One of the rooms in the old building had been converted to a mess hall, and at one end of it was a well-stocked bar.
“This is the ex-officers’ mess,” Dunwiddie explained, “membership limited to former majors and better of the Abwehr. No Nazis or SS—which is usually the same thing—allowed. I think we can sneak you in, despite that gold bar. The rules are also waived for me and a couple of my senior non-coms.”
He turned to the row of bottles. “Bourbon or scotch?”
“Bourbon, please,” Cronley said.
Dunwiddie made the drinks and handed one to Cronley.
“With your permission, Lieutenant, I will introduce you to the German officers at the evening meal, which is served at eighteen hundred. Most of them are good guys, typical officers. Of course, they can’t figure me out. Not only am I black, but an enlisted man, and when Major Wallace isn’t here—and he’s not often here—I’m der Führer.”
“I can’t figure you out either,” Jimmy confessed. “Or the way things are run. Or, for that matter, what we’re doing here.”
“Colonel Mattingly said I was to bring you up to speed on that. So where to start?”
“Norwich?” Cronley suggested.
Norwich University, in Northfield, Vermont, was the oldest of the small group of private military colleges—The Citadel, Virginia Military Institute, and a very few others—producing officers for the armed forces. The graduates of one generally knew all about their brother schools.
“Why not?” Dunwiddie said. “There I was, in the spring of 1944, in beautiful Vermont, finishing my third year at the Norwich School for Boys, a major in the Corps of Cadets, when I had an epiphany. . . .”
“You were a junior at Norwich in 1944?” Cronley asked in surprise.
Dunwiddie nodded.
“Then you can’t be much older than me. I’m class of ’45 at A&M.”
“I would have been in the class of ’45. I became legally able to drink this stuff about nine months ago,” Tiny said, holding up his glass.
“You look a hell of a lot older than twenty-one,” Jimmy said.
“Maybe it’s my complexion. May I continue?”
“Please.”
“As I said, I had an epiphany. I realized that unless I got out of my snazzy Norwich uniform and into an olive drab one, I was going to be one of those very pathetic members of the officer corps who got their commissions a week after they called the war off. So I enlisted.”
“You dropped out of Norwich to enlist?” Cronley asked incredulously.
“As a corporal, because of my Norwich training. It wasn’t quite as selfless as it sounds. I had heard there was a shortage of second lieutenants in ETO—the European Theater of Operations—and that they were meeting the shortage by running a six-week officer candidate school. The plan was that I would get myself sent to Europe right out of basic training, go to OCS, and be a second lieutenant commanding a tank platoon in combat while my classmates at Norwich were still waiting to graduate.”
“Jesus!”
“But, as you may have heard at A&M, the best-laid plans of mice and men sometimes go agley. Sure enough, just as soon as I arrived at the Second Armored Replacement Company, an officer—a light colonel by the name of Mattingly—showed up to take me to the commanding general . . .”
“Why?”
“. . . who was Major General Isaac Davis White, Norwich ’23, a classmate of my father’s. I suspect Pop wrote him I was coming. General White suggested—and when I. D. White suggests something, by comparison it makes Moses’s graven-on-stone Ten Commandments seem like a grocery list written on toilet paper—that the thing to do was send me to the 203rd Tank Destroyer Battalion.
“White officers, black troops. There, in a couple of months, I could pick up a little experience, maybe make sergeant, or even staff sergeant, and he would then feel justified in directly commissioning me. All OCS was, General White said, was the ETO version of Rook year at Norwich, and I’d already gone through that.
“Five weeks later, I was acting first sergeant of Charley Company of the 203rd.”
“How did that happen?”
“When the 203rd started taking out German armor, the Germans shot back. They were very good at that. Charley lost a lot of good people, including most of our officers and non-coms. Mattingly showed up at my hospital bed—”
“You were wounded?”