Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  It didn’t seem much of a respite to Harry. There was nowhere for the men to go with their meal. They simply dropped to the ground under the meager shelter of the olive trees, trying to wolf the steaming food down before the rain dampened its heat and flavor.

  After identifying themselves to the sentries, Harry, Ricks, and Kneece were admitted into the large room of the podere, which normally served as kitchen, dining room, and parlor. Now that space had been divided in half by blankets hung on a line strung across the room. Under the light of strings of bare bulbs, a squadron of clerks busied themselves with paperwork and typewriters, a switchboard buzzed, a pair of wireless operators twiddled with their consoles. In its ad hoc way, the room seemed no different from any administrative office back home, even down to the smell of fresh coffee from the pot kept warm on a portable petrol heater. Harry found the domesticity of the scene disorienting.

  Ricks took it all in with hard eyes. Harry could see a corner of the lieutenant’s mouth twitch in barely repressed disgust.

  They had been standing there only a second or so before an angular twenty-something captain emerged from behind the blankets. He had fragile, doll-like features, and had only half-successfully managed to subdue a head of curls with a thick coat of pomade. “Major Voss and company? Fm Captain Joyce, battalion exec. Major Porters been waiting for you fellows.” To one of the clerks: “I need that corporal from Love Company. You’ll find him over at the mess tent.” Back to Harry and company: “Gentlemen, won’t you please step this way?” Captain Joyce lifted the blanket to allow them to pass.

  The battalion CO rose from behind the farmhouse dining table he was using as his desk, coming forward to shake Harry’s soggy hand. Major Conrad Porter was a stubby, round fellow, a touch of premature gray at his temples, a face full of dimples when he brandished his too-broad smile. “Major Voss! And this must be Captain Kneece and Lieutenant Ricks.” He gestured to some folding chairs set near the cheery blaze in the broad hearth. “Why don’t you gentlemen get out of those things and dry off. Joyce, grab their rain gear, won’t you? And maybe get them some of that coffee I smell out front?”

  As they sat by the fire, Ricks’s eyes rested on the major’s boots, their polish shining in the firelight. Harry looked at his own footwear: He was caked in mud to the top of his leggings.

  Porter held out a pack of Lucky Strikes. Peter Ricks declined with a slight nod of his head. “We didn’t know when to expect you guys. I was on the verge of turning in myself.”

  “Sorry if we kept you up,” Ricks said.

  “It’s not that. It’s just we were beginning to worry. Ah, here’s Joyce with the coffee. All we’ve got is powdered milk, I’m afraid, but the sugar’s the real thing. Looks like you fellows have had a long, hard pull. Can we get you something hot from the kitchen?”

  Harry and Kneece were about to voice an enthusiastic yes, but Ricks cut in: “No, thanks, Major, we’re fine.”

  “Joyce, where’s that bottle? The captain found a bottle of this incredible brandy the locals drink. Maybe you’d like some with your coffee? Made from fruit, I think, isn’t that right, Joyce?”

  “Grappa,” said Harry.

  “You’ve heard of it?”

  “Some friends back home introduced me to it.”

  “The most incredible stuff! Joyce, why don’t you get these gentlemen that bottle and pour a few —”

  “Thanks again, no, Major,” Ricks said. “We really should —” “The lieutenant’s speaking for himself,” Woody Kneece cut in. “I think he’s a Mormon. But being a lapsed Baptist myself, I wouldn’t mind a snort.”

  “How long will you be with us?” Joyce asked, pouring a small splash into a canteen cup for Kneece. He offered the bottle to Harry, but Harry shook a smiling no. “Maybe you can spend the night drying out before you go on up to the line? We’ve got a spare bunk upstairs.”

  “We really should get straight on up to this guy,” Ricks replied, then turned to Harry. “Don’t you think, Major?” He turned back to Porter. “Our information is that Lieutenant Coster was assigned to your unit as some kind of forward observer, to a company commanded by a Captain DeFrance —”

  “Well, he was assigned to Captain DeFrance,” Joyce said. Ricks scowled. “Don’t tell me something happened to him.”

  “Not to Coster,” Porter replied. “To DeFrance. Wounded several days ago, on his way home as we speak. A shame. Good man. One of the platoon leaders has the company now. What was the name, Joyce? Beam?”

  “Lieutenant Brahm, sir.”

  Porter shook his head and smiled in a self-mocking manner. “This thing with DeFrance happened so fast I still haven’t had a chance to orientate myself with the new company CO. He’s a good man, though. Hell, they’re all good men, my company commanders. They wouldn’t be in my battalion if they weren’t! Now, the message I got from you —” Porter started to search through the papers on his desk.

  A piece of paper materialized in Joyce’s hand where he stood by his smaller, folding table across the room. “Here, sir.”

  “Ah, yes! This message I received from you requests we put you in contact with Lieutenant Coster. It doesn’t give — Well, gentlemen, I don’t mean to pry, but the man is in my command and there’s nothing here about the whys and wherefores.” Porter smiled nervously. “I mean I know you have your protocols and the like —”

  “It really doesn’t concern you or your command, Major,” Harry said comfortingly. “It has to do with a matter prior to his assignment here, when he was still flying cargo across the Atlantic.”

  Porter seemed relieved. “Then it’s all the lieutenant’s worry, eh, Joyce?”

  “I do have a question for you, though,” Harry said and saw Porter’s nervousness return. “I’m curious about what Coster’s orders were when he arrived. Specifically.”

  “I’ll have Joyce pull those for you. Nothing to them, really, just that we were to use him as a forward air controller. They’re still developing this practice of close-in air support and they said, as I recall, that Coster was a kind of, oh, I don’t remember the word —”

  “Experiment?” Ricks offered.

  “They said they’d be monitoring his performance, work up some kind of evaluation.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Harry asked.

  By then Joyce was back from the clerical side of the blanket wall and presented Harry with a typed order that said, in military verbiage, what Porter’d just told them. As for the question of who “they” were, there was no answer: “These orders come from G-3 in London. There’s no mention of who’s supposed to supervise this project.”

  “And we haven’t heard from anybody about this since Coster arrived,” Joyce said.

  “Did Coster have anything to say when he got here?”

  “Beyond making it very clear he didn’t want to be here,” Joyce replied, “not much.”

  “How’s he worked out?” Kneece asked. “As an air controller?”

  “Frankly, we thought that’s why you were here.” Porter seemed reluctant to go further, looked pleadingly to Joyce.

  “Lieutenant Coster has been a little… zealous in calling for air strikes,” the battalion exec explained gingerly. “I’m afraid some civilians have been hurt unnecessarily.”

  “Relax, sirs,” Kneece soothed. “We’re not here about that.”

  Ricks set his coffee down unfinished. “We should get moving,” he told Harry.

  “Not yet!” Porter said. “You need your — Ah, here he is!” He gestured at the dripping figure shuffling through the blankets. “Gentlemen, this is —”

  “Dominick!” Harry was out of his chair like a shot, setting his coffee down so hastily it spilled.

  “Signor Roosk! I guess I’m supposed to salute and call you ‘Major.’”

  “I take it,” Captain Joyce observed, “that you and Corporal Sisto are acquainted?”

  “A little bit,” Harry said, and he and the corporal chuckled.

  Dominick Sisto had
the lithe build of a boy; there was barely enough of him to wield his bulky Browning Automatic Rifle. The whiskers on his unshaven chin had the patchy, downy quality of an adolescent’s. But set in his youngster’s face were old eyes, red-rimmed and wary.

  With a happy suspicion, Harry turned to Kneece. “Is this your doing?”

  Kneece drained his grappa as if it were an earned reward. “I remembered the name from that very concerned woman I met at your home. When I knew we were coming here, I looked him up. Turns out this was his unit, I got to thinking he might be a useful… liaison.”

  “And guide,” Porter said. “The corporal is from Love Company, and that’s where you’ll be going.” He beckoned them to the map. “Behind this house is Hill 465. Love Company’s CP is just the other side of the hill. My rifle companies are dug in along here, about two hundred fifty meters further on. The MLR runs along these hills looking down on them. Now, this space between Love’s CP and their front line, you’ll have to be careful there. That’s all open space and is heavily mined. Corporal Sisto, has that area been cleared yet?”

  “No, sir. Krauts like to shoot the engineers in the day, sir. Engineers don’t like to clear mines in the dark, sir.”

  “Well, gentlemen, I wouldn’t worry. I’m sure Corporal Sisto and Lieutenant —”

  “Brahm,” Joyce supplied.

  “Yes, Lieutenant Brahm and the corporal’ll get you to your man all in one piece.”

  “Piece o’ cake,” Sisto promised. But with a smile that told Harry, Then again, maybe not.

  *

  It seemed as if the whole of the olive grove lit up in a series of blinding flashes, each accompanied by a detonation that Harry felt in his chest and that sent a tremble through the earth under his feet. The volley subsided, the noise rolling off across the grove like fading thunder. Sisto headed them out of the clearing and along a path circuiting the base of the hill.

  “Jesus…” Harry gasped.

  “What the hell was that?” Kneece demanded.

  “Don’t worry,” Ricks said. “Outgoing.”

  Sisto grinned back at Ricks. “You been around, Lieutenant?”

  “We’re practically neighbors, Corp. Third Battalion.”

  “No kidding! You oughta come over and visit. Word is we got much better mud than you guys. Ours has a nice, slow ooze. I hear you guys got that runny shit.”

  Runny shit. Harry remembered Dominick Sisto the altar boy, afraid to even say “damn” lest his mother hear him, and spank him all the way from home to the confessionals at St. Lucy’s Church.

  A second artillery volley illuminated the olive grove.

  “Heavies,” Ricks said.

  “They got a battery of 135 ‘Long Toms’ dug in half a mile northeast,” Sisto told them. “They like to shake the krauts up at night. ’Course, then the krauts want to do it back. Hey, Cap’n Kneece, I really wanna thank you for hookin’ me in here. This means somethin’ when you’re over here, to see somebody from back home. Signor Roosk and me, we go back. I think maybe I was even his youngest client, isn’t that so, signor?”

  Harry chuckled at the memory. “I think so.”

  “I was what? Ten?” Sisto turned to Kneece. “It’s summer, and in that building you can really bake when it gets hot.”

  “Like an oven,” Harry amplified.

  “So, my bedroom, the window, it looks out on the airshaft on top of ol’ Mr. Mayer’s store. I say to myself, lemme get a little air, I go walkin’ around out there, it’s dark, I trip, I fall through ol’ Mayer’s skylight. Somebody hears the noise, they call the cops, next thing you know the whole neighborhood’s outside that store wantin’ to see who the son of a bitch is broke into Mayer’s store. Out I come. I’m all scratched up from the fall, I look a mess. Well, my ol’ lady, she comes runnin’ right down when she heard all the noise. You know how all those little ladies are, right, Signor Roosk? Gotta have their nose in everything? She comes runnin’ down, didn’t even know I was missin’ she’s movin’ so fast to get the gossip. She spots me come out the door and she has a conniption. She doesn’t know whether to faint ’cause I’m all cut up or whack the hell out of me for breakin’ into ol’ Mayer’s store. I’m tryin’ to tell her I didn’t break in, I fell in, but now she’s finally decided to start whackin’ me —”

  Tor breaking into the store?” Kneece asked.

  “No, for practically givin’ her a heart attack. Well, she’s not listenin’ to me, the cops want to haul me off to the station — it was that ball-buster O’Rourke, Signor Roosk, ’member? That fat mick bastard was always bustin’ balls in the neighborhood. They drag ol’ Mayer out of bed, O’Rourke’s beatin’ his gums at him to file a complaint, and then along comes Signor Roosk. He talks all nice ’n’ quiet, gets everybody calmed down. He tells my mom, ‘Look, signora, you know Nicky’s a good boy If he says it was an accident, you know it’s an accident.’ He tells ol’ Mayer, ‘Mr. Mayer,’ he says, ‘you know Nicky, you know the Sistos, you know me. The kid had an accident. You let him work off the damage and call it quits.’ 01’ Mayer says fine, that fat O’Rourke’s pissed ’cause nobody wants to file a complaint, and I got my — whatchacallit? An acquittal?”

  “More like a plea bargain.”

  “So, what’re you doin’ here, signor? I ’member Mom writin’ me months ago you were back home. Lucky bastard, I’m thinkin’. No offense. That’s just like this fuckin’ Army. You get your ass home safe and they drag you back.”

  “It wasn’t the Army, Nicky. Business.”

  “Boy, I thought I had a shitty job. How’s Mom? You seen her, right?”

  “Just before I came over. She’s worried, Nicky. She hasn’t heard from you in a while.”

  Dominick Sisto shrugged inside his rain slicker, like the little altar boy shamed by a lapse in good conduct.

  “You should write to her,” Harry said.

  “I will.”

  “I’d leave out some of the grittier details.”

  “Sure. I know Mom, she’s probably havin’ kittens as it is. Don’t worry, I’ll leave this stuff out. Besides, who’d believe it?”

  They heard distant explosions, a muffled fusillade of them.

  “Somebody’s catchin’ some serious hell,” Sisto said.

  *

  Between the dark and the rain, Harry couldn’t make out much; yards of open field to one side, the base of the hill to the other. Twenty minutes later, Sisto stopped them at the edge of the olive grove.

  “OK,” he said, “it gets real nervous now.” He nodded at the field behind him.

  “Didn’t the major say the CP was in a farmhouse out here?” Kneece peered into the rain. “I don’t see it. Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

  “It’s there, Cap’n,” Sisto said. “Just not much to look at. See, the major, he’s got his house ’cause he’s got this whole fuckin’ mountain between him and the krauts. We go out there, there’s nothin’ between us and the krauts but…” He held out his cupped hand to catch the rain. “So, from here on out…” He put a finger to his lips. “I’ll take point, Lieutenant, you got the back door if that’s OK with you. You sirs” — Harry and Kneece — “you follow in the middle, keep some distance between you.”

  One by one, walking five yards apart, they followed Sisto out of the trees and across the field. Harry felt… he couldn’t find the word. Afraid, certainly, but something else.

  Fragile. That was the word. Harry walked across the sodden field as if he were made of glass, the enemy — the whole world — invisible beyond the small circle of grass and mud he could see.

  Sisto had been right about the house: There wasn’t much to see, even close up. A part of an outer wall here, the planking of the floor, the rest of the house blown away into rubble.

  “Peach,” Sisto called out in a loud whisper.

  “Pit,” came the countersign, and the security squad huddled behind the pitiful segment of wall waved them in. A shell crater some ten feet across occupied the back of the
house, had eaten away at the flooring and into the cellar. A ladder ran down the muddy side of the crater as a walkway Sisto led them down the ladder and past a shelter half, draped across the opening into the cellar.

  The cellar was a bare cave roughly hewn out of the ground under the house. Water seeped through the flooring above; the packed-down earthen floor was slick, the air dank and chill. Shadows ebbed round the pools of light from two hissing Coleman lanterns. A wireless operator dozed by the company’s two pack radios, one tuned to the battalion frequency, the other to the company’s platoons. A folding table held the company clerk’s typewriter, and some huddled shapes were snuggled deep in their sleeping bags nearby. Harry heard snores.

  The nearer lantern sat on a table draped with maps covered in grease pencil markings. Nearby, propped against the dirt wall atop his sleeping bag, was a soldier wearing a second lieutenant’s gold bars on his collar. He was unshaven, his thick brown hair filthy and matted. Harry couldn’t tell the man’s age. The lieutenant’s eyes were closed. “Tall my relief?” The lieutenant barely moved his lips when he spoke.

  “Excuse me?” Harry’d thought the man was asleep.

  The lieutenants eyes opened slowly, small, sad, and tired. “Any a’ y’all my relief?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  A ghost of a smile. “You’re sorry?” He pulled himself to his feet, reached for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on the map table. “Coffee? It’s not very warm.” He nodded at some open Marmite cans nearby “Somethin’ t’eat? There’s some left. Don’t know what kinda shape it’s in. Must be cold now.” The lieutenant sipped the cold coffee, looked down at the Marmite cans, and sighed. “They been sendin’ us an awful lotta hot food lately.”

  “You sound like you’re complaining,” Kneece said.

  “You usually get a lot of good food before a push,” Ricks explained.

  “Fatten up the sheep,” Sisto added.

  The lieutenant studied them again, blinking as if he was seeing them for the first time. “Any a’ y’all my relief?”