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 interrupt 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 Baltusrol 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