Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  “Oh,” said Burnecker, who was lying on his cot with his shoes off, but his overcoat still on, “look at that Ackerman! Sharp as Saturday night in a Mexican dance hall. Those girls in London will just fall over and lay down in the gutter when they see that haircomb.”

  Noah grinned, grateful to Burnecker for the familiar joke. How different this was from Florida. The closer they came to battle, the closer they got to the day when each man’s life would depend upon every other man in the company, the more all differences fell away, the more connected and friendly they all were. “I’m not going to London,” he said, carefully knotting his tie.

  “He has a duchess in Sussex,” Burnecker said to Corporal Unger, who was cutting his toenails near the stove. “Very private.”

  “No duchess in Sussex, either,” said Noah. He put on his blouse and buttoned it.

  “Where you going then?”

  “Dover,” said Noah.

  “Dover!” Burnecker sat up in surprise. “On a three-day pass?”

  “Uhuh.”

  “The Germans keep lobbing shells into Dover,” Burnecker said. “Are you sure you’re going there?”

  “Uhuh.” Noah waved at them and went out of the tent. “See you Monday …”

  Burnecker looked puzzledly after him. Then he shrugged. “That man’s troubles,” he said, “have unseated his reason.” He lay down and in a minute and a half he was sleeping.

  Noah slipped out of the clean, old, wood and brick hotel just as the sun was rising out of France.

  He walked down the stone street toward the Channel. It had been a quiet night, with a thin fog. He had gone to the restaurant in the center of the town where a three-piece band had played and British soldiers and their girls had danced on the large floor. Noah had not danced. He had sat by himself, sipping unsweetened tea, smiling shyly when he caught a girl looking at him invitingly, and ducking his head. He liked to dance, but he had decided sternly that it would have been unseemly to be whirling around a floor with a girl in his arms at the very moment, perhaps, that his wife was at her crisis of birth and agony, and the first cry of his child was heard in the world.

  He had gone back to the hotel early, passing the sign on the bandstand that read, “All Dancing Will Cease During Shell’ing.”

  He had locked himself in his cold, bare room and got into bed with a feeling of great luxury, alone, at ease, with no one to order him to do anything until Monday night. He had sat up in bed, writing a letter to Hope, remembering the hundreds of letters he had written her when he had first met her. “I am sitting up in bed,” he wrote, “in a real bed; in a real hotel, my own man for three days, writing this, thinking of you. I cannot tell you where I am, because the Censor wouldn’t like it, but I think I can safely tell you that there is a fog over the land tonight, that I have just come from a restaurant where a band was playing Among My Souvenirs, and where there was a sign that read All Dancing Will Cease During Shelling. I think I can also tell you that I love you.

  “I am very well and although they have worked us very hard for the last three weeks, I actually have gained four pounds. I will probably be so fat when I get home, neither you nor the child will recognize me.

  “Please do not worry about it’s being a girl. I will be delighted with a girl. Honestly. I have been giving great thought to the child’s education,” he wrote earnestly, bent over the pad in the flickering dim light, “and this is what I have decided. I do not like the new-fangled ideas in education that are inflicted upon children today. I have seen examples of what they do to unformed minds, and I would want to save our child from them. The idea of allowing a child to do whatever comes into its head, in order to permit free expression, seems to me to be absolutely nonsensical. It makes for spoiled, whining and disrespectful children,” Noah wrote out of the depths of his twenty-three-year-old wisdom, “and is based, anyway, on a false notion. The world, certainly, will not permit any child, even ours, to behave completely according to its own desires, and to lead a child to believe that is the case is only to practice a cruel deception upon it. I am against nursery schools, too, and kindergartens, and I think we can teach the child all it has to know for the first eight years better than anyone else. I am also against forcing a child to read too early in life. I hope I do not sound too dogmatic, but we have never had the time to discuss this with each other and argue out any of the points and compromise on them.

  “Please, darling, do not laugh at me for writing so solemnly about a poor little life that may not, at the moment I wrote this, have even begun. But this may be my last pass in a long time, and the last time I will be able to have the peace and quiet to think sensibly about this subject.

  “I am certain, dearest,” Noah wrote slowly and carefully, “that it will be a fine child, straight of limb, quick of mind, and that we shall love it very much. I promise to return to him and to you with a whole body and a whole heart. I know I shall, no matter what happens. I shall return to help with the diapers, to tell him stories at bedtime, to feed him spinach and teach him how to drink milk out of a glass, to take him out in the Park on Sundays and tell him the names of the animals in the zoo, to explain to him why he must not hit little girls and why he must love his mother as much as his father does.

  “In your last letter you wrote that you were thinking of calling the child after my father if he was a boy. Please do not do that I was not very fond of my father, although he undoubtedly had his good points, and I have been trying to run away from him all my life. Call him Jonathan, after your father, if you wish. I am a little frightened of your father, but I have admired him warmly ever since that Christmas morning in Vermont.

  “I am not worried for you. I know you will be wonderful. Do not worry about me. Nothing can happen to me now.

  Love,

  Noah.”

  “P.S. I wrote a poem this evening’ before dinner. My first poem. It is a delayed reaction to assaulting, fortified positions. Here it is. Don’t show it to anyone. I’m ashamed.

  Beware the heart’s sedition,

  It is not made for war:

  Fear the fragile tapping

  At the brazen door.

  That’s the first stanza. I’ll write two more stanzas today and send them to you. Write me, darling, write me, write me, write me …”

  He had folded the letter neatly and got out of bed and put it in his blouse pocket. Then he had put out the light and hurried back between the warm sheets.

  There had been no shelling during the night. Around one in the morning the sirens had gone off, but only for some planes that had raided London and were on their way home and had crossed the coast ten miles to the west. No guns had been fired.

  Noah touched the bulge of the letter under his coat as he walked down the street. He wondered if there was an American Army unit in town where he could have it censored. He always felt a twinge of distaste when he thought of the officers of his own company, whom he did not like, reading his letters to Hope.

  The sun was up by now, burning under the slight mist. The houses shone palely, swimming up into the morning. Noah passed the neatly cleaned-out foundations where four houses had been knocked down by shellfire. Now, finally, he thought, as he passed the ruins, I am in a town that is at war.

  The Channel lay out beneath him, gray and cold. He could not see the coast of France, through the thinning haze over the water. Three British torpedo boats, small and swift, were slicing into their concrete berths in the harbor. They had been out the night before, ranging the enemy coast, in a pale, blazing wake of foam, in a swirling confusion of swinging searchlights, streams of tracer bullets, underwater torpedo explosions that had sent black fountains of water three hundred feet in the air. Now they were coming in mildly, in the Sunday morning sunlight, at quarter-speed, looking playful and holiday-like, like speedboats at a summer resort.

  A town at war, Noah repeated silently.

  At the end of the street there was a bronze monument, dark and worn by the Channel winds. N
oah read the inscription, which solemnly celebrated the British soldiers who had passed this spot on their way to France in the years between 1914 and 1918.

  And again, in 1939, Noah thought, and on the way back, in 1940, from Dunkerque. What monument would a soldier read in Dover twenty years from now, what battles would they bring to his mind?

  Noah kept walking. He had the town to himself. The road climbed up the famous cliffs out across the windswept meadows that reminded Noah, as so much of England did, of a park kept in good repair by a careful, loving, and not very imaginative gardener.

  He walked swiftly, swinging his arms. Now, without the rifle, without the pack, without the helmet and canteen and bayonet scabbard, walking seemed like a light and effortless movement, a joyous, spontaneous expression of the body’s health on a winter morning.

  When he reached the top of the cliff, the mist had disappeared and the Channel sparkled playfully, blue and glittering all the way to France. In the distance stood the cliff of Calais. Noah stopped and stared across the water. France was amazingly near-by. As he watched he could almost imagine that he saw a truck, moving slowly, along a climbing road, past a church whose steeple rose into the washed air. Probably it would be an Army truck, he thought, and in it German soldiers. Probably on their way to church. It was a queer sensation, to look at enemy ground, even at this distance, and know that, in their glasses, they could probably see you, and all in a kind of trance-like, distance-born truce. Somehow, you could not help but feel that in a war, so long as you could see the enemy, or he you, killing should follow immediately. There was something artificial, spuriously arranged, about this peaceful observation of each other; it was an aspect of war that left you uneasy and dissatisfied. In a curious way, Noah thought, it would make it harder to kill them later.

  He stood on the top of the cliff, regarding the doubtful, clear coast of Europe. The town of Calais, with its docks and spires and rooftops and bare trees rising into the wartime sky, lay still in its Sunday-morning quietness, just like the town of Dover below him. He wished Roger were here with him today. Roger would have had something to say, some obscure, significant point of information about the two linked towns, twins through history, sending fishing smacks, tourists, ambassadors, soldiers, pirates, high explosive, back and forth at each other across the years. How sad that Roger had been sent to die among the palm trees and jungle moss of the Philippines. How much more fitting, if he had to die, if the bullet had reached him as he stormed the beach of the France he had loved so well, or been struck down riding into a country village near Paris, smiling, looking for the proprietor of the café he had drunk with all one summer—or if he had been in Italy when his death had reached him, fighting perhaps in the very fishing village through which he had passed up to Rome on his way from Naples in the autumn of 1936, recognizing the church, the city hall, the face of a girl, as he fell … Death, Noah realized, had its peculiar degrees of justness, and Roger’s death had been low on that particular scale. “You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin’ any money, Tha’s all I want to know …”

  Later, Noah decided, after the war, he would come back to this place with Hope. I stood here, in this exact spot, and it was absolutely quiet, and there was France, looking just the way it looks now. I don’t know to this day exactly why I picked Dover for what might have been my last pass. I don’t know … curiosity, maybe, a desire to see what it was like. A town at war, really at war, a look at the place where the enemy was … I’d been told so much about them, how they ‘fought, what weapons they used, what horrors they’d committed—I wanted at least to see the place where they were. And, then sometimes there was shelling, and I’d never heard a gun fired in anger, as they used to say in the Army …

  No, Noah decided, we won’t talk about the war at all. We’ll walk here hand in hand, on a summer’s day, and sit down next to each other on the cropped grass, and look out across the Channel and say, “Look, you can almost see the church steeple in France. Isn’t it a lovely afternoon …”

  The sound of an explosion shivered the quiet. Noah looked down at the harbor. A slow, lazy puff of smoke, small and toylike in the distance, was rising from the spot where the shell had hit among some warehouses. Then there was another explosion and another. The puffs of smoke blossomed in a random pattern throughout the roofs of the town. A chimney slowly crumbled, top faraway to make a sound, collapsing softly like bricks made out of candy. Seven times the explosions sounded. Then there was silence again. The town seemed to go back without an effort into its Sabbath sleep.

  The Germans on the other side of the water, their malice satisfied or their anger cooled by the martial display, cleaned their guns and waited.

  No answer came from the British guns. The dust clouds sent swirling up by the shells subsided, and in five minutes it was almost impossible to believe that anything had happened.

  Slowly, trying to fix in his mind the exact impression of what the explosions had looked and sounded like, Noah began to descend the hill into the town. It had all seemed so remote, so childishly spiteful, without plan … Is that it? he couldn’t help thinking, as he braced himself against the grade, striding downwards, Is that what a war is like?

  The town was awake by now. Two old ladies in black feathered bonnets, carrying prayer books in net-gloved hands, swept sedately toward church. A tall Marine Commando Lieutenant, with his arm in a white sling, rolled swiftly and debonairly past, beautifully uniformed, on a bicycle. A very small girl, held in tow by a church-bound aunt, looked up at Noah and offered, gravely, British childhood’s ritualistic greeting to the American Army, “Any gum, Chum?”

  “Harriet!” said the aunt coldly.

  Noah grinned and shook his head at the small blonde creature being dragged off to worship.

  A family group poured through a tall black door into the street, father, mother and a staggered ladder of children from the age of four to ten. The father held the hand of the smallest child. He had a round belly under decent broadcloth, and his face was sleepy and complacent under an ancient, wonderfully brushed hat. The mother circled the flock of children, like a collie dog, herding them down the street toward their prayers.

  A very pretty girl with bare legs and a loose coat passed absent-mindedly through the group reading the Sunday Times as she walked.

  A British Sergeant, with the standard British Sergeant’s face, cool, reserved, stiff with authority and competence, walked rigidly on the other side of the street, his wife on his arm. His wife was young, and Noah could tell she was trying to live up to the portentous Manual-Of-Arms bearing of her husband. But her face kept breaking into smiling life as she looked side-wise at her husband, and the effect was incongruous and appealing, like a child with colored ribbons in her braids, mounted on a spry and shaggy Shetland pony, who has by accident strayed into a parade of armored vehicles.

  “Good morning, good morning,” the citizens of the town said on their assaulted thoroughfares. “Isn’t it a lovely day? I hear they hit poor Mrs. Finchley’s fishmarket again. Well, now isn’t it nice to have your Albert back with you for the weekend? Isn’t it nice that the fog has gone? You can see France today. We are going to go up after dinner and look. Yes, I. heard from Sidney. Quite well, thank you, quite well, they took the last stitches out of the wound three weeks ago, and they are sending him to Calcutta on his convalescent leave … My Roberta has her American Sergeant down with her again this week-end and he brought a large can of that delicious American fruit salad and a whole carton of Chesterfields. A lovely boy, a lovely, lovely boy, and he says the permission ought to come through in about a month, now, you know how slow armies are, and they’re to be married here, if it’s before the invasion, I’ve already asked Reverend Redwine. Good morning, good morning, good morning …”

  Noah stopped in front of the church. It was a squat, stone building, with a heavy, square tower. It looked as though the God who was addressed within it was a forb
idding Old Testament God, Who laid the Law down squarely and with no frills or subtleties to the long generations of Channel-side worshipers; a Coast and Cliff God, a coldwater and storm God, long on justice and rationed in mercy. There was an air-raid shelter on the lawn, and rolls of zig-zagging barbed-wire fences near the rectory at the back, and menacing-looking concrete pyramids of tank blocks at the corner of the lawn, to stop the Germans who had never climbed the cliff as they had promised to do in 1940.

  The service was already on, and they were singing a hymn to the accompaniment of an organ within. The soprano of women’s and children’s voices over the deeper rumble of the organ and the men, seemed surprisingly delicate and frivolous, coming from the angular, gray stone. On an impulse that he did not examine, Noah went in.

  The congregation was small, and Noah sat down on one of the empty oak benches in the rear of the church. Many of the windows were broken, some patched with cardboard, others merely glittering edges of glass in heavy lead frames. The wind off the Channel, freighted with salt, gusted in through the holes, ruffling veils and Bible pages, flicking at the long white hair of the minister, who stood rather dreamily in the pulpit, rocking softly on his heels with the hymn, looking, with his thin, parchment face, and his blowing white hair, like an ancient pianist or astronomer, too deep in fugues or stars to remember to go to the barber.

  Noah had never gone to synagogue. His father’s overblown, rhetorical intimacy with religious literature had clouded over the idea of God in Noah’s mind early in life. And he had never even spoken to a Chaplain, Jewish or Christian, in the Army. They had always seemed too bluff, too hearty, too soldierly and mundane, too much like any other Captain or Troop Commander, to offer spiritual comfort of any kind to Noah. He always felt that if he went to any one of them and cried, “Father, I have sinned,” or “Father, I am afraid of Hell,” they would have clapped him on the back, quoted an Army regulation, and sent him out to clean his rifle.