There were other floggings but darn few. Hendrick was the only man in our regiment to be flogged by sentence of court-martial; the others were administrative punishment, like mine, and for lashes it was necessary to go all the way up to the Regimental Commander—which a subordinate commander finds distasteful, to put it faintly. Even then, Major Malloy was much more likely to kick the man out, "Undesirable Discharge," than to have the whipping post erected. In a way, an administrative flogging is the mildest sort of a compliment; it means that your superiors think that there is a faint possibility that you just might have the character eventually to make a soldier and a citizen, unlikely as it seems at the moment.
I was the only one to get the maximum administrative punishment; none of the others got more than three lashes. Nobody else came as close as I did to putting on civilian clothes but still squeaked by. This is a social distinction of sorts. I don't recommend it.
But we had another case, much worse than mine or Ted Hendrick's -- a really sick-making one. Once they erected gallows.
Now, look, get this straight. This case didn't really have anything to do with the Army. The crime didn't take place at Camp Currie and the placement officer who accepted this boy for M. I. should turn in his suit.
He deserted, only two days after we arrived at Currie. Ridiculous, of course, but nothing about the case made sense -- why didn't he resign? Desertion, naturally, is one of the "thirty-one crash landings" but the Army doesn't invoke the death penalty for it unless there are special circumstances, such as "in the face of the enemy" or something else that turns it from a highly informal way of resigning into something that can't be ignored.
The Army makes no effort to find deserters and bring them back. This makes the hardest kind of sense. We're all volunteers; we're M. I. because we want to be, we're proud to be M. I. and the M. I. is proud of us. If a man doesn't feel that way about it, from his callused feet to his hairy ears, I don't want him on my flank when trouble starts. If I buy a piece of it, I want men around me who will pick me up because they're M. I. and I'm M. I. and my skin means as much to them as their own. I don't want any ersatz soldiers, dragging their tails and ducking out when the party gets rough. It's a whole lot safer to have a blank file on your flank than to have an alleged soldier who is nursing the "conscript" syndrome. So if they run, let ‘em run; it's a waste of time and money to fetch them back.
Of course most of them do come back, though it may take them years— in which case the Army tiredly lets them have their fifty lashes instead of hanging them, and turns them loose. I suppose it must wear on a man's nerves to be a fugitive when everybody else is either a citizen or a legal resident, even when the police aren't trying to find him. "The wicked flee when no man pursueth." The temptation to turn yourself in, take your lumps, and breathe easily again must get to be overpowering.
But this boy didn't turn himself in. He was gone four months and I doubt if his own company remembered him, since he had been with them only a couple of days; he was probably just a name without a face, the "Dillinger, N. L." who had to be reported, day after day, as absent without leave on the morning muster.
Then he killed a baby girl.
He was tried and convicted by a local tribunal but identity check showed that he was an undischarged soldier; the Department had to be notified and our commanding general at once intervened. He was returned to us, since military law and jurisdiction take precedence over civil code.
Why did the general bother? Why didn't he let the local sheriff do the job?
In order to "teach us a lesson"?
Not at all. I'm quite sure that our general did not think that any of his boys needed to be nauseated in order not to kill any baby girls. By now I believe that he would have spared us the sight—had it been possible.
We did learn a lesson, though nobody mentioned it at the time and it is one that takes a long time to sink in until it becomes second nature:
The M. I. take care of their own—no matter what.
Dillinger belonged to us, he was still on our rolls. Even though we didn't want him, even though we should never have had him, even though we would have been happy to disclaim him, he was a member of our regiment. We couldn't brush him off and let a sheriff a thousand miles away handle it. If it has to be done, a man -- a real man -- shoots his own dog himself; he doesn't hire a proxy who may bungle it.
The regimental records said that Dillinger was ours, so taking care of him was our duty.
