“Yes, sir. Sir, the sergeant requests the captain consider that the three of us, plus Private Lewis, and First Sergeant Dunwiddie were the only non-coms left after the Krauts kicked the shit out of Company C, 203rd Tank Destroyer Battalion in the Ardennes Forest.”
“You’re talking about the Battle of the Bulge?” Cronley asked softly.
“Yes, sir. And after that, sir, we have been sort of like the Three Musketeers, as the captain suggests. Real close. No secrets between us. But, sir, that doesn’t mean we share what we have with anyone else, just with each other. Harold — excuse me, sir—Private Lewis thought we should know about you running that Kraut sonofabitch off when he was tormenting the Russian and he told us. Sir, we wanted him to tell us. So we’re in this deep shit as deep as he is.”
Cronley looked at him a moment and then said, “Stand at ease.”
The three moved from attention to parade rest, which was not at ease.
“If we are going to have an amicable relationship in the future, you’re going to have to start obeying my orders,” Cronley said. “Or don’t you know what at ease means?”
They relaxed.
First Sergeant Dunwiddie and Staff Sergeant Lewis came into the room.
That was quick.
Dunwiddie had Lewis stashed somewhere close.
Why should that surprise me?
Staff Sergeant Lewis marched up to Cronley, came to attention, raised his hand quickly to his temple, and barked, “Sir, Staff Sergeant Lewis, Harold, Junior, reporting to the commanding officer as ordered, sir.”
Cronley crisply returned the salute.
“Permission to speak, sir?” Dunwiddie asked.
“Denied. You just stand there with Sergeant Loudmouth, First Sergeant, while I have a word with the Three Musketeers of Kloster Grünau.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Some of you may have noticed a few moments ago that I said unkind things about Sergeant Lewis, including questioning the marital status of his parents. Not only was I rude to each of you but I used profane and obscene language. I also used blasphemous language to describe our home here in Kloster Grünau. You may consider this an apology.”
There was silence for a long moment. It was broken by Staff Sergeant Petronius J. Clark, the largest of the Musketeers, whose deep voice would make most operatic basso profundo sound, in comparison, like canaries.
“Aw, shit, Captain,” his voice rumbled, “Tiny told us you was Cavalry before you got stuck with this intelligence bullshit. We’re Cavalry. We wouldn’t respect an officer who didn’t know how to really eat ass colorfully, like you just did.”
Cronley turned to Lewis.
“Tell me, Sergeant, how skilled are you with a shovel?”
“Sir?”
“A counter-question is not a reply, Sergeant.”
“Sir, I expect I’m about as skilled as anyone else.”
“First Sergeant, load the Three Musketeers and Sergeant Loudmouth and four shovels into an ambulance. We are going off into the night to dig a grave. Make sure we have flashlights.”
A number of things became apparent almost as soon as they reached a small pasture that was a five-minute drive from Kloster Grünau.
The first was that a pickax was going to be required. Cronley sent Staff Sergeant Abraham back to fetch two of them.
The second was that the Army expression “Flashlights go dead just when you need them” was right on the money.
As soon as Sergeant Abraham returned from Kloster Grünau, he was sent back for a supply of flashlight batteries and a tape measure.
While he was gone, Technical Sergeant Martin and Staff Sergeant Lewis labored hard, and rather ineffectively, at their digging in the light of the ambulance’s headlights.
When Abraham returned, Martin and Sergeant Lewis — now working in the faint light of the flashlights — took the tape measure and marked off the length and width of the hole to be dug, using rolls of medical adhesive tape conveniently found in the ambulance.
“Stand inside the adhesive tape,” Captain Cronley ordered. “When you get down a little deeper, you’re going to have to work inside the walls of the grave. You might as well get used to that.”
When Sergeants Martin and Lewis complied, it became immediately apparent that two men could not simultaneously labor to deepen a grave while both were inside the dimensions of said grave. Testing proved this was especially true when one of the gravediggers required the use of a pickax in his labors.
“Well, we’ll do it like a relay race,” Captain Cronley announced. “First, the pickax man will dislodge the soil. He will then exit the grave and the shoveler will enter, remove the loose soil from the grave, then exit the grave to be replaced by a man with the pickax. Und so weiter.”
This modus operandi proved far less effective in practice than in theory. Too much time was lost changing laborers. There would be additional lost time as the grave deepened — six feet being one hell of a hole — and the pickax man had to crawl out before the shoveler could climb in.
A modification of the relay-race method was adopted. Working as fast as he could, one gravedigger would wield the pickax and then shovel the loosened dirt out of the hole. He would repeat this cycle three times. By then, the gravedigger was sweating and panting heavily and had to be replaced.
He would then be helped out of the grave and, now shivering in the near freezing temperature, be helped back into the field jacket and shirt he had removed to facilitate his pickax and shovel wielding. As he did so, a fresh gravedigger would quickly remove his field jacket and shirt, and then enter the grave to repeat the process. Und so weiter.
By 2100, it had been determined it was going to take two hours and thirty minutes to dig a grave — much longer than any of them had thought it would — and forty-five minutes to fill it up.
The burial party then got back in the ambulance and jeep and returned to Kloster Grünau.
[SIX]
Captain Cronley, First Sergeant Dunwiddie, and Technical Sergeant Tedworth watched as the medic liberally daubed merbromin on the hands of the gravediggers. The topical antibiotic stained the wounds a bright red.
When Cronley first saw the blisters, he thought it was kind of funny. Enormous, muscular men with delicate hands. Then he got a better look at the blisters and had second thoughts.
These guys are not only in pain now, but have been in pain since probably after the first five minutes of furiously swinging the pickaxes and shovels.
And they hadn’t said a word.
He had then sent for Doc, the medic sergeant, who had been in the NCO club having “a couple of beers,” he’d said, when he arrived a hair’s-breadth from being royally drunk.
“Doc,” Cronley said, “I was about to suggest a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to comfort our afflicted brethren. Would that be medically appropriate?”
“Sir, that’s probably a very good idea. What the hell have they been doing?”
“Field sanitation. Digging latrines,” First Sergeant Dunwiddie answered for him.
“First Sergeant, get a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the bar, then send our walking wounded to bed,” Cronley ordered. “No. Change of plans. I’ll want a word with them after you leave, Doc.”
“Yes, sir.”
When the medic had, none too steadily, left the room, Cronley asked, “Why do I think that when Doc gets back to the NCO club, he’s going to say, ‘I don’t know what the captain had those guys doing. They claimed digging latrines, but I don’t believe that. They had the biggest blisters I’ve seen since Christ was a corporal. They were digging something.’