Sloan Wilson - Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

Well, Tom thought as he entered the office of the Schanenhauser Foundation and sat down at his desk, he had played no games back in 1943, when he had met the boy in the leather jacket. There had been no time for games. Tom and Hank Mahoney had been alone — the whole company had been busted up, it had been snafu from the beginning — situation normal, all fouled up, only they hadn’t used the word “fouled” in those days; no word had been anywhere near bad enough to express the way they felt. They had jumped at the wrong time at the wrong place, and a quarter of the company had been killed by rifle and machine-gun fire before they hit the ground. That had been no time to have sad thoughts about eighteen-year-old German boys. They had jumped and been jumped, by a whole damn division, it had seemed like, and Tom had had just one idea: I’m going to get out of this alive and don’t try to stop me. No, he hadn’t thought that; it had been different from that. He had thought: I’m going to try to get out of this, I’m going to try; I’m not going to die for lack of trying.

Everything had been confusion. They had jumped from the planes just at nightfall, about a hundred men dropped behind the German lines to destroy a bridge. They had been supposed to land in a field near a copse of woods without opposition and proceed to the bridge under cover of darkness, but it hadn’t been like that at all. The Germans had been waiting; they had sent up flares and turned searchlights on the men dangling from the glistening white parachutes in the air. And those who survived had panicked as soon as they hit the ground. They had been green troops, many of them, boys who had never been on a combat jump before, and as soon as they saw that things weren’t going according to plan, they panicked and went running across the field toward the trees, and the Germans had really had it that time; they had simply lowered their antiaircraft guns and had a real turkey shoot right there at the edge of the forest. The paratroopers had been trained to crawl like snakes at a time like that, to hide like lizards on the ground, but most of them had forgotten, and had dashed toward the woods, running scared, big as snowmen in the searchlights and the flares. It hadn’t been necessary for a man to be very bright to be a soldier; all he had had to do was to remember a few basic rules, the most obvious one being to crawl when under fire, to slide like a snake, to live like a lizard, but that time the green troops had panicked and most of them, instead of living like lizards, had died like men.

Tom had gathered twelve men around him, lying on their bellies in the snow and the mud. He and Hank Mahoney and ten other men who kept their heads had crawled in a wide circle and made the woods, all right, at about ten o’clock in the evening. Going into the woods, they had crawled single file, one man thirty feet behind the other, leaving a track like a great snake through the snow and the mud, with Tom as lead man, fifty feet ahead of the others, because the woods might be mined, and it would just be foolish to let a mine kill more than one man. They had been wet to the skin long before they reached the woods, and it had been cold, very cold, as a half moon climbed above the naked trees. Tom and Hank Mahoney and the other ten men had sat huddled together in the woods for a few minutes, until Tom, thinking of the great snake’s trail they had left behind, had ordered them to disperse and try to get back to their own lines by different routes, traveling in pairs because it would be just foolishness to let the Germans catch them all at once.

So they had split up, and Tom had never seen most of the men again, nor heard what happened to them. Mahoney had gone with him. The two of them had walked as fast as they could through the woods, planning to circle home eventually, but hoping soon to find dry clothes, or an abandoned hut, or someway to escape the cold.

Shortly before dawn they had reached the edge of the woods and, shivering violently, had hidden behind an ice-glazed rock and looked at what they finally made out to be a German tank depot, with orderly rows of barracks topped by chimneys out of which wisps of smoke had been curling, black and velvety against the frosty sky. It had been then that they heard a man cough only a few hundred yards away from them, and they had crawled back into the trees and along the edge of the woods, keeping under cover, until they saw two sentries in leather, sheepskin-lined jackets, the dry collars turned snugly up around their ears. The younger and slighter of the two sentries had been the one doing the coughing. He had been standing about thirty feet outside the woods, looking down at his feet and coughing. With his right hand he had been negligently holding his rifle, and with his left he had been clutching his chest. The other sentry had been standing about twenty feet from him, his rifle cradled in one arm, watching his companion cough, and looking worried.

It had not been necessary for Tom and Hank Mahoney to talk. They had crawled toward the sentries over the hard crust of old snow in the dim light of the setting moon. It hadn’t been difficult. They had been able to crawl within ten feet of the sentries before jumping them silently — it hadn’t been difficult at all, and only one small cry had been made, not a very loud sound, the sort of noise a man might make in his sleep, not the sort of cry to alarm the whole camp. Tom hadn’t even had to use his knife at first — he had choked the sentry to prevent him from shouting, and when he had taken his hands away, the boy had seemed dead. Tom and Mahoney had stripped the bodies of the warm clothes, and the sheepskin collars had felt delicious against their own cold ears and necks. Before daylight, they had effaced all signs of the struggle and dragged the bodies into the woods behind a fallen tree in the hope that the Germans would think for a little while that their sentries had just gone over the hill. They had been about to leave the bodies lying stretched in the snow when the sentry Tom had choked groaned and moved one arm.

“I made sure of mine with my knife,” Hank had said. “Better finish yours off, or he’ll come to and rouse the whole camp.”

Tom had taken out his sheath knife and had hesitated. The young German sentry had lain at his feet, helpless as a patient on an operating table.

“Hurry up,” Hank had said nervously. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Tom had knelt beside the sentry. He had not thought it would be difficult, but the tendons of the boy’s neck had proved tough, and suddenly the sentry had started to sit up. In a rage Tom had plunged the knife repeatedly into his throat, ramming it home with all his strength until he had almost severed the head from the body.

“Come on, that’s enough,” Hank had said in a shocked voice. “Let’s get out of here.”

Trembling, Tom had stood up and followed Hank out of the woods. They had skirted the tank depot, until on the other side of the gully they found a burned-out tank which apparently had been left there to await shipment back to Germany as scrap. They had climbed into the wrecked tank and huddled in the cinders until nightfall.

In the pockets of his newly acquired leather jacket Tom had found chocolate and cough drops and a wallet with no money, and an identification card with a picture of a thin, serious-looking youth eighteen years old named Hans Engelhart, and there had also been a letter written in a fine feminine script on thin, blue, slightly scented paper, but the letter had been in German, and Tom hadn’t been able to read it. On the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope had been printed what obviously was a return address. The absurd idea of writing the sender of the letter had flashed into Tom’s mind. What would he say? “This morning I killed your boy, and I would like to send my condolences. He was in the wrong army, but he seemed like a nice boy, and I’m sorry it had to happen like this.” Impulsively he had torn the letter into small bits, together with its envelope, and, trying to forget the feeling of the plunging knife in his hand, had lain in the ashes to sleep.