by Irwin Shaw
He opened his eyes. It was dark, but he knew he was moving and he knew that he was not alone, because there was the smell. The smell was like untended pissoirs in Paris and clotted wounds and the winter clothes of the children of the poor. He remembered the sound of the shells over his head, and he closed his eyes again.
It was a truck. There was no doubt about that. And somewhere the war was still on, because there was the sound of artillery, going and coming, not very far off. And something bad had happened, because a voice in the darkness near him was weeping and saying between sobs, “My name is Richard Knuhlen, my name is Richard Knuhlen,” over and over again, as though the man were trying to prove to himself that he was a normal fellow who knew exactly who he was and what he was doing.
Christian stared up in the opaque darkness at the heavy-smelling canvas that swayed and jolted above him. The bones of his arms and legs felt as though they had been broken. His ears felt smashed against his head, and for awhile he lay on the board floor in the complete blackness contemplating the fact that he was going to die.
“My name is Richard Knuhlen,” the voice said, “and I live at Number 3, Carl Ludwig Strasse. My name is Richard Knuhlen and I live at …”
“Shut up,” Christian said, and immediately felt much better. He even tried to sit up, but that was too ambitious, and he lay back again, to watch the sky-rocketing waves of color under his eyelids.
The weeping stopped, and somebody said, “We are going to join up with the Japanese. And I know where.” And laughed wildly again and again. “In Rome!” the voice said, laughing. “On Benito’s balcony in Rome. I have to tell that expert that,” and then Christian realized that it was Himmler talking, and he remembered a great deal of what had happened in the last ten days.
The barrage had been bad the first night, but everyone was fairly well dug in, and only Meyer and Heiss had been hit. There had been flares and searchlights and the light of a tank burning between them, and small gasoline fires before them where the Tommies were trying to mark a path through the minefield for the tanks and infantry behind the barrage, small dark figures appearing in sudden flashes, busily jumping around so far away. Their own guns had started in behind them. Only one tank had got close. Every gun within a thousand meters of them had opened up on it. When the hatch was opened a minute later they saw with surprise that the man who tried to climb out was burning brightly.
The whole attack on their sector, after the barrage died down, had only lasted two hours, three waves with nothing more to show for it than seven immobile tanks, charred, with broken treads, at aggressive angles in the sand, and many bodies strewn peacefully around them. Everybody had been pleased. They had only lost five men in the company, and Hardenburg had grinned widely when he went back to battalion to report in the quiet of the morning.
But at noon, the guns had started on them again, and what looked like a whole company of tanks had appeared in the minefield, jiggling uncertainly in the swirling dust and sand. This time the line had been overrun, but the British infantry had been stopped before it reached them, and what was left to the tanks had pulled back, turning maliciously from time to time to rake them before rumbling out of range. And before they could take a deep breath, the British artillery had opened on them again. It had caught the medical parties out in the open, tending the wounded. They were all screaming and dying and no one could leave his hole to help them. That was probably when Knuhlen had begun to cry and Christian remembered thinking, dazedly and somehow surprised: They are very serious about this.
Then he had begun to shake. He had braced himself crazily with his hands rigid against the sides of the hole he was in. When he looked over the rim of the hole there seemed to be thousands of Tommies running at him and blowing up on mines, and those little bug-like gun carriers scurrying around among them in eccentric lines, their machine guns going, and he had felt like standing up and saying, “You are making a serious mistake. I am suffering from malaria and I am sure you would not like to be guilty of killing an invalid.”
It went on for many days and nights, with the fever coming and going, and the chills in the middle of the desert noon, and from time to time you thought with dull hostility: They never told you it could last so long and they never told you you would have malaria while it was happening.
Then, somehow, everything died down, and he thought: We are still here. Weren’t they foolish to try it? He fell asleep, kneeling in the hole. One second later Hardenburg was shaking him and peering down into his face, saying, “Goddamn you, are you still alive?” He tried to answer, but his teeth were shaking crazily in his jaws and his eyes wouldn’t really open. So he smiled tenderly at Hardenburg who grabbed him by the collar and dragged him like a sack of potatoes along the ground as he nodded gravely at the bodies lying on both sides. He was surprised to see that it was quite dark and a truck was standing there, with its motor going, and he said, quite loudly, “Keep it quiet there.” The man beside him was sobbing and saying, “My name is Richard Knuhlen,” and much later, on the dark board floor under the smelly canvas, in all the heavy, bone-shaking jolting, he was still crying and still saying it over and over again, “My name is Richard Knuhlen and I live at Number 3 Carl Ludwig Strasse.” When he finally really woke up and saw that perhaps he was not going to die at the moment and realized that he was in full retreat and still had malaria, he thought, abstractedly: I would like to see the General now. I wonder if he is still confident.
Then the truck stopped and Hardenburg appeared at the back and said, “Everybody out. Everybody!”
Slowly the men moved toward the rear of the truck, heavily, as though they were walking in thick mud. Two or three of them fell when they jumped down over the tailboard and just lay there uncomplainingly as other men jumped and fell on them. Christian was the last one out of the truck. I am standing, he thought with deliberate triumph. I am standing.
Hardenburg looked at him queerly in the moonlight. Off to both sides there was a flash of guns and there was a general rumble in the air, but the small victory of having landed correctly made everything seem quite normal for the moment.
Christian looked keenly at the men struggling to their feet and standing in sleepwalking poses around him. He recognized very few of them, but perhaps their faces would come back to him in daylight. “Where’s the company?” he asked.
“This is the company,” Hardenburg said. His voice was unrecognizable. Christian had a sudden suspicion that someone was impersonating the Lieutenant. It looked like Hardenburg, but Christian resolved to go into the matter more deeply when things became more settled.
Hardenburg put out his hand and pushed roughly at Christian’s face with the heel of his palm. His hand smelled of grease and gunoil and the sweat of his cuff. Christian pulled back a little, blinking.
“Are you all right?” Hardenburg said.
“Yes, Sir,” he said. “Perfectly, Sir.” He would have to think about where the rest of the company was, but that would wait until later, too.
The truck started to slither into movement on the sandy track, and two of the men trotted heavily after it.
“Stand where you are!” Hardenburg said. The men stopped and stood there, staring at the truck, which gathered speed and wound loudly over the shining sand toward the west. They were at the bottom of a small rise. They stood in silence and watched the truck climb, with a clashing of bearings past Hardenburg’s motorcycle, up the rise. It shone along the top of it for a moment, huge, rolling, home-like, then disappeared on the other side.
“We dig in here,” Hardenburg said, with a stiff wave of his hand to the white glitter of the rise. The men stared stupidly at it.
“Right now,” Hardenburg said. “Diestl,” he said, “stay with me.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Christian, very smart. He went over to Hardenburg, elated with the fact that he could move.
Hardenburg started up the rise with what seemed to Christian superhuman briskness. Amazing, he thought dully, as he follo
wed the Lieutenant, a thin, slight man like that, after the last ten days …
The men followed slowly. With rigid gestures of his arm, Hardenburg indicated to each of them where they should dig in. There were thirty-seven of them and Christian remembered again that he must inquire later what had happened to the rest of the company. Hardenburg stretched them out very thin, in a long, irregular line, one-third of the way up the rise. When he had finished he and Christian turned and looked back at the bent slow figures digging in. Christian suddenly realized that if they were attacked they would have to stand where they were, because there was no possibility of retreating up the exposed slope from the line where Hardenburg had set them. Then he began to realize what was happening.
“All right, Diestl,” Hardenburg said. “You come with me.”
Christian followed the Lieutenant back to the track. Without a word, he helped Hardenburg push the motorcycle up the track to the top of the rise. Occasionally a man would stop digging and turn and peer thoughtfully at the two men working the motorcycle slowly up to the crest of the slope behind them. Christian was panting heavily when they finally stopped pushing the machine. He turned, with Hardenburg, and looked at the sliver of a line of toiling men below him. The scene looked peaceful and unreal, with the moon and the empty desert and the doped movements of the shovelers, like a dream out of the Bible.
“They’ll never be able to fall back,” he said, almost unconsciously, “once they’re engaged.”
“That’s right,” Hardenburg said flatly.
“They’re going to die there,” said Christian.
“That’s right,” said Hardenburg. Then Christian remembered something Hardenburg had said to him as far back as El Agheila. “In a bad situation that must be held as long as possible, the intelligent officer will place his men so that they have no possibility of retreat. If they are placed so that they must either fight or die, the officer has done his job.”
“What happened?’ Christian asked.
Hardenburg shrugged. “They broke through on both sides of us.”
“Where are they now?”
Hardenburg looked wearily at the flash of gunfire to the south and the flicker farther off to the north. “You tell me,” he said. He bent and peered at the gas gauge on the motorcycle. “Enough for a hundred kilometers,” he said. “Are you well enough to hold on in back?”
Christian wrinkled his forehead, trying to puzzle this out, then slowly managed to do it. “Yes, Sir,” he said. He turned and looked at the stumbling, sinking line of figures down the hill, the men whom he was going to leave to die there. For a moment, he thought of saying to Hardenburg, “No, Sir, I will stay here.” But really, nothing would be gained by that.
A war had its own system of balances, and he knew that it was not cowardice on Hardenburg’s part, or self-seeking on his own, to pull back and save themselves for another day. These men would fight a small, pitiful action, perhaps delay a British company for an hour or so on the bare slope, and then vanish. If he and Hardenburg stayed, they would not be able, no matter what their efforts, to buy even ten minutes more than that hour. That was the way it was. Perhaps the next time it would be himself left on a hill without hope and another on the road back to problematical safety.
“Stay here,” Hardenburg said. “Sit down and rest I’ll go and tell them we’re going back to find a mortar platoon to support us.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Christian and sat down suddenly. He watched Hardenburg slide briskly down toward where Himmler was slowly digging. Then he fell sideways and was asleep before his shoulder touched the ground.
Hardenburg was shaking him roughly. He opened his eyes and looked up. He knew that it would be impossible to sit up, then stand up, then take one step after another. He wanted to say, “Please leave me alone,” drop off again to sleep. But Hardenburg grabbed him by his coat, at his neck, and pulled hard. Somehow Christian found himself standing. He walked automatically, his boots making a noise like his mother’s iron over stiff and frozen laundry at home, and helped Hardenburg move the motorcycle. Hardenburg swung his leg over the saddle with great agility and began kicking the starting pedal. The machine sputtered again and again, but it did not start.
Christian watched him working furiously with the machine in the waning, dry moonlight. It wasn’t until the figure was close to him that Christian looked up and realized that they were being watched. It was Knuhlen, the man who had been weeping in the truck, who had stopped shoveling and had followed the Lieutenant up the slope. Knuhlen didn’t say anything. He just stood there, watching blankly as Hardenburg kicked again and again at the pedal.
Hardenburg saw him. He took a slow deep breath, swung his leg back and stood next to the machine.
“Knuhlen,” he said, “get back to your post.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Knuhlen, but he didn’t move.
Hardenburg walked over to Knuhlen and hit him hard on the nose with the side of his fist. Knuhlen’s nose began to bleed. He made a wet, snuffling sound, but he did not move. His hands hung at his sides as though he had no further use for them. He had left his rifle and his entrenching tool at the hole he had been digging down the slope. Hardenburg stepped back and looked curiously and without malice at Knuhlen, as though he represented a small problem in engineering that would have to be solved in due time. Then Hardenburg stepped over to him again and hit him very hard twice. Knuhlen fell slowly to his knees. He kneeled there looking blankly up at Hardenburg.
“Stand up!” Hardenburg said.
Slowly Knuhlen stood up. He still did not say anything and his hands still hung limply at his hips.
Christian looked at him vaguely. Why don’t you stay down? he thought, hating the baggy, ugly soldier standing there in silent, longing reproach on the crest of the moonlit rise. Why don’t you die?
“Now,” Hardenburg said, “get back down that hill.”
But Knuhlen just stood there, as though words no longer entered the channels of his brain. Occasionally he sucked in some of the blood dripping into his mouth. The noise was surprising coming from that bent, silent figure. This was like some of the modern paintings Christian had seen in Paris. Three haggard, silent, dark figures on an empty hill under a dying moon, with sky and land cold and dark and almost of the same mysterious glistening, unearthly substance all around.
“All right,” Hardenburg said, “come with me.”
He took the motorcycle handlebars and trundled it down the other side of the rise away from the shovelers below. Christian took a last look at the thirty-six men scraping at the desert’s face in their doped, rhythmic movements. Then he followed Hardenburg and Knuhlen along the down-sloping path.
Knuhlen walked in a dumb, scuffling manner, behind the rolling motorcycle. They walked about fifty meters in silence. Then Hardenburg stopped. “Hold this,” he said to Christian.
Christian took the handlebars and balanced the machine against his legs. Knuhlen had stopped and was standing in the sand, staring patiently once more at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg cleared his throat as though he were going to make a speech, then walked up to Knuhlen, looked at him deliberately, and clubbed him twice, savagely and quickly, across the eyes. Knuhlen sat down backwards this time, without a sound, and remained that way, staring up dully and tenaciously at the Lieutenant. Hardenburg looked down at him thoughtfully, then took out his pistol and cocked it. Knuhlen made no move and there was no change on the dark, bloody face in the dim light.
Hardenburg shot him once. Knuhlen started to get up to his feet slowly, using his hands to help him. “My dear Lieutenant,” he said in a quiet, conversational tone. Then he slid face down into the sand.
Hardenburg put his pistol away. “All right,” he said.
Then he came back to the motorcycle, and swung himself into the saddle. He kicked the pedal. This time it started.
“Get on,” he said to Christian.
Carefully, Christian swung his leg over and settled himself on the pillion seat of the motorcy
cle. The machine throbbed jumpily under him.
“Hold on tight,” Hardenburg said. “Around my middle.”
Christian put his arms around Hardenburg. Very strange, he thought, hugging an officer at a time like this, like a girl going for an outing into the woods with a motorcycle club on a Sunday afternoon. So close, Hardenburg smelled frightfully, and Christian was afraid he was going to vomit.
Hardenburg put the machine into gear and it sputtered and roared and Christian wanted to say, “Please keep quiet,” because something like this should be done quietly, and it was discourteous to the thirty-seven men who had to stay behind to advertise so blatantly that they were being left alone to die and that other men would still be alive when they were bleached bones on the hill from which no escape was possible.
Thirty-six now, Christian thought, remembering the laborious small pits facing the British, facing the tanks and the armored cars. Three dozen. Three dozen soldiers, he thought, holding tight to the Lieutenant on the jolting machine, trying to remember not to have an attack of fever or chills, three dozen soldiers, at how much a dozen.
Hardenburg reached a level place, and he accelerated the motor. They sped across the empty plain glowing in the last level rays of the sinking moon; surrounded by the flicker of guns on all horizons. Their speed created a great deal of wind, and Christian’s cap blew off, but he did not mind, because the wind also made it impossible to smell the Lieutenant any more.
They rode north and west for a half hour. The flickering on the horizon grew stronger and brighter as the motorcycle slithered along the winding track among the dunes and the occasional patches of scrub grass. There were some burnt-out tanks along the track, and here and there a cannibalized truck, its naked driveshaft poking up into the dim air like an antiaircraft gun. There were some new graves, obviously hastily dug, with a rifle, bayonet-down in the ground, and a cap or helmet hanging from the butt, and there were the usual crashed planes, blackened and wind-ripped, with the bent propellers and the broken wings vaguely reflecting glints of the moon from their ragged metal surfaces. But it wasn’t until they reached a road considerably to the north, running almost due west, that they met up with any other troops. Then they suddenly were in a long regimental convoy of trucks, armored cars, scout cars, carriers and other motorcycles, moving slowly along the narrow track, in overpowering clouds of dust and exhaust fumes.