Well, they needed all those people, of course. Couldn’t get along without them.
But that came to two hundred and eighty-two men.
Then there was the field kitchen, with its staff of forty-seven, plus administrative detachment and dietetic staff; the headquarters detachment, with paymaster’s corps and military police platoon; the meteorological section, a proud sight as they began setting up their field teletypes and fax receivers and launching their weather balloons; the field hospital with eighty-one medics and nurses, nine medical officers and attached medical administrative staff; the special services detachment, prompt to begin setting up a three-D motion-picture screen in the lee of the parked personnel carriers and to commence organizing a handball tournament among the off-duty men; the four chaplains and chaplains’ assistants, plus the Wisdom Counsellor for Ethical Culturists, agnostics and waverers; the Historical Officer and his eight trained clerks, already going from foxhole to foxhole bravely carrying tape recorders, to take down history as it was being made in the form of first-hand impressions of the battle that had yet to be fought; military observers from Canada, Mexico, Uruguay, the Scandinavian Confederation and the Soviet Socialist Republic of Inner Mongolia, with their orderlies and attaches; and, of course, field correspondents from Stars & Stripes, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Scripps-Howard chain, five wire services, eight television networks, an independent documentary motion-picture producer, and one hundred and twenty-seven other newspapers and allied public information outlets.
It was a stripped-down combat command, naturally. Therefore, there was only Public Information Officer per reporter.
Still...
Well, it left exactly forty-six riflemen in line of skirmish.
Up in the Presbyterian belfry, Andy Grammis wailed: ‘Look at them, Jack! I don’t know, maybe letting advertising back into Pung’s Corners wouldn’t be so bad. All right, it’s a rat race, but-’
‘Wait,’ said Jack Tighe quietly, and hummed.
They couldn’t see it very well, but the line of skirmish was in some confusion. The word had been passed down that all the field pieces had been put on safety and that the entire firepower of the company rested in their forty-six rifles. Well, that wasn’t so bad; but after all, they had been equipped with E-Z Fyre Revolv-a-Clip Carbines until ten days before the expeditionary force had been mounted. Some of the troops hadn’t been fully able to familiarize themselves with the new weapons.
It went like this:
‘Sam,’ called one private to the man in the next fox-hole. ‘Sam, listen, I can’t figure this something rifle out. When the something green light goes on, does that mean that the something safety is off?’
‘Beats the something hell out of me,’ rejoined Sam, his brow furrowed as he pored over the full-coloured, glossy-paper operating manual, alluringly entitled, The Five-Step Magic-Eye Way to New Combat Comfort and Security. ‘Did you see what it says here? It says, “Magic-Eye in Off position is provided with positive Fayl-Sayf action, thus assuring Evr-Kleen Cartridge of dynamic ejection and release, when used in combination with Shoulder-Eez Anti-Recoil Pads.”‘
‘What did you say, Sam?’
‘I said it beats the something hell out of me,’ said Sam, and pitched the manual out into no-man’s-land before him.
But he was sorry and immediately crept out to retrieve it, for although the directions seemed intended for a world that had no relation to the rock-and-mud terra firma around Pung’s Comers, all of the step-by-step instructions in the manual were illustrated by mockup photographs of starlets in Bikinis - for the cavern factories produced instruction manuals as well as weapons. They had to, obviously, and they were good at it; the more complicated the directions, the more photographs they used. The vehicular ones were downright shocking.
Some minutes later: ‘They don’t seem to be doing anything,’ ventured Andy Grammis, watching from the steeple.
‘No, they don’t, Andy. Well, we can’t sit up here forever. Come along and we’ll see what’s what.’
Now Andy Grammis didn’t want to do that, but Jack Tighe was a man you didn’t resist very well, and so they climbed down the winding steel stairs and picked up the rest of the Pung’s Corners Independence Volunteers, all fourteen of them, and they started down Front Street and out across the baseball diamond.
Twenty-six personnel carriers electronically went ping, and the turrets of their one-oh-fives swivelled to zero in on the Independence Volunteers.
Forty-six riflemen, sweating, attempted to make Akur-A-C Greenline Sighting Strip cross Horizon Blue True-Site Band in the Up-Close radar screens of their rifles.
And Major Commaigne, howling mad, waved a sheet of paper under the nose of his adjutant. ‘What kind of something nonsense is this? he demanded, for a soldier is a soldier regardless of his rank. ‘I can’t take those men out of line with the enemy advancing on us!’
‘Army orders, sir,’ said the adjutant impenetrably. He had got his doctorate in Military Jurisprudence at Harvard Law and he knew whose orders meant what to whom. ‘The rotation plan isn’t my idea, sir. Why not take it up with the Pentagon?’
‘But, Lefferts, you idiot, I can’t get through to the Pentagon! Those something newspapermen have the channels sewed up solid! And now you want me to take every front-line rifleman out and send him to a rest camp for three weeks -’
‘No, sir,’ corrected the adjutant, pointing to a line in the order. ‘Only for twenty days, sir, including travel time. But you’d best do it right away, sir, I expect. The order’s marked “priority”.’
Well, Major Commaigne was no fool. Never mind what they said later. He had studied the catastrophe of Von Paulus at Stalingrad and Lee’s heaven-sent escape from Gettysburg, and he knew what could happen to an expeditionary force in trouble in enemy territory. Even a big one. And his, you must remember, was very small.
He knew that when you’re on your own, everything becomes your enemy; frost and diarrhoea destroyed more of the Nazi Sixth Army than the Russians did; the jolting wagons of Lee’s retreat put more of his wounded and sick out of the way than Meade’s cannon. So he did what he had to do.
‘Sound the retreat!’ he bawled. ‘We’re going back to the barn.’
Retire and regroup; why not? But it wasn’t as simple as that.
The personnel carriers backed and turned like a fleet in manoeuvres. Their drivers were trained for that. But one PC got caught in Special Service’s movie screen and blundered into another, and a flotilla of three of them found themselves stymied by the spreading pre-fabs of the field hospital. Five of them, doing extra duty in running electric generators from the power takeoffs at their rear axles, were immobilized for fifteen minutes and then boxed in.
What it came down to was that four of the twenty-six were in shape to move right then. And obviously that wasn’t enough, so it wasn’t a retreat at all; it was a disaster.
‘There’s only one thing to do,’ brooded Major Commaigne amid the turmoil, with manly tears streaming down his face, ‘but how I wish I’d never tried to make lieutenant colonel!’
So Jack Tighe received Commaigne’s surrender. Jack Tighe didn’t act surprised. I can’t say the same for the rest of the Independence Volunteers.