she said.

  “OK, Flo,” he said. “But for Christ’s sake, remember he’s got friends in high places.”

  “I don’t think he’s got a friend in the world, except maybe me and this fraulein,” she said. “You’re forgiven for that May and December crack, Tom.”

  “What the hell was I supposed to think? All of a sudden, you start acting like a…”

  “Maybe a frustrated mother, Tom,” she interrupted him. “Leave it at that.”

  Major Florence Horter had a brand-new 1946 Packard Clipper two-door sedan. When she drove it up the curved road to the main entrance of the 97th General Hospital, Craig Lowell was standing there waiting for her, his arm in a sling, his Ike jacket worn over his shoulder. She thought again that he looked very, very young. Maybe not thirteen anymore. But his age. Nineteen was still a boy.

  She dreaded what he was likely to find in Bad Nauheim. It wasn’t that she blamed the German girls for jumping into bed with these kids. Under the circumstances, tha
t was to be expected. Sex was all they had to get by. It wasn’t the first time in history that had happened, nor would it be the last.

  It was just that this damn fool of a young man really believed that he had found the exeception that proved the rule. That his fraulein had been a virgin—he’d even told her that, and he obviously believed it—and that she was different from all the others.

  What he was liable to find, if he found her at all, was that she had simply substituted some other young jackass for him, and that if she was everything he said she was, she had the new jackass convinced that he had been the first and that she was in love with him. Again, she didn’t blame the girl. If she was one of these German kids who had lost everything in the war, and couldn’t find a job, a young American officer with a ticket in his pants to the land of the big PX would look pretty appealing to her, too.

  She just didn’t like to think what being forced to face facts would do to Craig Lowell. She didn’t care if Lowell was a personal friend of Harry S Truman himself, the bottom line was that he was the loneliest kid she had ever met and that he was betting his entire emotional bank account on one hell of a long shot. An impossible long shot. This race had been fixed, and Lowell had a ticket on the wrong horse.

  When they got to Bad Nauheim, he directed her to the outskirts of town and down a dirt road to a farmer’s house. She went with him to the door. She didn’t speak German, but she understood enough to understand what the farmer and his wife told him. The girl was gone, had been gone for a long time, right after he had left, and they didn’t know where she had gone.

  Then they went back into Bad Nauheim, to the provost marshal’s office. The provost marshal Craig Lowell was looking for was long gone. No one he asked had ever heard of a fur-line called Ilse Berg. Then they drove across Bad Nauheim to one of the BOQs, and they sat in the lobby and waited until the bar opened so he could ask the bartender. The bartender was new, and he couldn’t remember a fraulein with that name—hell, he never got their names—or meeting the description Lowell gave him.

  “There’s one more thing we can try,” he said, when they were in the Packard again. “She was from Marburg. She was always trying to get me to go to Marburg, and see the house she lived in before the war. She said it was a castle.”

  “Haven’t you had enough?” Florence Horter said. “You’re kicking a dead horse.”

  “I want to try it,” he said. “If you don’t want to take me, why don’t you just take me to the railroad station?”

  They drove to Marburg, and put up in a transient officer’s hotel right in the middle of the medieval city. A smart-ass sergeant asked them if they wanted adjoining rooms.

  In the morning, a sympathetic sergeant at military government called the German police, who told him there was no Berg family with a daughter named Ilse in Stadt, Land, or Kreis Marburg. Then he went to the military government files and came up with a 1940 city register. There were seventeen Bergs, none of them with a female child named Ilse. And there was no castle named Berg. All castles, or most of them, anyway, were called “Berg Something.”

  “Like the Administration Building for the Kreis,” the MG sergeant said. “That’s Schloss Greiffenberg.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Lowell said. “I really appreciate your courtesy.”

  “How’d you hurt your shoulder, Lieutenant?” the sergeant asked.

  “You know what they say, Sergeant,” Lowell said, bitterly. “It’s not sex that’s bad for you. It’s the running after it that kills you.”

  They started back to Frankfurt am Main. He didn’t say anything at all until they were back on the autobahn; and when she stole looks at him, she saw that he was really thinking this whole mess through. The proof came when he told her about some little Jewish lieutenant in Greece, who had not only saved his ass on the hillside, but who had given him blood later.

  “He was like you, Major,” Lowell said. “He had my fraulein pegged and didn’t know if he should tell me or not.” He put a cigar in his mouth, and lit it with the cigarette lighter. He laid his head back against the seat and blew smoke rings. He looked, for a while, as if he might cry.

  “She wasn’t the first girl in your life,” Florence Horter said. “She won’t be the last.”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “she was the first. But she won’t be the last.” He sat up, and jammed the cigar defiantly in the corner of his mouth.

  “Now, don’t go off half shot, chasing every skirt in sight just to prove you’re a man,” Florence Horter said.

  He gave her a dirty look, and she thought she was about to be told off. He had to be mad at somebody, she decided, and it might as well be her.

  But he surprised her. He chuckled.

  “C. Lowell,” he said, raising the arm in the sling. “One-armed broad chaser.” Then he cursed. He had moved the arm too far.

  “Watch the sutures, damn it,” Major Horter said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lowell said. “Major, sir.”

  When they got to Frankfurt, a little after five thirty, and saw the curved white bulk of the I. G. Farben Building looming out of the rubble, Major Florence Horter took her hand from the wheel and pointed at the building which housed Headquarters, U.S. Forces, Europe Theater.

  “How would you like to buy me a steak in the O Club?”

  “I would be honored, ma’am,” he said.

  “If you stared soulfully into my eyes,” she said, “and maybe held my hand a little, it’d give everybody something to talk about.”

  They attracted more than a little attention when they walked into the officer’s club dining room, a large, glass-walled, high-ceilinged room. For one thing, she thought, Lowell was a rather spectacular sight with his arm in a sling and his Ike jacket worn over his shoulders like a Hungarian cavalryman. Even without that, he would have attracted attention simply for being a tall, handsome, muscular young man. And finally, here he was in the company of a frumpy field-grade nurse, nearly old enough to be his mother.

  He was, she saw, totally oblivious to the looks they got.

  She didn’t like it when he gulped down the first scotch and water, and then had two more before he even opened the menu, but then she decided that maybe he was entitled to get a little drunk; and in his condition, she didn’t think it would take much booze.

  It took a lot more to get him high than she thought it would, and something else surprised her. He did not, as she expected, start either to feel sorry for himself about his fraulein or to get nasty about her. He ran off at the mouth a little, but there wasn’t one self-pitying word about the fraulein.

  They stayed in the officer’s mess until it closed at midnight, and then drove back to the 97th General Hospital compound. It was only after she had dropped him in front of the main entrance that she remembered that his pass had expired at 2400. The door would be locked, and the OD would have to let him in and take his name. She figured she could talk the OD out of writing him up, but decided the hell with it. By the time it worked its way through channels, he would have been evacuated to the States. She parked her car and went to her room.

  The duty officer had taken a chance and gone to bed right after midnight; and so he was annoyed to see the young second lieutenant standing outside the locked glass doors. He gave the kid verbal hell as well as writing him up for being AWOL.

  When he handed Lowell his copy of the delinquency report, Lowell asked, very politely, whether he had been born chickenshit, or whether it was something he had learned in the army. The OD snatched the delinquency report from Lowell’s hand.

  “You will consider yourself under arrest, Lieutenant,” he said.

  “Fuck you,” Lowell said, cheerfully.

  The OD called the sergeant of the guard, a middle-aged sergeant-technician, and told him to “escort this officer to his ward and inform the nurse on duty that he is under arrest.”

  “Will you come with me, please, Lieutenant?” the sergeant asked, kindly.

  “Certainly.” Lowell sai
d. “Anything to oblige.”

  When they were out of sight of the OD, the sergeant asked him what had happened.

  “That wasn’t too smart, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said after Lowell had told him. “But I’m glad somebody finally told that sonofabitch off.”

  They walked up the wide, curving stairs to the mezzanine and the bank of elevators.

  The German night maintenance force—the gnomes, as they were known—were scrubbing the marble floors on their hands and knees. They made Lowell uncomfortable. There was something degrading about it. He walked quickly to the elevators to avoid looking at them.

  “Craig?” a soft voice asked hesitantly, disbelieving. He paused, but didn’t completely stop walking.

  “Craig,” the voice said. “Oh, my God, you’ve been hurt!”

  He stopped and turned.

  “Yeah, I’ve been hurt,” he said.

  “Craig!” It was a wail now, of anguish.

  Ilse was kneeling, erect, but kneeling, behind a bucket. She had a scrub brush in her hand. She was wearing a shapeless black smock of some kind, and there was a faded blue rag wrapped around her head.

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” Craig Lowell said, unaware he had said it.

  Ilse got awkwardly to her feet, putting the scrub brush in her bucket. She wiped her hands on her dress.

  “I am happy to see you again,” she said. “I didn’t know that you were here, or perhaps I would have asked per…”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” he said, and it came from the depths of his soul. “What are you doing with that fucking bucket?”

  He ran toward her, his eyes filled with tears, and he was drunk, and he slipped on the slippery wet marble and went crashing to the floor. He got the stitches in his chest and in his shoulder, and as he felt the blood warm his skin, he thought: They won’t be able to put me on that fucking air evac plane now.

  Ilse screamed and a nurse came running and took one look at him and said, “You opened your goddamned stitches.”