Colonel John Saxon was in an exceedingly foul mood when he hustled into the commo tent, not liking at all being bothered for any reason at his daily bowel movement.
Taking the microphone into his hairy paw and appropriating the radio operator’s seat, he growled, “Saxon here. What is so fuckin’ all-fired important, Mr. Whoever-you-are? And I’m warnin’ you, it better be fuckin’ good! Like capturin’ old Schickelgroober, that kinda good.”
A cool, precise, obviously unflustered voice replied, “Colonel Saxori, your regimental headquarters says that you have or at least had an officer named Milo Moray, a captain and company commander, in your battalion. Is this true?”
“Yeah, it’s so,” attested Saxon, the still-recent hurt of loss taking a good bit of the fire of anger out of him. “The fuckin’ Krauts Wounded him and then bay’neted him and a whole bunch of other wounded fellas to death. Two, three boys come to get away and make it back and tell us ‘bout it. Why? Have you found his body?”
“In a manner of speaking, colonel, in a manner of speaking. This is S-2, Second Armored Division. I’m Major George Smith. A man was captured by one of our advance units a few kilometers southwest of here yesterday. He was wandering around alone in bloodstained clothing, and that in itself made him suspicious, since there were no wounds to be found on him. After the regimental S-2 questioned him, found that his German was as fluent as his English and that, although he claimed to be a captain, there were no indications of rank on his uniform or in his effects and his identity tags carry an enlisted man’s service number, he was sent back here under guard.
“Whoever he is, colonel, he is a linguist. He speaks not only English and German, but French, Dutch, Flemish, Yiddish, Scottish, Spanish and Romanian, and those are only the ones we’ve been able to check out. He has the order of battle of your battalion and regiment down pat and about as much of that of your division and First Army as one could expect the captain of a line company to know. I like the man and I’d like to believe his story … and it’s a hair-raising one, too. But I’ve got to have more proof of his identity than he can give me, or has given me up to now, anyway. With all these phony GIs wandering around the countryside and speaking German when they think they aren’t overheard, we have no choice but to be damned sure just who or what we’ve got.”
“I unnerstand, major,” said Saxon. “You cain’t be-too fuckin’ careful, out in hostile country. I tell you what— you got this man there with you?”
“In the next room, colonel,” replied Smith.
“Then ask him or have somebody else ask him these-here questions I’m gonna tell you and then tell me what he answers.”
When the major resumed transmission, he said, “Colonel, the man states that his high-ranking buddy is Brigadier General Jethro Stiles, that the clapped-up cardshark of your battalion was a Belgian named Jaquot, that the name and rank of the man who tried to kill him back in the States was Sergeant Luigi Moffa, and that—”
“Never mind, major, never mind,” crowed Saxon, grinning from ear to ear. “You got the genyewine article there, not no Kraut. Send Milo home.”
When he finally got through to Brigadier General Stiles, Saxon said, “I hope you sittin’ down, gen’rul. Okay? Milo ain’t dead. Naw, he turned up and was picked up by some Secon’ Armored fellas, two, three days back, and their fuckin’ S-2s has had him sincet then, tryin’ to figger if he was who he said or a fuckin’ Kraut in GI clothes. I give the dumbass fuckers some questions could’n anybody but Milo answer right, and when I got the right answers, I told the bastards to send him back to battalion. I thought you’d wanta know, gen’rul.”
During his long, solitary sojourn through the winter wastes of the Ardennes, dodging German panzers and infantry units and finding himself forced by these and by natural obstacles to bear farther and farther east of north, Milo had had much time to think. He now was pretty certain that there was something extremely odd, to say the very least, about the way he was put together. He had been knifed in Qhicago by the late Jaan Brettmann, shot by Moffa back at Jackson, shot again by that German sniper and now bayoneted two or three times over by that SS man, yet he still was here to think about it all, and any one of the wounds he had suffered could have, should have, killed him outright. Not only was he still alive, he didn’t even have any scars from these terrible wounds.
All around him since D-Day, men—good men, strong men, healthy and well-trained and intelligent men—had been dying, many of them of injuries far less outwardly serious than those he had sustained and survived. So, why? He was human in every other way saving that he never sickened and that he could come unscathed out of patently deadly situations and incidents. He breathed, ate, digested, defecated and urinated. He functioned perfectly well sexually (at least no woman had voiced any complaints about his performances). He slept when he could. He was capable of pity, disgust, hate, respect, anger, possibly love too (but he had never found himself “in love,” not in the classic sense, so how could he be sure?), the whole gamut of human emotions. So what made him so different?
He did not formulate any answer before he stumbled across a tank crew engaged in replacing a damaged track link on their Sherman, screaming profane and obscene invective at the tank and each other and offering prime targets, had he been a German.
First Sergeant Bernie Cohen had been in a state approaching traumatic shock since battalion had called down to announce that their long-lost company commander, Captain Milo Moray, had somehow gotten out of the Ardennes alive and well and would be along whenever Second Armored could get him in. He still could not believe it even when Milo alit from a jeep and came into the Quonset hut orderly room of the reforming company.
Not until Milo had racked his Thompson, dumped his pistol belt on the table he called a desk, laid his helmet atop the belt .and started to remove his jacket could Cohen manage to speak.
His thin lips trembling, the noncom said, “But … but Milo, I seen it! A Kraut jammed a K98 bayonet in your chest at least twice. I know I seen it. I was in the trees not fifteen yards away. That’s why I told everybody you was dead.”
Milo just smiled and gripped the stunned man’s shoulder, saying, “I know, Bernie, I know you saw some poor bastard bayoneted, more than one, too, for they did that to fourteen men there. But they did miss me. I’d been cold-cocked during the fight, and I guess they thought I was already done for. When I did come to, the Krauts were long gone and the bodies of our guys were already stiff. I’m sure you did think I was dead, so forget it.”
XI
The German counteroffensive of December 1944 was stopped, of course, crushed under the tank treads of General George Patton’s Third Army, bombed and strafed incessantly by Allied air power and driven back with over 200,000 casualties. The so-called Battle of the Bulge quickly became history.
While Charlie Company was dug in on the eastern bank of the Rhine River, at Remagen, helping to hold that precious span from recapture by the Wehrmacht, Milo received orders to report back to battalion headquarters. He found there a jeep and driver waiting to transport him farther back, to division headquarters. Ushered into a warm, dry building and given a chair, he promptly fell asleep.
When at last he sat across the polished desk from Jethro, savoring his glass (real glass, cut and faceted) of cognac, he became unpleasantly aware of the fetid odor —compounded of wet, dirty woolens, gun oil, foul breath and flesh long unwashed—of himself.