by Irwin Shaw
“Then tell them to pick up those mines and come with me,” said Christian coldly, trying to sound as much like Lieutenant Hardenburg as possible. “I’m waiting,” he said sharply.
The Pioneer was panting in anger and fear now, and he had caught the Corporal’s habit of peering every few seconds toward the bend, to see if the Americans had appeared yet. “All right, all right,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. How many mines did you say you want?”
“Ten,” said Christian.
“The trouble with this Army,” grumbled the Pioneer, “is that there are too many people in it who think they know how to win the war all by themselves.” But he snapped at his men to pick up the mines, and Christian led them down into the ravine and showed them where he wanted them placed. He made the men cover the holes carefully with brush and carry away the sand they had dug up in their helmets.
Even while he supervised the men down below, he noticed, with a grim smile, that the Pioneer Sergeant himself was attaching the long fuses to the small, innocent-looking charges of dynamite under the span of the bridge.
“All right,” said the Pioneer gloomily, when Christian came up on the road again, the mines having been placed to his satisfaction, “the fuse is on. I do not know what you are trying to do, but I put it on to please you. Now, should I light it now?”
“Now,” said Christian, “please get out of here.”
“It is my duty,” said the Pioneer pompously, “to blow up this bridge and I shall personally see that it is blown up.”
“I do not want the fuse lighted,” Christian said, quite pleasantly now, “until the Americans are almost here. If you wish personally to stay under the bridge until that time, I personally welcome you.”
“This is not a time for jokes,” said the Pioneer with dignity.
“Get out, get out,” Christian shouted at the top of his voice, fiercely, menacingly, remembering with what good effect Hardenburg had used that trick. “I don’t want to see you here one minute from now. Get back or you’re going to get hurt!” He stood close to the Pioneer, towering ferociously above him, his hands twitching, as though he could barely restrain himself from knocking the Pioneer senseless where he stood.
The Pioneer backed away, his pudgy face paling under his helmet. “Strain,” he said hoarsely. “No doubt you have been under an enormous strain in the line. No doubt you are not quite yourself.”
“Fast!” said Christian.
The Pioneer turned hurriedly and strode back to where his squad was again assembled on the other side of the bridge. He spoke briefly, in a low voice, and the squad clambered up from the ditch. Without a backward glance they started down the road. Christian watched them for a moment, but did not smile, as he felt like doing, because that might ruin the healthful effect of the episode on his own men.
“Sergeant.” It was the Corporal, the runner from battalion, again, his voice drier and higher than ever. “The Captain is waiting …”
Christian wheeled on the Corporal. He grabbed the man’s collar and held him close to him. The man’s eyes were yellow and glazed with fright.
“One more word from you,” Christian shook him roughly, and the man’s helmet clicked painfully down over his eyes, onto the bridge of his nose. “One more word and I will shoot you.” He pushed him away.
“Dehn!” Christian called. A single figure slowly broke away from the platoon on the other side of the bridge and came toward Christian. “Come with me,” said Christian, when Dehn had reached him. Christian half-slid, half-walked down the side of the ravine, carefully avoiding the small minefield he and the Pioneers had laid. He pointed to the long fuse that ran from the dynamite charge down the northern side of the arch.
“You will wait here,” he said to the silent soldier standing beside him, “and when I give the signal, you will light that fuse.”
Christian heard the deep intake of breath as Dehn looked at the fuse. “Where will you be, Sergeant?” he asked.
Christian pointed up the mountain to the outcropping of boulders about eight hundred meters away. “Up there. Those boulders below the point where the road turns. Can you see it?”
There was a long pause. “I can see it,” Dehn whispered finally.
The boulders glittered, their color washed out by distance and sunlight, against the dry green of the cliff. “I will wave my coat,” said Christian. “You will have to watch carefully. You will then set the fuse and make sure it is going. You will have plenty of time. Then get out on the road and run until the next turn. Then wait until you hear the explosion here. Then follow along the road until you reach us.”
Dehn nodded dully. “I am to be all alone down here?” he asked.
“No,” said Christian, “we will supply you with two ballet dancers and a guitar player.”
Dehn did not smile.
“Is it clear now?” Christian asked.
“Yes, Sergeant,” said Dehn.
“Good,” Christian said. “If you set off the fuse before you see my coat; don’t bother coming back.”
Dehn did not answer. He was a large, slow-moving young man who had been a stevedore before the war, and Christian suspected that he had once belonged to the Communist party.
Christian took a last look at his arrangements under the bridge, and at Dehn standing stolidly, leaning against the curved damp stone of the arch. Then he climbed up to the road again. Next time, Christian thought grimly, that soldier will be less free with criticism.
It took fifteen minutes, walking swiftly, to reach the clump of boulders overlooking the road. Christian was panting hoarsely by the time he got there. The men behind him marched doggedly, as though resigned to the fact that they were doomed to march, bent under their weight of iron, for the rest of their lives. There was no trouble about straggling, because it was plain to even the stupidest man in the platoon that if the Americans got to the bridge before the platoon turned away out of sight behind the boulders, the platoon would present a fair target, even at a great distance, to the pursuers.
Christian stopped, listening to his own harsh breathing, and peered down into the valley. The bridge was small, peaceful, insignificant in the winding dust of the road. There was no movement to be seen any place, and the long miles of broken valley seemed deserted, forgotten, lost to human use.
Christian smiled as he saw that his guess had been right about the vantage point of the boulders. Through a cut in the hills it was possible to see a section of the road some distance from the bridge. The Americans would have to cross that before they disappeared momentarily from sight behind a spur of rock, around which they would then have to turn and appear again on the way to the bridge. Even if they were going slowly and cautiously, it would not take them more than ten or twelve minutes to cover the distance, from the spot at which they would first come into sight, to the bridge itself.
“Heims,” Christian said, “Richter. You stay with me. The rest of you go back with the Corporal.” He turned to the Corporal. The Corporal now looked like a man who expects to be killed, but feels that there is a ten percent chance he may postpone the moment of execution till tomorrow. “Tell the Captain,” Christian said, “we will get back as soon as we can.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” the Corporal said, nervous and happy. He started walking, almost trotting, to the blessed safety of the turn in the road. Christian watched the platoon file by him, following the Corporal. The road was high on the side of the hill now. When they walked, the men were outlined heroically and sadly against the shreds of cloud and wintry blue sky, and when they made their turns, one by one, in toward the hill, they seemed to step off into windy blue space.
Heims and Richter were a machine-gun team. They were standing heavily, leaning against the roadside boulders, Heims holding the barrel and a box of ammunition, and Richter sweating under the base and more ammunition. They were dependable men, but, looking at them, standing there, sweating in the cold, their faces cautious but noncommittal, Christian felt suddenly t
hat he would have preferred, at this moment, to have with him now the men of his old platoon, dead these long months in the African desert. He hadn’t thought about his old platoon for a long time, but somehow, looking at the two machine gunners, left behind on another hill this way, brought to mind the night more than a year before when the thirty-six men had thoughtfully and obediently dug the lonely holes which would a little later be their graves.
Somehow, looking at Heims and Richter, he felt that these men could not be depended upon to do their jobs as well. They belonged, by some slight, subtle deterioration in quality, to another army, an army whose youth had left it, an army that seemed, with all its experience, to have become more civilian, less willing to die. If he left the two men now, Christian thought, they would not stay at their posts for long. Christian shook his head. Ah, he thought, I am getting silly. They’re probably fine. God knows what they think of me, besides.
The two men leaned, thickly relaxed against the stones, their eyes warily on Christian, as though they were measuring him and trying to discover whether he was going to ask them to die this morning.
“Set it up here,” Christian said, pointing to a level spot between two of the boulders which made a rough v at their joining. Slowly but expertly the men set up the machine gun.
When the gun was set up, Christian crouched down behind it and traversed it. He shifted it a little to the right and peered down the barrel. He adjusted the sight for the distance, allowing for the fact that they would be shooting downhill. Far below, caught on the fine iron line of the sight, the bridge lay in sunlight that changed momentarily to shadows as rags of clouds ghosted across the sky.
“Give them plenty of chance to bunch up near the bridge,” Christian said. “They won’t cross it fast, because they’ll think it’s mined. When I give you the signal to fire, aim at the men in the rear, not at the ones near the bridge. Do you understand?”
“The ones in the rear,” Heims repeated. “Not the ones near the bridge.” He moved the machine gun slowly up and down on its rocker. He sucked reflectively at his teeth. “You want them to run forward, not back in the direction they are coming from …”
Christian nodded.
“They won’t run across the bridge, because they are in the open there,” said Heims thoughtfully. “They will run for the ravine, under the bridge, because they are out of the field of fire there.”
Christian smiled. Perhaps he had been wrong about Heims, he thought, he certainly knew what he was doing here.
“Then they will run into the mines down there,” said Heims flatly. “I see.”
He and Richter nodded at each other. There was neither approval or disapproval in their gesture.
Christian took off his coat, so that he would be able to wave it in signal to Dehn, under the bridge, as soon as he saw the Americans. Then he sat on a stone behind Heims who was sprawled out behind the gun. Richter knelt on one knee, waiting with a second belt of cartridges. Christian lifted the binoculars he had taken from the dead Lieutenant the evening before. He fixed them on the break between the hills. He focused them carefully, noticing that they were good glasses.
There were two poplar trees, dark green and funereal, at the break in the road. They swayed glossily with the wind.
It was cold on the exposed side of the hill, and Christian was sorry he had told Dehn he would wave his coat at him. He could have used his coat now. A handkerchief would probably have been good enough. He could feel his skin contracting in the cold and he hunched inside his stiff clothes uncomfortably.
“Can we smoke, Sergeant?” Richter asked.
“No,” said Christian, without lowering the glasses.
Neither of the men said anything. Cigarettes, thought Christian, remembering, I’ll bet he has a whole pack, two packs. If he gets killed or badly wounded in this, Christian thought, I must remember to look through his pockets.
They waited. The wind, sweeping up from the valley, circled weightily within Christian’s ears and up his nostrils and inside his sinuses. His head began to ache, especially around the eyes. He was very sleepy. He felt, that he had been sleepy for three years.
Heims stirred as he lay outstretched, belly down, on the rockbed in front of Christian. Christian put down the glasses for a moment. The seat of Heim’s trousers, blackened by mud, crudely patched, wide and shapeless, stared up at him. It is a sight, Christian thought foolishly, repressing a tendency to giggle, a sight completely lacking in beauty. The human form divine.
His forehead burned. The malaria. Not enough the English, not enough the French, the Poles, the Russians, the Americans, but the mosquitoes, too. Perhaps, he thought feverishly and cunningly, perhaps when this is over, I will have a real attack, one that cannot be denied, and they will have to send me back. He raised the glasses once more to his eyes, waiting for the chills to come, inviting the toxin in his blood to gain control.
Then he saw the small mud-colored figures slowly plodding in front of the poplars. “Quiet,” he said warningly, as though the Americans could hear Heims and the other man if they happened to speak.
The mud-colored figures, looking like a platoon in any army, the fatigue of their movement visible even at this distance, passed in two lines, on each side of the road across the binoculars’ field of vision. Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, forty-two, forty-three, Christian counted. Then they were gone. The poplars waved as they had waved before, the road in front of them looked exactly the same as it had before. Christian put down the glasses. He felt wide awake now, unexcited.
He stood up and waved his coat in large, deliberate circles. He could imagine the Americans moving in their cautious, slow way along the edge of the ridge, their eyes always nervously down on the ground, looking for mines.
A moment later he saw Dehn scramble swiftly out from beneath the bridge and run heavily up to the road. Dehn ran along the road, slowing down perceptibly as he tired, his boots kicking up minute puffs of dust. Then he reached a turn and he was out of sight.
Now the fuse was set. It only remained for the Americans to behave in a normal, soldierly manner.
Christian put on his coat, grateful for the warmth. He plunged his hands in his pockets, feeling cozy and calm.
The two men at the machine gun lay absolutely still.
Far off there was the drone of plane engines. High, to the southwest, Christian saw a formation of bombers moving slowly, small specks in the sky, moving north on a bombing mission. A pair of sparrows swept, chirping, across the face of the cliff, darting in a flicker of swift brown feathers across the sights of the gun.
Heims belched twice. “Excuse me,” he said politely.
They waited. Too long, Christian thought anxiously, they’re taking too long. What are they doing back there? The bridge will go up before they get to the bend. Then the whole thing will be useless.
Heims belched again. “My stomach,” he said aggrievedly to Richter. Richter nodded, staring down at the magazine on the gun, as though he had heard about Heims’s stomach for years.
Hardenburg, Christian thought, would have done this better. He wouldn’t have gambled like this. He would have made more certain, one way or another. If the dynamite didn’t go off, and the bridge wasn’t blown, and they heard about it back at Division, and they questioned that miserable Sergeant in the Pioneers and he told them about Christian … Please, Christian prayed under his breath to the Americans, come on, come on, come on …
Christian kept the glasses trained on the approach to the bridge. The glasses shook, and he knew that the chills were coming, although he did not feel them at that moment. There was a rushing, tiny noise, near him, and, involuntarily, he put the glasses down. A squirrel scurried up to the top of a rock ten feet away, then sat up and stared with beady, forest eyes at the three men. Another time, another place, Christian remembered, the bird strutting on the road through the woods outside Paris, before the French road block, the overturned farm cart and the mattresses. The animal kingdom, curious for a
moment about the war, then returning to its more important business.
Christian blinked and put the glasses to his eyes again. The Americans were out on the road now, walking slowly, crouched over, their rifles ready, every tense line shouting that their flesh inside their vulnerable clothing understood that they were targets.
The Americans were unbearably slow. They were taking infinitely small steps, stopping every five paces. The dashing, reckless young men of the New World. Christian had seen captured newsreels of them in training, leaping boldly through rolling surf from landing barges, flooding onto a beach like so many sprinters. They were not sprinting now. “Faster, faster,” he found himself whispering, “faster …” What lies the American people must believe about their soldiers!
Heims belched. It was a rasping, ugly, old man’s noise. Each man reacted to a war in his own way, and Heims’s reaction was from the stomach. What lies the people at home believed about Heims and his comrades, What were you doing when you won the Iron Cross? Mother, I was belching. Only Heims and he and Richter knew what the truth was, only they and the forty-three men tenderly approaching the old stone of the bridge that had been put up by slow Italian laborers in the sunlight of 1840. They knew the truth, the machine gunners and himself, and the forty-three men shuffling through the dust across the gunsights eight hundred meters away, and they were more connected by that truth than to anyone else who wasn’t there that morning. They knew of each other that their stomachs were contracting in sour spasms, and that all bridges are approached with timidity and a sense of doom …
Christian licked his lips. The last man was out from behind the bend now, and the officer in command, the inevitable childish Lieutenant, was waving to a man with the mine detector, who was moving regretfully up toward the head of the column. Slowly, foolishly, they were bunching, feeling a little safer closer together now, feeling that if they hadn’t been shot yet they were going to get through this all right.