The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  Under these circumstances, obviously, your application for recall to extended active duty cannot be favorably considered.

  Thank you for your interest in the United States Army.

  Sincerely yours,

  John D. Glover

  Major, Adjutant General’s Corps

  Deputy Chief, Reserve Officer Branch

  (Armor) ODCS-P

  He was sorely tempted to write Major Glover and tell him to stick his commission up his anal orifice, but he decided, finally, fuck him. It wasn’t worth the time or effort.

  (Seven)

  Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

  30 May 1950

  Garmisch was nice, really beautiful, but there were some problems. There weren’t very many permanent party personnel, and the commissary and PX were small. There was only a small medical detachment, known as the Broken Bones Squad, to handle skiing accidents; and there was not even a dentist.

  What the permanent party did was drive into Munich, about one hundred kilometers (sixty miles) to the north. A U.S. Army General Hospital there provided pediatricians for Sanford, Jr., and obstetricians for Sharon now that she was that way again. There was also a huge commissary with a much wider selection than the one in Garmisch had; and, of course, the Munich Military Post PX was the largest in Germany.

  Sandy arranged his classes so that he was free after 1100 on Fridays. That allowed him to get into Munich to the hospital by half past two. He had bought a 1950 Buick Roadmaster sedan, two months old, from a captain who had been a ski instructor. He’d broken his leg and been shipped home. Sandy got it at a good price, and he liked having a big car. The way some of the Germans drove, it was better to be in a big car in case of accident.

  There was a standard routine when the Felters went to Munich. First, he dropped Sharon at the hospital and then he went to the commissary with the shopping list. Then he went back to the hospital and picked up Sharon and Little Sandy, and they went together to the PX. They spent the night in the Four Seasons Hotel, and then drove back to Garmisch late Saturday mornings. He didn’t like to be on the roads at night if he could avoid it, and the Four Seasons was a good hotel—run by the army—where you could get a really fancy meal at a very reasonable price.

  It was a Friday afternoon in early June, the first really nice spring day they’d had. Sandy dropped Sharon off at the hospital (Little Sandy didn’t need to see the pediatrician, so he had him with him), and then he drove to the commissary.

  He parked the Buick, then got out and somewhat awkwardly locked it, holding Little Sandy in his arms so he wouldn’t run around the parking lot in front of a car.

  And the fat jolly butcher from the Gehlen Organization appeared out of nowhere and said: “Oh, what a pretty little boy!”

  “Why, thank you,” Sandy said. “I think so.”

  “He looks just like my grandson,” the jolly fat butcher said, and took out his wallet and held it open for Sandy to look.

  It wasn’t a picture of a little boy. It was a picture of a tall, skinny man in worn work clothing.

  “That was taken ten days ago,” the butcher said. “At Vyritsa, near Leningrad. If nothing goes wrong, processing takes about ten days. We’ll keep you posted.”

  “You’re sure this is the one?”

  “My dear Felter,” the man said, “please believe me. That is Colonel Count Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg.”

  “No offense,” Felter said. “But this is a little personal, too.”

  “So I understand,” the jolly butcher said, enjoying Felter’s surprise. “Our mutual friend thought that Colonel Robert F. Bellmon would be interested in the gentleman’s homecoming, and asked me to ask you if you would be good enough to give him the word.”

  The fat jolly butcher put his wallet away, and started making cootchy-cootchy-coo sounds to Little Sandy. Then he said, “Our mutual friend would like both of you to know that while we make a mistake once in a while, most of the time we’re pretty efficient.”

  Then he tipped his hat and walked away.

  (Eight)

  Marburg an der Lahn, Germany

  24 June 1950

  He was tall and skeletal. His eyes were sunken and his skin was gray, and he had other classical signs of prolonged malnutrition. The suit that Generalmajor (Retired) Gunther von Hamm had insisted on giving him in Bad Hersfeld to replace the rags he had from the Russians hung loosely on his shoulders and bagged over his buttocks, which were nothing more than muscle and bone. The shoes hurt his feet, although he couldn’t understand why that should be. They were quality leather, even lined with leather. Gunther had said that the government was paying pensions again and that he really could afford to give him clothing, money, and whatever else he needed until his own retirement and back pay came through.

  He had been riding in the dining car since lunch. He had felt a little faint, and he hadn’t wanted to walk back to his second-class compartment. He’d asked the waiter if he could stay, and the waiter had been more than obliging. The waiter had seen returnees like him before. They made him uncomfortable, and if one of them wanted to sit at a dining car table, that seemed little enough to ask.

  He had broken the rules. He was supposed to go to a returnee center in Cologne, but when the train had stopped at Kassel, the first stop after crossing the border, he had just gotten off. He had had enough of centers and processing. He’d hitchhiked to Bad Hersfeld and found Gunther and Greta by the simple expedient of looking for their name in the phone book.

  Gunther had picked him up in his Volkswagen, and he could tell from the look in Gunther’s eyes how bad he looked—and something else: Gunther did not have good news for him.

  He got it that night: His wife was dead, a suicide. His daughter was believed to have gone to relatives in East Germany. Gunther said the Red Cross was very helpful in circumstances like these, in establishing contact across the East/West German borders.

  He knew that Gunther didn’t believe a word he was saying.

  So he had come home to nothing.

  He had felt too weak to go on just then, and so he imposed on Gunther’s hospitality for four days. They fed him, and they tried to talk of pleasant things. And then he had announced, and he would not be dissuaded, that he was feeling fine now and wanted to go to Marburg. He had no place else to go, and there was no sense putting it off.

  Kassel appeared to have really taken a beating. He remembered the Americans had come up north to Kassel through Giessen. Out of the foggy recesses of memory, he recalled seeing a communiqué. American armored forces had taken Giessen and were proceeding in the direction of Kassel.

  If they had done this to Kassel, what had they done to Marburg, which was on their only possible route north?

  The train reached the Marburg railyards all of a sudden, surprising him. The area didn’t seem to have suffered any damage at all.

  He got up and picked up the cardboard suitcase, tied shut with strings. He remembered to leave a tip for the waiter. There was new money; deutsche marks had replaced reichsmarks. He really had no idea what they were worth. Gunther had given him five hundred deutsche marks, to be paid back when he got his affairs in order.

  He looked at the money, and decided that five marks would be a suitable tip. There was a little strip of silver inlaid in the paper. He had noticed that with interest.

  He laid the five marks on the table and got up and walked carefully out of the dining room and stood in the vestibule. The waiter came after him and gave him his five marks back.

  “Welcome home, mein Herr,” he said.

  “Thank you very much,” he said. That was very touching. Do I look that bad?

  He could see out the open vestibule window now. There wasn’t much damage. People were playing soccer on the old soccer field. Whatever else had happened, the twin spires of St. Elizabeth’s Church were there, rising above the trees.

  Next the old city came into view. There was no damage. How incredible. It looked exactly as it had looked the day he
left! As he had so often thought of it in memory.

  And then they were in the station, and the train was slowing. He waited until it had completely stopped. He stepped between the cars into the vestibule from which the steps had been lowered, then got carefully, awkwardly off.

  He was still holding the five marks in his hand. He put it into his jacket pocket, or tried to. The pocket was still sewn shut. He put it in his trousers pocket. Just having money was a strange feeling.

  The people made him feel strange. They were all so fat, they were all so rosy.

  There were two men on the platform, watching the arriving passengers go down the stairway to the tunnel leading to the station. Policemen. He knew a policeman when he saw one. They were looking at something, probably a photograph, held in their hands.

  They can’t be expecting me, he thought. No one knows about me. No one knew about me coming until I arrived. My name wasn’t even on the list of returned prisoners.

  But the policemen, nevertheless, looked at him very intently when he walked past them and started down the stairs. Probably because I was so long a prisoner. Policemen don’t like prisoners; whether they are criminals or prisoners of war, it makes no difference.

  They know, he thought, with something close to terror. They know I didn’t go to the center in Cologne, as I was ordered to do. They have come to arrest me.

  He sensed, rather than saw, that the policemen were coming down the stairs behind him. There was a feeling of terror. So close, and am I to be arrested again? But why? There didn’t have to be a reason. The state provided any reason it wanted. It was not necessary to satisfy a prisoner that he was being justly detained.

  He went up the stairs into the station. The general outline of the station was familiar, but there was something new. He wondered about that. The glass, of course. The doors were now all glass. Before they had been wooden doors with glass panels. Now they were huge pieces of thick glass. Much nicer. The station had obviously been bombed; and when they’d rebuilt it, they had put in new doors, making them all glass.

  He wondered why they didn’t break, with all the use they obviously got.

  He had probably been wrong about the policemen. They hadn’t arrested him. Why should they? They had just happened to come down the stairs when he did.

  He reached the glass doors. The door was automatic, and he watched it close. He put his hand out to push it open again. Before he touched it, the door opened away from him with a whoosh. How did they do that?

  He stepped outside. Way down Bahnhofstrasse, he could see the Cafe Weitz. It was still in business. How interesting.

  Somebody snapped their fingers behind him. He started, turned his head, and saw one of the policemen, with a subtle but unmistakable gesture, pointing him out to someone else, someone ahead of him.

  What do they want to arrest me for?

  How much can I be punished for not going to the center in Cologne?

  Then he thought: It’s probably nothing more than a debriefing. The military wants to debrief me on what I saw in Russia. I saw the inside of an office in a logging camp in a swamp and nothing more. I could tell them, “I saw nothing of military significance at all.” But they wouldn’t believe him. They would insist on a full interrogation, according to regulation.

  He bristled then. They should have sent an officer to do this. I am entitled to that courtesy. They should have sent an officer in uniform, not policemen.

  There was an enormous car at the curb. He read what was spelled out in chrome on the trunk lid. Ford Super Deluxe. It didn’t look like the Ford automobiles he remembered.

  A tall man who looked like a policeman was leaning on the car, and now he stood up straight and took off his hat and stepped in front of him.

  “Herr Graf?” the man asked in a Berliner’s accent. It had been a long time since he had been addressed as Herr Graf. He was afraid of the policeman.

  “Herr Oberst Graf von Greiffenberg?” the policeman asked again.

  “Yes,” the Graf said. “I am the Graf, and formerly Oberst.”

  “Herr Oberst Graf, will you come with us, please?”

  Resistance was obviously futile. There were three of them, and he was tired and weak. He got in the back of the Ford. One of the policeman got in beside him and the other one in the front.

  With squeal of tires, the car made a U-turn and drove past the soccer field. Policemen always drove too fast, he thought.

  “See if you can raise them from here, Ken,” the driver of the car, the man in charge, said. He spoke in English. It had been a long time since he had heard English spoken.

  The other man in the front seat picked up what looked like a telephone.

  “Umpire, Umpire,” he said. “This is Home Base. Do you read, over?”

  “Home Base, this is Umpire. Read you five by five, go ahead.”

  “I’ll be damned,” the man driving said.

  “Umpire, Home Base,” the man with the telephone said. “We have the eagle in the bag. I say again, we have the eagle in the bag. Heading for the autobahn.”

  “You’re Americans,” he said.

  “Yes, sir, Colonel,” the man driving said. “We’re American. We’ve been looking all over for you.”

  The radio went off again a few minutes later.

  “Home Base, Umpire, do you read?”

  “Go ahead, Umpire.”

  “You’ll be met at the autobahn. Black Buick Roadmaster. Confirm.”

  “Understand black Buick at the autobahn.”

  “Roger, Roger. What’s the eagle’s condition?”

  “Feathers are a little ruffled, that’s about it.”

  “Umpire clear with Home Base.”

  There was an even more enormous automobile waiting for them at the autobahn. A little Jew got out of it and walked over to the Ford and opened the door. He put his hand out.

  “My name is Felter, sir,” the little Jew said. “I’m here to meet you at the request of an old comrade-in-arms. We’ve been looking all over for you, sir.”

  “Who would that be?” he said, stiffly. “What old comrade-in-arms?”

  “Colonel Robert Bellmon, sir,” the little man said.

  The Graf straightened. So Bellmon had made it, had he?

  “This is very kind of Colonel Bellmon,” the Graf said. “But if it is permitted, I would prefer to be in Marburg.”

  “If you will, sir,” the little Jew said, “please come with me. I have a car, here, sir,” Captain Sanford T. Felter said.

  The Graf was not used to arguing with authority.

  “Very well,” he said.

  The Jew’s Buick Roadmaster was the biggest automobile the Colonel Count von Greiffenberg had ever seen. The softness of the seats was incredible. They were like a very comfortable couch.

  “May I be permitted to inquire where I am being taken?”

  “Kronberg Castle, sir. Colonel Bellmon, and some others, are waiting for you there.”

  “Some others?”

  The little Jew didn’t answer that question.

  “It’ll take us just about an hour, sir,” he said.

  Colonel Graf Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg dozed off.

  The last time Colonel Graf Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg had been to Kronberg Castle was at a reception given by Prince Philip of Hesse. Now, he was not very surprised to see, it had been taken over by the Americans. To judge by the officers he saw, they were using it as some sort of rest hotel for their senior officers.

  The little Jew opened the door for him and led him into the hotel.

  “If you’ll come with me, please, sir,” he said.

  The inside of the castle was just as luxuriously furnished as it ever had been.

  “Colonel, if you’ll just sit here a moment, I’ll go get Colonel Bellmon,” the little Jew said, ushering him into an armchair.

  “Get this gentleman whatever he wants,” the little Jew said to a waiter.

  “What can I get you, sir?” the waiter asked.

>   “Nothing, thank you,” he said. “I think I’ll walk around. If I may.”

  “Of course, sir.”

  He walked into what used to be the library. It was still the library, and through its French doors he could see the rolling lawn. He went to look out.

  He saw Bellmon. Bellmon and a tall, good-looking young man were driving golf balls. The colonel was perversely pleased that the little Jew had not been able to find Bellmon. He considered walking through the French doors and just going up to him. And then he decided he had better wait. He was, in effect, Bellmon’s guest.

  There was a blond child, a boy, a beautiful little thing, being attended by a middle-aged woman in an army nurse’s uniform, and a blond young woman, obviously the child’s mother. The young woman looked too young to be a general’s wife, but she had a coat, mink, he thought, and clothes and jewelry that made it plain she was not a junior officer’s wife.

  She belonged, the colonel decided, to the tall blond man driving golf balls with Colonel Bellmon. There was something about him that smelled of money and position.

  Then the little Jew appeared and walked quickly over to Colonel Bellmon.

  Bellmon dropped his golf club and started into the building. The young man went to the young woman. They started for the building. It must be Bellmon’s son and daughter. That’s who it had to be.

  Colonel Count Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg turned and faced the door through which Bellmon would appear. He would, he told himself, not lose control of his emotions. He would be what he was, an officer and a gentleman.

  Bellmon entered the room and saw him and, the colonel knew, recognized him. But he did not cross the room to him. Do I look that bad?

  The young woman in the mink coat, clutching the child in her arms, came into the room. She gave the child to the handsome young man. And then she crossed the room, and looked into his eyes.