Cronley, taking his canvas suitcase with him, got out of the airplane and stood on the road. The puddle jumper turned, taxied back down the road, turned again, and immediately roared toward him and took off.
As soon as that aircraft was airborne, the L-4 with First Sergeant Tiny Dunwiddie aboard came in and landed. It came to a stop, its engine still turning, near Cronley.
Dunwiddie squeezed himself out of the airplane, and it immediately turned and taxied back down the road and turned again and took off.
“Did those clowns salute you, Lieutenant?” Tiny asked.
Cronley shook his head.
“Salute Lieutenant Cronley!” Dunwiddie ordered. “And say, ‘Welcome to Grünau, sir,’ to your new commanding officer.”
The sergeants standing by the pedestal-mounted Brownings saluted, and all four soldiers repeated, “Welcome to Grünau, sir.”
Cronley returned their salutes.
“You,” First Sergeant Dunwiddie said, pointing to the sergeant at the Browning in the nearest jeep, “get our luggage and put it and you in the other jeep.” He next pointed to the driver. “And you get in the back of this one.”
The driver hurriedly complied with his orders.
Dunwiddie waved Cronley into the passenger seat of the jeep, got behind the wheel, and headed down the road.
On hearing that they were headed to “the Grünau Monastery,” Cronley’s mind filled with images of ancient heavy stone monasteries, most of which he’d acquired from motion pictures starring Errol Flynn in tights.
What he found, instead, was a large tent city surrounded by two lines of barbed wire enclosing what he guessed to be at least five, maybe more, acres. Hung on the wire, spaced at twenty-five-yard intervals, were signs reading EINGANG VERBOTEN!
In the center of the tent city was a masonry building. An American flag flew from a pole in front of it. After first one and then a second gate in the barbed wire was pulled aside by heavily armed and uniformly huge black soldiers wearing “tanker” jackets with the shoulder insignia of the Second Armored Division, Dunwiddie drove them to the building.
As they did so, Cronley saw that there were a large number of Germans in uniforms stripped of insignia. They were either marching purposely between the tents, or just milling around. There also was a scattering of obviously German women and children.
“This is the command post, Lieutenant,” Dunwiddie announced. “We’re home, so to speak, in what used to be the prior’s house when this place was a Carthusian monastery.”
He gestured for Cronley to get out of the jeep and go into the building.
“This is not what I expected,” Cronley announced.
“This is what you get,” Dunwiddie said, and then smiled and asked, “What did you expect, monks walking around in black robes with their heads bowed in prayer?”
He bowed his head and put the tips of his fingers together.
“Yeah. I guess,” Cronley admitted, chuckling.
“That hasn’t happened here for a long time,” Dunwiddie said. “From what I’ve been able to find out, they shut down the monastery here in 1802 during the Secularization.”
“During the what?”
“The secular state—in those days, the kings, dukes, et cetera—took the property of the church away from the bishops and abbots, et cetera.”
“What are you, Sergeant, some kind of historian?”
“In a way. I was majoring in history at Norwich,” Dunwiddie said.
“You went to Norwich?”
Dunwiddie nodded, and then asked: “So why am I not a commissioned officer and gentleman, such as yourself?”
Tiny chuckled when he saw the uncomfortable look on Cronley’s face, and then went on: “Why don’t I answer that while we’re having a little nip to cut the dust of the trail?”
—