Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  Certain armored elements had been held out of the column that stretched back as far as the eye could reach. They were being assembled in a reserve area behind the infantry and small figures could be seen from the height pouring fuel and handing up ammunition to the men working in the turrets.

  Hardenburg was standing up in the rear of the car, surveying everything keenly. He had even managed to shave in the morning, although he was running a high fever. His lips were cracked and covered with sores, he had a new bandage on his forehead, but he looked once more like a soldier. “This is where we stop them,” he announced. “This is as far as they go.”

  Then the planes had come in low from the sea, the drumming of their engines drowning out the slow roar of the armor on the climbing road. They came in regular, arrow-like formation, like stunt-fliers at a carnival. They looked slow and vulnerable. But somehow, no one was firing at them. Christian could see the bombs dropping in twisting, curling arcs. Then the mountainside was exploding. A truck deliberately toppled over above them, and went crashing ponderously into the ravine a hundred meters below. One boot flew in a long, tumbling curve out from it, as though it had been thrown out from the truck by a man who was resolved to save the first thing that came to his hand from the wreck.

  Then the bomb hit close by. Christian felt himself being lifted, and he thought: It is not fair, after having come so far and so hard, it is not at all fair. Then he knew he was hurt, except that there was no pain, and he knew that he was going to go out and it was quite peaceful and delicious to relax into the spinning, many-colored, but painless chaos. Then he was out.

  Later, he opened his eyes. Something was weighing him down and he pushed against it, but there was no use. There was the yellow smell of cordite and the brassy smell of burned rock and the old smell of dying vehicles, burning rubber and leather and singed paint. Then he saw a uniform and a bandage and he realized that it must be Lieutenant Hardenburg, and Lieutenant Hardenburg was saying calmly, “Get me to a doctor.” But only the voice and the tabs and the bandage was Lieutenant Hardenburg because there was no face there at all. There was just a red and white pulpy mass, with the calm voice coming somehow through the red bubbles and the white strips of whatever it had been that held the side of Lieutenant Hardenburg’s face together. Dreamily, Christian tried to remember where he had seen something like that before. It was hard to remember because he had a tendency to go out again, but finally it came back to him. It was like a pomegranate, roughly and inaccurately broken open, veined and red and with the juice running from the glistening, ripe globules past the knife down onto the shining ivory plate. Then he began to hurt and he didn’t think about anything else for a long time.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “THEY ASSURE ME,” the voice behind the bandages was saying, “that in two years they can give me a face. I am not under any illusions. I will not look like a motion-picture actor, but I am confident it will be a serviceable face.”

  Christian had seen some of the serviceable faces that the surgeons patched onto the wrecked skulls delivered to their tables, and he was not as confident as Hardenburg, but he merely said, “Of course, Lieutenant.”

  “It is already almost definite,” the voice went on, “that I will see out of my right eye within a month. By itself that is a victory, even if it was as far as they could go.”

  “Certainly, Lieutenant,” Christian said in the darkened room of the villa on the pretty island of Capri, standing in the winter sunlight of the Bay of Naples. He was sitting between the beds, with his right leg, bandaged and stiff in front of him, just touching the marble floor and his crutches leaning against the wall.

  The case in the other bed was a Burn, an armored-division burn, very bad, and the Burn merely lay still under his ten meters of bandage, filling the high-ceilinged cool room with the usual smell, which was worse than the aroma of the dead, but which Hardenburg could not smell, because he had nothing left to smell with. An economically-minded nurse had realized this fortunate fact and had placed them side by side, since the hospital, once a vacation spot of a prosperous Lyons silk manufacturer, was being crowded more and more every day with the surgically interesting products of the fighting in Africa.

  Christian was in a larger hospital down the hill, devoted to the common soldiers, but they had given him his crutches a week ago, and he now felt like a free man.

  “It is very good of you, Diestl,” said Hardenburg, “to come and visit me. As soon as you get hurt people have a tendency to treat you as though you were eight years old, and your brain goes to rot along with everything else.”

  “I was very anxious to see you,” Christian said, “and tell you in person how grateful I am for what you did for me. So when I heard you were on the Island, too, I …”

  “Nonsense!” It was amazing how much the same, clipped, precise, snarling, Hardenburg’s voice was, although the whole façade that had shielded the voice was now gone. “Gratitude is out of order. I did not save you out of affection, I assure you.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian.

  “There were two places on that motorcycle. Two lives could be saved that might be useful somewhere later on. If there was someone else there who I thought would be more valuable later, I guarantee I would have left you.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian, staring at the smooth, white, unfeatured bandages wrapped so neatly about the head that he had last seen red and dripping on the hill outside Solum, with the noise of the British planes dying away in the distance.

  The nurse came in. She was a motherly-looking woman of about forty, with a kindly, fat face. “Enough,” she said. Her voice was not motherly, but bored and business-like. “The visit is over for the day.”

  She stood at the door, waiting to make sure that Christian left. Christian stood slowly, taking hold of his crutches. They made a sodden, wooden noise on the marble floor.

  “At least,” said Hardenburg, “I will be able to walk on my own two feet.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Christian said. “I’ll visit you again, if you are agreeable, Lieutenant.”

  “If you wish,” said the voice behind the bandages.

  “This way, Sergeant,” said the nurse.

  Christian tapped his way out clumsily, because he had only recently learned how to handle the crutches. It was very good to be out in the corridor, where you could not smell the Burn.

  “She will not be too disturbed,” Hardenburg was saying through the white muffling wall of bandage, “by the change in my appearance.” He was talking about his wife. “I have written her and told her I was hit in the face and she said she was proud of me and that it would alter nothing.”

  No face, Christian thought, that is quite a change in appearance. But he said nothing. He sat between the two beds, with his leg out, and his crutches in their accustomed place against the wall.

  Now he came to visit the Lieutenant almost every day. The Lieutenant talked, hour after hour, through the white darkness of the bandages, and Christian said, “Yes, Sir,” and “No, Sir,” and listened. The Burn still smelled just as badly, but after the first few gagging moments each time, Christian found himself able to bear it and even, after awhile, to forget it. Locked in his blindness, Hardenburg talked calmly and reflectively for hours on end, slowly unwinding the tissue of his life for his own and Christian’s benefit, as though now, in this enforced and brutal holiday, he was taking inventory of himself, weighing himself, judging his past triumphs and errors and mapping out the possibilities of his future. It grew more and more fascinating for Christian, and he found himself spending half-days in the evil-smelling room, following the spiraling, oblique uncovering of a life that he felt to be more and more significantly locked with his own. The sickroom became a combination of lecture room and confessional, a place in which Christian could find his own mistakes clarified, his own vague hopes and aspirations crystallized, understood, categorized. The war was a dream on other continents, an unreal grappling of shadows, muffled trumpets in
a distant storm, and only the room with the two swathed and stinking figures overlooking the sunny, blue harbor, was real, true, important.

  “Gretchen will be very valuable to me,” Hardenburg was saying, “after the war. Gretchen, that’s the name of my wife.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian, “I know.”

  “How do you know? Oh, yes, I sent you to deliver a package.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian.

  “She is quite handsome, Gretchen, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, Sir. Quite handsome.”

  “Very important,” said Hardenburg. “You would be amazed at the number of careers that have been ruined in the Army by dowdy wives. She is also very capable. She has a knack for handling people …”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian.

  “Did you have an opportunity to talk to her?”

  “For about ten minutes. She questioned me about you.”

  “She is very devoted,” said Hardenburg.

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “I plan to see her in eighteen months. My face will be well enough along by then. I do not wish to shock her unnecessarily. Very valuable. She has a knack of being at home wherever she finds herself, of being at ease, saying the correct thing …”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “To tell you the truth, I was not in love with her when I married her. I was very much attached to an older woman. Divorced. With two children. Very attached. I nearly married her. It would have ruined me. Her father was a laborer in a metal factory and she herself had a tendency to fat. In ten years she will be monstrous. I had to keep reminding myself that in ten years I expected to have Ministers and Generals as guests in my home and that my wife would have to serve as hostess. She had a vulgar streak, too, and the children were impossible. Still, even now, thinking of her, I feel a sinking, weak sensation. Have you ever been like that about a woman?”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Christian.

  “It would have been ruinous,” said the voice behind the bandages. “A woman is the most common trap. A man must be sensible in that department as in anything else. I despise a man who will sacrifice himself for a woman. It is the most sickly form of self-indulgence. If it were up to me, I would have all the novels burned, too, all of them, along with Das Kapital and the poems of Heine.”

  And another time, on a wet day, with the Bay outside the window gray and hidden in the sweep of winter rain …“After this one is over, we must leap into another war. Against the Japanese. It is always necessary to subdue your allies. It is something that is left out of Mein Kampf, perhaps, out of shrewdness on the author’s part. And after that, it will be necessary to permit some nation, somewhere, to grow strong, so that we can always have an enemy who will be quite difficult to beat. To be great, a nation must always be stretched to the limits of its endurance. A great nation is always on the verge of collapse and always eager to attack. When it loses that eagerness, history begins to tap out the name on the tombstone. The Roman Empire stands as a perfect example for any intelligent people forever. The moment a people changes from, ‘Whom shall I hit next?’ to ‘Who will be the next to hit me?’ it is on the road to the dust-heap. Defense is only a coward’s anagram for defeat. There is no successful defense to anything. Our civilization, so called, which is merely a combination of laziness and an unwillingness to die, is the great evil. England is the dessert on the Roman dinner. It is never possible to enjoy the fruits of war in peace. The fruits of war can only be enjoyed in further war, or you lose everything. When the British gazed around and said, ‘Look what we have won. Now let us hold onto it,’ an empire slipped through their fingers. It is always necessary to remain barbarians, because it is the barbarians who always win.

  “We Germans have the best chance of all. We have an elite of daring and intelligent men, and we have a large, energetic population. It is true that other nations, say the Americans, have as many daring and intelligent men, and a population that is at least as energetic. But we are more fortunate, for one reason, and we shall conquer because of it. We are docile and they are not and probably never will be. We do what we are told and so we become an instrument in the hands of our leaders that can be used for decisive acts. The Americans can be made an instrument for a year, five years, but then they break up. The Russians are dangerous, merely because of their size. Their leaders are stupid, as they always have been, and the energy of the people is canceled out by ignorance. It is only the size that is dangerous, and I do not believe it to be crucial.”

  The voice spun on, like the voice of a thoughtful scholar in a university library, reading from a well-loved book that had almost been memorized by the reader. The rain hit the window in soft, wet spurts, obscuring the harbor. The Burn in the next bed lay without moving, deep in its frightful smell, deep past hearing or caring or remembering anything.

  “In several ways,” Hardenburg was saying, “this wound of mine was a fortunate occurrence.” It was another afternoon, still and dreamlike, with the sun late in the sky, and the entire landscape deep blue, water, air and mountains transparent and luminous outside the window. “Somehow, I was not very lucky in the Army—and this wound will mean I will not be tied to the Army any more. Somehow, I was never in the right spot in the Army. As you know, I was only promoted once, while men who had gone to school with me were promoted five times. There is no use complaining. It has nothing to do with favoritism or merit. It is merely a question of where you happen to be at certain moments. At a particular headquarters when the General there is given a lucky command. At a particular place in the line when the enemy attacks. How the despatches are worded on some mornings and who chances to read them that morning and how he is feeling at the moment … Well, it was becoming clear I was not lucky in that direction. Now they will not send me back into the Army. It is bad for the morale to have men commanded by an officer with a maimed face. Perfectly sensible. You do not march a company through a military cemetery before an attack if you can help it. Simple discretion. But a wounded face will be of value later, just the same. I intend going into politics. I had intended doing it later, through the Army, but I will save twenty years this way. Positions of leadership when the war is over will only be open to men who can prove they have served the Fatherland well on the battlefield. I will not have to wear my medals on my lapel. My face will be my medal. Pity, respect, gratitude, fear—my face will produce them all. There will be a world to be governed when this is over, and the Party will find my face as good a symbol as any to represent them in other countries.

  “The idea of my face does not disturb me. When they take the bandages off I am going to get up and look at it in the mirror. I am quite certain that it is going to be horrible. Horror should not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well. For the purpose of our country we need an empty Europe. It is a mathematical problem and the equalizing sign is slaughter. If we believe in the truth of the answer we must not draw back from the arithmetic which solves the equation.

  “Wherever we go everyone must realize that we are quick to kill. It is the most satisfactory key to dominion. Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven. It is the most valuable equipment in any military man, and when an officer loses it he should ask to be cashiered and returned to civilian life to take up bookkeeping.

  “I have read some of your letters to your friends back home and I have been revolted by them. You are much older than I am, of course, and have been exposed to a great deal of Europe’s nonsense, and I see your letters are full of talk about the great days of peace and prosperity for all the world that will come when the war is over. That is all very well for women and politicians, but a soldier should know better. He should not want peace, because peace is a buyer’s market for
a soldier, and he should know that prosperity can only be unilateral. We can be prosperous only if all Europe is a pauper, and a soldier should be delighted with that concept. Do I want the illiterate Pole, drunk on potato alcohol in the winter mud of his village, to be prosperous? Do I want the stinking goatherd in the Dolomites to be rich? Do I want a fat Greek homosexual to teach Law at Heidelberg? Why? I want servants, not competitors. And failing that, I want corpses. It is only because we are still part politicians, we Germans, selling ourselves to the world for an outdated and unnecessary vote of confidence, that we talk like that. In ten years we can display ourselves as what we are—soldiers, and nothing more, and then we can dispense with this nonsense. The soldier’s world is the only real world. Any other world is something off the shelf of a library—rhetoric and old bindings. Flabby wishes and banquet speeches at a table at which all the guests have fallen asleep. Ten thousand shelves of books cannot stop one light tank. The Bible has been printed a billion times, perhaps, and a single patrol of five men in an armored car can break the ten commandments fifty times in a half hour in a Ukrainian village and celebrate that night over two cases of captured wine.

  “War is the most fascinating of all pursuits, because it most completely fits the final nature of man, which is predatory and egotistic. I can say it because I have given my face for it, and no one can accuse me of loving it safely from a distance and for its rewards alone.

  “I do not think we are going to lose this war, because we cannot afford to. But if we do lose it we will lose it because we were not harsh enough. If we announced to the world that for every day of war, we would kill one hundred thousand Europeans, and kept our promise, how long do you think the war would last? And not Jews, because everyone is used to seeing Jews killed and everyone is more or less secretly delighted with us for our efficiency in that field. And the supply of Jews is not inexhaustible, no matter how generously we compute grandmothers. No. Europeans, Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Dutchmen, English prisoners of war. We should print the lists of names with photographs, on good paper, and drop them over London instead of bombs. We are suffering because our conduct is not yet as mature as our philosophy. We kill Moses, but pretend to tolerate Christ, and we risk everything for that brainless pretense.