At night when sleep comes slowly I often think of “the Colonel and the Corporal.”
I never met them and I have forgotten their names. Even if I did remember them I wouldn’t tell. Nothing would be gained. But I would like to pass on to you their story as it was told to me months ago in Germany.
They were an inseparable team—“the Colonel and the Corporal.” That’s the way everyone who knew about them spoke of them—“the Colonel and the Corporal.” Few people who asked about the Colonel ever failed to add “and how’s that Corporal of his, too?”
Close friendships between officers and men are unusual in Army life but not exactly rare. Differences in rank ordinarily make too high a hurdle for such friendships because of the grinding social distinctions drawn in military circles by an inflexible caste system which is as old as war.
But the friendship of “the Colonel and the Corporal” was a battlefield friendship, not a parlor friendship. And it was built on a mutual trust and loyalty in time of danger that had been tested and found steel-true in more than one combat.
They belonged to an outfit of picked men who were assigned the most perilous of missions. Tasks which required brains. A sense of battle time, and stoutness of heart as well as muscle.
The Colonel was an organizer of high ability, a sensitive, skilled planner. He set up the initial operation for his outfit in Normandy but when the time came to go into action he insisted on going in with them too, although that hadn’t been in the plan. His superiors hadn’t wanted to risk him.
“I want to go along with you, sir,” said the Corporal. And that’s how the friendship began. The Colonel and the Corporal went in together. At the very start they found themselves in desperate straits, and before they broke through encircling Germans with their men, the Corporal’s carbine had saved the Colonel’s life. And the Colonel’s .45 automatic had preserved the Corporal.
There were tight spots and close calls after that as battle followed battle. The Colonel came through them all, with the Corporal a loyal shadow at his side. At night the Corporal stayed up to help the Colonel work out details of the next day’s troop movements. It was a friendship never put into words. Each understood the other.
Other soldiers often kidded the Corporal for his almost dog-like devotion to his officer. He never resented it.
“I would go with him anywhere,” he always answered. “Anywhere he wanted.”
Nobody guessed as the war wore on to its close that the Colonel was cracking. The days of strain in the field and the midnight hours of planning had worn him down. Yet he seemed as light and easy as ever. He never gave the usual signs—temper outbursts, nervous irritability over small matters.
So it came as a shock to everyone—particularly the Corporal—when the Colonel put a gun to his temple one night and pulled the trigger. He had been organizing a major battle action, and in the middle of it he knew he hadn’t the strength to go on. And rather than try to bluff and risk his men’s lives when he no longer had confidence in his own power to win through, he chose this way out. It wasn’t cowardice in any sense. No one felt it was anyway.
The Corporal was stunned. A few days later he got another blow. A letter came from his girl back home telling him as gently as she could she had fallen in love with someone else during his absence. The letter was to tell him she was getting married. She hoped he wouldn’t blame her too much.
The Corporal wasn’t the kind who gets hurt easily. But here were two props gone from his life. He caught himself going blindly with the letter to the Colonel’s tent to ask his advice. But the Colonel was dead. Buried. And it wasn’t the same with the new colonel.
For a long time the Corporal thought it over all alone, keeping it all to himself. Then he acted. He took the carbine that had saved his Colonel. He cleaned and polished it and put on a clean uniform. He put the barrel of the carbine to his head and reached his hand down for the trigger like a lover, and so he joined his old Colonel.
They were two men I never met. It seems strange to me that, lying at night now half a world away, I think often when sleep comes slowly of “the Colonel and the Corporal,” knit in the endless camaraderie of the grave.
★★★
Soon after the gray-blue tide of Nazis retreated from one village on the Belgian-German border it was entered and occupied by an American outfit. Buildings in liveable condition were scarce and one lieutenant was quartered in the home of a local family.
He considered himself in great luck when he discovered that the family consisted only of Papa, Mama and their very pretty daughter. She was dark-haired, with dark smoldering eyes that passed over the lieutenant without lingering.
He was annoyed when fellow officers in bleaker billets joshed him on his good fortune.
“It isn’t the way you think it is at all,” he complained. “She won’t give me a second look.”
Perhaps piqued by her indifference—perhaps because any pretty girl looks desirable to a soldier in a strange cold country—he fell violently in love with her.
Now an American soldier at that time had two great weapons in his armory of romance. One was his personal charm. The other was—food. In practical Belgium, where war had emptied thousands of larders, many a marriage blossomed in families where American soldiers first won good will by presenting the doting Belgian parents with a side of bacon and several cases of ten-in-one rations appropriated by “midnight requisition” from an army kitchen.
The lieutenant was a proud man. He decided to win his disdainful girl by personal charm. His vanity was forgiveable. He was handsome and tall and had always done well with the girls back home.
He brought the girl flowers. She took them with an audible sniff, and it was her mother who put them into vases with a worried frown. He tried to go skiing with her, and she slipped away from him to go to the forest ski run with other village girls.
One night when the family was gathered in the tiny parlor she sat at the piano and played Lizst’s “Liebestraum” and Schubert’s “Serenade.” She struck the piano sharply and he thought she was playing such tender selections much too loudly, but they encouraged him. He walked over and sat down by her side on the bass end of the piano. She turned her shoulder to him coldly and played the soprano end only. Rebuffed, he moved away. The mother glanced up uneasily. The father buried himself in the second volume of a French pictorial history of the First World War with an harrassed look.
The next day the lieutenant noticed the family had hardly anything on the table for dinner. Realizing personal charm had failed to win him entry, he swallowed his gold bar pride—nobody is as touchy and proud as a second lieutenant—and decided to try the second alternative, food.
He brought cans of orange juice and packages of cigarets and pipe tobacco. Papa smiled. He brought a sack of coffee, a carton of tea bags, some sugar, some flour. Mama thawed visibly. He brought a boxful of potatoes, two great frozen chunks of meat. The girl turned him a rainbow face.
His romance was on the upgrade. With each gift of food his girl gave him happy looks. The lieutenant began thinking of engagement rings, of marriage.
“Do you think if I married her now I could get her and her family back to the States, where they would be safe until the war is over?” he asked his friends.
One evening at dusk he met her on the stairs as he was going to his room. Her father and mother had gone a few streets away to visit a family in which there had been a death. As she passed he reached out and drew her to him and kissed her for the first time. Her face looked troubled as she pulled away, and then she told him lightly in French to come down in an hour and they would sing and play the piano together.
He waited in his room a few minutes, then grew restless. He took off his shoes and put on his slippers and tried to read. He couldn’t. He slammed the book shut and walked down to the first floor. It was empty in the growing darkness.
Then he heard his girl laugh. It was the contented laugh of one in love. It came faintly from below. He walked out into the kitchen. There were fresh bread scraps on the table. He heard the laugh again.
Uncertainly he opened the cellar door, and her laugh welled out again clear and strong. He heard her say tenderly in a tone she had never used with him—“Ma Cheri.” And then as the hairs began to stand up stiffly on the back of his neck he heard a man’s voice reply softly in guttural German.
Immediately the lieutenant understood. He had been quartered in a border family of German sympathizers. The girl had fallen in love with a German soldier and hidden him in her cellar. It was for him she played love selections on the piano so strongly—so he could hear them in his hideaway. And she had smiled fawningly on the lieutenant only to get her secret lover food.
The lieutenant hesitated only a moment.
He drew his flashlight with his left hand and with his right hand pulled out his automatic pistol.
And with sick heart and no sense of victory the lieutenant moved soundlessly down the cellar stairs to take his rival prisoner.
★★★
Hal Boyle, Pulitzer Prize winner for distinguished correspondence, was up front with the army in Africa, Italy, France and Germany… after a home leave he went on to the Pacific and Tokyo… he was born in Kansas City, Feb. 21, 1911… loved writing from kindergarten days… idolized Richard Harding Davis… realized his ambition to be a war correspondent… he now is on a roving assignment with the Marines in Japan.