sergeant rowland cole got hold of eight bullets from an execution of spies by firing squad carried out under martial law. He had dug them out one by one with his jackknife.

—What did you want to do with the bullets, Sergeant?

—A memento. Collect them.

—Sell them later, at home in Philadelphia?

—Maybe. But maybe just keep them.

—How did you know that these were spies?

—They had been shot. I asked.

—What was so interesting about the eight bullets? What did you find so interesting about them, after they’d been used?

—That they came from the people who had really been shot.

—Were you interested in the men who were shot?

—No, only in the question that maybe they were shot unjustly.

—But that’s got nothing to do with the bullets you scraped out of the bodies.

—I think it does.

—Why?

—If the spies were innocent, then these were instruments of murder. Something like that has got to be kept safe.

—And it didn’t occur to you, that what you were doing constitutes theft, looting from the dead on the battlefield?

—I did think of the dead. And that I would like to take something from them with me. If I had taken their shoes or something from their pockets, that would have been looting. The bullets didn’t belong to them.

—They belonged to the firing squad?

—The firing squad had thrown them away.

—So they belonged in the bodies of the dead.

—But they didn’t belong to the dead they didn’t want the bullets.

The court-martial took a long time to reach a decision. Cole’s defense counsel, a lieutenant who had studied law at Stanford for three semesters, insisted that the firing squad had deliberately given up ownership of the bullets, but that the condemned had not accepted this gift, either because they had already been dead before the bullet reached its final resting place in their body, or because, in general, experience shows that no one voluntarily allows himself to be shot.

It was known that through his family the law student had connections in the Pentagon and the Senate. Thus the court did not want to add a second Draconian judgment to the arbitrary verdict which had preceded the execution of the alleged “spies.” Yes, said the looter Cole after the main hearing, he had only taken the bullets in order to underpin his protest against such unjust shootings. He had taken them as a form of evidence. Cole’s division had meanwhile advanced further into the center of Germany, in the direction of Magdeburg. There was no time to waste; so the accused was acquitted and, supplied with provisions, put in a jeep, which was to bring him to a spa in Brittany.