Robert Adams - A Man Called Milo Morai

The week stretched into two weeks, then a third, but Jethro assured Milo that he was keeping in regular touch with the battalion as well as regiment and division and that their presence was not crucial to anyone’s well-being. Milo never asked what Jethro was doing in Washington, and Jethro himself seldom volunteered much information, only advising that Milo make the most of his current period of relaxation as there would be no time or opportunity for such soon.

It had been Martine who had steered Milo, early on, to a set of treatises on varying aspects of military science— tactics, strategy, management of military units in the attack, in the defense, on the march, proper utilization of intelligence and a plethora of other subjects; most of these were written in French, but a couple were in German, as well.

“Milo Moray, I am terribly worried for our Jethro,” she had confided to him. “At times, he seems foolishly overconfident in his abilities to command successfully so large numbers of the soldiers, lacking but the barest of training and educations in such matters. Milo Moray, my father is a graduate of Saint-Cyr, as too was his father and my late elder brother, and so I know—even if my husband will not admit to knowledge—just what is required to make a competent commander of a man. With the sole exceptions of the excessively rare military geniuses, years of education, training and experience are necessary.

“Now, my husband is well educated, but it was not a military education he enjoyed, nor is his a true military mind, for even I can consistently best him at chess. He means well, he is very conscientious, as we both know, but in a life-or-death situation that often is not enough, and I have a strong, terrible feeling that he may not come alive back to me from out of this war.

“But I have another deep feeling, too, Milo Moray. That is that you are very possibly one of these near-genius military minds still unsuspected and in hiding. The little Austrian naval officer has known you for long, yes? He has told me that he is of the firm opinion that before you lost your memory, you were at some time a military man, possibly a European cavalry officer, and if true this could account for my intuitions regarding you.

“So, please to read these books, Milo Moray. Even if they do not help you to recall your past, perhaps they will give to you knowledge with which you may help my husband to succeed in his chosen position and return safely to me and to his children.”

Milo never was to know just what Jethro did or said during his three weeks in Washington, but whatever it was, it worked with a vengeance. Upon their return to South Carolina and the unit, things began to move. The slow, sporadic trickles of supplies and equipment became a steady stream and then a veritable flood. Empty slots were quickly filled as missing and badly needed specialists — commissioned, warranted and enlisted — were transferred in from other units, not a few of them from nearly the width of a continent away. Enough men soon were on hand to allow them the freedom to start weeding out the misfits and troublemakers with which they had initially been cursed.

An episode that was to haunt Milo for many years to come occurred on the day that the former battalion supply sergeant, Luigi Moffa, was brought up from the post stockade for sentencing on the multitude of charges of which he stood convicted.

With a clanking of his sets of manacles, the man in the faded, baggy, blue-denim fatigues (with a prominent bull’s-eye painted in white on the back of the shirt) dropped down from the back of the weapons carrier and shuffled awkwardly up the steps into one of the buildings housing battalion headquarters. Milo’s glimpse of the prisoner and his two beefy, well-armed, grim-faced guards showed him a drastic change from the Moffa he first had met. It was not simply the lack of tailored uniforms and patent-leather field shoes, nor was it the loss of at least thirty pounds. It was not even the face that showed still-pinkish scars, fresh bruises and a barely closed cut above one eye. It was the eyes themselves and the general demeanor of the once-arrogant and abusive man—they contained no spark of life or any vitality, Moffa resembled nothing so much as an ambulatory corpse.

Milo sighed and went back to his work. He hated to think of any man being so thoroughly broken, but then reflected that if any man deserved it for his many misdeeds, it was certainly Moffa; that much had come to light during Captain Potter’s very thorough investigations.

He had been back at work for a good quarter hour when the entire building reverberated to a booming pistol shot, followed rapidly by four more, then, after a pause, a man’s scream ended by a fifth shot.

Suddenly, a wild-eyed major in a class-A uniform caked with dirty snow, his face and hands bleeding from a profusion of cuts and gashes, stumbled through the entry of the building.

“The prisoner!” he gasped to no one and everyone. “That Guinea bastard! He heard his sentence, then got a gun away from one of the guards and shot the other one. Then he started after us! I jumped through the window.”

Just then, a soldier came pounding down the long central corridor and was narrowly missed by the pistol ball that tore its splintery way through the closed door of the room in which the board had sat for Moffa’s sentencing.

“Goddam!” swore Milo, then turned to one of the clerks. “Turner, go outside to the other end of the building and tell those fuckers not to try to use the corridor until we can get this fuckin’ mess sorted out.” To another, he saidj “Dubois, you and my driver get the major here up to the regimental surgeon on the double. Those cuts look bad, and he’s bleeding like a stuck pig.”

Before the adjutant, Captain John Saxon, and a bevy of men and officers had tramped through the snow around the safe side of the long building, Milo and a few of his men had conducted a cautious reconnaissance of the distinctly unsafe side to find two officers safe, though gashed and shivering in the bitter cold, each crouched low under one of the two smashed-out windows. A third officer lay in the snow on his face, his head at such an impossible angle to the body that he could not possibly have been alive.-A fourth officer hung backward out of one of the windows; he had a big blue-black mark on his forehead, and that head no longer possessed a back to it.

Working along the sides of the building, as much as possible out of the murderous prisoner’s sight and line of fire, Milo got up to first one, then the other of the two living officers and dragged them back to where other men could take charge of them. He saw no point in risking anyone’s life to retrieve the two dead men, officers or no.

Back in the environs of his office, he rendered John Saxon a report through still-chattering teeth. The old soldier nodded brusquely, then gripped his shoulder. “You done good, Milo, but then, you a Reg’lar.”

“Sargint majer!” he then roared. “Take you some bodies and git ovuh to the arms room and tell Jacoby I said to issue you three Thompsons, a hunnert rounds of ball for each one, a half a dozen smoke grenades and a coupla Mark Two pineapples. Git!”

Milo grasped Saxon’s arm, hard. “John, you can’t just pitch hand grenades into that room. Moffa may not have killed all of them—some could be lying wounded in there still.”

“You got a better ideer, Milo?” demanded the grizzled officer. “Besides just leavin’ the fucker in there till he grows him a long gray beard?”

Milo cudgeled his brain frantically. “John … how about tear gas? That ought to get him out.”

“Where we gonna get any quick, Milo, huh? It ain’t none in the arms room, I can tell you that.”

“Then how about letting me try to talk him out, John?” Milo was shocked to hear himself say the words.