Book Cover:

Stewart Dubinsky Knew His Father Had Served In World War Ii, and he'd been told how David Dubin (as his father had Americanized the name that Stewart later reclaimed) had rescued Stewart's mother from the horrors of the Balingen concentration camp. But when, after his father's death, he discovers a packet of wartime letters to a former fiancee and learns of his father's court-martial and imprisonment, he is plunged into the mystery of his family's secret history and is driven to uncover the truth about this enigmatic, distant man who always refused to talk about his war.

As he pieces together his father's past through military archives, letters, and, finally, notes from a memoir his father wrote in prison, secretly preserved by the officer who defended him, Stewart starts to assemble a dramatic and baffling chain of events. Reconstructing the terrible events and agonizing choices his father faced on the battlefield, in the courtroom, and in love, gains a closer understanding of his past, of his father's character, and of the brutal nature of war itself.

.

Dearest Grace--

My sickness is over, and I love you and miss you more than ever! Yesterday I got up feeling fine and ran to breakfast and I have been well ever since. I am beginning to know the routine aboard this commandeered cruise ship, where much of the civilian staff remains on duty--including Indian wallahs who serve the officers in our staterooms. We also have a wonderful band that three or four times a day strikes up sentimental classical numbers in the old first-class dining room, which is still turned out with baubled chandeliers and red velvet drapes. The enlisted men below enjoy many fewer luxuries, but even they know-their accommodations are a marked improvement over what they'd get on most of the Navy's old buckets.

With Tchaikovsky on the air, I sometimes forget we are in a war zone and distinctly treacherous waters. Yet with time on my hands, I suppose it's natural that thoughts of what may lie ahead occasionally preoccupy me. During the four days of sickness after we sailed from Boston, I naturally spent long periods on deck. For all the sophistication I like to think I acquired at Easton College and in law school, I am still a Midwestern hick. Until now, I have never been on a body of water broader than the Kindle River, and there have been moments when I've found the vastness of the Atlantic terrifying. Gazing out, I realize how far I have gone from home, how alone I am now, and how immaterial my life is to the oceans, or to most of the people around me.

Of course, with my transfer to the Judge Advocate General's Department, I have much less to fear than when I was training as an infantry officer. The closest I am likely to get to a German is to give advice about his treatment as a POW. I know you and my parents are relieved, as I am, too, but at other moments I feel at sea. (Ho ho!)

I'm not sure why God sets men against each other in war--in fact, I'm no surer than ever that I believe in God. But I know I must do my part. We all mus do our parts, you at home and us here. Everything our parents taught us--my parents and your parents, different though they may be--is at stake. I know this war is right. And that is what men--and Americans, especially--do. They fight for what is right in the world, even lay down their lives if that's required. I still feel as I did when I enlisted, that if I did not take up this fight, I would not be a man, as men are. As I must be. There are instants when I am actually jealous of the soldiers I am traveling with, even when I see them overcome by a sudden vacancy that I know is fear. They are imagining the bullets sizzling at them in their holes, the earthquake and lightning of bombs and artillery. But I envy who they will become in the forge of battle.

I promise you that such insanity passes fleetly and that I'll happily remain a lawyer, not a foot soldier. It is late now and they say there are heavy seas ahead. I should sleep while I can.

Good night, darling. I'll see you in my dreams!

With love forever, David.

Chapter 1.

STEWART: ALL PARENTS KEEP SECRETS

All parents keep secrets from their children. My father, it seemed, kept more than most. The first clue came when Dad passed away in February 2003 at the age of eighty-eight, after sailing into a Bermuda Triangle of illness--heart disease, lung cancer, and emphysema--all more or less attributable to sixty years of cigarettes. Characteristically, my mother refused to leave the burial details to my sister and me and met the funeral director with us. She chose a casket big enough to require a hood ornament, then pondered each word as the mortician read out the proposed death announcement.

"Was David a veteran?" he asked. The undertaker was the cleanest-looking man I'd ever seen, with lacquered nails, shaped eyebrows, and a face so smooth I suspected electrolysis.

"World War II," barked Sarah, who at the age of fifty-two still raced to answer before me.

The funeral director showed us the tiny black rendering of the Stars and Stripes that would appear in the paper beside Dad's name, but my mother was already agitating her thinning gray curls.

"No," she said. "No war. Not for this David Dubin." When she was upset, Mom's English tended to fail her. And my sister and I both knew enough to keep quiet when she was in those moods. The war, except for the bare details of how my father, an American officer, and my mother, an inmate in a German concentration camp, had fallen in love, virtually at first sight, had been an unpleasantness too great for discussion throughout our lives. But I had always assumed the silence was for her sake, not his.

By the end of the mourning visitation, Mom was ready to face sorting through Dad's belongings. Sarah announced she was too pressed to lend a hand and headed back to her accounting practice in Oakland, no doubt relishing the contrast with my unemployment. Mom assigned me to my father's closet on Monday morning, insisting that I consider taking much of his clothing. It was nearly all disastrously out of fashion, and only my mother could envision me, a longtime fatso, ever shrinking enough to squeeze into any of it. I selected a few ties to make her happy and began boxing the rest of his old shirts and suits for donation to the Haven, the Jewish relief agency my mother had helped found decades ago and which she almost single-handedly propelled for nearly twenty years as its Executive Director.

But I was unprepared for the emotion that overtook me. I knew my father as a remote, circumspect man, very orderly in almost everything, brilliant, studious, always civil. He preferred work to social engagements, although he had his own polite charm. Still, his great success came within the mighty fortress of the law. Elsewhere, he was less at ease. He let my mother . Hold sway at home, making the same weary joke for more than fifty years--he would never, he said, have enough skill as a lawyer to win an argument with Mom.

The Talmud says that a father should draw a son close with one hand and push him away with the other. Dad basically failed on both accounts. I felt a steady interest from him which I took for affection. Compared to many other dads, he was a champ, especially in a generation whose principal ideal of fathering was being a 'good provider.' But he was elusive at the core, almost as if he were wary of letting me know him too well. To the typical challenges I threw out as a kid, he generally responded by retreating, or turning me over to my mother. I have a perpetual memory of the times I was alone with him in the house as a child, infuriated by the silence. Did he know I was there? Or even goddamn care?

Now that Dad was gone, I was intensely aware of everything I'd never settled with him--in many cases, not even started on. Was he sorry I was not a lawyer like he was? What did he make of my daughters? Did he think the world was a good place or bad, and how could he explain the fact that the Trappers, for whom he maintained a resilient passion, had never won the World Series in his lifetime? Children and parents can't get it all sorted out. But it was painful to find that even in death he remained so enigmatic.

And so this business of touching the things my father touched, of smelling his Mennen talcum powder and Canoe aftershave, left me periodically swamped by feelings of absence and longing. Handling his personal effects was an intimacy I would never have dared if he were alive. I was in pain but deeply moved every minute and wept freely, burbling in the rear corner of the closet in hopes my mother wouldn't hear me. She herself was yet to shed a tear and undoubtedly thought that kind of iron stoicism was more appropriate to a man of fifty-six.

With the clothing packed, I began looking through the pillar of cardboard boxes I'd discovered in a dim corner. There was a remarkable collection of things there, many marked by a sentimentality I always thought Dad lacked. He'd kept the schmaltzy valentines Sarah and I had made for him as grade-school art projects, and the Kindle County championship medal he'd won in high school in the backstroke. Dozens of packets of darkening Kodachromes reflected the life of his young family. In the bottom box, I found memorabilia of World War II, a sheaf of brittle papers, several red Nazi armbands taken, I imagined, as war trophies, and a curled stack of two-by-two snaps, good little blackand-white photos that must have been shot by someone else since my father was often the subject, looking thin and taciturn. Finally, I came upon a bundle of letters packed in an old candy tin to which a note was tied with a piece of green yarn dulled by time. It was written in a precise hand and dated May 14, 1945.

Dear David, I am returning to your family the letters you have sent while you have been overseas. I suppose they may have some significance to you in the future. Inasmuch as you are determined to no longer be a part of my life, I have to accept that once time passes and my hurt diminishes, they will not mean anything to me. I'm sure your father has let you know that I brought your ring back to him last month.

For all of this, David, I can't make myself be angry at you for ending our engagement. When I saw your father, he said that you were now being court-martialed and actually face prison. I can hardly believe that about someone like you, but I would never have believed that you would desert me either. My father says men are known to go crazy during wartime. But I can't wait any longer for you to come back to your senses.

When I cry at night, David--and I won't pretend for your sake that I don't--one thing bothers me the most. I spent so many hours praying to God for Him to deliver you safely; I begged Him to allow you to live, and if He was especially kind, to let you come back whole. Now that the fighting there is over, I cannot believe that my prayers were answered and that I was too foolish to ask that when you returned, you would be coming home to me.

I wish you the best of luck in your present troubles.

Grace

.

This letter knocked me flat. Court-martialed! The last thing I could imagine of my tirelessly proper father was being charged with a serious crime. And a heartbreaker as well. I had never heard a word about any of these events. But more even than surprise, across the arc of time, like light emitted by distant stars decades ago, I felt pierced by this woman's pain. Somehow her incomprehension alloyed itself with my own confusion and disappointment and frustrated love, and instantly inspired a ferocious curiosity to find out what had happened.

Dad's death had come while I was already gasping in one of life's waterfalls. Late the year before, after reaching fifty-five, I had retired early from the Kindle County Tribune, my sole employer as an adult. It was time. I think I was regarded as an excellent reporter--I had the prizes on the wall to prove it--but nobody pretended, me least of all, that I had the focus or the way with people to become an editor. By then, I'd been on the courthouse beat for close to two decades. Given the eternal nature of human failings, I felt like a TV critic assigned to watch nothing but reruns. After thirty-three years at the Trib, my pension, combined with a generous buyout, was close to my salary, and my collegiate cynicism about capitalism had somehow fed an uncanny knack in the stock market. With our modest tastes, Nona and I wouldn't have to worry about money. While I still had the energy, I wanted to indulge every journalist's fantasy: I was going to write a book.

It did not work out. For one thing, I lacked a subject. Who the hell really cared about the decades-old murder trial of the Chief Deputy Prosecuting Attorney that I'd once thought was such a nifty topic? Instead, three times a day, I found myself staring across the table at Nona, my high-school sweetheart, where it swiftly became apparent that neither of us especially liked what we were seeing. I wish I could cite some melodrama like an affair or death threats to explain what had gone wrong. But the truth is that the handwriting had been on the wall so long, we'd just regarded it as part of the decorating. After thirty years, we had drifted into one of those marriages that never recovered its motive once our daughters were grown. Nine weeks before Dad's passing, Nona and I had separated. We had dinner once each week, where we discussed our business amiably, frustrated one another in the ways we always had, and exhibited no signs of longing or second thoughts. Our daughters were devastated, but I figured we both deserved some credit for having the guts to hope for better at this late date.

Nevertheless, I was already feeling battered before Dad died. By the time we buried him, I was half inclined to jump into the hole beside him. Sooner or later, I knew I'd pick myself up and go on. I'd been offered freelance gigs at two magazines, one local, one national. At five foot nine and 215 pounds, I am not exactly a catch, but the expectations of middle age are much kinder to men than women, and there were already signs that I'd find companionship, if and when I was ready.

For the moment, though, out of work and out of love, I was far more interested in taking stock. My life was like everybody else's. Some things had gone well, some hadn't. But right now I was focused on the failures, and they seemed to have started with my father.

And so that Monday, while my mother thought I was struggling into Dad's trousers, I remained in his closet and read through dozens of his wartime letters, most of them typed Army V-mails, which had been microfilmed overseas and printed out by the post office at home. Is stopped only when Mom called from the kitchen, suggesting I take a break. I found her at the oval drop-leaf table, which still bore the marks of the thousands of family meals eaten there during the 1950s.

"Did you know Dad was engaged before he met you?" I asked from the doorway.

She revolved slowly. She had been drinking tea, sipping it through a sugar cube she clenched between her gapped front teeth, a custom still retained from the shtetl. The brown morsel that remained was set on the corner of her saucer.

"Who told you that?"

I described Grace's letter. Proprietary of everything, Mom demanded to see it at once. At the age of eighty, my mother remained a pretty woman, paled by age, but still with even features and skin that was notably unwithered. She was a shrimp--I always held her to blame that I had not ended up as tall as my father--but people seldom saw her that way because of the aggressive force of her intelligence, like someone greeting you in sword and armor. Now, Mom studied Grace Morton's letter with an intensity that seemed as if it could, at any instant, set the page aflame. Her expression, when she put it down, might have shown the faintest influence of a smile.

"Poor girl," she said.

"Did you know about her?"

"Know'? I suppose. It was long over by the time I met your father, Stewart. This was wartime. Couples were separated for years. Girls met other fellows. Or vice versa. You've heard, no, of Dear John letters?"

"But what about the rest of this? A court-martial? Did you know Dad was court-martialed?"

"Stewart, I was in a concentration camp. I barely spoke English. There had been some legal problem at one point, I think. It was a misunderstanding."

"Misunderstanding'? This says they wanted to send him to prison."

"Stewart, I met your father, I married your father, I came here with him in 1946. From this you can see that he did not go to prison."

"But why didn't he mention this to me? I covered every major criminal case in Kindle County for twenty years, Mom. I talked to him about half of those trials. Wouldn't you think at some point he'd have let on that he was once a criminal defendant himself?"

"I imagine he was embarrassed, Stewart. A father wants his son's admiration."

For some reason this response was more frustrating than anything yet. If my father was ever concerned about my opinion of him, it had eluded me. Pushed again toward tears, I sputtered out my enduring lament. He was. such a goddamn crypt of a human being! How could Dad have lived and died without letting me really know him?

There was never a second in my life when I have doubted my mother's sympathies. I know she wished I'd grown up a bit more like my father, with a better damper on my emotions, but I could see her absorb my feelings in a mom's way, as if soaked up from the root. She emitted a freighted Old World sigh.

"Your father," she said, stopping to pick a speck of sugar off her tongue and to reconsider her words. Then, she granted the only acknowledgment she ever has of what I faced with him. "Stewart," she said, "your father sometimes had a difficult relationship with himself."

I spirited Dad's letters out of the house that day. Even at my age, I found it easier to deceive my mother than to confront her. And I needed time to ponder what was there. Dad had written colorfully about the war. Yet there was an air of unexpressed calamity in his correspondence, like the spooky music that builds in a movie soundtrack before something goes wrong. He maintained a brave front with Grace Morton, but by the time he suddenly broke off their relationship in February 1945, his life as a soldier seemed to have shaken him in a fundamental way, which I instantly connected to his court-martial.

More important, that impression reinforced a lifetime suspicion that had gone unvoiced until now: something had happened to my father. In the legal world, if a son is to judge, Dad was widely admired. He was the General Counsel of Moreland Insurance for fifteen years, and was renowned for his steadiness, his quiet polish, and his keen ability in lasering his way through the infinite complications of insurance law. But he had a private life like everybody else, and at home a dour aura of trauma always clung to him. There were the smokes he couldn't give up, and the three fingers of scotch he bolted down each night like medicine, so he could get four or five hours of sleep before he was rocked awake by unwanted dreams. Family members sometimes commented that as a younger man he had been more outspoken. My grandmother's theory, which she rarely kept to herself, was that Gilda, my mother, had largely taken David's tongue by always speaking first and with such authority. But he went through life as if a demon had a hand on his shoulder, holding him back.

Once when I was a boy, he saw me nearly run over as a car screamed around the corner, barely missing me where I was larking with friends on my bike. Dad snatched me up by one arm from the pavement and carried me that way until he could throw me down on our lawn. Even so young, I understood he was angrier about the panic I'd caused him than the danger I'd posed to myself.

Now the chance to learn what had troubled my father became a quest. As a reporter, I was fabled for my relentlessness, the Panting Dog School of Journalism, as I described it, in which I pursued my subjects until they dropped. I obtained a copy of Dad's 201, his Army personnel file, from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, and with that fired off several letters to the Defense Department and the National Archives. By July, the chief clerk for the Army Judiciary in Alexandria, Virginia, confirmed that she had located the record of my father's court-martial. Only after I had paid to have it copied did she write back stating that the documents had now been embargoed as classified, not by the Army, but by, of all agencies, the CIA.

The claim that my father did anything sixty years ago that deserved to be regarded as a national security matter today was clearly preposterous. I unleashed a barrage of red-hot faxes, phone calls, letters, and e-mails to various Washington offices that attracted all the interest of spam. Eventually, my Congressman, Stan Sennett, an old friend, worked out an arrangement in which the government agreed to let me see a few documents from the court-martial, while the CIA reconsidered the file's secret status.

So in August 2003, I traveled to the Washington National Records Center, in Suitland, Maryland. The structure looks a little like an aircraft carrier in dry dock, a low redbrick block the size of forty football fields. The public areas within are confined to a single corridor whose decor is pure government, the equivalent of sensible shoes: brick walls, ceilings of acoustic tile, and an abundance of fluorescent light. There I was allowed to read--but not to copy--about ten pages that had been withdrawn from the Record of Proceedings compiled in 1945 by the trial judge advocate, the court-martial prosecutor. The sheets had faded to manila and had the texture of wallpaper, but they still glimmered before me like treasure. Finally, I was going to know.

I had told myself I was ready for anything, and what was actually written could hardly have been more matter-of-fact, set out in the deliberately neutral language of the law, further straitjacketed by military terminology. But reading, I felt like I'd been dropped on my head. Four counts had been brought against Dad, the specifications for each charge pointing to the same incident. In October 1944, my father, acting Assistant Staff Judge Advocate of the Third Army, had been directed to investigate allegations by General Roland Teedle of the 18th Armored Division concerning the possible court-martial of Major Robert Martin. Martin was attached to the Special Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, which had been founded during World War II (accounting, I figured, for why the Agency had stuck its nose in now). Dad was ordered to arrest Major Martin in November 1944. Instead, in April 1945, near Hechingen, Germany, my father had taken custody of Martin, where, according to the specifications, Dad "deliberately allowed Martin to flee, at great prejudice to the security and well-being of the United States." Nor was that just rhetoric. The most serious charge, willful disobedience of a superior officer, was punishable by execution.

A weeklong trial ensued in June 1945. At the start, the count that could have led to a firing squad had been dismissed, but the three charges remaining carried a potential sentence of thirty years. As to them, I found another discolored form labeled JUDGMENT.

The court was opened and the president announced that the accused was guilty of all specifications and charges of Charges II, III, and IV; further that upon secret written ballot, two-thirds of the members present concurring, accused is sentenced to five years' confinement in the United States Penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth at hard labor, and to be dishonorably discharged from the U. S. Army forthwith, notice of his discharge to be posted at the place of his abode.

I read this sheet several times, hoping to make it mean something else. My heart and hands were ice. My father was a felon.

Dad's conviction was quickly affirmed by the Board of Review for the European Theater--the Army equivalent of an appellate court--leaving General Teedle free to carry out the sentence. Instead, in late July 1945, the General revoked the charges he himself had brought. He simply checked off a box on a form without a word of explanation.

But it was not a clerical error. The court-martial panel was reconvened by the General's order the next week and issued a one-line finding taking back everything they had done only a month and a half earlier. My father, who had been under house arrest since April, was freed.

The blanks in this tale left me wild with curiosity, feeling like Samson chained blind inside the temple. The Army, the CIA, no one was going to keep me from answering a basic question of heritage: Was I the son of a convict who'd betrayed his country and slipped away on some technicality, or, perhaps, the child of a man who'd endured a primitive injustice which he'd left entombed in the past?

I filled out innumerable government forms and crossed the continent several times as I pieced things together, visiting dozens of document storage sites and military libraries. The most productive trips of all were to Connecticut, where I ultimately acquired the records of Barrington Leach, the lawyer who'd defended my father unsuccessfully at Dad's trial before General Teedle revoked the charges.

Almost as soon as my travels started, I became determined to set down my father's tale. Dad was the only member of the Judge Advocate General's Department court-martialed during World War II, and that was but a small part of what made his experiences distinctive. I toiled happily in the dark corridors of libraries and archives and wrote through half the night. This was going to make not only a book, but my book, and a great book, a book which, like the corniest dens ex machina, would elevate my life from the current valley to a peak higher than any I'd achieved before. And then, like the cross-examiners in the criminal courtrooms I had covered for so many years, I made the cardinal mistake, asked one question too many and discovered the single fact, the only conceivable detail, that could scoop me of my father's story.

He had written it himself.

Chapter 2.

DAVID: REGARDING THE CHARGES AGAINST ME CONFIDENTIAL

ATTORNEY-CLIENT COMMUNICATION

TO: Lieutenant Colonel Barrington Leach, Deputy Associate Judge Advocate, Headquarters, European Theater of Operations, U. S. Army (ETOUSA)

FROM: Captain David Dubin

RE: The Charges Against Me

DATE: May 5, 1945

I have decided to follow your suggestion to set down the major details I recall regarding my investigation of Major Robert Martin of OSS and the ensuing events which will shortly bring me before this court-martial. Since I have no desire to discuss this with another soul, including you as my lawyer, I find writing a more palatable alternative, even while I admit that my present inclination is not to show you a word of this. I know my silence frustrates you, making you think I lack a full appreciation for my circumstances, but rest assured that the prospect of a firing squad has caught my attention. Yet as a member of the JAG Department who has both prosecuted and defended hundreds of general courts-martial in the year or so I have been overseas, I am fully convinced that I have nothing to say for myself. General Teedle charges that last month in Hechingen I willfully suffered Major Martin to escape from my lawful custody. And that is true. I did. I let Martin go. I intend to plead guilty because I am guilty. The reasons I freed Martin are irrelevant in the eyes of the law and, candidly, my own business. Let me assure you, however, that telling the whole story would not improve my situation one whit.

I may as well start by expanding on some of the information I routinely request of my own clients. I am a Midwesterner, born in 1915 in the city of DuSable in Kindle County. Both my parents were immigrants, each hailing from small towns in western Russia. Neither was educated beyond grade school. My father has worked since age fourteen as a cobbler, and owns a small shop a block from the three-flat where they raised my older sister, my younger brother, and me.

I was a good student in high school, and also won the Kindle County championship in the hundred-yard backstroke. This combination led me to receive a full scholarship to Easton College. Easton is only about twenty miles from my parents' apartment, but a world apart, the longtime training ground of the genteel elite of the Tri-Cities. As a man whose parents' greatest dream was for their children to become `real Americans,' I embraced Easton in every aspect, right down to the raccoon coat, ukulele, and briar pipe. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and then entered Easton's esteemed law school. Afterward, I was lucky enough to find work in the legal department of Moreland Insurance. My parents pointed out that I appeared to be the first Jew Moreland had hired outside the mail room, but I'd always endeavored not to look at things that way.

For two years, I tried small personal-injury lawsuits in the Municipal Court, but in September 1942, I enlisted. No one who cared about me approved. Both my parents and my sweetheart, Grace Morton, wanted me to wait out the draft, hoping against hope that I'd be missed, or at least limit my time in the path of danger. But I was no longer willing to put off doing my part.

I had met Grace three years earlier, when I fit her for a pair of pumps in the shoe section of Morton's Department Store, where I'd earned pocket money throughout college and law school. In her round-collared sweaters and tiny pearls and pleated skirts, Grace was the image of the all-American girl. But what most attracted me was not her blonde bob or her demure manner so much as her high-mindedness. She is the best-intentioned soul I have ever met. Grace worked as a schoolteacher in the tough North End and waited several months before letting on that her family owned the department store where I'd first encountered her. When I decided to enter the service, I proposed, so that we could remain together, at least while I was posted Stateside. She instantly agreed, but our marriage plans set off a storm in both families that could be calmed only by postponing the wedding.

After basic training at Fort Riley, I entered Officers Candidate School in the infantry at Fort Benning in Georgia. I was commissioned a Second Lieutenant on April 6, 1943. Two days later, I was transferred forthwith to the Judge Advocate General's Department. I had just turned twenty-eight, making me eligible for JAGD, and some thoughtful superior had put me in for reassignment. In essential Army style, no one asked what I preferred, and I probably don't know the answer to this day. Still ambivalent, I was sent to the stately quadrangle of the University of Michigan Law School to learn about the Articles of War. My graduation in the upper half of my class made my promotion to First Lieutenant automatic.

When I entered the JAG Department, I had requested service in the Pacific, thinking I was more likely to get within the vicinity of active combat, but in August 1943, I was sent to Fort Barkley, Texas, for a period of apprenticeship, so-called applicatory training as the Assistant Judge Advocate at the camp. I spent most of my time explaining legal options to soldiers who'd received Dear Johns from their wives and, as an odd counterpoint, sorting out the many conflicting Dependency Benefit Claims the Army had received from the five women a soldier named Joe Hark had married at his five prior postings, each without benefit of any intervening divorce.

In March 1944, I was at last reassigned overseas, but to the Central Base Station in London, rather than the Pacific. I was fortunate, however, to come under the command of Colonel Halley Maples. He was in his late fifties, and the picture of a lawyer, more than six feet tall, lean, with graying hair and a broad mustache. He seemed to hold a high opinion of me, probably because I, like him, was a graduate of Easton University Law School. Sometime in July, only a few weeks after D-Day, the Colonel was designated as the Staff Judge Advocate for the newly forming Third Army, and I was delighted when he asked me to serve as his acting assistant. I crossed the Channel on August i6, 1944, aboard the USS Holland, finally coming within the proximity of war.

The staff judge advocates were part of Patton's rear-echelon headquarters, and we traveled in the General's wake as the Third Army flashed across Europe. It was an advantageous assignment. We did none of the fighting, but time and again entered the French villages and towns jubilantly celebrating their liberation after years of Nazi occupation. From atop the beds of half-ton trucks and armored troop carriers, the infantrymen tossed cigarettes and chocolates to the crowds while the French uncorked bottles of wine hidden from the Germans for years and lavished kisses on us, more, alas, from whiskery old men than willing girls.

In the liberated towns, there was seldom any clear authority, while dozens of French political parties squabbled for power. Locals clustered about the police station and our military headquarters, seeking travel passes or trying to find the sons and fathers who'd been carried off by the Germans. The windows of stores purveying Nazi goods and propaganda were smashed with paving stones, while the cross of Lorraine, symbol of the French resistance, was painted over every swastika that could not be removed. Collaborators were routed out by mobs. In Brou, I saw a barmaid set upon by six or seven youths in resistance armbands who cut off all her hair as punishment for sleeping with Nazis. She endured her shearing with a pliancy that might not have been much different from the way she'd accepted her German suitors. She said nothing, merely wept and sat absolutely still, except for one arm that moved entirely on its own, bucking against her side like the wing of some domesticated fowl engaged in a futile attempt at flight.

Patton was concerned that the chaotic atmosphere would affect our troops and looked to Colonel Maples and his staff to reinforce discipline. I and my counterpart, Anthony Eisley, a squat young captain from Dayton who had practiced law in his father's firm for several years, were assigned to try the large number of general courts-martial which were arising for fairly serious offenses--murder, rape, assault, major thefts, and insubordination--many of these crimes committed against French civilians. In other commands, these cases, especially the defense of the accused, were handled by line officers as an auxiliary duty, but Colonel Maples wanted lawyers trained in the Articles of Wai dealing with matters that could end in stiff prison sentences or, even, hanging.

The principal impediment in carrying out our assignment was that we had barely set up court when we were on the move again, as Patton's Army rampaged at an unprecedented pace across France.

Columns raced through territory even before navigators could post the maps at headquarters. We tried men for their lives in squad tents, with the testimony often inaudible as bombers buzzed overhead and howitzers thundered.

I felt grateful to be at the forefront of history, or at least close to it, and appreciated Colonel Maples as a commander. In the Army officers corps, being built on the double, it was not uncommon, even in the upper ranks, to find commanders who had never so much as fired a rifle in combat, but Maples was not merely a distinguished lawyer who'd risen to the pinnacle of a famous St. Louis firm, but also a veteran of the Great War, which had taken him through many of these towns.

In early September, headquarters moved again to Marson, from La Chaume, bringing us across the Marne. The Colonel asked me to drive with him in search of the field where he had survived the most intense battle he'd fought in. It was a pasture now, but Maples recognized a long stone fence that separated this ground from the neighbor's. He had been a twenty-five-year-old second lieutenant dug into one of the slit trenches that ran across this green land, no more than one hundred yards from the Germans.

There had been more fighting here again lately. In the adjoining woods, artillery rounds had brought down many of the trees, and tank tracks had ripped into the earth. The dead personnel and spent materiel had been cleared away, but there were still several animals, cows and military horses, bloated and reeking and swarming with flies. Yet it was the battles of a quarter century ago which appeared to hold the Colonel. As we walked along the devastated field, he recalled a friend who had popped out to relieve himself and been shot through the head.

"Died like that, with his drawers around his knees, and fell back into the latrine. It was terrible. It was all terrible," he said and looked at me.

Beyond the fence on the neighbor's side, in a narrow culvert, we found a dead German soldier facedown in the water. One hand was on the bank, now withered with a bare leathery husk over what would soon be a skeleton. He was the first dead man I'd seen on a battlefield, and the Colonel studied the corpse for quite some time while I contended with my thumping heart.

"Thank God," he said then.

"Sir?"

"I thank the Lord, David, I shall be too old to come to this place again in war."

Back in the jeep, I asked, "Do you think we might have to fight another World War soon, sir?" Eisley, my courtroom colleague, believed that war with the Soviets was all but inevitable and might begin even before we'd mustered out. The Colonel greeted the idea with exceptional gravity.

"It must not happen, Dubin," he said, as if imparting the most consequential order. "It must not."

By the end of September, Patton's sprint across Europe had come to a virtual stop. Our armored divisions had outraced their supply lines, and the dusty tanks and half-tracks sat immobile awaiting fuel, while the weather turned from bright to gloomy, soon giving way to the wettest fall on record. The front stretched on a static line about ten miles south of the Vosges Mountains. In the interval, infantry replaced the armor and dug themselves into foxholes which, in an echo of the Great War, were only a couple hundred yards from those of the enemy. The Krauts reportedly hurled nighttime taunts. "Babe Ruth is Schwarz-black. Black niggers is at home fucking with your wife." We had plenty of German speakers in our ranks, kids from New York and Cincinnati and Milwaukee, who shouted out their own observations about the puniness of Hitler's balls, hidden under his dress.

The stall allowed the administrative staff, including the judge advocates, to make our first durable headquarters in Nancy early in October. Asa student of French in high school, I seemed to have acquired the impression that there was only one city to speak of in that country. But Nancy's center had been erected in the eighteenth century by a king without a country, Stanislas Leszczynski, later to become Duke of Lorraine, with a grandeur and panache equal to my images of Paris. Patton's forward headquarters was in the Palais du Gouverneur, a royal residence at the end of a tree-lined arcade that resembled pictures I'd seen of the Tuileries. Our offices, along with other rear elements, were about a fifteen-minute walk across town, in the Lycee Henri Poincare, the oldest school in Nancy.

To process the backlog of cases that had collected as we were trying to keep up with Patton, Colonel Maples asked the personnel nabobs in G-1 to appoint two standing courts-martial. They ultimately assigned nine officers to each, allowing the members to attend to other duties on alternate days. Eisley and I, however, were in court seven days a week, ten hours a day. To break the routine we agreed to rotate roles as the prosecuting trial judge advocate, and as counsel for the accused.

The military tribunal was set up in the former party room of the school, where three dormitory dining tables had been pushed together. At the center was the most senior officer serving as president of the court-martial, flanked by four junior officers on either side. At the far left, Eisley or I would sit with our client, and on the opposite end whoever that day was the TJA. In the center of the room, a table of stenographers worked, taking down the testimony, while a single straight-backed chair was reserved for the witness. The president of one panel was Lieutenant Colonel Harry Klike, a bluff little prewar noncom who'd risen through the Quartermaster Corps and was determined to exhibit the cultivation he believed appropriate for an officer and gentleman. Each day's session ended with Klike officiously announcing, "The court-martial stands adjourned until zero eight hundred tomorrow, when we will reconvene to dispense with justice." No one, as I recall, had the heart to correct him.

We proceeded with dispatch and often finished two or even three cases in a day. In need of a break when court adjourned, Eisley and I often strolled down the rue Gambetta to the magnificent Place Stanislas, with its ornate state buildings and elaborate gates tipped in gold. At a cafe on the square we sipped cognac and eyed the good women of the town, with their wedgies and upswept hairdos. Tony, married but at full liberty three thousand miles away, praised the imagination of French women and their rugged lovemaking style. I listened without comment, while the patron tried to shoo the French kids who appeared beside our table with cupped hands, all of them the master of at least one line of English: "Some gum, chum?"

Out on the avenue, long military columns passed, coming from or going to the front. The hardest-hit units on the way back passed with little expression, grimy, embittered hangdog men, on whom the wages of war were posted like a sign. Cordons of ambulances sometimes raced through, carrying the wounded to the local field hospital. But the replacement troops headed for battle made the most unsettling sight. A hush often came over the streets while the soldiers stared down at us from the trucks. In their faces you could see their desperation and anger about the cruel lottery that left us secure and them facing mortal danger. At those moments, I often found myself thinking uneasily about the way the Third Army's successes were described around headquarters using the word 'we.'

Eventually, Tony and I would begin preparing for the coming day. When the crimes involved attacks on local residents we would go out to jointly interview the witnesses. With the benefit of my high-school French, I read well and could understand, but spoke with more difficulty. Nonetheless, I had improved considerably in my two months on the Continent, and allowing for the grace of hand gestures, we could usually make our way through these meetings without a translator.

The MP who drove us most days, Staff Sergeant Gideon Bidwell, was called Biddy, a shortened version of the nickname Iddy Biddy he'd been awarded by the usual boot-camp smart alecks. He was as wide at the shoulder as a bus seat and at least six foot two, with curly black hair and a pink face holding a broad nose and green eyes. Bidwell was highly competent, but in a cheerless way. He was one of those enlisted men who realize that they are the true Army, whose jobs consist of winning the war at the same time that they keep the officers from making fools of themselves. He hauled the gear, and drove the jeep, and turned the map so I had it going in the right direction, but with a sullen air that made him somewhat unapproachable. When he had picked me up in Cherbourg where I landed, I recognized the sounds of Georgia in his speech, after my time at Fort Benning, but in response to my questions, he said only that his folks had left Georgia several years ago. He remained generally closemouthed about himself, not outwardly insubordinate, but with a sour look tending to indicate he didn't care much for anyone. I sensed that sooner or later we were going to clash.

One evening, we stopped at the stockade so I could interview my client for the next day's proceedings. Biddy was with me as we entered the doubled-wire perimeter, where three long lines of pup tents were erected in abnormally tight formation. When my client shuffled out of the guardhouse in his ankle irons and manacles, Biddy buried a heavy groan in his chest.

"Why they always colored?" he asked himself, but loud enough for me to hear. Enough of Georgia seemed to have come North with Bidwell that I preferred not to hear his answer. I gave him a bit of a look, at which he stiffened, but he had the good sense to turn away.

Oddly, Biddy's remark provoked me to ponder his question, albeit from another angle. Given my sympathies for the French families who appeared so often as the victims in our courtrooms, it had not even struck me much at first that many of the soldiers being sentenced to long terms in disciplinary barracks were colored. Yet Biddy was right, at least about the pattern, and the next time I found myself alone with Colonel Maples, I asked why he thought Negroes appeared so frequently among the troops we prosecuted.

"Negroes?" Maples looked at me sharply. "What in the world are you suggesting, Dubin? There are plenty in the stockade who are white." There surely were. Lots of soldiers had ended up in the Army only because a sentencing judge had given them that option rather than prison. Men who were strong-arm robbers and drug fiends at home did not always change their stripes, even on the battlefield. "Do you doubt these boys are guilty?"

In most of the cases I handled, the soldiers were sober by the time I saw them and entered abashed guilty pleas. And the crimes with which they were charged were seldom minor. A few days ago, I had been the prosecutor of a colored soldier who literally knocked the door down at a girl's house, when she refused him; he'd had his way with her only after beating both her parents brutally. It puzzled me that the colored troops had generally maintained such good order in England, but were losing discipline on the Continent.

"They're guilty, sir, no question. But thinking about it, I've found myself wondering, sir, if we're as understanding of the colored troops."

I did not need to mention any particular incidents, because that week we had evaluated the case of a decorated officer who'd been on the front since D-Day. As he'd watched a line of German prisoners marching past, he'd suddenly raised his carbine and begun shooting, killing three and wounding four others. His sole explanation was, "I didn't like the way they were looking at me." Colonel Maples had decided that we would seek a sentence of only three years.

"These Negro boys aren't in combat, Dubin, not for the most part. We can't treat them as we do the men who've been through that." I could have pointed out that the colored battalions weren't generally given the option, but I felt I had gone far enough. "It's liquor and women, Dubin," the Colonel added. "You're a smart man to stay clear of liquor and women.), I could tell my questions had troubled the Colonel, and I wasn't surprised two days later when he called me into his office. It was the former quarters of the school prefect, a room of tall antique cabinets in mellow oak.

"Listen, Dubin, I don't know how to say this, so I'll just come out with it. About your remarks to me the other day? You'd best be careful with that sort of thing, man. You don't want people to think you're the wrong kind of Jew. Is that too plain?"

"Of course not." In truth, I received the Colonel's remark with the usual clotted feelings references to my heritage inevitably provoked. My parents were Socialists who disparaged religious practice. Thus for me, the principal meaning of being a Jew was as something people reliably held against me, a barrier to overcome. I had labored my whole life to believe in a land of equals where everyone deserved to be greeted by only one label--American.

The Army did not always appear to see it that way. I was a week into basic training before I found out that the 'H' on my dog tags meant 'Hebrew,' which irritated me no end since the Italians and Irish were not branded with an 'I.' But the armed forces were awash in bias. The enlisted men could not talk to one another without epithets. Spic, Polack, dago, Mick, cracker, hick, Okie, mackerel-snapper. Everybody got it. Not to mention the coloreds and the Orientals, whom the Army preferred not even to let in. The JAG Department's officers, however, were primarily well-bred Episcopalians and Presbyterians with excellent manners who did not engage in crude insults. Colonel Maples had gone out of his way to make clear he harbored no prejudice, once saying to me that when we got to Berlin, he planned to march up to the Reichstag with the word 'Jude' written on his helmet. But his remark now was a reminder that my colleagues' silence about my ancestry did not mean any of them had forgotten it.

A few days later, the Colonel again asked to see me.

"Perhaps you need a break from these courts-martial day in and day out," he said. "Quite a grind, isn't it?"

Given what the soldiers at the front put up with, I would never have taken the liberty to complain, but the Colonel was right. There was not much about my daily activities that would lift the spirits, sending boys who'd come here to risk their lives for their country to a military prison instead. But the Colonel had a plan to give all of us a breather. Eisley would switch places for a couple of weeks with Major Haggerty, the Deputy Staff Judge Advocate, who had been reviewing convictions and providing legal advice as the law member on one of the panels. As for me, I was to conduct a Rule 35 investigation, looking into the potential court-martial of an officer.

"There's a bit of a problem on the General staff. The Brits have a word: lerfuffle.' Lord, I miss the Brits. The way they speak the language! Fellows made me howl several times a day. But that's what there is, a kerfuffle. I assume you've heard of Roland Teedle." General Teedle was a virtual legend, often said to be Patton's favorite among the brigadier generals. His i8th Armored Division had been at the forefront of the charge across France. "Teedle's gotten himself into a state of high dudgeon about some OSS major who's been operating on his flank. How much do you know about the OSS, Dubin?"

Not much more than I'd read in the paper. "Spies and commandos," I said.

"That's about right," said the Colonel. "And certainly true of this particular fellow. Major Robert Martin. Sort of an expatriate. Fought in Spain for the Republicans. Was living in Paris when the Nazis overran it. OSS recruited him, apparently, and he's done quite well. He's been on the Continent since sometime in 1942. Ran an Operational Group behind German lines--a collection of Allied spies and French resistance forces who sabotaged Nazi operations. After D-Day, he and his people were placed under Teedle's command. They derailed supply trains, ambushed German scouts, gave the Nazis fits while the i8th was bearing down on them."

I said that Martin sounded brave.

"Damn brave," said Maples. "No doubt of that. A hero, frankly. He's won the Distinguished Service Cross. And the Silver Star twice. And that doesn't count the ribbons de Gaulle has pinned on his chest."

"Jesus," I said before I could think.

The Colonel nodded solemnly during the brief silence, one that often fell among soldiers when they faced the evidence of another man's courage. We all had the same thought then: Could I do that?

"But you see," the Colonel said, "it's one of those devilish ironies. Probably what's led to Martin's troubles. He's been a lone wolf too long, really. He has no fear. Not just of the enemy. But of his own command. The Army is not a place for individualists." I could tell that the Colonel had spent time thinking about this case. He smoothed the edges of his broad mustache before he continued. "I don't have the details. That's your job. But Teedle claims that Martin's defied his orders. Several times now. Says Martin is just sitting out in some chateau leading the life of Riley and thumbing his nose. Apparently there's a girl involved."

The Colonel paused then, presumably reconsidering his frequent reminders that women and warriors were a bad mix.

"At any rate," he said, "there's to be a Rule thirty-five investigation. Follow the manual. Interview Martin. Interview the General. Talk to the witnesses. Do formal examinations. Prepare a report. And be diplomatic. Formally, a junior officer shouldn't be interviewing his superiors. I'm trusting you, David, not to ruffle feathers. Remember, you act in my name.,, "Yes, sir."

"G-i is hoping that this Major Martin will see the light when he recognizes that matters are turning serious. An actual court-martial would be tragic, frankly. Teedle and this fellow Martin--both are very fine soldiers, Dubin. General Patton hates that kind of catfight. Bring Martin to his senses, if you can. But watch yourself. Don't forget that at the end of the day, Roland's the one who's going to have Patton's ear."

The Colonel came around his desk to put a hand on my shoulder, and with it I felt the weight of his avuncular affection for me.

"I thought you'd enjoy this break, David. Get you a little closer to the front. Something's bound to start happening there again any day. I know you'd like that. And there may not be much more chance. Word is that Monty's bet Ike a fiver that the war here will be over before the New Year. Now that would make a fine Christmas present for all of us, wouldn't it?"

He was beaming until something froze his features, the realization, I suspect, that Christmas meant far more to him than to me. But I answered, "Yes, sir," in my most enthusiastic manner and issued a brisk salute before going off to find out whatever I needed to about Major Robert Martin.

Chapter 3.

DAVID: THE GENERAL

The 18th Armored Division had made camp about twenty-five miles north and east of Nancy, not far from Arracourt, where they were enjoying a period of rest and recovery. When Biddy and I showed up at the motor pool for a jeep to proceed to our interview with General Teedle, we were told that because of severe supply discipline with gasoline, we would have to squeeze in four boys from the 134th Infantry who'd missed their convoy. The 134th was relieving troops on the XII Corps front and these soldiers, who'd already seen their share of combat, made glum traveling companions. A private sitting behind me, a boy named Duck from Kentucky, struck up a few verses of "Mairzy Doats," until his buddies finally became spirited about one thing--that Duck should shut the hell up.

The air remained sodden, and approaching the front the bleakness went beyond the weather, clinging to the soldiers trudging down the roads. The signs of the recent battles were all about. The earth was scorched and rutted, and the picturesque French farmhouses, with their thatched roofs that made them look like something out of "Hansel and Gretel," were mostly in ruins. Even the ones that had fared relatively well were usually open to the top, looking like a man without his hat. Timbers lay strewn on the ground and often all that remained of a structure that had been home to a family for decades, even centuries, was the whitewashed chimney or a lone wall. The debris had been bulldozed to the side of the road, but every now and then there were disturbing tokens of the civilian casualties, a decapitated doll, wounded like its human counterparts, or a coat without a sleeve.

Given the conditions of the roads, it took us several hours to reach the i8th. They had spread out across the drier ground on the downslopes of several vast bean and hay fields. Having dealt with the claims for the land our troops trampled in England, I could only imagine the joy of the French farmer who would now get compensation for the use of land on which his crops were already drowned.

The i8th Armored Division had been the heroes of every newsreel we'd seen for months, the troops who'd dashed across France and were going to chase Hitler into some hole in Berlin and shoot a mortar down it for good riddance. There was a bold air here and loud voices after having survived the front. While Patton waited for fuel, ordnance, and rations, he had ordered many of the infantry divisions into intensive training, but for the i8th, with its tanks and mobile artillery, the strict conservation of gasoline left them with little to do each day but clean their weapons and write long letters home.

Crossing the camp with our packs, looking for Teedle's HQ, Biddy and I drew resentful stares. Our uniforms were still fresh, not grease-stained or torn, and our helmets lacked the mottled camouflage nets handed out for combat. Once or twice we passed soldiers who made a chicken squawk behind us, but Biddy's sheer size was enough to stifle most of the insults I was used to hearing tossed down from the troop convoys that passed through Nancy.

Rather than commandeer a house in town for himself, as other generals might have done, Teedle had remained with his men in a large tent that served combat-style as both his billet and headquarters. The heavy blackout flaps had been raised in daytime. Inside, a board floor had been installed in sections, and there were several desks, two of them face-to-face, where a couple of corporals were pounding away at Remingtons. Another, larger desk was unoccupied beside a frame cot which was certainly the General's. Two footlockers were stacked there with a kerosene lamp atop them for nighttime reading.

I approached the first of the two corporals, who was working with a pencil clenched between his teeth, and gave my name and unit. He was a very thin fellow with a wry look and he began to rise. I said, 'At ease," but he tossed off a quick salute from his seat.

"Corporal Billy Bonner, Paragraph Trooper in the Armchair Division."

"Oh, isn't that cute?" said the second corporal, without looking up from his work. "Bonner's going back to burlesque when the war is over." Bonner addressed the other corporal as 'Frank,' and told him to shut up. They bickered for a moment.

"Well, then just don't talk to me at all," Frank concluded. His voice was high and he gave his head a dramatic toss. I exchanged a look with Biddy, who had remained at the tent opening. No need to ask why that one wasn't in combat.

In frustration, Bonner arose and limped toward Biddy, waving me along. Bonner proved chummy enough that I felt free to ask about his leg. He'd been shot at Anzio, he said, and had opted to become a clerk rather than go home. The reward for his dedication, he said, was working beside Frank. "Welcome to the Army," he added. Listening to him, I remembered a sergeant in basic training who'd warned me not to tell anybody I could type, good advice as Bonner could now attest.

The Corporal had just finished explaining that Teedle was due back momentarily from an inspection of forward installations, when he caught sight of the General and scurried to his desk like a schoolchild.

I snapped to attention as Teedle stormed past us. A private from the Signal Corps was trailing him, hauling the body of a huge radio telephone while Teedle screamed into the handset, alternately venting at the poor fellow at the other end and at the signal man, whenever the sound faded.

"Tell him that I have two battalions down to one ration a day. No, damn it. Two battalions, one ration. One ration. An army moves on its stomach. Ask him if he's heard that one. If the Nazis kill these boys it's one thing, but I'll be damned before I see their country starve them to death." I'd heard that the frontline troops were often hungry. In the officers' mess in Nancy, food was plentiful--canned goods, pastries with honey, tea, Nescafe. Midday meals were often huge. The meat and poultry, requisitioned from the locals, swam in heavy gravies.

Teedle handed the phone roughly to the signal man and dismissed him, then plunged to his seat, looking unhappily at the papers stacked on his desk.

He had yet to remove his helmet. The General barked suddenly at Bonner.

"Are you telling me that Halley Maples sent that pup to deal with Martin?" As far as I had noticed, Teedle hadn't even looked at me.

Bonner turned my way and said with his subversive smile, "The General will see you now."

When I'd first heard Teedle's name, I had expected some round little fellow who'd look at home in a Technicolor musical movie like The Wizard of Oz. But the General gave every impression of being a soldier, the kind who would have been happy to be referred to as a rough-and-ready son of a bitch. Teedle was a big red-faced man, with a chest as round as a cock robin's, . And tiny pale eyes set off starkly within lids that appeared to have been rubbed raw, probably from exhaustion or perhaps an allergic condition, or even, I suppose, tears.

In front of the General's desk I came to attention again, gave name, rank, and unit, and explained that with his permission, I would like to take a statement from him, in connection with the Rule 35 regarding Martin. Teedle studied me throughout.

"Where'd you go to college, Dubin?"

"Easton."

"Uh-huh. I'm from Kansas. None of those fancy-ass schools in Kansas. How about law school?"

"Easton. If I may, General, I went on scholarship, sir."

"Oh, I see. A smart guy. Is that what you're telling me?"

Not to suggest that, sir."

"Well, if you gad about telling everybody you meet first thing how bright you are, you're not very smart at all, are you, Lieutenant?"

I didn't answer. He had me pinned and that was the point anyway. Teedle was plainly another of those commanders who wanted his troops to know he was the match of any of them. He took a second to set his helmet on his desk. His hair, what little was left of it, was somewhere between red and blond, and stood up on his head like stray wires. He'd found his canteen and screwed off the cap. Even at a distance of six feet, I could smell the whiskey. He took a good solid slug.

"All right, so what do I need to tell you about Martin?"

"As much as you can, sir."

"Oh, I won't do that. You'll start thinking Martin's a wonderful fellow. You're likely to think he's a wonderful fellow anyway. I'll tell you something right now, Dubin. You're going to like Robert Martin a good deal better than you like me. He's charming, a sweet talker. And brave. Martin may be the bravest son of a bitch in the European theater. You seen combat, Dubin?"

"No, sir. I'd like to."

"Is that so?" He smirked and pointedly lowered his line of sight to the JAG Department insignia on the collar of my tunic. "Well, if you ever find yourself in the middle of a battlefield, Lieutenant, what you'll see around you is a bunch of fellows scared shitless, as they should be, and one or two sons of bitches jumping up and down and acting as if the bullets can't touch them. They get hit sooner or later, believe me, but it takes a hell of a lot longer than you'd think. Martin's one of those. Thinks he's invincible. I don't like that either. A soldier who's not afraid to die is a danger to everybody."

"Is that the problem, sir? The root of it?"

"Hardly. The problem, if you want to call it that, is that the fucking son of a bitch won't follow orders. He's gone off on several operations without my say-so, even though he's supposed, to be under my command. Successful operations, too, I don't dispute that, sabotaging train lines, mostly, so those Nazi pricks can't get troops and supplies where we're heading. He's a whiz at that. Every railway worker in France seems to bow at Martin's feet.

"But twice I've sent troops to the wrong position because I didn't know he'd already blown the lines. I've had to hold off artillery because I got late word that Martin and his men turned up in the target area, without any prior communication to me. And I've slowed deployments several times because Martin was off screwing with the Germans, instead of finishing the recons he'd been assigned. And it's not just discipline that concerns me, Lieutenant, although I believe in discipline as much as any other general you've ever met. What makes my hemorrhoids ache is that men were in danger each time, men who didn't need to be killed. Not that day. Not in that place. And I take that personally."

My face must have reflected some doubt about his choice of words.

"You heard me, Lieutenant," he said, and stood behind his desk. "It's personal. I get up every goddamn morning knowing that young men under my command are going to die--even now with nothing special happening, I'm losing thirty men a day, and I'll carry their souls with me as long as I live, Dubin. I mean that. While I last on this globe, there will always be some shadow of grief. I wanted this star so bad I probably would have killed someone to get it, but I didn't realize that the dead stick with generals this way. I grieved for plenty who died under my command at lower ranks, but that burden departed, Dubin, and it doesn't now, and when I've asked others, all they can say is that this is just how it is."

He paused to see how I was taking this. His face, especially his large, lumpy nose, had gained even more color, and he helped himself to another snort from his canteen.

"That, in a few words, is what I don't like about Robert Martin. I've been a soldier my whole life, Dubin, I know how the game is played, and I realize I'd get nowhere with the General staff complaining about Martin's heroics. But I passed the word to OSS that he's outlived his usefulness here. And eventually they agreed. Told me I should order him back to London. And now we get the melodrama. Because Martin won't go.

The prick won't go. I've given him his orders in writing three times, and he's sitting there like he's on vacation. I've tolerated the bastard when I had to, Dubin, but I've got him dead to rights now, and I'm not taking any more of his crap. All understood? So type that up, just the last part there, and I'll sign it."

"I thought there was something to do with a woman, sir. That's what Colonel Maples indicated."

Teedle laughed suddenly. He was so relentlessly intense that I nearly jumped at the sound. I would have bet the man in front of me laughed at nothing.

"Oh, that," he said. "I'll tell you the truth, Dubin. I don't give a dry turd about the woman. Patton's G-I cares--they want the same rules for all personnel, naturally. Before D-Day, Martin commanded an Operational Group here on the Continent--Sidewinder, or some such name. They were spying and making the Nazis' lives difficult with little hit-and-run operations. He must have had thirty men under him, a few Allied spies who'd come ashore like him, but most of his command were members of the French and Belgian underground. The Frenchmen have all run home, the spoils of war and whatnot. I suppose the bastards are going to fight each other about who runs the show here.

"There are still a few odd ducks remaining with Martin, probably because they're not welcome anywhere else. And one of them's a woman, a beautiful little bit from what I hear. He recruited her in Marseilles a few years ago, and she's been beside him, helping with a lot of the ruses OSS is always employing. These OSS women have been damned effective, Dubin. Don't sell them short. You know the fucking Krauts, they think they're gentlemen, so they're never as suspicious of females as they should be. This girl claims to be a nurse sometimes. You can go just about anywhere in a nurse's uniform in the middle of a war.

"Now it's true, she's probably twenty years younger than Martin, and by all accounts he's been giving her the old one-two and maybe he's even in love with her or thinks he is. That's the theory in London, I suspect, about why he won't go back. My theory is that it just jollies him up to grind his finger in my eye.

"But as for the fact that he's stuck on the girl, or fighting beside his bed partner, they may not like that in the General staff, think it's bad for discipline when our troops catch on, but I couldn't care less. Soldiers always want sex. Do you know why?"

Because they were away from women, I answered. Their wives, their girlfriends.

"You think they'd hop their wives the way these boys go diving after these French girls? I don't. They think they're going to die, Dubin. The reasonable ones anyway. That's what I think. And if you get the time in combat you say you'd like, you'll be thinking that way, too. And when you feel death imminent, Dubin, you don't want to be alone. Isolation is the next stage, in the casket. You desire nothing more than contact with life, and life in its purest form. You want sex. And God. These boys want God, too. They want to fuck. And they want to pray. That's what a soldier wishes for when he doesn't wish he was back home. Forgive me for lecturing, but you're new to all of this and you're better off getting used to the truth.

"So I don't care if Martin's fucking this girl, or some calf he encounters on the road. We have a few troops doing that, too, I get the farmers in here complaining. Fuck who you want to as far as I'm concerned. But follow orders. So write up what I need to sign and then tell that son of a bitch to get the hell out of my area or he'll have an escort to the disciplinary barracks. That's all."

Yet again, Teedle lifted the canteen. It was his fifth or sixth drink. He should have been loaded, but his fury burned at such intensity that the liquor was probably vaporized on the way down his throat. I had no idea exactly what to think of General Teedle, especially the eagerness with which he'd invited me to dislike him. He seemed to have been one of those boys picked on all his childhood who grew up determined to be tougher than the bullies, yet who never overcame the hurt of being the odd man out. But his brusque honesty impressed me, especially since it even seemed to go so far as acknowledging his own unhappiness.

After seeing General Teedle, it made more sense not to return to Nancy, but rather to set out for Major Martin, who was nearby. The General directed his G-i to assist us, and the personnel officer, Lieutenant Colonel Brunson, briefed us further and ordered maps. When we were done, we returned to the motor pool, where the sergeant in charge informed us that they'd dispatched our jeep and couldn't spare another until morning.

Biddy caught on immediately. "Burnin our gas, not theirs," he murmured to me. He was right, of course, but we still weren't going to get a vehicle. Instead we went off separately to seek billeting. The captain of the headquarters company found me a cot in a four-man tent and showed me where dinner would be in the officers' mess, formed from two squad tents. The meal, when it was served, was hot B ration reduced to a greenish mash, but no one around here was complaining, since even headquarters company, which usually wangled the best, was down to only two meals a day. One of my most embarrassing little secrets was that I had found during training that I did not mind field rations, even what came in tins in the B and C: meat and vegetables, meat and beans, meat and spaghetti. The typical lament was that it looked like dog food and tasted like it, too. But much of it struck me as exotic. My parents, for all their lack of formal religious practice, had never brought pork into our home. Pork and beans was not my particular favorite, but I regarded ham as a delicacy, so much so that even Spam was a pleasure.

Afterward, I wandered toward the staging area where the enlisted men were encamped to make sure Bidwell had found a place. There was a virtual tent city there encompassing several battalions. It had its own eye appeal. The ranks of pup tents were in perfect lines stretching out hundreds of yards, with the latrine slit trenches dug at regular intervals, all of it illuminated by the brightness of the fires the cooks were still tending. I walked along, exchanging salutes with the enlisted men who took notice of me, trying to find Division Headquarters Company, with whom Biddy was said to be quartered.

Now and then, when I asked directions, I'd also see if I could swap novels with some of the men. I had stuffed books in every pocket of my fatigues before we left Nancy, eager for new reading material. I sometimes felt I had read every novel in the city. I had been holding on to two of the most popular titles, Lost Horizon and Sanctuary, by William Faulkner, the latter much in demand because of Popeye's foul activities with a corncob. My hope was for more Faulkner, which I was lucky enough to find in the hands of a redheaded private from Texas. I also got a novel by James Gould Cozzens in exchange for The Last Citadel.

It would be hard to say how important the few minutes I spent reading each night were to me. Thoughts of my parents, of my brother and sister, or of Grace were fraught with emotion. I could not surrender to the comfort of imagining myself among them again, to the security of the life I had left, because I knew I could go mad with yearning and with regret that I'd been so determined to do my duty. But the chance to feel myself in another locale, neither here nor home, if only for a few minutes, was a special reprieve, an essential sign that life would again have the richness and nuance it holds in times of peace.

I never found Bidwell. But after I made my last literary trade, I bumped into Billy Bonner. He'd been tippling and was holding a cognac bottle, most of the contents gone now.

"Trying to become acquainted with native customs, First Lieutenant," Bonner said. "French might be onto something with this stuff." He hefted the bottle and missed his mouth at first. Half the off-duty soldiers I encountered in France were pie-eyed, fueled by stores of wine and newer treats like Pernod and Benedictine they'd never seen in the States. Not that the officers were any better. Those of us at headquarters were still receiving the garrison ration of liquor every month, and even officers in foxholes were supposed to get a quart of scotch, a pint of gin, two bottles of champagne, and a bottle of brandy, although it was rarely delivered, given the strains on the supply chain. I traded away most of what arrived. Even at Easton College, where Prohibition had made drinking an adventure, I tended to abstain, never caring much for liquor's loose feeling.

"You seem fairly deep into your exploration of local culture, Bonner."

"Yes, sir. Just so long as I can roll out in the morning.

Bonner saw the pocket book in my hand and we exchanged thoughts about novels for a moment. I promised to trade him Light in August on our next visit. I had turned away when Bonner said clearly behind me, "They've got you investigating the wrong one, Lieutenant."

I revolved to stare at him.

"Teedle and Martin?" he said. "You're investigating the wrong one. At least, as I see it. You oughta ask around."

"Then I'll start by asking you, Corporal. Tell me what that remark means."

Bonner peered at length into the mouth of the bottle, as if the answer were in there.

"It probably means I've had too much of this," he said after quite some time. He gave me that thin, conspiratorial smile and without waiting for a response slipped off into the dark camp.