Young Lions

by Irwin Shaw

  They cleaned their mess kits and, luxuriously smoking nickel cigars from their rations, they strolled through the sharp, dark evening, toward Noah’s tent, their mess kits jangling musically at their sides.

  There was a movie in camp, a 16 mm version of Rita Hay-worth in Cover Girl, and all the men who were billeted in the same tent with Noah were surrendering themselves to its technicolor delights. Michael and Noah sat on Noah’s cot in the empty tent, puffing at their cigars, watching the blue smoke spiral softly up through the chilled air.

  “I’m pulling out of here tomorrow,” Noah said.

  “Oh,” Michael said, feeling suddenly bereaved, feeling that it was unjust for the Army to throw friends together like this, only to tear them apart twelve hours later. “Your name on the roster?”

  “No,” said Noah quietly. “I’m just pulling out.”

  Michael puffed carefully at his cigar. “AWOL?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  God, Michael thought, remembering the time Noah had spent in prison, hasn’t he had enough of that? “Paris?” he asked.

  “No. I’m not interested in Paris.” Noah bent over and took two packs of letters, carefully done up in string, from his barracks bag. He put one pack, the envelopes scrawled unmistakably in a woman’s handwriting, on the bed. “Those are from my wife,” Noah said flatly. “She writes me every day. This pack …” He waved the other bunch of letters gently. “From Johnny Burnecker. He writes me every time he has a minute off. And every letter ends, ‘You have to come back here.’”

  “Oh,” Michael said, trying to recall Johnny Burnecker, remembering an impression of a tall, raw-boned boy with a girlish complexion and blond hair.

  “He’s got a fixation, Johnny,” Noah said. “He thinks if I come back and stay with him, we’ll both come through the war all right. He’s a wonderful man. He’s the best man I ever met in my whole life. I’ve got to get back to him.”

  “Why do you have to go AWOL?” Michael asked. “Why don’t you go into the orderly room and ask them to send you back to your old Company?”

  “I did,” Noah said. “That Peruvian. He told me to get my ass the hell out of there, he was too busy, he wasn’t any goddamn placement bureau, I’d go where they sent me.” Noah played slowly with the pack of Burnecker’s letters. They made a dry, rustling sound in his hands. “I shaved and pressed my uniform, and I made sure I was wearing my Silver Star. It didn’t impress him. So I’m taking off after breakfast tomorrow.”

  “You’ll get into a mess of trouble,” Michael said.

  “Nah.” Noah shook his head. “People do it every day. Just yesterday a Captain in the Fourth did it He couldn’t bear hanging around any more. He just took a musette bag. The guys picked up all the other gear he left and sold it to the French. As long as you don’t try to make Paris, the MP’s don’t bother you, if you’re heading toward the front. And Lieutenant Green, I hear he’s Captain now, is in command of C Company, and he’s a wonderful fellow. He’ll straighten it out for me. He’ll be glad to see me.”

  “Do you know where they are?” Michael asked.

  “I’ll find out,” Noah said. “That won’t be hard.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of getting into any more trouble?” Michael asked. “After all that stuff in the States?”

  Noah grinned softly. “Brother,” he said, “after Normandy, anything the United States Army might do to me couldn’t look like trouble.”

  “You’re sticking your neck out,” Michael said.

  Noah shrugged. “As soon as I found out in the hospital that I wasn’t going to die,” he said, “I wrote Johnny Burnecker I’d be back. He expects me.” There was a note of quiet finality in Noah’s voice that admitted no further questioning.

  “Happy landing,” Michael said. “Give my regards to the boys.”

  “Why don’t you come with me?”

  “What?”

  “Come along with me,” Noah repeated. “You’ll have a lot better chance of coming out of the war alive if you go into a company where you have friends. You have no objections to coming out of the war alive, have you?”

  “No,” Michael smiled weakly. “Not really.” He did not tell Noah of the times when it hadn’t seemed to make much difference to him whether he survived or not, some of the rainy, weary nights in Normandy when he had felt so useless, when the war had seemed to be only a growing cemetery, whose only purpose seemed the creation of new dead; or the bleak days in the hospital in England, surrounded by the mangled product of the French battlefields, at the mercy of the efficient, callous doctors and nurses, who would not even give him a twenty-four-hour pass to visit London, to whom he had never been a human being in need of comfort and relief, but merely a poorly mending leg that had to be whipped back into a facsimile of health so that its owner could be sent back as soon as possible to the front. “No,” Michael said, “I don’t really mind the idea of being alive at the end of the war. Although to tell you the truth, I have a feeling, five years after the war is over, we’re all liable to look back with regret to every bullet that missed us.”

  “Not me,” said Noah fiercely. “Not me. I’m never going to feel that.”

  “Sure,” Michael said, feeling guilty. “I’m sorry I said it.”

  “You go up as a replacement,” said Noah, “and your chances are awful. The men who are there are all friends, they feel responsible for each other, they’ll do anything to save each other. That means every dirty, dangerous job they hand right over to the replacements. The Sergeants don’t even bother to learn your name. They don’t want to know anything about you. They just trade you in for their friends and wait for the next batch of replacements. You go into a new Company, all by yourself, and you’ll be on every patrol, you’ll be the point of every attack. If you ever get stuck out some place, and it’s a question of saving you or saving one of the old boys, what do you think they’ll do?”

  Noah was speaking passionately, his dark eyes steady and intense on Michael’s face, and Michael was touched by the boy’s solicitude. After all, Michael remembered, I did damn little for him in his trouble in Florida, and I was no great comfort to his wife back in New York. He wondered if that frail dark girl had any notion of what her husband was saying now on the wet plain outside Paris, any notion of what subterranean, desperate reasoning a man went through in this cold foreign autumn so that he could one day come back and touch her hand, pick up his son in his arms … What did they know about the war back in America, what did the correspondents have to say about the replacement depots in their signed pieces on the front pages of the newspapers?

  “You’ve got to have friends,” Noah was saying fiercely. “You can’t let them send you any place where you don’t have friends to protect you …”

  “Yes,” Michael said gently, putting out his hand and touching the boy’s wasted arm, “I’ll go with you.”

  But he didn’t say it because he felt that he was the one who needed friends.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A CHAPLAIN in a jeep picked them up on the other side of Chateau-Thierry. It was a gray day and the old monuments among the cemeteries and the rusting wire of another war looked bleak and ill-tended.

  The Chaplain was quite a young man, with a Southern accent, and very talkative. He was attached to a P-51 fighter group and he was going up to Reims to testify as a character witness for a pilot who was being court-martialed there.

  “Poor young feller,” the Chaplain said, “nicest boy you could hope to meet. Has a darn nice record too, twenty-two missions already, one certain and two probables, and even though the Colonel personally asked me not to testify, I believe it’s my Christian duty to go up there and say my piece in court.”

  “What is he up for?” Michael said.

  “He committed a nuisance at a Red Cross dance,” the Chaplain said. “He pissed on the floor in the middle of a number.”

  Michael grinned.

  “Conduct unbecoming an officer, the Colonel says,” s
aid the Chaplain, looking around dangerously from the wheel. “The boy was a little drunk and I don’t know what-all was passing through his mind. I am taking a real personal interest in the case. I have had a long correspondence with the officer who is conducting the defense, a very smart Episcopalian boy who was a lawyer in Portland before the war. Yes, Sir. And the Colonel is not going to stop me from saying what I have to say, and he knows it. Why,” the Chaplain said indignantly, “Colonel Button is the last man in the world to persecute a man on a charge like that. I’m going to tell the Court about the Colonel’s activity at a dance in Dallas, right at home, in the heart of the United States of America, surrounded by American women. You may not believe it, but Colonel Button, in full uniform, pissed into a potted rubber plant in the ballroom of a downtown hotel, and I saw it with my own eyes. Only he was a high-ranking officer, and we all hushed it up. But it’s going to come out now, it really is.”

  It started to rain. Curtains of water sifted down over the ancient earthworks and the rotting wooden posts that had supported the wire in 1917. The Chaplain slowed down, peering through the clouded windshield. Noah, who was sitting in the front seat, worked the manual wiper to clear the glass. They passed a little fenced-off plot next to the road where ten Frenchmen had been buried on the retreat in 1940. There were faded artificial flowers on some of the graves, and a little statue of a saint in a glass case on a gray wood pedestal. Michael looked away from the Chaplain, thinking vaguely of the overlapping quality of wars.

  The Chaplain stopped the jeep abruptly, and backed it down the road toward the little French cemetery.

  “That will make a very interesting photograph for my album,” the Chaplain said. “Would you boys mind posing in front of it?”

  Michael and Noah climbed out and stood in front of the neat little plot. “Pierre Sorel,” Michael read on one of the crosses, “Soldat, première class, né 1921 mort 1940.” The artificial leaves of laurel and the dark memorial ribbon around them had run together in streaks of green and black in the long rains and the warm sun of the years between 1940 and 1944.

  “I have more than a thousand photographs I’ve taken since the war began,” said the Chaplain, busily working on a shiny Leica camera. “It will make a valuable record. A little to the left, please, Boys. There, that’s it.” There was a click from the camera. “This is a wonderful little camera,” the Chaplain said proudly. “Takes pictures in any light. I bought it for two cartons of cigarettes from a Kraut prisoner. Only the Krauts know how to make good cameras, really. They have the patience we lack. Now, you boys give me the address of your families back in the States, and I’ll make up two extra prints, and send them back to show the folks how healthy you are.”

  Noah gave the Chaplain Hope’s address in care of her father in Vermont. The Chaplain carefully wrote it down in a pocket notebook with a black leather cover and a cross on it.

  “Never mind about me,” Michael said, feeling that he didn’t want his mother and father to see a photograph of him, thin and worn, in his ill-fitting uniform, standing in the rain before the ten-grave roadside cemetery of the lost young Frenchmen. “I don’t like to bother you, Sir.”

  “Nonsense, Boy,” said the Chaplain. “There must be somebody who’d be right happy with your picture. You’d be surprised, all the nice letters I get from folks whose boys’ pictures I send them. You’re a smart, handsome young feller, there must be a girl who would like to put your picture on her bedtable.”

  Michael thought for a moment. “Miss Margaret Freemantle,” he said, “26 West 10th Street, New York City. It’s just what she needs for her bedtable.”

  While the Chaplain scratched away in his notebook, Michael thought of Margaret receiving the photograph and the note from the Chaplain on the quiet, pleasant street in New York. Maybe now, he thought, she’ll write … Although what she’ll have to say to me, and what I might possibly answer, I certainly don’t know. Love, from France, a million years later. Signed, Your interchangeable lover, Michael Whitacre, Army Specialty Number 745, from the grave of Pierre Sorel, né 1921, mort 1940, in the rain. Having a wonderful time, wish you were …

  They got into the jeep again and the Chaplain drove carefully along the narrow, high-backed, slippery road with the marks of tank treads and a million heavy army wheels on it.

  “Vermont,” the Chaplain said pleasantly to Noah, “that’s a pretty quiet section of the country for a young feller, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not going to live there,” Noah said, “after the war. I’m going to move to Iowa.”

  “Why don’t you come to Texas?” the Chaplain said hospitably. “Room for a man to breathe there. You got folks in Iowa?”

  “You might say that,” Noah nodded. “A buddy of mine. Boy by the name of Johnny Burnecker. His mother’s found a house we can have for forty dollars a month, and his uncle owns a newspaper and he’s going to take me on when I get back. It’s all arranged.”

  “Newspaperman, eh?” the Chaplain nodded sagely. “That’s the lively life. Rolling in money, too.”

  “Not this newspaper,” Noah said. “It comes out once a week. It has a circulation of 8,200.”

  “Well, it’s a start,” said the Chaplain agreeably. “A springboard to bigger things in the city.”

  “I don’t want a springboard,” said Noah quietly. “I don’t want to live in a city. I haven’t got any ambition. I just want to sit in a small town in Iowa for the rest of my life, with my wife and my son, and my friend, Johnny Burnecker. When I get the itch to travel, I’ll walk down to the post office.”

  “Oh, you’ll get tired of it,” the Chaplain said. “Now that you’ve seen the world, a small town will seem pretty dull.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Noah, very firmly, working the manual wiper with a decisive flick of his arm. “I won’t ever get tired of it.”

  “Well, you’re different from me, then.” The Chaplain chuckled. “I come from a small town and I’m tired in advance. Though, to tell the truth, I don’t think I’ll have anybody much waiting for me at home.” He clucked sympathetically to himself. “I have no children, and my wife said, when the war began, and I felt I had the call to join up, ‘Ashton,’ she said, ‘you have got to make your choice, it is either the Corps of Chaplains or your wife. I am not going to sit home by myself for five years, thinking of you traveling around the world, loose as a hummingbird, picking up with God knows what kind of women. Ashton,’ she said, ‘you don’t fool me, not for a minute.’ I told her she was unreasonable, but she’s a stubborn woman. The day I come home I bet she starts proceedings for a divorce. I had quite a decision to make, I can tell you that. Oh, well,” he sighed philosophically, “it hasn’t been so bad. There’s a very nice little nurse in the 12th General, and I have managed to assuage my sorrows.” He grinned. “Between my nurse and my photography, I find I hardly think of my wife at all. As long as I have a woman to soothe me in my hours of despair, and enough film to take my pictures, I can face whatever comes …”

  “Where do you get all that film?” Michael asked, thinking of the thousand pictures for the album, and knowing how difficult it was to get even one roll a month out of any PX.

  The Chaplain made a sly face and put his finger along his nose. “I had some trouble for awhile, but I have it taped now, as our English friends say. Oh, yes, it’s taped now. It’s the best film in the world. When the boys come in from their missions, I get the Engineering Officer of the Group to let me clip off the unexposed ends in the gun cameras. You’d be surprised how much film you can accumulate that way. The last Engineering Officer was beginning to get very stuffy about it, and he was on the verge of complaining to the Colonel that I was stealing government property, and I couldn’t make him see the light …” The Chaplain smiled reflectively. “But I have no trouble any more,” he said.

  “How did it work out?” Michael asked.

  “The Engineering Officer went on a mission. He was a good flier, oh, he was a crackerjack flier,” the Chaplain
said enthusiastically, “and he shot down a Messerschmitt, and when he came back to the field he buzzed the radio tower to celebrate. Well, the poor boy miscalculated by two feet, and we had to sweep him together from all four quarters of the field. I tell you, I gave that boy one of the best funerals anybody has ever had from the Corps of Chaplains in the Army of the United States. A real, full-sized, eloquent funeral …” The Chaplain grinned slyly. “Now I get all the film I want,” he said.

  Michael blinked, wondering if the Chaplain had been drinking, but he drove the jeep with easy competence, as sober as a judge. The Army, Michael thought dazedly, everybody makes his own arrangements with it …

  A figure stepped out from under the protection of a tree and waved to them, and the Chaplain slowed to a halt. An Air Forces Lieutenant was standing there, wet, dressed in a Navy jacket, carrying one of those machine pistols with a collapsible stock. “Going to Reims?” the Lieutenant asked.

  “Hop in, Boy,” said the Chaplain heartily, “get right on in there in the back. The Chaplain’s jeep stops for everybody on all roads.”

  The Lieutenant climbed in beside Michael and the jeep rolled on through the thick rain. Michael looked sidelong at the Lieutenant. He was very young, and he moved slowly and wearily, and his clothes didn’t fit him. The Lieutenant noticed that Michael was staring at him.

  “I bet you wonder what I’m doing here,” the Lieutenant said.

  “Oh, no,” said Michael hastily, not wishing to get into that conversational department. “Not at all.”

  “I’m having a hell of a time,” the Lieutenant said, “trying to locate my glider group.”