by Irwin Shaw
“Noah, Noah,” the boy from Iowa was sobbing, “how do you feel? Are you all right?”
Noah thought he was smiling up at Johnny Burnecker, but after awhile he realized nothing much was happening on his face, no matter how hard he tried to move it. And it was getting terribly cold, very cold for summer, very cold for noon, very cold for France, very cold for July and a young man …
“Johnny,” he managed to whisper. “Don’t worry, Johnny. Take care of yourself. I’ll be back, Johnny, honest, I’ll be back …”
The war had turned out funny. No more snarling and cursing. No more Rickett, because Rickett had died in his arms, covering him with Sergeant’s blood. Now it was the soft-voiced, soft-handed, crosseyed little short-order cook, as gentle as Christ, a cockeyed, thin-moustached Christ with a strange Greek name, and it was the thin, sorrowful face of the General, who earned his pay by walking out into gunfire with a little stick in his hand, a General with a face full of tragedy and authority, whom you could not refuse anything; and it was the racked sobbing of his brother Johnny Burnecker, whom he had promised never to desert because they were lucky for each other, they would live, though the whole Company died, as of course they would, because there were so many hedges across so many fields that still lay ahead of all of them. The Army had changed, was changing, swiftly, softly, in a roaring mist of tubes and tourniquets, morphine and tears.
They lifted Noah onto a stretcher and started carrying him back. Noah raised his head. Seated on the ground, with his helmet off, abandoned to grief, sat Johnny Burnecker, weeping for his friend. Noah tried to call out to him, to assure him that all in the end would turn out well, but no sound came from his throat. He dropped his head and closed his eyes, as he was borne away, because he could not bear to see his deserted friend any more.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE DEAD HORSES were beginning to bloat and smell in the strong summer sun. The odor mingled with the acrid, medicinal smell of the ruptured ambulance convoy that lay, a jumble of overturned wagons, spilled pungent powders, scattered heaps of papers, torn and useless red crosses, along the road. The dead and the wounded had been removed, but otherwise the convoy remained, curving up the long hill, just as it had been left after the strafing and dive-bombing Americans had passed over it.
Christian went by it slowly, on foot, still carrying his Schmeisser, in a straggling group of perhaps twenty men, none of whom was known to him. He had picked them up early in the morning, after he had become separated from the hastily organized platoon with which he had been posted three days before. The platoon, he was sure, had deserted to the Americans during the night. Christian felt a somber sense of relief that he was no longer responsible for them or their actions.
Looking at the dead convoy, sadly marked with the red crosses that had done no good at all, he was overwhelmed with a sense of anger and despair. Anger at the swooping, 400-mile-an-hour young Americans who had come upon the slow-moving wagons toiling up the hill with their load of broken and dying men and had, in the wanton fury of destruction, roweled it with their machine guns and rockets.
The men around him, he could tell from glancing at them, did not share his anger. All that was left was their despair. They were past anger, as they trudged, gravel-eyed and exhausted, under heavy packs, some of them with no weapons, past the ruins of the convoy, past the growing smell of the horses. They dragged slowly eastward, keeping their eyes with dull wariness on the dangerous clear sky above them, moving like a dying beast, without reason or hope, toward the final cool, sheltered place where they might lie down and die. Some of them, with crazy miserliness, through all the welter of retreat and death, still carried loot with them. One man held a violin in his hand, stolen from what music-lover’s living room no one would ever know. A pair of silver candlesticks jutted out of another man’s pack, mute and stubborn evidence that this soldier, even in this agony, had faith in a future of dinners, table-linen, food, soft lights. A huge, red-eyed man without a helmet, whose long shock of blond hair was crusted with dust, carried in his pack a dozen wooden containers of Camembert cheese. When he passed Christian, because he was a powerful man and walked with dogged swiftness, the ripe, fermenting aroma of the melting cheese made a sick marriage with the smell of the convoy.
At the head of the convoy was a wagon on which was mounted an 88 millimeter anti-aircraft cannon. The horses were dead in the traces, in wild attitudes of gallop and fear, and there was blood all over the gun and its mounting. The German Army, Christian thought dully, as he went past, horses against airplanes. At least, in Africa, when he retreated, he had retreated with the aid of engines. He remembered the motorcycle and Hardenburg, the Italian staff car, the hospital plane that had crossed the Mediterranean with him, carrying him to Italy. It seemed to be the fate of the German Army, as a war went on, to go back to more and more primitive methods of fighting. Ersatz. Ersatz gasoline, ersatz coffee, ersatz blood, ersatz soldiers …
He seemed to have been retreating all his life. He had no memory any more of ever advancing any place. Retreat was the condition, the general weather of existence. Going back, going back, always hurt, always exhausted, always with the smell of German dead in his nostrils, always with enemy planes flickering behind his back, their guns dancing brightly in their wings, their pilots grinning because they were safe and they were killing hundreds of men a minute.
There was a loud blowing of a horn behind him, and Christian scrambled to one side. A small, closed car sped past, its wheels sending a fine cloud of dust over him. Christian got a glimpse of clean-shaven faces, a man smoking a cigar …
Then somebody was shouting, and there was the howl of engines above him. Christian lumbered away from the road and dove into one of the carefully spaced holes that had thoughtfully been provided by the German Army along many of the roads of France for the use of its troops at moments like this. He crouched deep in the damp earth, covering his head, not daring to look up, listening to the returning whine of the engines, and the savage tearing sound of the guns. After two passes, the planes moved off. Christian stood up. He climbed out of the hole. None of the men he had been walking with had been touched, but the little sedan was overturned, against a tree, and it was burning. Two of the men who had been in it had been thrown clear, and were lying very still in the center of the road. The other two men were burning in a welter of spilled gasoline, torn rubber and whipcord upholstery.
Christian walked slowly up to where the two men were lying face down on the road. He did not have to touch them to see that they were dead.
“Officers,” said a voice behind him. “They wanted to ride.” The man behind him spat.
The other men walked past the two dead forms and the burning car. For a moment Christian thought of ordering some of the men to help him move the bodies, but it would have meant an argument, and at the moment, it did not seem very important whether two bodies, more or less, were put to one side or not.
Christian slowly started eastward once more, feeling his bad leg shiver beneath him. He blew his nose and spat again and again to try to get the smell and the taste of the dead horses and the spilled medicine out of his mouth and throat.
The next morning he had a stroke of luck. He had pulled away from the other men during the night and had marched slowly on to the outskirts of a village, which lay across his path in the moonlight, dark, empty, seemingly lifeless. He had decided not to try to get through it by himself, at night, since it was all too possible that the inhabitants, seeing a lone soldier wandering past in the dark, might pick him off, rob him of his gun, boots and uniform, and throw him behind a hedge to rot. So he had camped under a tree, eaten sparingly of his emergency ration, and slept until dawn.
Then he had hurried through the town, almost trotting down the cobbled road, past the gray church, the inevitable statue of victory with palms and bayonets in front of the town hall, the shuttered shops. No one was stirring. The French seemed to have vanished from the face of the land as the Germans r
etreated through it. Even the dogs and the cats seemed to understand that it was safer for them to hide until the bitter tide of defeated soldiers passed over them.
It was on the other side of town that his luck changed. He was hurrying, because he was still in sight of the walls of the last row of houses, and his breath was coming hoarsely into his lungs, when he saw, coming around a bend in the road ahead of him, a figure on a bicycle.
Christian stopped. Whoever it was on the bicycle was in a hurry. He kept his head down and pedaled swiftly toward where Christian was standing.
Christian moved to the middle of the road and waited. He saw that it was a young boy, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, capless, dressed in a blue shirt and old French Army pants, racing bumpily through the cool, misty dawn light between the still rows of poplars on each side of the road, casting a soft, elongated shadow of legs and wheels on the road in front of him.
The boy saw Christian when he was only thirty yards away. He stopped suddenly.
“Come here,” Christian shouted hoarsely, in German, forgetting his French. “Walk over here.”
He started toward the boy. For a moment the two of them stared at each other. The boy was very pale, with curly black hair and dark, frightened eyes. With a swift, animal-like movement, the boy picked up the front wheel of the bicycle and whirled it around. He was running with the bicycle before Christian could unsling his gun. The boy jumped onto the bicycle. Bent over, with his blue shirt filling with wind behind him, he pedaled furiously back along the road, away from Christian.
Without thinking, Christian opened fire. He caught the boy with the second burst. The bicycle careened off into the ditch alongside the road. The boy went sliding across the road to the other side, and lay there without moving.
Christian lumbered quickly along the uneven road, his boots making a thick thudding sound in the silent morning. He bent over the bicycle and picked it up. He rolled it back and forth. It was unharmed. Then he looked at the boy. The boy’s head was twisted toward him, very pale and unmarked under the curly hair. There was a light blond fuzz of moustache under the slender nose. A red stain slowly spread across the back of the faded blue shirt. Christian made a movement toward the boy, but thought better of it. They’d have been bound to hear the shooting in the village, and if they found him there, fiddling over a dying child, they’d make short work of him.
Christian swung himself up on the bicycle and started east. After the weary days of walking, the ground seemed to spin past beneath him with charming swiftness and ease. His legs felt light; the dawning breeze against his cheeks was soft and cool; the light dewy green of the foliage on both sides of the road was pleasing to the eye. Now, he thought, it needn’t only be officers who ride.
The roads of France seemed to have been made for bicyclists, not too rough, with the paving in fair condition, and no high hills to slow a man down. Why, it was easily possible for a man to do two hundred kilometers a day, easily …
He felt youthful, strong, and for the first time since he had seen the first glider coming down out of the coastal sky that bad morning so long ago, he began to feel as though there was some hope for him. After a half hour, as he was gliding down a gentle slope between two fields of half-grown wheat, pale yellow in the morning sun, he found himself whistling, a vacation-like, holiday-like, tuneless, heart-free merry sound, rising gay and uninstructed in his throat.
All that day, he fled east along the road to Paris. He passed groups of men, walking, moving slowly in overloaded farm wagons stubbornly loaded with pictures and furniture and barrels of cider. He had passed refugees before in France, a long time ago, but it had been more natural then, because they were mostly women, children and old men, and you knew they had some reason to hold onto mattresses and kitchen pots and odds and ends of furniture because they hoped to set up domestic lives somewhere else. But it was strange to see a German Army trudging along this way, young men with guns and uniforms, who could only hope either finally to be reformed on some line by some miracle and turned around to fight—or to fall into the hands of the Americans who, it was rumored, were closing in on them from all directions. In either case, framed paintings from Norman chateaux and cloisonne lamps would do them a minimum amount of good. With set faces, past all reasonableness, the defeated men streamed slowly toward Paris on the summer roads, officerless, without formations or discipline, abandoned to the tanks and the planes of the Americans who were following them. Occasionally a wheezing French bus, with a charcoal furnace, would drag past, loaded down with dusty soldiers, who would have to get out on the hills to push. Once in a while an officer could be seen, but he would keep his mouth shut, look as lost and deserted as any of the others.
And, meanwhile, the country, in the full bloom of summer, with the geraniums high and pink and red along the farmers’ walls, was shining and lovely in the long perfect days.
By evening, Christian was exhausted. He hadn’t ridden a bicycle for years, and in the first hour or two he had gone too fast. Also, twice during the day, shots had been fired at him, and he had heard the bullets snipping by, past his head, and had driven himself frantically out of danger. The bicycle was wavering almost uncontrollably all over the road as he slowly pushed into the square of quite a fair-sized town at sunset. He was pleased, dully, to see that the square was full of soldiers, sitting in the cafés, lying exhausted and asleep on the stone benches in front of the town hall, tinkering hopelessly with broken-down 1925 Citroëns in an attempt to get them to move just a few more kilometers. Here, for a few moments, at least, he could be safe.
He dismounted from the bicycle, which by now was a kind of slippery enemy, raw-boned and malicious, a French machine with a sly intelligence of its own, which seemed to drag on his last strength with tenacious and murderous purpose, and which had almost thrown him four or five times on mild curves and hidden bumps in the road.
He walked stiffly beside the bicycle, his legs rigid and weak. The other men sitting and lying in the square glanced stonily at him for a moment, without interest or connection, then dropped their eyes with bleak indifference. He clutched the bicycle tightly, feeling that any one of these weary, foreign-looking, cold-eyed men would gladly murder him for the two wheels and the worn saddle if they could.
He would have liked to lie down and sleep for a few hours, but he didn’t dare. Since the two shots on the road, he refused to take the risk of stopping any place, even in the most remote and quiet spot, by himself. The only safety from the lurking French now was either in speed or numbers. And he could not lie down here, in town, among the other men, because he knew that when he awoke, the bicycle would be gone. He knew that he, himself, would have leaped at the chance to steal the machine from any sleeping comrade, even from General Rommel, himself, and there was no reason to suppose the other footsore and bloody-minded gentlemen in the town square would be more fastidious.
A drink, he thought, a drink will give me a breathing spell, a drink will keep me going.
He walked stiffly through the open door of a café, wheeling the bicycle at his side. There were some soldiers sitting in the back of the room and they looked at him briefly and without surprise, as though it was the most natural thing in the world for German Sergeants to enter cafés wheeling bicycles, or leading horses, or at the controls of armored cars. Christian carefully put the bicycle against the wall and placed a chair against the back wheel. Then he sat down slowly in the chair. He gestured to the old man behind the bar. “Cognac,” he said. “A double cognac.”
Christian looked around the shadowy room. There were the usual signs in French and German, with the rules for the sale of alcohol on them, and the legend that only apéritifs would be sold on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This was a Thursday, Christian remembered hazily, but the special nature of this particular Thursday might be said to countermand even the regulations of a Minister of the French Government at Vichy. At any rate, the Minister who had delivered himself of the regulation was no doubt running as
fast as he could at the moment and would probably be grateful for a little cognac himself. The only law anyone could be expected to observe on the evening of this summer day was the law of flight, the only authority the guns of the First and Third American Armies, not yet heard in this part of the country, but already felt, already exercising a premature and dreadful sovereignty.
The old Frenchman shuffled over with a small glass of brandy. The old man had a beard like a Jewish prophet and his teeth smelled terribly of decay, Christian noticed irritably. Was there no escaping, even in this cool dark place, the odors of ferment and mortality, the scent of dying bone and turning flesh?
“Fifty francs,” said the old man, leaning horribly over Christian, his hand still cautiously on the glass.
For a moment Christian thought of arguing with the old thief about the overcharge. The French, he thought, making a good thing out of victory and defeat, advance and retreat, friend and enemy. God, he thought sourly, let the Americans have them for awhile, see how happy they’ll be about it. He tossed the fifty francs, worn scraps of paper printed by the German Army, on the table. He would have little use for francs, soon, anyway, and he grinned within himself at the thought of the old man trying to collect on the printed, flimsy German promise from the new conquerors.
Methodically, the old man put the paper away, and dragged himself back, past the outstretched legs of the other soldiers, to his position behind the bar. Christian toyed with his glass, not drinking yet, content for the moment merely to sit, with his aching legs resting, his shoulders heavily comfortable against the wooden back of the chair. He glanced idly at the other men in the bar. It was too dark to see their faces clearly, and they were not talking or making a sound, merely sitting in attitudes of exhaustion and contemplation, sipping slowly at their drinks, as though they did not expect to be able to drink much longer, and wished to hold the memory of the alcohol, the sense of its sharpness against their tongues, as long as possible now.