Secret Warriors (Men at War 2)

"If by that you're asking if you are expected to be there, Dick, the answer is yes, you are."

"Yes, Ma' am," Canidy said.

"I'll look forward to it, Ma' am." She walked toward the door and had just about reached it when Canidy said, softly but loud enough for her to hear, "Nice tail, wouldn't you say, Colonel?" Cynthia spun around.

Canidy was stroking the tail feathers of a cast-bronze pheasant sitting on a bookcase shelf. He smiled at her benignly. "Something else, Cynthia?" he asked innocently. She turned around again and marched out of the room. Canidy looked at Colonel Stevens, his eyes mischievous.

"Sometimes, if I'm lucky," he said, "I can get her to swear. You'd be surprised at the words that refined young woman has in her vocabulary." should have marched into announced my arrival for Although he wasn't sure why, Stevens heard himself laugh. He wondered what was behind the exchange. "She implied that you'll be at dinner," Canidy said. "Yes, I will be," Stevens said. "Does that mean you're one of us?" Yes, I suppose I am," Stevens said." A very new one, however. "I would ask what they have you doing," Canidy said, "and what the dinner is all about, but if I do that, tight-lipped little men will suddenly leap out of the woodwork, crying, "Shame on you, you broke the rules,' and confiscate the booze." Stevens laughed again. When he'd seen Bill Donovan, Donovan had told him not to be put off by Canidy's irreverent attitude, and that he was where it counted a very good man. Stevens had also been told both about Canidy's exploits in the air and that he'd completed a secret mission in Morocco. This irreverent young man, Stevens thought, is a veteran.

When the Second World War had started, Stevens himself had been a civilian. And his somewhat sad judgment at the time was that he would not serve at all. Even if they scraped him from the bottom of the barrel and put him back in uniform, they'd make him a troop morale officer, or some such, at a remote training camp in Arkansas or South Dakota. He had made inquiries in 1940, and it had been made quite clear to him that he was persona non grata at the War Department. In 1937, after sixteen years of commissioned service following his graduation from the Military Academy at West Point with the class of 1921, Edmund T. Stevens resigned from the Army. He had risen only, in a decade and a half, to captain in the Coast Artillery Corps. From the beginning, his wife never liked the service, and there had been constant pressure from her, from her family, and from his own family for him to give it up. Clearly he was not destined for high rank or important command. The pay was very low, and the environment not right for the children. Subtly and bluntly they put it to him that he was no longer a child; and, as it says in the Bible, it was time for him "to put away childish things."

Bitterly disappointed when he did not find his name on the majors list in the spring of 1937, he submitted his resignation. He took his family from Fort Bliss, Texas, to New York, where a place was quickly found for him in his wife's father's business, the importing of European canned goods and wines. By the fall of 1938, by dint of hard work, and, he joked, because his wife had inherited controlling interest in the firm, he had been elected vice president for European operations and sent to London. The Stevenses had a splendid year before the war started. The boys loved their school despite the absurd hats and customs, which left Debbie and him alone together in London on what was almost a second honeymoon. On their first, there hadn't been much they could afford on his second lieutenant's pay. When war came to England, they sadly boarded the Queen Mary for New York. Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Edmund T. Stevens ran into William J. Donovan in the bar at the Baltusrol Country Club in New Jersey. Donovan asked him how he planned to spend the war, and Stevens, somewhat stiffly, told Donovan that he thought he could qualify for a commission in the Quartermaster Corps. "You're going back in the Army?" Donovan asked, surprised, "If they'll have me," Stevens confessed.

"It's been made rather clear to me that I have let the side down. I don't think I could get a commission in artillery again, but perhaps, if there's a war, maybe in the Quartermaster Corps. I now know a good deal about how to store canned goods."

"Don't be surprised if I get in touch," Donovan said, and then something happened to interrup

t the conversation. By the time war came, Stevens managed to get a reserve commission as a captain, QMC.

This was based more on his canned-goods experience than on his West Point diploma and previous service, but there had been no telegram ordering Captain Stevens of the Quartermaster Corps (Reserve) to arrange his affairs so that he could enter upon extended active service. Disappointed but not really surprised, he put military service from his mind, forgot the Bahusrol Golf Club conversation he had had with Colonel Wild Bill Donovan, and went back to the family business. And then one day, wearing a look of utter confusion on her face, his secretary put her head in the door and said there was an Army officer on the telephone, asking for Colonel Stevens.

"This is Edmund Stevens," he said when he had picked up the telephone.

"Hold on, please, Colonel, for Colonel Donovan," a woman on the line said. "Ed," Donovan asked without preliminaries, "how soon can you get down here? I need you right now." Despite a surprisingly emotional reaction-Pavlovian drooling at the sound of a military trumpet, he told himself-Stevens could not, as Donovan wanted, catch the next Congressional Limited for Washington. Stevens wasn't able to get to Washington until eleven-thirty the next morning His wife was furious: He was simply too old to go running off the moment Bill Donovan blew his bugle. He considered his wife's arguments on the ride to Washington.

They were reinforced by his uncomfortable awareness that he was wearing a uniform that no longer fit. It was worse in Washington. As he walked across the waiting room at Union Station, a military policeman stopped him and informed him that the leather Sam Browne belt he was wearing had been proscribed for more than a year. He was sorry, he said, but he had his orders, and would have to issue Stevens a citation for being out of uniform. He then asked for Stevens's ID card, and of course Stevens didn't have one. Stevens had resigned himself to arrest for impersonating an officer when a man walked up, asked if he was Edmund T.

Stevens, and then flashed some sort of identity card. The MP backed off immediately. "I'm Chief Ellis, Colonel," the man said.

"Captain Doug lass sent me to fetch you. I must have missed you on the platform."

"It's Captain Stevens," Stevens insisted. "Yes, Sir, whatever you say, Sir," Ellis said. He then took Stevens to the dining room in the Ward man Park Hotel, where Colonel Donovan and Captain Peter Doug lass were about to take luncheon. That afternoon was the first Stevens heard of the Office of Strategic Services. Over broiled scrod Donovan told him that he wanted Stevens to go to London for that organization and serve as sort of secretary-treasurer of the office he had established there.

What was needed over there right away, Donovan said, was someone with enough military experience to deal with the military from whom OSS was drawing ninety percent of its logistical support, as well as someone familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the "natives."

Since Stevens obviously met both criteria, Donovan felt certain he would accept the job. Stevens of course agreed. "Buy yourself some silver leaves, Colonel," Donovan said, handing him a War Department general order, four consecutive paragraphs of which promoted Captain Stevens, Quartermaster Corps, U.S. Army Reserve, to lieutenant colonel; ordered Lieutenant Colonel Stevens to extended active duty for the duration of the war plus six months; detailed him to the General Staff Corps for duty with the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and further reassigned him to the Office of Strategic Services. Stevens spent the next several days in briefing, most of which he didn't understand, and, honor-bound, told Captain Peter Doug lass about it. "Once you get over there, it will all fall in place," Doug lass had said.

"And tomorrow night there will be a working dinner, and things should be a lot clearer after that. If you'd like, you could take the day off and go home. Just be back here by, say, half past five tomorrow afternoon."

"I will have some sort of leave before I actually go to London, won't l?"

"I don't think that will be possible right now," Doug lass said.

"But you'll be coming back and forth, I'm sure, and we'll work something out then."

His wife was furious and heartsick when he announced he was leaving for overseas practically immediately. But his private reaction-though he was careful not to show it-was exultation, as if he had been pardoned from prison.

As Canidy made himself-Stevens politely declined-a second drink, a muscular young first lieutenant in Class-A uniform-pink trousers and green blouse and glossy jump boots-arrived, soon after followed by a somewhat better-looking young man also wearing pinks and greens, but with no insignia except for parachutist's wings on the breast. "What's he dressed for, Martin?" Canidy asked. "His commission came through, Sir," Martin said. "Where's his insignia?"

"He hasn't been sworn in yet, Sir," Martin said.

"I thought it best to wait for that before pinning on his insignia."

"if I didn't know better, Martin," Canidy said, "I would mistake you for a West Pointer." Martin, Colonel Stevens thought, isn't sure if he has been complimented or insulted. And Major Canidy, come to think of it, certainly wouldn't have made that crack if he suspected that this middle-aged retread warrior marched in the Long Gray Line. "Do those little silver wings mean what I think they do?" Canidy asked.

"That you have willingly been jumping out of airplanes?"

"Why don't you lay off me, Dick?" the handsome young man snapped.