Pat nodded briskly. “You damn tootin’ I does, Milo. It’s like I’s said for a helluva long time—you some kind of a man, you is. You gonna make a damn good soldier, too, I can tell you that right now. You got the kinda style it ain’t much seen of no more.”
The leavetaking was an emotional one, to say the least, what with all of the women crying, save only old Rosaleen, who had done with her crying for the occasion and who now wore Milo’s gift on a thumb, her other fingers being too small to give it secure lodgement.
As the old cook reached up to hug Milo’s neck, she stated, “It’s gettin’ this lovely, lovely present of yours sized to my finger, I’ll be doin’, Milo Moray, and then it’s I’ll be wearin’ it until the day I die and buried with me it’ll be. God and His Blessed Mither guard and keep you, now, and it’s my prayers you’ll be havin’ of me that you fare well.”
In the Mercedes-Benz, Milo took the sealed envelope from the pocket of his greatcoat and passed it to Dr. Guiscarde, saying, “The name of the young man this is intended for is on the envelope. Sam Osterreich can put you in touch with him. And make him take it, hear? He’s way too bright a boy to waste his life peddling door-to-door.”
“The old sarge, now, he was some kinda sojer, some kinda sojer, I tell you, mister!” stated Master Sergeant Norrnan Oates between and through mouthfuls of Rosaleen O’Farrell’s hearty homebaked bread and butter and roast beef or country ham, sharp cheddar cheese and home-canned mustard pickles. “Won’t no reason for him to get gassed like he did, you know. ‘Cept of he put his own gas mask on that young lootenant who was layin’ there wounded with his own mask shot fulla holes, is all. An’ then the one what he took off a corpse won’t workin’ right, see.
“Naw, Sarge O’Shea, he was a real, old-time sojer, the kind like you don’t hardly see no more in thishere newfangled Army. You want some more coffee?”
Milo accepted, holding out his white china mug for a refill, for it was the best coffee he could recall ever having tasted, its flavor being the equal of its aroma.
Taking another hard-boiled egg in his thick fingers, the stout, balding, jowly soldier cracked it with the flick of a thumbnail, then expertly peeled off the shell, showered it with salt and pepper and bit off the top half before continuing.
“Yeah, I tell you, mister, it was plumb good to hear old Sergeant Pat’s voice again, this mornin’. Way he tells it, you kinda on the run, like, right?” He chuckled, then added, along with the rest of the egg, “Didn’ need to tell me that, even, none of it, ‘cause I’d’ve knowed. If it won’t important like for you to make tracks, he’d’ve got ole Castle in Chicago to ’list you up ’stead of me. So you tell me, what’s the law want you for? Better level with me, Moray, ‘cause I got me ways of findin’ out and I don’t cotton to being lied to.”
When Milo had related an encapsulated version of the story, the sergeant pushed back from his desk, threw back his head and laughed and laughed and laughed, his huge beer belly jiggling and bouncing to his mirth. His already florid face became an alarming dark red, his eyes streamed tears, and he finally had to hold his sides and breathe in wheezes. At last, he was able to exert enough self-control to straighten up, pull himself back to the desk and wipe at his eyes and face with a wadded handkerchief, following which, he used the same cloth to loudly and thoroughly blow his nose, before jamming it back into a pocket.
Still grinning, he said, “Christ on a crutch, Moray, it’s high time they took shit like that out’n the friggin’ law-books. Goddam, man, fuckin’s the most natcherl thing in the world. I don’t go ’long with rape, see, but if the woman’s willin’, hell, the goddam cops shouldn’t have no place in it a-tall. As for the damn preachers and priests and all, bugger the sour-faced lot of ’em, folks has got the right to some pleasure, no matter what they say or claim the Bible says. You ever read the Bible, Moray—I mean, really read it? Well, you should—it’s chock-full of more begats than you ever saw in your life, and the onliest way to begat a kid is to fuck a woman.
“As for your trouble, don’t you worry none about it no more, hear me? That shit back in Chicago, that is the damnedest bum rap I ever heard tell of.”
V
Among the first things Milo had to do upon his enlistment in the Army of the United States of America in November 1938 was to quickly learn to understand and to speak—though not, ever, to write—a whole new dialect of English. No one of the many dictionaries, thesauruses and etymological works he had read through during his months of work in the confines of the public library had given him more than a hint of the slang, the depthless crudities, the euphemisms, the scatological references, the slurs, the obscenities and blasphemies that all went a long way toward making up the everyday language of the common soldier.
The standardized, non-obscene Army terms and abbreviations were very easy to assimilate, especially for those men who had no difficulty in reading basic English, not that every one of the recruits could do so. A few were just too stupid, more were simply ill-educated. With most of the rest, the problem was that English was not their native language, and it was in helping these latter that Milo soon proved his worth to the commissioned and noncommissioned cadre of his training company.
Not that his skill at languages spared him any of the training, details, fatigue duties, drilling, classes, weary route marches and endless round of bullying and general harassment suffered by the rest of his company and battalion. Early on, he was given an armband to wear, told that he was henceforth an “acting squadleader” and given responsibility for six European immigrants, a pair of Mexicans, a Turk, and a Lebanese who spoke Arabic, Turkish and French fluently but had only a few words and so very few phrases of English that Milo privately wondered how he had gotten accepted for the Army at all.
His abilities to get through to the members of his squad earned him a measure of grudging respect from his superiors, but what really impressed them was his unerring marksmanship and other proven combat qualifications.
When once he had mastered the mechanical functions of the U.S. Rifle, Caliber .30, Model 1903, and the Pistol, Caliber .45, Model-1911A1, he consistently racked up range scores in the high-expert classification, and no one afterward believed his quite truthful answers to the questions that he could not recall ever having handled or fired either pistols or rifles before. But their understandable disbelief was not confined to his statements only, for in the Army of that time, there was full many a man with a past to hide.
He also was given an expert’s badge in the art of the bayonet. The grizzled but still-vital and powerful old sergeant who conducted the bayonet classes averred that Private Moray was one of the best that he ever had seen— fast, sure and strong in the attack, cunning and wary in the defense and so well coordinated as to be able to take instant advantage of an error made by an opponent. He added that he was convinced that the man was no stranger to the use of the bayoneted rifle, but he added that his personal style was unorthodox—not American, not French, not British, not classic Prussian, either. If Milo had told the training sergeant the unvarnished truth, that he too did not know just where and how he had learned bayonet work, that it only came to him as instinctively as breathing, the man would have been no more believing than had the range personnel confronted with the deadly marksmanship of this supposedly green recruit.
Sergeant Jethro “Judo” Stiles was. the field first sergeant of Milo’s training company, and he also doubled as the battalion instructor in hand-to-hand combat. Unlike most of the cadremen, he was neither loud nor arrogant nor a brutal, sadistic bully. When he was not demonstrating the best means of garroting an enemy sentry quickly and in silence, the most efficient ways of dislocating joints and shattering bones or how to take a pistol away from an enemy, breaking his trigger finger and wrist in one process, he was quiet almost to the point of introversion, kindly, gentle, polite, well spoken and well read. He neither chewed tobacco, used snuff nor smoked cigarettes, only a pipe, and then rarely; he drank little beer, but was a connoisseur of fine wines and a real authority on cognacs and armagnacs. He lived well in rented housing off post, owned an automobile and wore beautifully tailored uniforms. It was believed that he was a remittance man, paid by his family to stay in the Army as a way of avoiding a scandal of some sort.