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"Take him out and shoot him," Speirs replied, not looking up.
"Sir," Mercier called out, "sir, please, sir, it's me, Sergeant Mercier."
"Mercier, get out of that silly uniform," Speirs ordered.
Shortly thereafter, he called the company together. He said he noted that the men who were relatively new to the company were celebrating out of proportion to their contribution to the victory. He wanted it toned down. No more shooting off of weapons for example, and especially not of German weapons, which made everyone jumpy when they went off.
But trying to stop the celebration was like trying to stop the tide. Not even Speirs could resist. Back in company HQ, he and Sergeant Carson sat in the orderly room, popping champagne bottles, throwing the empties out the French doors. Soon there was a pile of empties outside. Speirs and Carson went to the balcony for some fresh air. They looked at the bottles.
"Are you any good with that .45 pistol?" Speirs asked. Carson said he was.
"Let's see you take the neck off one of those bottles." Carson aimed, fired, and shattered a bottle. Speirs took his turn with the same results; soon they were banging away.
Sergeant Talbert came storming in, red-faced, ready to shoot the offenders of the company order. He saw Carson first. "Carson, I'll have your ass for this," he shouted. Just as he started explaining that Captain Speirs had ordered no shooting, Speirs stepped out from behind Carson, a smoking .45 in his hand.
After a few seconds of silence, Speirs spoke: "I'm sorry, Sergeant. I caused this. I forgot my own order."
Webster, Luz, and O'Keefe had meanwhile found their way to Goering's wine cellar. They were late, the other Easy men had already been there and Winters had withdrawn the guard, throwing the cellar open to anyone. As Webster, Luz, and O'Keefe drove to the site in Luz's Volkswagen, they saw a steady stream of German trucks, Volkswagens, even armored cars winding up the road to the officers' club.
The last contingent of E Company men had a wooden box with them, which they stuffed with bottles. "I was shocked to find that most of the champagne was new and mediocre," Webster remarked. "Here was no Napoleon brandy and the champagne had been bottled in the late 1930s. I was disappointed in Hitler."
What Webster failed to take into account was that Nixon had preceded him, and Nixon was a connoisseur of fine liquor, and he had picked out five truckloads for himself and the other officers long before Webster, also a self-styled connoisseur, arrived. "On this occasion," an amused Winters commented, "the Yale man [Nixon] pulled his rank on the Harvard boy."
Outside the club, Webster, Luz, and O'Keefe ran into a group of French soldiers, drinking, shouting "La guerre est finis! La guerre est finis!" shooting their machine-pistols into the sky, slapping the Americans on the back, asking for cigarettes, offering drinks.
The Americans gave away cigarettes, shook hands all around, and took off, driving back to their apartment as fast as possible. And there, Webster wrote, "began a party unequalled. Popping corks, spilling champagne, breaking bottles. Raucous laughter, ringing shouts, stuttering, lisping sentences. Have anusher glash. Here, goddammit, lemme pop that cork鈥攊sh my turn. Ishn thish wunnerful? Shugalug. Filler up. Where is Hitler? We gotta thank Hitler, the shun uwa bish. Bershteshgaden, I love you.