'The car...' said pale General Ingrid-Maria Stafstrom of Sweden.
'Well, I guess this is cosier anyway.' Frank's eyes hardened.
'But you are so capable of 'running the show'. It is a compliment.' General von Chemnitz clicked his heels. 'Ah, here is...'
They stood up as General Cumberland came in. He wore light battle-dress, his tunic open all the way down and his shirt unbuttoned to show his chest and medallion. Dark combat goggles were pushed up over his cap and his light blue eyes were steady in his weather-beaten face. He looked younger than fifty and he did not seem at all anxious about his immense responsibilities. As he shook hands with the other commanders he shuddered every time his flesh touched theirs.
'Now, gentlemen.' He sat down at the head of the table. 'I hope Frank's filled you in on the basics, uh?'
'I think they're in the picture,' said Frank.
'Great. But I'd like to briefly reiterate the ideology behind all this again for you. See, we've been sent over here because we heard you needed some help with a few of your problems. And we didn't just say we'd help — we put our money where our mouths were.
'And we sent you the guys to help you out. Well, I guess you needed more guys, and you got 'em. You got 'em without even having to ask. And you're welcome. We know the trouble you have and that's what we're here to put a stop to. We know what the Israelis are up to and we think we can maybe give 'em something to think about — so they'll damn well stop what they're up to before they do something really foolish.
'We know that your armies, your intelligence outfits and your civilian communities are riddled through and through with fifth columnists — with traitors — and we're doing something about that, too. When action's called for — we're the guys to call.'
He put his teeth together and smiled. 'Let me just read you something I got from back home the other day.' From his tunic pocket he took a clipping which he carefully unfolded and spread before him on the table. Then he began to read in a quiet but declamatory tone: 'Let's start looking at the situation in which we and the rest of the free-world forces involved find ourselves. It is not complex, not obscure, not hard for anyone to understand.
'We are losing the war.
'So many of the people on our side are being killed that the rest of them are thinking about quitting.
That definition of losing, incidentally, is not only my own. It was taught to me by Admiral Bull Halsey before I covered the battle for Iwo Jima, the first time I saw mortal combat. The actions in the Rhine Valley now are no less obscene or exalting or decisive than were those in the grey sands cradling Mount Suribachi twenty-five years ago.
'Even the hideous casualty totals are in the same magnitude, though they have taken days instead of years to inflict; the fighting in Europe between the forces of our side and those who would bury us has cost more than 100,000 lives. Of the dead, only several hundred have been Americans.
'Of those, seven were men beside whom I had walked or parachute jumped or river forded or shared a stint of guard duty on a sandbagged emplacement at some place whose name we could not pronounce till we got there.
'Almost all U. S. casualties are from the small group of Americans serving in active combat. Most U. S. uniformed personnel do not actively risk their lives. Out of every five or six sent overseas, only one is exposed to actual daily fighting while the others serve in supporting roles. So those three millions of our men now in Europe add only several thousand to the active European armed forces which, including militia, now total more than twelve million.
Those few exposed Americans, though, have accomplished something by their sheer character that no other Americans have been able to do in more than a decade. They have forced a major enemy to change tactics as a response to what they are doing.
This is in utter contrast to what happened to free-world forces in Hungary and Algeria and Cuba and Formosa and Laos, where our side did all the second-guessing and did not once win.
The fighting in Europe marks the first time that our side in the eyes of the enemy has been applying a system of force so effectively that the other side considers we must be halted at all costs lest we start winning the war.
'What we have been doing right, of course, is to provide some superb leadership to the tough European fighting man.
'I have watched the workings of the practice during fourteen months in the field with nine different combatant forces. The enemy fear it so greatly that killing Americans now is their priority tactical objective.
The erstwhile ranking target used to be any European community leader; in September, almost a thousand mayors and provincial representatives were assassinated or abducted.
'Somehow, this fact seems not to have become known to most Americans and they impatiently ask what defect of will in the European people prevents formation of a stable democratic government.
The facts as I saw them in the region where most Europeans live, the suburbs and the countryside, were not mysterious at all; there just haven't been enough surviving politicians, thanks to enemy raiding and the attendant atrocities.
'But beginning this fall, enemy tacticians issued orders that were a little different from their previous ones. And shorter, too. Get the Americans.
These orders are not being disobeyed. Out of forty-two American mentors attached to European combat units, who happened to be billeted in one headquarters in the heart of Bavaria's most strategic area, nineteen were killed or wounded in two months. I know: I too was quartered there then, and the count is my own, not that of any public information officer back in Bonn.
'By the grisly economy of war, this change in enemy targeting is the ultimate stamp of effectiveness on what we at home have been taught cynically and incorrectly to call the 'advisor system' of military aid to Europe.
'Obviously, it is more than that. 'Advisors' do not become prime enemy targets.
'I submit with great pride that these Americans are not only advising; they are not just fighting in self-defense. Without any trappings of command — indeed, without even a shadow of command authority — they are leading.
'They are leading foreign troops simply because that's the way the troops want it. Why? Because each of these men, in the European troops' opinion, is the best soldier around and hence the leader most likely to bring them through victorious. And to put it bluntly, bring them back alive.
'In short, though the U. S. seems to have hidden its virtue, the details of the honourable course it has taken in Europe, the Europeans know and salute it when the chips are down.
'Why 'honourable'? Consider' our defense treaty; it pledges to supply Europe whatever she lacks to win over communism. When it developed that in fact military leadership was a prime lack, we began delivering just what we'd promised.
'Well then, why is there still a question about the outcome? Why aren't we winning?
'In my judgement, simply because we haven't sent enough of this leadership.'
The general paused, looked up and spoke softly. Well, gentlemen — that's the kind of support you're getting from the folk back where I come from. I'll skip most of the rest — but I'll read you the last bit: 'All of which puts the determination of tomorrow's history where I have every confidence it best belongs: squarely into the hands of the people of the United States.
'It is for each of us to decide what we want to do and to give the government we have elected freely some clear evidence of our will to win, lose or draw.
'After all, it is not that administrative abstraction we call a government that will bear the final bloody consequence if we choose badly. 'It is us and our sons and daughters.'
General Cumberland looked reverently at the clipping as he folded it carefully and when he glanced up his eyes were chips of blue steel.