“Some captain from up division come and took him and damn near ever other swingin’ dick in the whole fuckin’ area, Sarnt Moray. Said he needed bodies for to man the p’rimeter. That was Sunday afternoon, late, and ain’t none of them fuckers come back, neither, not even to eat or sleep or shower or change clothes or nuthin’. I done been here since then all by my lonesome, checkin’ fellers in and watchin’ them all get dragged off for details and all, and I guess I’d’ve plumb starved to death if old Sarnt Trent hadn’ sent me chow and all over here whenever he thought to.”
“Okay, Emil, you did well, all things considered, you did very well,” stated Jethro, clapping a hand on the haggard man’s shoulder and smiling. “Now you shag ass back to your quarters and shower and get yourself some sack time, at least twenty-four hours of it, before you report back here to me. Now, go!”
When once the exhausted man with his dark-ringed, bloodshot eyes and his three days’ growth of beard had staggered out in the direction of his barrack, the two noncoms began to go through the stack of messages.
“The captain called in Sunday, about the same time we did,” Jethro announced. “He should have been back from New Orleans by now, shouldn’t he?”
“Maybe not.” Milo shook his head. “Not if he was driving over the same kinds of roads we were, and his old Ford isn’t a match for your car, either, Jethro. He might well have had a breakdown,in some backwater without a telephone or a wire.”
At that moment, the telephone jangled. Both grabbed for the receiver, but Stiles reached it first. “B Company, Sergeant Stiles speaking, sir.” Then he smiled faintly and visibly relaxed.
“Hello, James … ahh, Captain Lewis, sir. What’s our status? Odd that you should ask me that, sir. Sergeant Moray and I have just driven in from South Carolina to find that someone from up at division has taken it upon himself to strip this company of every man with the exception of cooks, first-three-graders and the company CQ. As of this moment, there are no officers, two master sergeants, one tech sergeant, one buck sergeant and three cooks in all of B Company.”
He fell silent for only a moment, then exclaimed, “Whaat? My God, James, you can’t be serious. That bad, is it? All right, all right, you can borrow Milo, but only if you help me get back some of my other men from whoever has them just now. War or no war, the last I heard there were inductees due in here on Wednesday, Thursday, latest, and my cadre are needed here, in the company area, one hell of a lot more than squatting in a trench somewhere out on the post perimeter. Besides, does any officer or man really think the Japanese are going to assault us here within the next day or so? Doesn’t it stand to reason they’ll hit California or Washington State first? And the last time I consulted a map, James, California was over two thousand miles from here.”
He paused once more, and Milo could hear Captain James Lewis’ familiar voice, though not his words. Then Stiles spoke again. “Yes, I understand, James. Milo will be over as soon as he can get into uniform and drive there. Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
In the existing paucity of officers, Captain James Lewis ranked high enough to need very little bluster to free the impressed cadremen of his and Milo’s training battalion from the guard and labor details scattered here and there about the periphery of the post. And those men —tired, hungry, sleepless, filthy and shivering with cold —were every one more than happy to clamber aboard the trucks and be borne back to hot meals, showers, clean clothes and their bunks.
By the time Milo had offloaded his company’s men before the mess hall and dispatched the trucks back to the motor pool, then reported back to the orderly room, Captain Muse and two of the other officers were back and affairs were gradually returning to as close to the old peacetime state of normalcy as any of them would again see.
With the dastardly attack on Pearl Harbor and the other military facilities on Oahu, the former flood of trainees became a virtual tsunami, as patriotism, rage and the declaration of war coincided to swell the ranks with not only the hapless draftees, but enlistees by the scores of thousands, the very cream of the citizenry answering the call to the colors of their now-beset land.
Given better pickings from which to choose, the training units began to flesh out, to replace stopgap personnel with really effective cadremen and, consequently, to turn out a far better grade of graduate from the basic training courses. But the great and too-rapid growth also necessitated the quick establishment of more training camps and units. James Lewis was advanced to major and sent to take command of a training battalion somewhere in a new camp in Pennsylvania. Captain Muse was given similar treatment, and all of the other company officers were promoted and shipped out. For all of his refusals, Jethro Stiles soon found himself commanding B Company with the silver bars of a first lieutenant on his shoulders. Milo moved up to first sergeant, with Emil Schrader, now a tech sergeant, as his field first.
Schrader hailed from Kansas and was a son of immigrants from Brandenburg. Though American-born and -bred, he spoke better and more grammatical German than English. Milo often chatted with him in that tongue … and that was where the trouble started.
Jethro entered Milo’s office and carefully closed and latched the door one morning. “Milo,” he began in a low, guarded tone, almost a whisper, “something damned strange is going on concerning you. Have you made any application for OCS or for a transfer out of the unit without telling me about it?”
“Of course not, Jethro,” was Milo’s prompt reply. “Why?”
Lieutenant Stiles shook his head slowly. “Why? I don’t know why, anything, Milo. But I just received an order to hold you ready here to be picked up and transported to an interview with an officer that I happen to know is connected with division CID … probably G-2, too, if not Army Counterintelligence. I can’t imagine why a man like that would want to interview a noncom of a training company. Can you?”
Milo disliked Major Jay Jarvis from first laying eyes upon him. The man was short, skinny and pasty-white, save for his petulant, liver-colored lips, a multitude of facial pimples and muddy-brown eyes. He was of early middle years, balding and had chewed his nails to the quick, and his class-A uniform hung on his bony figure like a sack. His hands never stayed still for an instant, always playing with one of the profusion of stiletto-sharp pencils, a cold pipe which had strewn ashes from end to end of the GI desk, a stack of manuals and pamphlets, a higher stack of assorted papers and personnel files, the knot of his tie or the soggy handkerchief with which he dabbed at a dripping beak of a nose.
When Milo had been coldly ushered into the office by the armed second lieutenant and buck sergeant who had escorted him here from B Company, the door had been closed—and locked—behind him, leaving him to salute and report to this strange officer.
The major looked up at him, but would not look him in the eyes. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he demanded in an atrocious accent.
“]a, Herr Major. Ich spreche Deutsch,” he replied aloud, adding, to himself, “And one hell of a lot better than you do, you sourpussed bastard.”
“You speak it well, too,” said the officer grudgingly. “As well as a native, I’d say. Moray, you’re being considered for a commission, but we need to know more about you, more than this”—he flicked a personnel file with the nailless fingers of one soft hand—“so-called 201 file of yours gives us. Where did you learn your German, Moray?”
Milo sighed silently. Here it starts again after all this time. “Sir, I don’t know how or when or where I learned any of the languages I speak. I have been an amnesiac since the mid-thirties. My very earliest memory is of waking up in a hospital in Chicago, having been found clubbed down and robbed in an alley.”