The Young Lions (66 page)

As he climbed over the seat Michael halted and looked back. There was no sign that a city, ruined or unruined, lay over the horizon.

He started the jeep, feeling better to be at the wheel, and they drove slowly without speaking through the yellow afternoon sun towards the American lines.

Half a mile further on they saw troops coming up on both sides of the road, in single file, and they heard a strange, skirling noise. A moment later they saw that it was a battalion of infantry, Scotch-Canadian, each company led by a bagpiper, walking slowly towards a road that led off into wheatfields to the left. Other troops could be seen, just their heads and weapons showing above the wheat, marching slowly down towards the river.

The noise of the bagpipes sounded wild and comic and pathetic in the open, deserted country. Michael drove very slowly towards the approaching troops. They were walking heavily, sweating dark stains into their heavy battledress, loaded down with grenades and bandoliers and boxes of machine-gun ammunition. In front of the first Company, just behind the bagpiper, strode the Commanding Officer, a large, red-faced young Captain, with a swooping red moustache. He carried a small swagger-stick and he stepped out strongly in front of his troops, as though the crying, thin music of the pipes were a joyous march.

The officer grinned when he saw the jeep, and waved his swagger-stick. Michael looked past him to the men. Their faces were strained under the sweat, and no one was smiling. Their battledress and equipment were fresh and neat and Michael knew that these men were going into their first battle. They walked silently, already weary, already overburdened, with a blank, wrenched look on their crimson faces, as though they were listening to something, not to the pipes or to the distant rumble of the guns, or the weary scuffle of their boots on the road, but to some inner debate, deep within them, that reached them thinly and to which they had to pay close attention if they wished to catch its meaning.

But as the jeep came abreast of the officer he grinned widely, a twenty-year-old athlete's, white-toothed grin under the ludicrous and charming moustache, and boomed out, in a voice that could be heard for a hundred yards, although the jeep was only five feet from him, "Lovely day, isn't it?"

"Good luck," Pavone said, in the simple, not over-loud, well-modulated tone of the man who is going back from the fighting and can now control his voice, "good luck to you all, Captain." The Captain waved his stick again, in a jerky, friendly gesture, and the jeep slowly rolled past the rest of the Company, brought up at the rear by the MO, with the red crosses on his helmet, and a young, listening, thoughtful look on his face, and the first-aid kits in his hands.

The music of the bagpipes died down into fragile, gull-like echoes as the Company turned off into the wheatfield and wound deeper and deeper into it, like armed men marching purposefully and regretfully into a rustling, golden sea.

Michael woke up, listening to the growing mutter of the guns. He was depressed. He smelled the damp, loamy odour of the foxhole in which he slept, and the acid, dusty smell of the bivouac dark over his head. He lay rigid, in the complete darkness, too tired to move, warm under the blankets, listening to the sound of guns that was coming closer each moment. The usual air raid, he thought, hating the Germans, every goddamn night.

The sound of the guns was very close now and there was the soft deadly hiss of shrapnel falling near-by and the plump, solid sounds as the steel fragments hit the earth. Michael reached in behind him and got his helmet and put it over his groin. He pulled his barracks bag, which was lying next to him in the hole, stuffed with extra pants, vests and shirts, and rolled it on top of him, on his belly and chest. Then he crossed his arms over his head, covering his face with the warm smell of his flesh and the sweaty smell of the long sleeves of the woollen underwear. Now, he thought, as this nightly routine which he had worked out in the weeks in Normandy was completed, now they can hit me. He had figured out the various parts of himself which were most vulnerable and most precious, and they were protected. If he got hit in the legs or arms it would not be so serious.

He lay there, in the complete darkness, listening to the roaring and whistling above his head. He began to feel cosy and protected in the deep hole in which he slept. The inside of the hole was lined with stiff canvas cut from a crashed glider, and he had put down as a ground cloth a luminescent silk signalling panel that gave an air of Oriental luxury to the neat underground establishment.

Michael wondered what time it was, but he was too tired to try to find his flashlight and look at his watch. From three to five in the morning he was to be on guard duty and he wondered dully whether it was worth while to try to go to sleep again.

The raid went on. The planes must be very low, he thought, they're firing machine-guns at them. He listened to the machineguns and to the patient roar of the planes above. How many air raids had he been in? Twenty? Thirty? The Luftwaffe had tried to kill him thirty times, in a general, impersonal way, and had failed.

He played with the idea of being hit. A nice, eight-inch gash in the fleshy part of the leg. With a nice little fracture of the thigh-bone thrown in. Michael thought of himself hobbling bravely up the ramp of Grand Central Station in New York, fully equipped with Purple Heart, crutches and discharge papers.

The guns stopped outside and the planes droned back towards the German lines. Michael slipped the barracks bag off his chest and rolled the helmet away from his groin. Ah, God, he thought, ah, God, how long it this going to last?

Then the guard he was to relieve poked his head into the tent and pulled Michael's toe under the blankets.

"On your feet, Whitacre," said the guard. "You're going for a walk."

"OK, OK," Michael said, pushing back the blankets. He shivered and hurriedly put on his shoes. He put on his field jacket and picked up his carbine, and, shivering badly, stepped out into the night. It had clouded over and a fine drizzle was falling. Michael reached into the tent and got out his raincoat and put it on. Then he went over to the guard, who was leaning against a jeep, talking to another sentry, and said, "All right, go on back to sleep."

He stood leaning against the jeep, next to the other guard, shivering, feeling the drizzle filtering in under his collar and rolling down his face, peering out into the cold wet darkness, remembering all the women he had thought about during the raid, remembering Margaret, and trying to compose a letter, a letter so moving, so tender and heartbreaking and true and loving, that she would see how much they needed each other and would be waiting for him when he got back to the sorrowful, chaotic world of America after the war.

"Hey, Whitacre," it was the other sentry, Private Leroy Keane, who had already been on duty for an hour, "do you have anything to drink?"

"No," said Michael. He was not fond of Keane, who was garrulous and a scrounger, and who had, to boot, the reputation of being an unlucky man to be with, because the first time he had left camp in Normandy his jeep had been strafed and two of the men in it had been wounded, and one killed, although Keane had not been touched. "Sorry." Michael moved away a little.

"Have you got any aspirin?" Keane asked. "I got a terrible headache."

"Wait a minute." Michael went back to his bivouac and brought back a small tin of aspirin. He gave the tin to Keane. Keane took six of them and tossed them into his mouth. Michael watched, feeling his own mouth curl in distaste.

"Don't you use water?" Michael asked.

"What for?" asked Keane. He was a large, bony man of about thirty, whose older brother had won the Congressional Medal of Honour in the last war, and Keane, trying to live up to the glory of the family, put on a very tough front.

Keane gave Michael the aspirin box. "What a headache," Keane said. "From constipation. I haven't been able to move my bowels for five days."

I haven't heard anybody use that expression, Michael thought, since Fort Dix. He walked slowly beside the line of bivouacs along the edge of the field, hoping Keane wouldn't follow him. But there was the clumsy scuffle of Keane's boots in the grass beside him and Michael knew there was no escaping the man.

"I used to have a perfect digestion," Keane said mournfully.

"But then I got married."

They walked in silence to the end of the row of tents and the officers' latrine. Then they turned and started back.

"My wife stifled me," said Keane. "Also she insisted on having three children, right away. You wouldn't believe it, that a woman who wanted children like that was frigid, but my wife is frigid. She can't bear to have me touch her. I got constipated six weeks after the wedding day and I haven't had a healthy day since then. Are you married, Whitacre?"

"Divorced."

"If I could afford it," Keane said, "I would get divorced. She's ruined my life. I wanted to be a writer. Do you know many writers?"

"A few."

"Not with three children, though, that's a cinch." Keane's voice was bitter in the darkness. "She trapped me from the beginning. And when the war began, you don't know what a job I had getting her to allow me to enlist. A man from a family like mine, with my brother's record… Did I ever tell you how he won the medal?"

"Yes," said Michael.

"Killed eleven Germans in one morning. Eleven Germans," Keane said, his voice musical with regret and wonder. "I wanted to join the paratroopers, and my wife threw a fit of hysterics. It all goes together, frigidity, lack of respect, fear, hysteria. Now look what I'm doing. Pavone hates me. He never takes me out with him on his trips. You were at the front today, weren't you?"

"Yes."

"You know what I was doing?" asked the brother of the Medal-of-Honour winner bitterly. "I was sitting here typing up rosters. Five copies apiece. Promotions, medical records, allowances. I'm really glad my brother isn't alive, I really am."

They walked slowly, in the rain, the water dripping from their helmets, the muzzles of their carbines held low, pointing groundward, to keep the wet out.

"I'll tell you something," Keane said. "A couple of weeks ago, when the Germans nearly broke through here, and there was talk about our being set up as part of a defensive line, I'll admit to you, I was praying they would break through. Praying. So we would have to fight."

"You're a goddamn fool," Michael said.

"I could be a great soldier," Keane said harshly, belching.

"Great. I know it. Look at my brother. We were full brothers, even if he was twenty years older than me. Pavone knows it. That's why he takes a perverted pleasure in keeping me back here at a typewriter, while he takes other people out with him."

"It would serve you damned well right," Michael said, "if you got a bullet in your head."

"I wouldn't care," Keane said flatly. "I wouldn't give a damn. If I get killed, don't give my regards to anyone."

Michael tried to see Keane's face, but it was impossible in the dark. He felt a wave of pity for the constipated, brother-and-hero-haunted man with the frigid wife.

"I should have gone to OCS," Keane went on. "I would have made a great officer. I'd have my own company by now, and I guarantee I'd have the Silver Star…" His voice went on, mad, grating, sick, as they walked side by side under the dripping trees. "I know myself. I'd have been a gallant officer."

Michael couldn't help smiling at the phrase. Somehow, in this war, you never heard that word, except in the rhetoric of the communiques and citations. Gallant was not the word for this particular war, and only a man like Keane would use it so warmly, believing in the word, believing that it had reality and meaning.

"Gallant," Keane repeated firmly. "I'd show my wife. I'd go back to London with the ribbons on me and I'd cut a path a mile wide through the women there. I never had any luck there before because I was a private."

Michael grinned, thinking of all the privates who had done spectacularly well among the English ladies, knowing that Keane could arrive anywhere with all the ribbons in the world, and stars on his shoulders, and find only frigid women at all bars, in all bedrooms.

"My wife knew it," Keane complained. "That's why she persuaded me not to become an officer. She had it figured out, and then when I saw what she'd done to me, it was too late, I was overseas."

Michael was beginning to enjoy himself, and he had a cruel sense of gratitude to the man beside him, for taking his mind off his own problems.

"What's your wife like?" he asked maliciously.

"I'll show you her picture tomorrow. Pretty," Keane said.

"Very well formed. She looks like the most affectionate woman in the world, always smiling and lively when anybody else is around. But let the door close, let us be alone, and it's like the middle of a glacier. They trick you," Keane mourned in the wet darkness, "they trick you, they trick you before you know what's happening… Also," he went on, pouring it out, "she takes all my money. And it's awful here, because I just sit around and I remember all the things she did to me, and I could go crazy. If I was in combat I could forget. Listen, Whitacre," Keane said passionately, "you're in good with Pavone, he likes you, talk to him for me, will you?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Either let him transfer me to the infantry," said Keane, and Michael's mind registered, This one, too, and for what reasons!

"Or," Keane went on, "let him take me with him when he leaves camp. I'm the sort of man he needs. I'm not afraid of being killed, I have nerves of steel. When the jeep was strafed and the other men were hit, I just watched them as coolly as if I was sitting in a movie looking at it on the screen. That's the sort of man Pavone needs with him…"

I wonder, Michael thought.

"Will you talk to him?" Keane pleaded. "Will you? Every time I start to talk to him, he says, 'Private Keane, are those lists typed yet?' And he laughs at me. I can see him laughing at me," Keane said wildly. "It gives him a distorted pleasure to think that he has the brother of Gordon Keane sitting back in the Communication Zone typing rosters. Whitacre, you've got to talk to him for me. The war will be over and I will never be in a single battle if someone doesn't help me!"