“Then, there are the hordes of political prisoners freed from the various camps and prisons, the Jews and gypsies who were lucky enough to survive the death camps, the POWs of various nationalities from out of the scattered Stalagen—and it seems like five out of every six of those is a Russian whose native language is not Russian, who does not even speak Russian very well and who hates and despises Russians as much as or more than he hates and despises Germans.
“Then we’ve got the Germans—civilian Nazis, all the varieties of SS and Gestapo, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Hitler Jugend, former police of various kinds, a real hodgepodge. And, to really complicate matters, there’s too a sprinkling of the Axis countries— Eyeties, Vichy French, Hungarians, Rumanians, Albanians, Poles, Vlasoffs Cossacks, Danes, Swedes, some few of Quisling’s Norwegians, Spanish Falangists, Finns, Ukrainian nationalists, Serbs, Croatians, Dalmatians, Montenegrans, Latvians, Esthonians, Lithuanians, Dutch, Flemings, Walloons, a few Swiss nationals, Bessarabians, Turks, even one or two Syrians have turned up. Up north, the British chanced onto some Japs and a Hindu from Meerut trying to pass themselves off as Chinese and Polynesian, respectively, after having gotten out of Berlin just ahead of the Red Army.
“My present command consists of about three hundred officers and men and a few civilians and WAACs. Hell, I’ll take anybody I can sink my claws into who can cut the fucking mustard—male or female, commissioned or warranted or enlisted, white or black or yellow or polka-dot, Christian or Jew or Moslem of Buddhist or atheist, military or civilian. My work is vitally important, Milo, that’s why I’m so powerful just now. When I found out that you’d come through the war in one piece, I knew just how valuable a linguist like you would be to me, and I put things in motion to get you for my team. You can do your country and yourself a hell of a lot more fucking good working under mee, here, than you could going up against the Japs in the invasion of their home islands.
“Just how many languages do you speak, anyhow? We were only able to test you out on ten or twelve, as I recall from Holabird.”
Milo shrugged. “I really don’t know, Colonel Barstow, not for sure. It’s always only when I’m confronted with a person whose speech I can understand or a foreign book I can read that I come to know that I own yet another language. Maybe twenty, I’d say, of present knowledge.”
Barstow just grinned and rubbed his palms together in glee, saying, “Good, good, Milo, you’re an answer to prayers. I’m going to put in the paperwork on your majority today. You won’t ever be sorry you came back to work for me, I promise you.”
After so long wearing uniforms and nothing but uniforms, the civilian clothing issued by Colonel Barstow’s operation felt odd and sloppy to Milo. He was assigned an office equipped with an OD GI steel desk, a dark-oak swivel chair, a straight armless chair for interviewees, a four-drawer steel filing cabinet and three-sided length of wood on which was lettered: “MILO MORAY, CAPTAIN INF., USA.”
But he had not been a week on the job when Barstow gave him a handful of similar wooden name blocks with vastly dissimilar names. “I’ll let you know when and if to use these, Milo. Just stow them away somewhere convenient, for now. Sometimes it’s better that they don’t know they’re talking to military officers.”
During the course of the six weeks that followed, Milo had pass before his desk a broad cross section of the flotsam and jetsam of the war now concluded in Europe, and he determined the most of them to be nothing more or less than just what they were purported to be: frightened, confused, often demoralized, malnourished displaced persons, frequently neurotic, sometimes psychotic. But now and then he was able to unmask a ringer, too. No big fish, just lower-ranking SS, mostly, clumsily essaying to fob themselves off as former political prisoners or nationals of other countries, all of these seemingly desirous of instant repatriation.
His majority came through. Barstow presented him with a pair of gold oak leaves and jokingly pinned them on the shoulders of his gray tweed civilian coat, before he poured them each a glass of Scotch and sat down behind his desk, waving Milo to another chair.
“Once all this is done and most of the Army has gone back home, what are your plans, Milo? Mean to stay in the Army, do you? You could do a lot worse, you know.”
“I don’t know, colonel,” said Milo honestly. “My permanent rank is tech sergeant, and that, or at most master, is probably the best I could hope for in a reduced army of Regulars. I’ve promised to care as best I can for a dead buddy’s widow and four children, and I can’t see trying to do that on a sergeant’s pay. I might do better in the civilian world—I could hardly do worse, pay-wise.”
Barstow shook his head emphatically. “You’ve obviously been talking to old soldiers who stayed in after the last war. Things are going to be very different for America and for her armed forces, once this thing is done, you know. The Powers That Be have, I think, learned a hard lesson well; I doubt that the defense establishment will ever again be allowed to wither and rot away into the near-uselessness of long neglect that it was become by the late thirties and early forties. There won’t be millions of men mantained under arms, naturally, but the defense forces will be substantial, and I’m certain that the draft is going to be maintained, which will mean a continuing recruit-training establishment and a ready-if-needed force of trained civilian reserves always on tap for any real emergency. Yes, there will probably be some reductions in rank, but nowhere nearly so many as the old soldiers think. So you really should think about staying in.”
Milo savored the Scotch, thinking that poor Jethro’s taste in whisky had been far superior. “But colonel, I don’t think that the American people are militaristic enough to put up with an Army and Navy of any real size squatting around the country.”
“Not that many will stay in the States, Milo,” replied Barstow. “Think about it a little. We’re going to have garrisons here in Germany, in Japan and probably too on the assorted chunks of real estate we’ve taken from Japan, back in the Philippine Islands, in Italy, in North Africa and other places too numerous to mention. A virtual empire has fallen into our laps, Milo, a worldwide sphere of influence, a power vacuum, as it were; if we as a nation handle things properly, act with the force we now possess, we can have peace—real peace, long-lasting peace—through our strength. If we fail to use what we have to quickly gain what we want, there are other forces waiting to fill the void, and we’ll be dragged into another war or two or three every succeeding generation forever.
“But win, lose or draw, as regards the world and power, Milo, our armed forces are going to be in need of good, intelligent, combat-proven Regular officers for a long, long time yet to come. A man with a record like yours should strongly consider a peacetime military career.”
“Do you intend to stay in after the war, colonel?” asked Milo.
Barstow laughed. “Touche! You’re direct enough, aren’t you, major? In answer: yes, for a while, at least, until I’ve made brigadier, anyway. Then I might retire to teach, maybe to go into politics. I think I’d like being a state governor or a U.S. senator, and with the right backing, who knows how much higher I might go?”
As the months rolled on, the endless parade of interviewees passed before Mile’s desk—the loud, the uncommunicative, the cowed, the arrogant, men of honor and others who never knew the meaning of the word in any language. No one of them would freely admit to ever having been Nazis, Fascists or anything approaching extreme right-wing politics, but there were adherents of virtually every other hue of the political spectrum, which often made for a difficult time in maintaining order in the displaced persons camps.