Hanging on

If he was achieving his lesser goal, he was also losing the chance to attain the greater one. He might eventually get every man to sign his contract-but by then he would have wasted so much time that they could never build the village before the Germans arrived…
        Nevertheless, he was the first in line for breakfast at the mess hall, because he wanted to have a front row seat for the morning's carefully planned drama. "Looks delicious," Kelly told Sergeant Tuttle when the cook ladled hot cereal into his mess tin.
        Tuttle leaned across the steaming kettle. "I don't like doing this," he whispered.
        "We need Maurice's help," Kelly whispered back at him. "Without it, we all die. These bastards have to be made to sign."
        "I know," Tuttle said, looking back at the line of impatient men.
        "Two more came across. Kasabian and Pike. You can treat them like you normally would," Kelly said.
        "But the others-"
        "You know what to do with the others."
        Kelly got the rest of his breakfast and sat down at one of the crude tables. He toyed with his cereal, but his attention was riveted on the men in the breakfast line who had not cooperated in the matter of the credit contracts.
        Private Armento was the tenth man in line, first of the troublemakers to reach Tuttle. The cook looked over Armento's shoulder, silently pleading with Kelly. The major turned his thumbs down. Reluctantly, Tuttle "misjudged" the position of Armento's plate and poured a ladle of hot cereal all over his hands.
        Quite a lot of commotion followed.
        Then, Private Aaron Lange, another holdout who was immediately behind Armento, got the hot-cereal treatment when he held out his tin. When he and Armento finished dancing around the room and blowing on their reddened fingers, they came over to Major Kelly and signed their credit contracts.
        "I'm glad you men have finally seen where your best interests lie," Kelly told them, putting their contracts with the others that had been signed.
        All morning, one by one, the holdouts began to see the same light which Armento and Lange had seen. Private Garnett put his signature on his contract after he tripped and fell with his second full mess tin. He had also tripped and fallen with the first. Private John Flounders signed up when, after waiting in the serving line for twenty minutes, he discovered that, curiously, Sergeant Tuttle ran out of hot cereal just before Flounders was to be given his. When the morning's work assignments were read and Private Paul Akers learned he had been assigned to that detail which would shovel out the old latrine ditch and carry the stinking contents into the woods, Akers came around to Kelly's way of thinking. Private Vinney, who was also assigned to the latrine job, lasted for less than five minutes before throwing away his shovel and signing up. And three other men stayed with it until they were accidentally bumped into that vile trench by two workmen who were trying to jostle past them with a heavy length of pine planking…
        At 9:15 that same morning, Kelly went over to the hospital bunker and waved the completed forms at Lily Kain. "When they ask for their tents back, you can tell them we found a crate of bandage materials that we'd overlooked. Tell them we won't have to cut up their tents after all."
        "They signed?" she asked.
        "All but Slade."
        "But will Maurice be willing to overlook Slade?"
        "Sure," Kelly said. "If I sign a second confession and guarantee to pay Slade's two hundred bucks, why should Maurice be upset?"
        "You'd do that?" she asked.
        "Do I have any choice?"
        "I guess not." She brightened, smiled, puffed out her wonderful chest. "Well! Now that this is settled, everything should run pretty smoothly."
        "No," Kelly said. "This is only a reprieve. We have Maurice's help now, but that won't matter. Something worse will come up. We'll be delayed a few more minutes or hours. We can never get this finished in time. We're all doomed."
        In the next two hours, the race against time was begun in earnest. All over camp, projects were launched. Thanks to Angelli's ability to cross all language barriers, the Americans and the French worked fairly well together. Ditch-like foundations for the walls of the fake buildings were marked and cut. A few outhouses, were framed and erected. In the midst of all this,