Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“There’s a point to it, sir,” Whitter said. “Naturally, Docker’s men took their cue from him. They made jokes about Korbick, not to his face but behind his back. And one night, sir, they took out their spite against him in a way you wouldn’t think white men were capable of.” He fixed a righteous stare on Docker. “While he was sitting in the tin barrel he took baths in, I hate to say this in front of the lady here, they dumped a helmetful of latrine dirt over Sergeant Korbick’s head. Ruined a fine man’s army career, turned him into the kind of person you see and laugh at in some nuthouse. And all that because he was putting the blocks to that Jew-boy, Gelnick, trying to make it plain to him that the things he got away with where he came from just didn’t sit right with the people running this man’s army...”

There was a mindless anger in Whitter’s voice now, a gleam of sweat like oil on his forehead. He paused to take a deep breath but before he could say another word Major Karsh removed his glasses and looked evenly at him, the rictus smile back. And as Whitter opened and closed his mouth soundlessly, once again glancing nervously toward Docker, Karsh sighed, dropped his pencil on the table and said, “The board has expressed its appreciation for your earlier testimony, lieutenant.”

He rapped gently on the table with his knuckles. “We’ll recess now, gentlemen, and reconvene at fourteen hundred hours.”

The weather had turned colder. A feathery snow was dissolving on the surface of the river. Docker sat on an iron bench under bare poplar trees and looked through the tracery of a bridge toward buildings that had been battered into rubble by bombs and rockets.

He smoked a cigarette and thought of Gelnick, the Hogman, with his squinting, suspicious eyes (and what good reasons he had to be suspicious) and the flecks and crumbs of food that frequently ringed his mustache, and he thought of Gelnick’s wife, Doris, whom he had never met or even seen a picture of, and remembered the way Larkin had described her, and the ache (intended or not, you couldn’t tell with Larkin) there had been in the words he had used. Not your all-American cheerleader type, Larkin had said, little, almost thin, but great legs and great black hair and brown eyes that made you think she could be Spanish or something... When he looked away from the river he saw Elspeth Corey walking through a park on the opposite side of the boulevard. He had an impulse to join her but hesitated because he felt it probably wouldn’t be proper under the circumstances... A military convoy pulling 75-millimeter cannons rolled past, and when it was gone, the big tires grinding solidly through the grime of sleet and ice in the street. Docker saw no one in the park, except two old women in black coats gathering fallen twigs under the trees.

When Docker returned to the Hotel Empire an hour later, the double doors to the ballroom were open and the MP corporal was not at his post. Karsh was seated alone at the conference table, glancing through a sheaf of typewritten pages. There were no other papers on the table or on the desk that Sergeant Corey had been using. Everything else was gone, too — note pads, files, coffee cups and even the mason jars that had held sharpened pencils.

Major Karsh observed Docker’s reactions and smiled. “Sit down, lieutenant,” he said. “Have a cigarette, if you like. This is no longer the seat of First Army’s special board of inquiry.” The major glanced around and snapped his fingers. “Like that, the hearings are over and we have only a few last details to check out.”

Docker took off his overcoat, folded it on Sergeant Corey’s desk and sat down facing the major.

“You’re surprised, I’m sure,” Karsh said.

“In addition to that, I’m pretty damn curious.”

“That’s a normal reaction, but the explanation is simple. During our recess I telephoned Colonel Rankin. After we discussed the matter, he agreed with my recommendation to terminate the hearings.”

“Then you and the colonel agreed on a verdict?”

“No, we didn’t,” Karsh said. He took a leather cigarette case and a Zippo lighter from a pocket of his tunic and put them on the table. “There is no verdict, lieutenant. No conclusions or recommendations, not even any educated guesses.”

“Then can I ask you what the hell this charade was all about?”

“Of course, you can. But it was no charade. I can assure you this board of inquiry wasn’t convened for trivial or ulterior reasons. We hoped to get the truth, or a good piece of the truth in regard to Private Jackson Baird. I’ve now decided that isn’t possible. You and I could sit across this table exchanging questions and answers for” — Karsh paused to light a cigarette — “for another week or another month, but we still wouldn’t be any closer to agreeing on the truth of these issues. It’s like that black whiskey your gunner cooked up for Section Eight. Personally, I’d accept your version of what occurred at Utah Beach. But do you think you could convince Lieutenant Whitter of that?”

“I wouldn’t bother—”

“Then you see my point.”

“Yes, but I don’t think you see mine, major. I wouldn’t bother because it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference one way or the other, that whiskey is no more important than the sears we filed off our rifles, or the helmet of crap dumped over Korbick’s head. The important question from the start was whether or not Jackson Baird deserted his post under fire. And now you’ve called the hearings off because you say there’s no answer to it.”

Karsh frowned down at his Zippo lighter, which was decorated on each side with tiny replicas of the First Army shoulder patch — the letter A in black on a field of gray.

“It’s a difficult question, lieutenant.” He blew a fat smoke ring then, and broke its symmetry with a flick of his finger.

“However, I didn’t say I couldn’t answer it. What I suggested was that we probably couldn’t find an answer we could agree on. If you want my opinion, based on the boy’s bloodlines, I would say no to the question. The Baird family didn’t put its name in the history books and on grave markers across the country’s bloodiest battlefields by breeding cowards. But we’re not talking about something as uncomplicated as studs and mares and bloodlines—”

“No, I presume we are still talking about your gray areas,” Docker said.

“You can disparage that legal and moral no-man’s-land if you want, but in all warfare, and that includes business and politics and every other form of human competition I know about, there are very few blacks and whites. Docker. Which is why the world needs judges and juries who can hear both sides of an argument and establish some ground rules for compromise.”

Docker didn’t entirely disagree, but wasn’t sure he needed the lecture.

Major Karsh blew another smoke ring, seemed pleased by its completeness, and poked a finger through it. “Practically everything we touched on in these hearings had a couple of different shadings to it. We know the Baird youngster soldiered well in your section, and that he fought and died, not just honorably but even heroically. That’s a series of events we can call facts. As for the rest of it... who’s to say? Matter of fact, who’s to say about your friend Larkin?...”

Larkin? What the hell, Docker thought. He suspected Karsh had been talking, at least partly, to justify himself for the way he’d grilled him. It had been pretty clear to him, after a while, that the hearing was designed to reach one conclusion — the exoneration of Baird — regardless of what he or anybody else said, and Karsh seemed to need to make this right — for himself as well as Docker...