Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.

  “Come on, darling,” Louise said. He could feel that she was shivering, and he was surprised, because she had always been so cool, so contained. “We’re not doing any good here. Let’s go home.”

  Silently, they turned and walked away. Behind them, the firemen had managed to reach some valve and the gushing from the broken main diminished, then stopped completely. The water in front of the Palace was calm and black.

  A great many other things happened that day in the City of London.

  A Major General who had just received the plans for the invasion of France pleaded for another division of infantry to be put on the beach in the first two days.

  A Spitfire pilot who had completed two tours of duty and who had shot down six planes was grounded for drunkenness and shot himself in his mother’s bedroom.

  A new ballet was put into rehearsal in’ which the leading male dancer had to crawl on his stomach completely across the stage, symbolizing subconscious lust.

  A girl in a top hat and long black silk, stockings sang, “I’m going to get lit up when the lights go up again” in a musical comedy and was joined in the chorus by the audience, three-quarters of whom were Americans.

  An ulcer finally broke through the stomach wall of a Service of Supply Major in Grosvenor Square who had been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for two years. He had just picked up a memorandum, marked SECRET, on his desk, which notified him that a hundred and twenty tons of 105 millimeter ammunition, which had been ticketed for Southampton, had been lost due to the breaking apart in mid-ocean, in a mild squall, of a Liberty ship.

  A B-17 pilot from Utah who had been listed as missing over Lorient three months before, arrived at Claridge’s, smiling widely, speaking forty words of French, and asked for the royal suite. He made sixteen calls, using a small address book he had never allowed to leave his person, in the next twenty minutes.

  A twenty-year-old farmer from Kansas spent eight hours in a cold pool learning how to swim under water so that he could blow up submerged obstacles off the coast of Europe the day of the invasion.

  In the House of Commons, a question was asked of the Home Secretary, demanding an explanation of the fact that American soldiers accused of rape were tried and convicted by American courts-martial, and hanged, although there was no capital punishment for rape in British law, and the offense, which must be considered a civil one, was committed on British civilians on territory under the sovereignty of the King.

  A Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg, now a Private in His Majesty’s Army, Corps of Pioneers, spent the day painting tarpaulins with a water-resistant shellac. At lunch time, speaking German, he quoted Kant and Spengler to a fellow-soldier and compared notes with a new arrival about the barracks at Dachau.

  At noon, a maid in a boarding house in Chelsea noticed the smell of gas coming from a room and unlocked the door to find the naked bodies of an American Sergeant and a British girl, locked on the bed. They were both dead. When they went to bed they had left the gas heater on. The girl’s husband was in India and the Sergeant’s wife was in Montana. The American Army finally told the wife that her husband had died of a heart attack. He was twenty-one years old.

  A Lieutenant in the Coastal Command had lunch at his club and drove down to his station, where he boarded his Liberator on a routine submarine patrol. The plane rose into the air, wheeled south toward the Bay of Biscay, and was never heard of again.

  An Air Raid Rescue Warden dug a seven-year-old girl with black hair out of a caved-in cellar, where she had been trapped in a raid eight days before.

  A Corporal in the American Army, on his way to lunch, saluted a hundred and eleven times on his passage across Grosvenor Square.

  A Scotchman in a bomb-disposal squad reached carefully in between two crossed girders and slowly withdrew the fuse of a two-thousand-pound bomb that had failed to explode the night before. The bomb had been making a curious ticking noise for forty-five minutes.

  An American poet, aged twenty-five, now a Sergeant in the Engineers, in London on a three-day pass, walked slowly through Westminster Abbey, and noticed that there was more room devoted to the remains of obscure nobility than to all the company of Keats, Byron, Shelley, et al., and reflected that if there were a Westminster Abbey in Washington, there would be more Goulds there than Whitmans, more Harrimans than Thoreaus.

  A joke about the Americans, which ran, “What’s wrong with Americans?” “Nothing. It’s just that they’re overpaid, overfed, overdressed, oversexed, and over here,” was repeated twelve hundred times during the day.

  The mother of three small children, whose father was at the moment crouched in a hole south of Anzio, being shot at by a German mortar crew, stood in a queue for an hour and three-quarters and returned home with a pound of boned haddock. She looked at her children and considered killing them, but thought better of it, and made a stew of the fish, with one potato, and some soybean flour.

  A committee of high-ranking officers of both Armies met to discuss making a motion picture about the invasion of Europe, in which the teamwork of all concerned was to be the main theme of the effort. The man representing the RAF quarreled with the man representing the British Ground Forces, the man representing the Eighth Air Force quarreled with the man representing the American Navy, the man representing the American Services of Supply grew furious with the British Captain who represented the Coastal Command, and it was resolved that the matter should be sent to a higher committee.

  At noon, a squad of British enlisted men, clerks in the offices off Berkeley Square, could be seen practicing bayonet drill among the air-raid shelters and the wan trunks of dead trees, while other clerks sat on the cold benches and ate their lunch in the watery sunshine.

  A British committee finished a carefully worded report to their Headquarters proving that American daylight bombing was wasteful and impractical.

  The first jonquils appeared on barrows on street corners and shabby people in patched clothes stopped, with longing hearts, and bought the frail bunched blossoms and carried them selfconsciously to their offices and their homes.

  At the luncheon concert in the National-Gallery, a trio played the works of Schubert, Walton and Bach.

  Near Whitechapel a fence on which had been printed in large white letters, in 1942, Open the Second Front Now, was torn down for firewood.

  In the Thames Estuary off the India docks, a Merchant Marine seaman from Seattle prayed for a raid that night, because his wife expected another child in two months, and he got a bonus for every raid on his ship while he was in port.

  Also … four million souls went into offices and factories and warehouses and worked steadily and slowly and methodically, taking time out for tea at ten and four, at adding and subtracting, and mending and polishing, at assembling and stitching, carrying and sorting, typing and filing, making and losing. They did it all in a slow, sensible competent manner that irritated all the Americans who came into contact with them. Later they went home and some of them died in the night’s raid, in exactly the same slow, dignified, sensible manner.

  Four days after the opening of Hamlet, Michael was called into the orderly room of the Special Services Company to which he was attached for rations and quarters and told that he was ordered to report to the Infantry Replacement Depot at Litchfield. He was given two hours to pack his bags.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  THE LANDING BARGE went around in a monotonous circle. The spray heaved in over the side, puddling on the slippery deck. The men crouched over their weapons, trying to keep them dry. The barges had been rolling a mile off the beach since three o’clock in the morning. It was seven-thirty now, and all conversation had long ago ceased. The preliminary barrage from the ships was almo
st over, and the simulated air attack. The smoke screen thrown across the cove by a low-flying Cub was even now settling on the water’s edge. Everybody was wet, everybody was cold, everybody, except for the men who felt like throwing up, was hungry.

  Noah was enjoying it.

  Crouched in the bow of the barge, tenderly keeping dry the charges of TNT that were his especial care, feeling the salt spray of the North Sea batter against his helmet, breathing the sharp, wild, morning air, Noah was enjoying himself.

  It was the final exercise for his regiment in their assault training. It was a full-dress rehearsal, complete with naval and air support and live ammunition, for the coast of Europe. For three weeks they had practiced in thirty-man teams, each team to a pillbox, riflemen, bazooka men, flame-throwers, detonation men. This was the last time before the real thing. And there was a three-day pass, waiting like a promise of Heaven, in the orderly room for Noah.

  Burnecker was pale green from seasickness, his large farmer’s hands gripping his rifle convulsively, as though there, at least, might be found something steady, something secure in a heaving world. He grinned weakly at Noah.

  “Holy jumping mule,” he said, “I am not a healthy man.”

  Noah smiled at him. He had grown to know Burnecker well in the last three weeks of working together. “It won’t be long now,” Noah said.

  “How do you feel?” Burnecker asked.

  “O.K.,” said Noah.

  “I’d trade you the mortgage on my father’s eighty acres,” Burnecker said, “for your stomach.”

  There was a confusion of amplified voices across the sliding water. The barge veered sharply and picked up speed as it headed for the beach. Noah crouched against the damp steel side, ready to jump when the ramp went down. Maybe, he thought, as the waves slapped with increasing force against the speeding hull, maybe there will be a cable from Hope when I get back to camp, saying it is all over. Then, later, he thought, I will sit back and tell my son, “The day you were born, I was landing on the coast of England with twenty pounds of dynamite.” Noah grinned. It would have been better, of course, to have been with Hope while it was happening, but this really had its advantages. You were too occupied to worry very much. There was no anxious pacing of corridors, no smoking of too many cigarettes, no listening to the screams. It was selfish, of course, but it had its points.

  The barge grated against the smooth beach and a second later the ramp went down. Noah leaped out, feeling his equipment banging heavily against his back and sides, feeling the cold water pouring in over his leggings. He raced for a small dune and flung himself down behind it. The other men lumbered out, spreading rapidly, ducking into holes and behind clumps of scrub grass. The riflemen opened up on the pillbox eighty yards away, on a small bluff overlooking the beach. The bangalore torpedo men crept carefully up to the barbed wire and set their fuses, then ran back. The bangalores exploded, adding the sharp smell of their explosion to the soft thick smell of the smoke that the plane had laid down.

  Noah picked himself up, with Burnecker protecting him, and ran forward to a hole that lay near the wire. Burnecker fell in on top of him.

  Burnecker was panting heavily. “Goodness,” Burnecker said, “isn’t dry land wonderful?”

  They laughed at each other, then slowly poked their heads out of the hole. The men were working precisely, like a football team running through signals, advancing, as they had been taught, on the pale gray sides of the pillbox.

  The bazooka went off again and again, in its rushing, noisy explosion, and large chunks of concrete flew up in the air from the pillbox.

  “At times like this,” Burnecker said, “I ask myself only one question. ‘What are the Germans supposed to be doing while we go through all this?’”

  Noah leaped out of the hole and dashed, crouching, holding his charges, through the opening in the wire. The bazooka spoke again and Noah threw himself to the sand, in’ case any of the concrete flew out toward him. Burnecker was lying beside him, panting heavily.

  “And I used to think plowing was hard,” Burnecker said.

  “Come on, Farmboy,” said Noah, “we’re on our way.” He stood up. Burnecker got off the ground, groaning.

  They ran to the right and threw themselves behind a six-foot-high dune. The grass on top of the dune was snapping in the wet wind.

  They watched the man with the flame-thrower carefully crawl towards the pillbox. The fire from the riflemen supporting them still whistled over their heads and ricocheted off the concrete.

  If Hope could only see me now, thought Noah.

  The man with the flame-thrower was in position now, and the other man with him turned the cock on the cylinders on his back. It was Donnelly who carried the enormous heavy cylinders. He had been picked because he was the strongest man in the platoon. Donnelly started the flame-thrower. The fire spurted out, whipping unevenly in the strong wind, smelling oily and heavy. Donnelly sprayed the slits of the pillbox in savage, arching bursts.

  “All right, Noah,” said Burnecker. “Do your act.”

  Noah leaped up and ran lightly and swiftly to windward of Donnelly, toward the pillbox. By now the men in the box were theoretically either dead, wounded, burned or stunned. Noah ran strongly, even in the deep sand. Everything seemed very clear to him, the chipped and blackened concrete, the dangerous narrow slits, the cliff rising dark green and steep behind the beach, against the streaked, gray sky. He felt strong, able to carry the heavy charges for miles. He breathed evenly and deeply as he ran, knowing exactly where to go, exactly what he was going to do. He was smiling as he reached the pillbox. Quickly and deftly he threw the satchel charge against the base of the wall. Then he poked the other charge on its long stick, into the ventilating hole. He was conscious as he worked that the eyes of all the men in the platoon were on him, performing expertly and well the final act in the ceremony. The fuses were spitting now, well-lit, and Noah turned and raced toward a foxhole thirty feet away. He threw himself in a long, bunched dive, into the hole, and ducked his head. For a moment there was silence on the beach, except for the hiss of the wind through the spikes of ocean grass. Then the explosions came, one on top of another. Chunks of concrete hurtled into the air and landed dully near him in the sand. He looked up. The pillbox was split open, smoking and black. Noah stood up. He smiled, rather proudly.

  The Lieutenant who had been in charge of their training at the camp, and who had come along as an observer, was walking toward him.

  “Roger,” said the Lieutenant. “Good job.”

  Noah waved at Burnecker and Burnecker, standing now, leaning on his rifle, waved back.

  There was a letter from Hope at Mail Call. Noah opened it solemnly, with slow hands.

  “Darling,” the letter read, “Nothing yet. I am ENORMOUS. There is a feeling here that the child will weigh a hundred and fifty pounds at birth. I eat all the time. I love you.”

  Noah read the letter three times, feeling adult and paternal. Then he folded it carefully and put it in his pocket, and went back to his tent to get ready for his three-day pass.

  As he dug down in his barracks bag for a clean shirt, he felt secretly for the box he had hidden there. It was still there, wrapped in long johns. It was a box of twenty-five cigars. He had bought it in the United States and carried it across the ocean with him, for the day that was now almost upon him. He had lived so much of his life without ritual or ceremony, that the simple, rather foolish notion of signalizing the birth of an heir by handing out cigars had assumed solemn proportions in his mind. He had paid a great deal for the cigars in Newport News, Virginia, eight dollars and seventy-five cents, and the box had taken up precious room in his barracks bag, but he had never begrudged either the cost or the space. Somehow, more felt than thought, Noah dimly realized that the act of giving, the plain, clumsy symbol of celebration, would make him feel the real living presence of the child, three thousand miles away, would place the child and himself in his own mind and the minds of the men arou
nd him, in the proper normal relationship of father and son or father and daughter. Otherwise, in the ever-flowing stream of khaki, it would be so easy to make that day like every other day, that soldier like every other soldier … While the smoke still rose from the propitiatory offering, he would be more than a soldier, more than one of ten million, more than an exile, more than a rifle and a salute, more than a helmet and a dogtag … he would be a father, love’s creative particularized link among the generations of men.