Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  The man with the mine detector began to sweep the road twenty meters in front of the bridge. He worked slowly and very carefully, and as he worked, Christian could see the Lieutenant, standing in the middle of the road, put his binoculars to his eyes and begin to sweep the country all around him. Zeiss binoculars, no doubt, Christian’s mind registered automatically, made in Germany. He could see the binoculars come up and almost fix on their boulders, as though some nervous, latent military sense in the young Lieutenant recognized instinctively that if there were any danger ahead of him, this would be the focus of it. Christian crouched a little lower, although he was certain that they were securely hidden. The binoculars passed over them, then wavered back.

  “Fire,” Christian whispered. “Behind them. Behind them.”

  The machine gun opened up. It made an insane shocking noise as it broke the mountain stillness, and Christian couldn’t help blinking again and again. Down on the road two of the men had fallen. The others were still standing there stupidly, looking down in surprise at the men on the ground. Three more men fell on the road. Then the Americans began to run down the slope toward the ravine and the protection of the bridge. They are sprinting now, Christian thought, where is the cameraman? Some of the Americans were carrying and dragging the men who had been hit. They stumbled and rolled down the slope, their rifles thrown away, their arms and legs waving grotesquely. It was remote and disconnected, and Christian watched almost disinterestedly, as though he were watching the struggle of a beetle dragged down into a hole by ants.

  Then the first mine went off. A helmet hurtled end over end, twenty meters straight up in the air, glinting dully in the sunlight, its straps whipping in its flight.

  Heims stopped firing. Then the explosions came one on top of another, echoing and re-echoing along the walls of the hills. A large dirty cloud of dust and smoke bloomed from the bridge.

  The noise of the explosions died slowly, as though the sound was moving heavily through the draws and along the ridges to collect in other places. The silence, when it came, seemed unnatural, dangerous. The two sparrows wheeled erratically, disturbed and scolding, across the gun. Down below, from beneath the arch of the bridge, a single figure came walking out, very slowly and gravely, like a doctor from a deathbed. The figure walked five or six meters, then just as slowly sat down on a rock. Christian looked at the American through his glasses. The man’s shirt had been blown off him, and his skin was pale and milky. He still had his rifle. While Christian watched, the American lifted his rifle, still with that lunatic deliberation and gravity. Why, thought Christian with surprise, he’s aiming at us!

  The sound of the rifle was empty and flat and the whistle of the bullets was surprisingly close over their heads. Christian grinned. “Finish him,” he said.

  Heims pressed the trigger of the machine gun. Through his glasses, Christian could see the darting spurts of dust, flickering along a savage, swift line in an arc around the American. The American did not move. Slowly, with the unhurried care of a carpenter at his workbench, he was putting a new clip in his rifle. Heims swung the machine gun, and the arc of dust splashes moved closer to the American, who still refused to notice them. The American got the clip in his rifle and lifted it once more to his naked shoulder. There was something insane, disturbing, about the shirtless, white-skinned man, an ivory blob against the green and brown of the ravine, sitting comfortably on the stone with all his comrades dead around him, firing in the leisurely and deliberate way at the machine gun he could not quite make out with his naked eye, paying no attention to the continuous, snapping bursts of bullets that would, in a moment or two, finally kill him.

  “Hit him,” Christian murmured irritably. “Come on, hit him.”

  Heims stopped firing for a moment. He squinted carefully and jiggled the gun. It made a sharp, piercing squeak. The sound of the rifle came from the valley below, meaningless and undangerous, although again and again there was the whine of a bullet over Christian’s head, or the plunk as it hit the hard-packed dirt below him.

  Then Heims got the range and fired one short burst. The American put down his gun drunkenly. He stood up slowly and took two or three sober steps in the direction of the bridge. Then he lay down as though he were tired.

  At that moment, the bridge went up. Chunks of stone spattered against the trees along the road, slicing white gashes in them and knocking branches off. It took a long time for the dust to settle, and when it did, Christian saw the lumpy, broken mud-colored uniforms sticking out here and there, at odd angles, from the debris. The half-naked American had disappeared under a small avalanche of earth and stones.

  Christian sighed and put down his glasses. Amateurs, he thought, what are they doing in a war?

  Heims sat up and twisted around. “Can we smoke now?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Christian, “you can smoke.”

  He watched Heims take out a pack of cigarettes. Heims offered one to Richter, who took it silently. The machine gunner did not offer a cigarette to Christian. The miserly bastard, thought Christian bitterly, and reached in and took out one of his two remaining cigarettes.

  He held the cigarette in his mouth, tasting it, feeling its roundness, for a long time before he lit it. Then, with a sigh, feeling, well, I’ve earned it, he lit the cigarette. He took a deep puff and held the smoke in his lungs as long as he could. It made him feel a little dizzy, but relaxed. I must write about this to Hardenburg, Christian thought, taking another pull at the cigarette, he’ll be pleased, he wouldn’t have been able to do better himself. He leaned back comfortably, taking a deep breath, smiling at the bright blue sky and the pretty little clouds racing overhead in the mountain wind, knowing that he would have at least ten minutes to rest before Dehn got there. What a pretty morning, he thought.

  Then he felt the long quivering shiver sliding down his body. Ah, he thought deliciously, the malaria, and this is going to be a real attack, they’re bound to send me back. A perfect morning. He shivered again, then took another pull at his cigarette. Then he leaned back happily against the boulder at his back, waiting for Dehn to arrive, hoping Dehn would take his time climbing the slope.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “ON YOUR FEET, Private Whitacre,” the Sergeant said, and Michael rose and followed him. They went in to a large room, with high, dark-paneled doors. The room was lit by tall candles that reflected back a thousand times in yellow buds from the pale green mirrors with which the room was lined.

  There was the long, polished table, with the one chair drawn up in the middle, just as Michael had always known it would be. He sat down on the chair, with the Sergeant standing behind him. There was an inkwell before him and a plain wooden pen.

  Another door opened and the two Germans came in. They were full Generals and they had on magnificent uniforms. Their decorations, their boots, their spurs, their monocles gleamed softly in the candlelight. They marched up to the table, in perfect formation, stopped, with a memorable clicking of heels, and saluted.

  Michael saluted gravely, from his chair. One of the Generals unbuttoned his tunic and slowly drew out a stiff piece of rolled parchment. He gave it to the Sergeant. The Sergeant unrolled it. It made a dry noise in the still room. The Sergeant laid it on the table in front of Michael.

  “The surrender papers,” the Sergeant said. “You have been chosen to accept the surrender for the Allies.”

  Michael nodded gravely. Offhandedly he glanced over the documents. They seemed to be in order. He picked up the pen and dipped it in the inkwell. “Michael Whitacre, 32403008, Private First Class, U.S.A.” he wrote in a bold, sprawling signature, at the bottom of the page, under the two German signatures. The pen scratched unmusically in the silence. Michael put the pen down. He stood up.

  “That will be all, gentlemen,” he said flatly.

  The two Generals saluted. They quivered when they saluted. Michael did not return the salute. He stared a little over their heads at the sea-green mirrors behind them.


  The Generals about-faced precisely. They marched out. There was a defeated Prussian rhythm of boots on the bare, shining floor, and an ironic tinkle of spurs. The heavy door opened and they went out. The door closed. The Sergeant vanished. Michael was left alone in the candlelit room, with the single chair, the long, gleaming table, the inkwell, the stiff, yellowish square of parchment with his signature on it.

  “Drop your——’s and grab your socks,” the heavy voice shouted. “Rise and shine! Rise and shine!”

  There was the shrill, cutting sound of whistles, all through the old house and from the other houses along the street, and the groaning, despairing moans of soldiers awaking in the darkness.

  Michael opened his eyes. He was in a lower bunk and he stared up at the slats and straw mattress of the bunk above him. The man in the upper bunk was a nervous sleeper and a slow cascade of dust and straw splinters came down on Michael every night.

  Michael swung his feet out of the bunk. He sat heavily on the edge, feeling his tongue sour behind his teeth, smelling the dreadful, unwashed, cold sweat and wool smell of the twenty men in the room. It was five-thirty in the morning and the blackout blinds were still drawn tightly across the never-opened windows.

  Shivering, Michael dressed, his mind numb to the groans and swearing and obscene noises of the Army all around him preparing itself to face the day.

  Blinking, he put on his overcoat and stumbled down the rickety stairs of the old house that had been taken over for enlisted men’s billets. He stepped out into the bone-seeking chill of the London morning. All along the street other men were soddenly grouping for the reveille roll call. Not far from where Michael stood there was a house with a bronze plaque on it that announced that William Blake had lived and worked there in the nineteenth century. What would William Blake’s reactions have been to reveille? What would William Blake have thought if he had looked out his window at the huddled, swearing, beersick men from the other side of the ocean, who were standing there, shivering, under the barrage balloons, still invisible in the high, thin, dark fog? What would William Blake have said to the Sergeant who called, greeting the fresh morning of a new day in the long progress of humanity toward grace, “Drop your——’s and grab your socks?”

  “Galiani.”

  “Here.”

  “Abernathy.”

  “Here.”

  “Tatnall.”

  “Here.”

  “Kammergaard.”

  “Here.”

  “Whitacre.”

  “Here.”

  William Blake, I am here, John Keats, I am here. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I am here. King George, I am here. General Wellington, I am here. Lady Hamilton, I am here. Oh, to be in England now that Whitacre’s there. Lawrence Sterne, I am here. Prince Hal, I am here. Oscar Wilde, I am here. Here with helmet, gasmask, and PX ration card, here, injected for tetanus, typhus, typhoid, and smallpox, here, instructed how to behave in an English home (food is low and second helpings must be refused), here, warned against the syphilis of the Saxon nymphs of Piccadilly, here, with brass buttons burned of varnish and polished bright to compete with the British Army. Here, Paddy Finucane, dead in the Channel in the crashed Spitfire, here Montgomery, here Eisenhower, here Rommel, ready at my typewriter, armed with carbon copies, here, here, here, England, here by way of Washington and Local Board 17, here by way of Miami and Puerto Rico and Trinidad and the Guianas and Brazil and Ascension Island, here by way of the ocean in which the submarines surface at night to fire, like sharks in a dream, at the planes flying without lights in the streaming darkness ten thousand feet above, here history, here my past, here among the ruins and the Midwestern voices shouting “Taxi, taxi” in the blacked-out midnights. Here, Neighbor William Blake, here is an American, God help us all.

  “Dismiss!”

  Michael went into the house and made up his bunk. He shaved and mopped the latrine and picked up his messkit and went slowly, in an aluminum jangling, through the awakening, gray streets in the first sober light of the London morning, to breakfast in a large red house that in other times had been inhabited by the family of an earl. Overhead there was the steady drone of a thousand engines, as the Lancasters crossed the Thames on the way home from Berlin. There was grapefruit juice for breakfast, oatmeal, powdered eggs and bacon, thick, underdone, swimming in its own grease. Why, thought Michael, as he ate, why can’t they teach an Army cook how to make coffee? How can we live on coffee like this?

  “The ——th Fighter Group wants a comedian and some dancers,” Michael said to Captain Mincey, his superior officer, sitting at the desk in the room that was lined with pictures of all the famous people who had passed through London for the USO. “And they don’t want any more drunks. Johnny Sutter was potted up there last month, and he insulted a pilot in the ready room and was knocked out twice.”

  “Send them Flanner,” Mincey said, weakly. Mincey had asthma and he drank too much, and the combination of Scotch and the climate of London always left him a little forlorn in the morning.

  “Flanner has dysentery and he refuses to leave the Dorchester.”

  Mincey sighed. “Send them that lady accordionist,” Mincey said, “what’s her name, with the blue hair.”

  “They want a comedian.”

  “Tell them we only have accordionists.” Mincey sniffed, pushing a tube full of medicine up his nose.

  “Yes, Sir,” said Michael. “Miss Roberta Finch cannot continue up into Scotland. She had a nervous breakdown in Salisbury. She keeps taking her clothes off in the enlisted men’s mess and tries to commit suicide.”

  “Send that crooner to Scotland,” Mincey sighed, “and make out a full report on Finch and send it back to Headquarters in New York, so we’ll be covered.”

  “The MacLean troupe is in Liverpool Harbor,” Michael said, “but their ship is quarantined. A seaman came down with meningitis and they can’t come ashore for ten days.”

  “I can’t bear it,” said Captain Mincey.

  “There is a confidential report,” Michael said, “from the ——nd Heavy Bombardment Group. Larry Crosett’s band played there last Saturday and got into a poker game Sunday night. They took eleven thousand dollars from the Group and Colonel Coker says he has evidence they used marked cards. He wants the money back or he is going to prefer charges.”

  Mincey sighed weakly, poking the glass tube into his other nostril. He had run a night club in Cincinnati before the war and he often wished he was back in Ohio among the comedians and specialty dancers. “Tell Colonel Coker I am investigating the entire matter,” he said.

  “A Chaplain at the Troop Carrier Command,” Michael said, “objects to the profanity used in our production of Folly of Youth. He says the leading man says damn seven times and the ingenue calls one of the characters a son of a bitch in the second act”

  Mincey shook his head. “I told that ham to cut out all profanity in this theatre of operations,” Mincey said. “And he swore he would. Actors!” He moaned. “Tell the Chaplain I absolutely agree and the offending individuals will be disciplined.”

  “That’s all for now, Captain,” Michael said.

  Mincey sighed and put his medicine in his pocket: Michael started out of the room.

  “Wait a minute, Whitacre.” Mincey said.

  Michael turned around. Mincey regarded him sourly, his asthma-oppressed eyes and nose red and watery. “For Christ’s sake, Whitacre,” Mincey said, “you look awful.”

  Michael looked down without surprise at his rumpled, over-large blouse and his baggy trousers. “Yes, Captain,” Michael said.

  “I don’t give a damn for myself,” Mincey said. “For all of me you could come in here in blackface and a grass skirt. But when officers come in from other outfits, they get a bad impression.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Michael.

  “An outfit like this,” Mincey said, “has to look more military than the paratroopers. We have to shine. We have to glisten. You look like a KP in the Bulgarian
Army.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Michael.

  “Can’t you get yourself another blouse?”

  “I’ve asked for one for two months, now,” Michael said. “The Supply Sergeant won’t talk to me any more.”

  “At least,” Mincey said, “polish your buttons. That’s not much to ask, is it?”

  “No, Sir,” said Michael.

  “How do we know,” Mincey said, “General Lee won’t show up here some day?”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Michael.

  “Also,” Mincey said, “you always have too many papers on your desk. It gives a bad impression. Put them in the drawers. Only have one paper on your desk at any one time.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “One more thing,” Mincey said damply. “I wonder if you have some cash on you. I got caught with the check at Les Ambassadeurs last night, and I don’t collect my per diem till Monday.”

  “Will a pound do?”

  “That all you got?”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Michael.

  “O.K.” Mincey took the pound. “Thanks. I’m glad you’re with us, Whitacre. This office was a mess before you came. If you’d only look more like a soldier.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Michael.

  “Send in Sergeant Moscowitz,” Mincey said. “That son of a bitch is loaded with dough.”

  “Yes, Sir,” said Michael. He went into the other office and sent Sergeant Moscowitz in to see the Captain.

  That was how the days passed in London, in the winter of 1944.

  “Oh, my offense is rank,” the King said, when Polonius had gone, “it smells to heaven;

  It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,—

  A brother’s murder!”

  In the little shadow boxes on each side of the stage, put there for that purpose, the sign “Air Raid Alert” was flashed, and a moment later came the sound of sirens, and immediately after, in the distance, toward the coast, the rumble of gunfire.

  “Pray can I not,” the King went on.

  Though inclination be as sharp as will

  My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent …”